1. Yes, Stallman would most certainly permit you transcoding the video – this would be your personal choice.
2. I believe transcoding the video to watch it would fall under fair use, and so not covered by copyright, so nobody would be able to deny you this anyway, but I am not a lawyer.
Fair use is only a concept in copyright. The problem with MPEG-4 is patents. You would need to look at the MPEG-LA's licensing to determine if you can encode it yourself.
This comment contains cognitive dissonance in the form of a blaming statement, which is probably why you are being DV'd. Stallman's ideologies can be viewed as political ideologies, which by definition are about people wanting to live their lives with certain types of freedom, mostly attributed to information they generate.
Your statement puts itself into conflict with those who choose this ideology because you claim it's a radio-button decision that forces choice between 'people' and 'personal information ownership'. It's not.
You haven't actually stated a position, but merely made an ambiguous observation, so I can't disagree with it. You may want to parse your comment again.
By the way, I think you're being DV'd for not adding substance to the discussion. I'm now guilty of the same thing, so feel free to hit that upside-down triangle :-)
To paraphrase Nick Fury: When Stallman says freedom, I kind of think he means the other thing. Taking away one choice of video format is not freedom. Telling people to upload photos of him only to specific websites is not freedom. Telling people who own a specific device not to take pictures of him at all is not freedom. Choosing a free software license that forces others to release changes they make is not freedom. Forcing "freedom" onto people is not freedom.
Its more about freedom of using rather than creating.
You want to create something that can be used by anyone without restrictions from patents, etc. -- so necessarily that imposes limits on what you can create (in this case no mp4).
I think you can look at GPL in a similar way: it is more about protecting the user than the developer: it imposes restrictions on the developer that are necesasry to ensure the freedom of the user(s).
> [...] so necessarily that imposes limits on what you can create (in this case no mp4).
This is a bad example. I guess you could just encode the video twice, no?
Your GPL example I like a lot though; I never heard that argument before. One problem I have with it is that the line between users and developers can be a little blurry, or, in my case doesn't exist at all. I'm also not sure why you'd need the GPL license to ensure the users' freedom. Say OpenOffice is MIT licensed. I'm a developer, I fork it and make changes that I don't publish because I don't have to. How does that relate to your (the user's) freedom? I can take OpenOffice away from you, or un-MIT-license it, or whatever.
The GPL, or copyleft, does not require you to release your changes. 10:31 in the video: "And they can also offer it to the rest of the public, if they wish."
It doesn't matter whether you're just using a program, or also hacking away at it, being a developer/programmer means you're also using it, i.e. means you're also a user of the program.
So compared to users, developers don't lose anything, except for the fact that they are not allowed to turn a program into an instrument of power over other users. I don't know why you say ideology > people above. If anything, copyleft really favours the people as the majority of people are not programmers.
Even for programmers, copyleft has incentive for them to contribute since it's a guarantee that their investment into the program will not be 'wasted', i.e. used in proprietary software (if the programmer believes in the morality of free software that is, obviously it can go both ways).
> "I'm also not sure why you'd need the GPL license to ensure the users' freedom."
If it's licensed under MIT, you can simply continue development under a proprietary license at anytime (and typically you would stop distributing the source, only distributing the binary). Eventually, the unmaintained MIT licensed version will likely become useless (assuming it remains unmaintained/no development), and because the latest version of the program is proprietary, the user loses the freedom they once had when using this program. The GPL essentially forbids this in order to prevent that from happening.
You are right about the video, demanding to have it available in at least one free codec would suffice.
About the software: Lets say you stop updating your fork after some time, and it fails to run on a newer system, but it is something that someone really wants to use.
If he has the source code available he can rebuild it / port it / fix bugs in it and continue to use it even after the original developer abandons it.
A somewhat similar idea: I can still run, change, apply security updates for Linux software on a very old laptop (until the hardware eventually breaks) that runs mostly FOSS.
But I can't do that on an Android phone that uses proprietary camera/phone/gps/etc. libraries because after some point the vendor stops supporting it and without the source code it is hard to make it run on newer versions of the OS.
Had the license been GPL I could've asked for the source code and keep using it. An MIT license would allow more freedom for the vendor (to link/modify use in proprietary applications), but it doesn't require distributing source code so it provides less freedom for the end-user.
> I'm a developer, I fork it and make changes that I don't publish because I don't have to.
That's all fine, because you're only exercising Freedoms 0 and 1. The MIT/BSD licenses and many others are sufficient for these. As soon as you come to exercising Freedom 2 and 3 though, users of the code are susceptible to losing all 4 freedoms for that software. It's at the whim of any of the middle-men distributing or modifying it as to whether any of the freedoms are preserved for all users.
He is not taking away any choices. He just makes choices. A result of freedom. He is not forcing it onto anybody. He's just practising it.
Freedom is not a zero-sum game, but a optimisation problem. Take some people the right to parasite other peoples work is somehow lowering their freedom, but it gives much more freedom to the end user. It's up to you to decide what is more important.
But this debate already happened a millions times and I don't think this is going to be fruitful.
> He is not taking away any choices. He just makes choices.
Well, he literally made the choice to take away once of our choices. But you're right, that is a result of his personal freedom (and I don't mind that).
> [...] it gives much more freedom to the end user.
I couldn't disagree more, but that's okay I guess.
> But this debate already happened a millions times and I don't think this is going to be fruitful.
That depends or your definition of fruitful. I never head your opinion on it before, and now I did. I also think it's a good idea to remind the next generation of developers that we don't have all the answers yet.
I think the point is, freedom is also not free unless you have the right to restrict yourself, with or without option. Freedom includes the right to impose ones own personal restrictions, and not have it imposed upon you from external agency.
You aren't wrong, but there are different conceptions of the word "freedom". Stallman explains the specific values of the word "freedom" related to Free Software at the beginning of the talk.
So he is advocating not using things that restrict people's freedom (in the Free Software sense).
It is similar to the bit about licenses near the end of the talk - Stallman says that an MIT/BSD license allows some people to alter the source and transform it into proprietary code and therefore they would reduce the (Free Software) freedoms of a user.
Some devices have them for sure, a small lithium cell that keeps a clock and some settings in place for when you swap batteries. At least that's how my camera works. I assume its egineered into other devices for similar reasons.
> perhaps they need a StingRay or Reaper drone in the area to boost the signal. The cell tower itself may be powerful enough to pick up the signal.
that small battery would indeed not be able to be enough to send a signal to a cellphone tower, so you could not really track phones without primary batteries. current batteries are quite low powered, and wireless data is already pretty expensive in term of power usage. if you want enough data speeds.
And I don't think you can effectively receive a GPS signal with a low powered battery.
what they could do though, is automatically find nearest smartphones, and use them to retransmit. far fetched for when you don't move too much, but possible...
> Then red dots for people who have turned their phone off and removed the main battery. Highly suspicious behaviour obviously. A Reaper or StingRay would then be dispatched to the red dot's location.
Alrighty. So the NSA dispatches a reaper every time somebody drops their droid phone and the battery pops out?
I waited a while to post this, because I wanted to see if anyone felt the same. It seems I'm alone - which is both interesting and a little scary!
To me it seems to me like Stallman has become a professional complainer about how programs are made and distributed, and critically, his position is weakened by not being a working practitioner.
I'd be ashamed at fumbling with the presentation software; here you are making a case for free software, and end up making a really good case against it (does anyone want to use software that befuddles an expert programmer?) I also feel that it reflects poorly on Stallman himself that he immediately throws up his hands and says "I don't know how to do this" instead of carefully examining the situation. (Of course, there's also a case to be made that that was a very mature and wise move.)
Here's the real problem. Take the market of custom software for small business. Can this be done in a free software model? I think yes, but only if you could get clients to agree to a) pay for custom software development, and b) give all of that custom development away to their competitors. One can imagine the ultimate SaaS platform (including perfect freedom to self-host, etc), open source, all modifications (hosted and otherwise) dutifully shared. Question: would such a thing be good or evil?
P.S. Out of curiosity, since he doesn't seem to program anymore, and I can't see how complaining could pay well, does anyone know how he actually pays the bills?
No you are not alone, but since people often simply just downvote instead of discussing dissenting views, which takes more time, there is a risk to express minority opinions in certain threads, as it will drain your precious karma.
To half-answer your question: RMS once got 150,000 shares of VA Linux which were worth millions at some time, but I have no idea if he ever sold them before they became worhtless. He lives mainly from his speaking engagements nowadays.
That line from War Games, you are going to need it: "Remember you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? Remember that? You're doing it right now."
Thanks for the link; it doesn't help my impression of him, but I wouldn't use it for an ad hominem either. Being weird and demanding doesn't necessarily correlate with being wrong. "Not being able to do stuff" does, though.
Yes, he got shit done - this is huge, and trumps most other arguments you might make. Still I wonder about an alternate reality where the OSS movement had a leader that was less of a nut-job.
A common question. And I didn't watch, because I usually don't want to sit through an entire linear presentation.
Is there a tool somewhere that you can make your own transcripts from the audio? Bonus if it generates periodic snapshots from the video. Bonus if you can give it timestamps that you explicitly want snapshotted.
EDIT: Bonus if you can select a section of text that didn't come over well in transcription, and play that section of audio, or that section of AV.
If this doesn't exist, there has to be someone sitting here right now on a Saturday morning, thinking "Hell yeah, I can do that!"
It's pretty much voice transcription. Ask the Dragon Naturally Speaking guys or Google or Apple or any of the number of people in that space. Even cell carriers doing visual voice mail are faced with the same underlying problem.
There was quite a substantial effort this year to bring near live transcribing and subtitling of all the talks. Unfortunately I can't find any files or transcripts right now, but you should keep an eye out on the subtitling wiki [0].
His talk starts pretty interesting but by the end he gets pretty repetitive, he repeats the same things multiple times.
Haven't seen/heard him speak before so I was sort of surprised he's an old man with an old man voice. He actually sounds like a pretty nice/agreeable guy though, which is an impression I haven't gotten from his online writings.
Some of his arguments are really valid but most average people wouldn't be convinced since the nefarious aspects of computing haven't personally hit them (and might never do, but that doesn't make the points any less valid).
