
The Problem with Stallman - alive2007
https://medium.com/@omarh/the-problem-with-gnu-5941ba869be2
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wyldfire
> I used to have this Arch Linux distro.

I think you'll strike a better balance with Ubuntu than Arch.

> I trust American capitalism to do a well-enough job.

Stallman's right about one thing: general purpose computing is under threat.
What if buying a CPU that can boot without a signed bootloader from its
manufacturer becomes so uncommon that it's outlawed? It doesn't sound terribly
far-fetched to me. For now I have the freedom to buy x86 chips and opt-out of
Trusted Platform. But I can foresee a day when that's no longer the case.

> I just don’t want to spend 3 hours looking up what broke my Wi-Fi drivers
> this time.

Yeah, I hear you. I've been using a linux laptop for my regular machine for
4-5 years now and sometimes there are some hiccups.

~~~
alive2007
I've spent some time with Stallman in real life. There is very little variance
between Ubuntu and OS X to him. They both have free kernels (Linux, XNU) that
come with nonfree binary blobs (device drivers) and nonfree userlands (Ubuntu
apt-get main channel is not entirely free, OS X is obviously nonfree). To
Stallman, once you give convenience the time of day, you might as well be Bill
Gates.

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rekado
The story seems to have been deleted.

