>Disclaimer: I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. … I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I pretend that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today.
The problem is that the man himself epitomizes his own ideas. A lot of his behavior is a consequence of taking his ideas to their logical conclusion. For example, consider the following interaction [0]:
My closest interactions with him involved trying to get him off a conference stage so the next session could happen (just as bad as you’d imagine) and being seated next to him on a puddle-jumper during a 90 minute ground hold (whatever you’re imagining, worse).
He … berate[d] me for having noise canceling headphones (something to do with them not being based on free software). He spent the whole time telling me about software freedom and how my headphones were a symbol of oppression or some such.
I’m not sure how forcing the manufacturer of those headphones to make their hardware and firmware fully open source would benefit the world in any way, shape, or form. This sort of demagoguery does way more harm to the Free Software movement than good. If more of RMS’s ideas means more people thinking and behaving like that, we really, really don’t need any more.
RMS did a really poor job of explaining why closed source firmware is problematic to free software, I agree, and I'll explain better below. I also have some critique of activist language.
First, activist language is pretty hard for any human to listen to. Anyone that's been tackling the "long fight" of what they view as oppression has this map in their head of things that add up to their main point in life and cannot help but continually extrapolate it for people. On some topics, people eat this kind of language up. On others, it's rather dull, especially if the person using the language can't quickly connect relatable points for people. RMS was good at long-form broad thinking that was dealing with the issues at the time. He was pretty fuck all when it came to really explaining them in a digestible, conversation style manner.
As for why proprietary headphone firmware hurts free software: take some Bose noise cancelling headphones and try to connect them to something like a mainstream Linux distribution like PopOS and use them on Zoom. They'll work, but only in a low quality mode, or the audio receiver will work but not the microphone. Now do the same with Airpods, or use Airpods on an Android phone. Airpods will work and you'll get high fidelity audio, but they're constantly exhibiting weird disconnection behaviors. On Linux you'll get incredibly low fidelity audio. Proprietary drivers are at the source of all of this.
RMS came from a day where the pioneers of Linux and alternative operating systems weren't building them for servers. They were building them for users because Windows was expensive and the machines to run it on were more expensive. Oppression to someone like him, and many others, were linked to this and many other circumstances at the time. The idea that the optimizations of computing were available only to a few was utterly disasterous.
To connect the two ideas, product x which is proprietary works best on product y which is also proprietary. It's a system that reinforces itself and excludes or marginalizes the rest, which eroded the original mission of building optimized software that is collectively free enough for anyone in the world to use.
Somewhat ironically, a lot of people in this thread are complaining about diversity when really that's what most of these initiatives were born in.
There's a place for talking about the viability of FOSS firmware for headphones and similar devices, but I'm sure we can both agree that on an airplane ride (omitted from parent response, but that's when it happened) is not the right time. The problem imo isn't the argument, it's where and when it was presented.
Most people on airplanes are, at least in my experience: half-tired, somewhat sleepy and vaguely annoyed due to all the annoyances and frustrations with getting through customs. Few people want to be subjected to angry rants at that point. RMS should at least have recognized that[0] this is the sort of rant that is best put on his website after the ride rather than at the person who just was wearing some headphones[1].
With RMS having placed himself as the de facto speaker for the FSF, this is an extremely bad look for them once this story got out and by extension Free Software as a whole[2] (and why, imo, he should've been moved to some sort of "guru" position long ago instead of being the public speaker).
[0]: Yes, I realize he's probably autistic. The counter I have to that is that autism isn't an excuse. It's an explanation and RMS has habitually rejected any attempts to understand that his behavior may be regarded as extremely rude according to everyone who has worked with him, which is why I still consider this to be a detriment to him as a person. Almost every autistic person I know is miles more understanding than RMS is in that their behavior might sometimes come across in ways they didn't intent to. RMS is full head-in-the-sand-I'm-always-right on this sort of thing whenever he's confronted.
[1]: Which probably would have made it a more useful argument too, since more people would've been aware of it as opposed to severely irritating a random individual on an airplane.
[2]: Not to dismiss the merits of FOSS on that, of course. There's plenty of other organizations that I would consider more useful advocates such as the FSFe and the SFC.
> Yes, I realize he's probably autistic. The counter I have to that is that autism isn't an excuse. It's an explanation
It’s a disability.
> Almost every autistic person I know is miles more understanding than RMS is in that their behavior might sometimes come across in ways they didn't intent to.
It’s also a spectrum. Something that might be easy for an autistic person might be hard for another.
That said…
> and RMS has habitually rejected any attempts to understand that his behavior may be regarded as extremely rude according to everyone who has worked with him, which is why I still consider this to be a detriment to him as a person.
An autistic person may have difficulty reading social cues, but it's hard to imagine a clearer social cue than "this person is wearing a device for the express purpose of not listening to things".
>take some Bose noise cancelling headphones and try to connect them to something like a mainstream Linux distribution like PopOS and use them on Zoom. They'll work, but only in a low quality mode, or the audio receiver will work but not the microphone.
My Bose QC45 headphones work identically on all my hardware (Mac, Linux, and occasionally Windows). They can use both standard Bluetooth or a standard 3.5mm TRS connector, neither of which requires any special drivers. Although I've never had any Linux-specific issues, I would guess that if you're experiencing them it's due more to Linux's notoriously poor audio stack than the actual hardware, which conforms to industry standards.
>Now do the same with Airpods, or use Airpods on an Android phone. Airpods will work and you'll get high fidelity audio, but they're constantly exhibiting weird disconnection behaviors. On Linux you'll get incredibly low fidelity audio.
I've also done this to a limited extent (AirPods on Android), and did not notice anything unusual, aside from a few missing Apple-specific features (e.g. auto-device switching, which is not part of the Bluetooth protocol).
>To connect the two ideas, product x which is proprietary works best on product y which is also proprietary. It's a system that reinforces itself and excludes or marginalizes the rest
It is generally in the best interest of companies to produce goods usable by a maximal marketshare; willingly excluding customers and their money is usually not a good business strategy. This is why companies voluntarily conform to standards. The main exception to this is when standards inhibit the quality of the good. In that case, companies are willing to trade a smaller marketshare for a better user experience in that smaller market (e.g. AirPods' Apple-only features).
As an extreme example, consider cars. Parts are proprietary to a given model because each car is optimized for its specific market niche (size, appearance, performance, etc.), which requires all parts for a given model to be closely integrated. The engine of a Honda is not compatible with a Nissan, because engines and cars must be so tightly integrated that it would be an impossibly bad experience otherwise.
How would you feel if Google started building its websites to function significantly better in Chrome than in any other browser? (I guess is already happening to some extent... but not as egregiously as it could.) Because that's the same idea. We have Web standards, which all websites should use, just like we have wireless standards which all wireless hardware should use. Efficient implementation of the standard should be all that's required.
Why do we do this? Because it's better for individual large companies? No, it's not. We do it because following interoperable standards is better for everyone. Having tightly-integrated Apple products is nice, but having tightly-integrated everything is better for consumers, innovators, and small new companies.
Car analogies are not apt here. Cars and engines are physical things. Software is not.
>How would you feel if Google started building its websites to function significantly better in Chrome than in any other browser? (I guess is already happening to some extent... but not as egregiously as it could.) Because that's the same idea. We have Web standards, which all websites should use
If the proprietary Chrome-only extensions to web standards provided a dramatically better user experience, I would have no issues with this, as long as users are 100% free to choose whichever browser (and online services) they please, and as long as other companies were free to independently implement/reverse engineer these extensions.
I would only have a problem if Google abused a monopoly position to force users to use its products, à la Microsoft and Internet Explorer in the late 90s.
>Why do we do this? Because it's better for individual large companies? No, it's not.
It's almost always better for companies to maximize their marketshare, unless maximizing marketshare would compromise the quality of the product. The iPod was originally Mac only, and was a rather niche toy until Apple opened compatibility, at which point it became a global sensation. This was likely due to the fact that in 2001, when the iPod debuted, all Apple computers had a port fast enough to transfer gigabytes of music (FireWire, 400 Mb/s), while most non-Apple machines still had USB 1.0 (12 Mb/s), so a high capacity MP3 player simply would not have been a good user experience. It wasn't until USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s) became common a year or so later that a large MP3 player became a good experience on non-Apple machines, and Apple rationally decided to maximize its marketshare.
>Car analogies are not apt here. Cars and engines are physical things. Software is not.
You are correct that analogies to physical goods are imperfect; I was merely using them to point out how the experience of tight product integration can sometimes be more valuable to the user than interoperability. It all depends on the use case.
Not to be rude, but your vision is very exclusivity focused, which is at odds with the era of free software that RMS emerged from.
Chrome is very resource intensive. If I'm giving machines away to people to make computing "free" your description of an acceptable standard is not compatible with mine. Specialized machines, Chromebooks, now exist for this purpose but they're still arguably expensive and sacrifice other "free OS" capabilities and standards to make this possible.
On the note of Apple I didn't even bother mentioning them. Their whole business is exclusivity, incompatibility, and avoiding standards/sharing.
Today's free software is optimized for business congruency, which is another valid side of free software but I'd argue we've over indexed in this category at this point.
To some of your original points about PulseAudio I agree that it's old and shit for today's age. I think there's some WIPs that aim to replace it with a modern stack, but I haven't checked in a bit. That said, I'd also argue that Bose had to work with Microsoft and Apple to develop drivers for their headphones. I don't think it'd be much of a stretch for them to do that with the Linux community. I'm not blaming them for how shit Pulse is; I'm disappointed that the standards of audio are not shared so that developing one product that works everywhere is possible in that category as it is in other categories of computing. This is what free software organizations harping on standards do for everyone. They also do so mostly behind the scenes.
> Anyone that's been tackling the "long fight" of what they view as oppression has this map in their head of things that add up to their main point in life and cannot help but continually extrapolate it for people.
Well said. This is a good point for any activist to keep in mind.
Good insight on "activist language", it's something I've been sensible (and irritated) more and more the last few years, but had trouble putting words on it.
I've had this experience myself, with RMS. I actually was asking if the FSF had the right to assert the copyleft on bison, and sign a document asserting that Bison's open licensing applied to bison - who had the right to assert the license, which was open, basically.
As a consultant for IBM. We were trying to USE bison, and this was when MS would chase every possible avenue to sue people for violation of copyright, so it was a big deal ... and had RMS been willing to assert that the copyleft applied to bison, that the FSF actually wrote the software and applied the copyleft to its code, IBM told me that it was willing to _defend the GPL in court_. For a signature, RMS would have had the 800-pound gorilla defending the GPL. (We were also going to make a donation to the FSF to help them along, although that wasn't part of "the deal" - it was, like, "hey, you do good stuff, we're planning on putting this in the project budget next because if we can use your stuff, that helps us a lot."
And RMS first off refused to say the copyleft was assigned to bison; it did, of course, everyone knew it, but we needed the legal affirmation or it was pointless. (I can claim that I can fly, everyone knows it, but unless I'm actually airborne at some point...) Then he asked for money (less than we'd talked about budgeting internally) ANYWAY, before we'd even brought it up, if memory serves. (It's been a long time.)
> He spent the whole time telling me about software freedom and how my headphones were a symbol of oppression or some such.
Easily solvable by telling him “I don’t care” and placing your headphones on your head and activating the noise cancellation in his full view then ignoring him for the rest of the flight.
You do realize that this is exactly what most people and corporations have done to RMS and the FSF for many years now? Got tired of his inappropriate antics, brash manner, and said "I don't care" and stuck their fingers in their ears.
And that's exactly why RMS should take a back seat. FSF believes the principles are important and so they should be communicated in a way that is most palatable so others can hear them and interact with them on a personal and professional level.
Until that happens, most will just keep ignoring the ever-irritating RMS and in-turn FSF as they would an annoying neighbor on a flight.
As the top comment notes, the FSF is not about an argument, it is a about a man. In that case it seems fair to hold the debate on the same topic FSF advocates are so passionate about.
There's a reason every famous civil rights protest in the last century or so started with someone carefully chosen to stage it. A poor quality advocate can get in the way of change.
I can't think of a lot of em that moderated their views towards a middleground vis a vis the status quo or were not on some fronts called dogmatic so I find this a bit of a lacking comparison.
For example:
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Oh man this hits hard, I used to be such a strong advocate for Free Software, copyleft, open firmware and drivers. I worked on FOSS projects, was an actual "member" of the FSF during a time when I really didn't have the money to donate.
The dream just like… died. There was so much pointless drama, public opinion (tbh rightfully) turned against RMS and the GPL, the banner flown by people who believed in the mission, just became another license. It was one of my first sad "don't meet your heroes" moments.
I don't even bother licensing my work under the L/GPL anymore because nobody cares and it just makes my code less useful to folks.
>A lot of his behavior is a consequence of taking his ideas to their logical conclusion.
Any philosophy taken to an extreme leads to zealotry. I don't think Stallman is special in that regard. If I'm in layover I don't wanna hear anyone's elevator pitch, full stop. I'm miserable enough as is after being legally frisked and fighting airport traffic to get to a gate an hour early despite the airlines inevitably delaying the flight themselves by 2 hours.
We can learn what NOT to do while embracing the aspects that made him so empassioned about this stuff to begin with.
Like most things, the harms of closed-source {firm,soft}ware fall on a spectrum, and a black-and-white absolutist view is impractical and demagogical.
When the harms of closed-source are high and hard to detect via other means (e.g. Dieselgate, like you mention), I agree that said firmware should be auditable. Maybe even for things like network cards, although in that case it would be very easy to detect any spy traffic via network traffic analyzers, and any company caught shipping network cards with embedded spy firmware would cause a news sensation and be immediately driven out of business.
But when the harms are low-to-none, I'm not sure what good your proposed legislation would do. In the case of the headphones, the best argument you present against closed-source firmware is literally a joke about subliminal messaging.
I get your point, but it should be noted that there is little evidence subliminal messages have any significant effect outside extremely specific circumstances, so this hardly seems like a real threat.
More broadly, the problems you are discussing would rarely be accurately addressed by open source firmware, since so few people have the required expertise or time to actually audit that. What would be far more useful would be state authorities maintaining code review boards, and asking for auditable firmware, not necessarily open source. If a state board received access to these sources and reviewed them, that would actually fix all the problems of confidence that you mention.
>The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source.
To me this seems to be the case, and once $ gets involved, I think there is no way to stop this from happening. What volunteer would not be seduced by a 6 figure USD salary.
I would not be surprised if RMS turned down offers similar to that 40+ years ago. That alone shows his dedication to Free Software. So yes, we need more like him.
> What volunteer would not be seduced by a 6 figure USD salary
This seems to be more of an NA thing. I know/have heard of plenty of EU devs who cut short interviews with NA companies offering 6 figure salaries because they lived very comfortably on their (often lower end) 5 figure salaries and why would they want any more? Especially if it involves sacrificing QoL.
From what I heard, in the EU if you loose work you will get plenty of support from your Gov. Wish that was the case were I am.
In NA, especially in the US, you get a bit of support. But after a period of time, you will be homeless. The period of time depends upon your State. I think in all cases, this period of support, will not exceed 1 year, some states much less. Also that support itself, is no were near the amount needed to cover basic living expenses.
This means, in the US, many people would have a very hard time saying no to the a high salary.
And there seems to be a trend where Companies will not hire people where were unemployed at the time of the interview. Luckily right now that trend seems to have reversed somewhat due to the skill work shortage.
Depends where in the EU (it’s not all equal) but yeah. The high taxes generally mean there’s some support if you lose your job.
The amount of support varies wildly and is situationally dependant.
Eg: as an Irish person working and paying taxes in Germany, when I lost my job there was significantly less help available than there was to a German colleague. Which shouldn’t be the case, but it is.
What kind of person would interview at a company, probably go through multiple rounds of interviews and coding questions, get the job they were looking for, and turn it down because they were offered more than they expected?
Why did they interview at the company in the first place?
I understood it as them turning down an offer despite the lucrative salary, not because of it. Probably because the circumstances were not quite what they were hoping for.
Some companies like to be sneaky with whether they're open to remote or not.
"Oh we have plenty of remote employees! But it is on a team per team basis so that's something you'll have to bring up with your manager", says the recruiter
"Oh that's a great question, let me check in with my VP but we should definitely keep the ball rolling!", says the manager.
The interviews go on, and then they push an offer with a big number, except now they're not ambiguous and they tell you you're gonna have to move to SF/NYC/etc, hoping the big number will do the convincing.
In my experience, pulling that trick on a Swedish or a Swiss person will be met with a flat "nah I'm not interested in SF, thanks for wasting my time".
(same trick applies with companies who have multiple offices and tell you they're open to you working at $OFFICE_OF_CHOICE... until the offer is on the table and all of a sudden they really care where you'll have to be)
There's definitely lots of cultural things at play here; one of them in my experience is that American culture tends to see a lot of things as "negotiable", whereas European cultures (especially nordic/germanic ones!) like things to be clear and black on white from the get go.
Indeed. As a Swedish dev, I had part of that experience with a known American company that seemed interested in hiring me to work with an important but very industry-specific technology I was familiar with. It was not a long process with multiple interviews, but I did have a quick introductory call and one substantial interview, after which they said that the teams working with that tech are always onsite in California.
That's it, at that moment I am no longer interested, and it leaves somewhat of a bitter taste - they definitely knew where the position was and could have saved everyone some time by saying it right away.
The alternative is not accepting 5 figure salary. The alternative is accepting low end 5 figure salary and working on the FOSS product in after hours of a full day dedicated to something else entirely.
While that's a cute anecdote, that just means the bid wasn't high enough. QOL for rich people in the USA is at least equal to vastly higher than in the EU.
The way it looked like while it was happening was they propped up a figure (esr) who was symphatetic to the needs of corporations and all too ready to enjoy the spotlight. They then FLOSSified the movement as if Free Software and Open Source were the same thing. I always likened this to the sale of Manhattan to the white man for $24. Dumb injuns right? The thing is, the white man did not buy it from the actual owners of the place. It was a different tribe taking the money and helping the westerners establish a false claim.
It might be a little harsh since the open source "movement" did exist already and was a thing. It wasn't specifically created for this purpose as far as I know.
You may also re-license under AGPL all your old software that you distributed so far under another license, as long as you still have the copyright on it. You won't be able to prevent others to use the old license, but you are in no obligation to continue distributing your old software under those old licenses. Of course, people who want up to date up-streams will have to agree to the new licensing terms. They may still fork the old software and keep it under the old license, but if they try to merge an AGPL patch, it'll become AGPL automatically by the GPL contamination. So they're quite incentivised to switch to the new upstream with the new AGPL license.
People get angry and frustrated when a big tech company makes a decision that is user-hostile, but benefits the tech company's profits. This is to be expected because in almost all cases, the big tech company has no obligation other than to maximize profits.
The four freedoms help to put a check on the power of big tech companies by providing alternatives that keep power in the hands of the user.
That does not mean that free software and big tech companies cannot coexist or even thrive together. Red Hat was built on free software. System76 sells hardware that runs mostly free software.
The problem with this utopic vision is that the vast vast majority of users have no power over their software regardless of whether it's proprietary or open source: they just don't know how to write software, so the supposed four freedoms are almost entirely lost on them.
The other problem is that it is simply un-economical to imagine a software world that is run non-commercially in the current economical models. Most software would simply not get written if it had to be redistributable for free by every recipient. As it stands, the only economical way of creating free software is as a cooperation project between several commercial entities, who benefit from pooling resources to build common infrastructure - such as the Linux kernel, LLVM and clang, or Kubernetes.
>> they just don't know how to write software, so the supposed four freedoms are almost entirely lost on them.
I don't know how to do car repairs, that's why I hire someone to do it for me.
Software developers can be hired to work on software the same way.
>> it is simply un-economical to imagine a software world that is run non-commercially in the current economical models.
Software freedom does not have to mean non-commercial. Software can respect freedom and still be sold commercially.
>> the only economical way of creating free software is as a cooperation project between several commercial entities
This is not strictly true.
While many large projects have many interested contributors and supporters, some projects are driven by a single company, a small team, or a single person.
> Software developers can be hired to work on software the same way.
No they can't. A car mechanic can fix almost any part of any car, and can do so for the majority of issues in a few hours at most. The majority of issues car mechanics address are also almost identical (scratches on the car, tire issues etc).
In contrast, virtually every single software issue requires a bespoke solution that will take specific knowledge of that specific piece of software. The best Linux kernel hacker will still need to spend days to learn how to fix a bug in GNU sed. And the majority of bugfixes take at least a couple of days of dedicated work, and often require access to the specific environment where the issue reproduces (e.g. particular accounts etc). There are good reasons why this kind of business only works in B2B mode. No single consumer would ever afford the costs.
> Software freedom does not have to mean non-commercial. Software can respect freedom and still be sold commercially.
No it can't. There are 0 examples of GPL software being sold commercially. It is simply impossible to make a business charging money for something your buyer can give away for free in infinite amounts. If anyone ever became successful doing so, someone else would setup a business buying software from them and selling it on at a discount.
What you can do is sell consulting services for free software, but we're back to B2B only.
> While many large projects have many interested contributors and supporters, some projects are driven by a single company, a small team, or a single person.
Single-company projects are only typically free until someone else figures out how to eat their lunch (see AWS forcing Elastic and Mongo to move away from GPL-style freedoms). Small teams and single people developing some software do happen, and there is of course the foundation model (the GNU Project and Mozilla being huge players), but these are more exceptions than the rule. The reality is that even in OSS, most contributors to most projects are companies (either companies selling that same software in B2B settings, or companies selling something else that depends on that software as a component).
>> No they can't. ... virtually every single software issue requires a bespoke solution that will take specific knowledge of that specific piece of software. The best Linux kernel hacker will still need to spend days to learn how to fix a bug in GNU sed. And the majority of bugfixes take at least a couple of days of dedicated work, and often require access to the specific environment where the issue reproduces
You say, "No they can't" and then say it might take a few days. When I stated that I hire a car mechanic to fix my car, I do so because I do not have the specialized knowledge and tools to do it myself.
Software is the same way. If your C software needs a fix, you can hire a C developer to examine it, find the problem, and fix it. Yes, it might take a few days depending on the complexity of the software, but it IS possible and most professional software developers would be able to do it for the right price.
>> No it can't. There are 0 examples of GPL software being sold commercially.
There are many examples of GPL software sold commercially:
>> What you can do is sell consulting services for free software, but we're back to B2B only.
These are not just "support contracts" or "consulting services", they are subscriptions for the software. Support and consulting is usually available to, but at additional cost.
> Software is the same way. If your C software needs a fix, you can hire a C developer to examine it, find the problem, and fix it. Yes, it might take a few days depending on the complexity of the software, but it IS possible and most professional software developers would be able to do it for the right price.
Ok, let me rephrase: the cost will not be something the vast majority of users can afford. It would be a strictly B2B thing, with a few ultra-rich clients using it as well.
> There are many examples of GPL software sold commercially:
Java is free (as long as you don't forget to upgrade). RHEL is completely free, you only pay for a support subscription (and upgrades? I don't remember exactly). I'm not sure what Cloudera is or what they are selling, since the website is terrible, so maybe that's one example?
> These are not just "support contracts" or "consulting services", they are subscriptions for the software. Support and consulting is usually available to, but at additional cost.
Neither Java nor RHEL stop working if you don't pay your subscription: they are support contracts, offering either support for old versions or upgrades.
I should also note neither of them is (normally) sold to consumers - they are both positioned as B2B offerings.
Good response to some points by the sibling. I was going to respond that part of the reason is just that the cost of software is mentally anchored very low for people. Right now Windows 11 Pro license is shown to me as $199, which is enough to pay someone for around 27 hours of minimum wage in the US. Assuming you pay someone closer to $40 per hour, it would be almost 5 hours. Some random Internet websites tell me that typical auto repairs are between $300 and $500.
Cannot 100% vouch for these numbers, but it seems to me that the idea is not as outright ridiculous as you're trying to suggest, if we allow for tweaking economic incentives here and there. To be clear, I am evaluating this as a hypothetical scenario, not a project I am specifically endorsing.
Of course the current situation with consumers getting software for "free" and software developers getting fat FTE paychecks is some sort of a local maximum that would be hard to give up for both groups. But then the grandma that wants you to fix her email client won't be putting you through some ridiculous whiteboard/hackerrank interviews, so there is that. Bugs are mostly solvable with time, tools and attention, not genius.
I was thinking about this some more, and realized also that comparing bugfixing in software to car repairs is a false comparison. When repairing a car, the work is about identifying the ways it differs from the original design, and fixing those (typically by swapping out broken pieces for identical working ones, or cleaning out gunk).
But repairing a bug is not similar to that. It is instead about identifying what is wrong in the original design itself, and how to change the design to eliminate this flaw while not introducing others. This is not like replacing a cracked exhaust pipe, it's like figuring out that the engine isn't getting enough power because the shape of the exhaust isn't appropriate, figuring out the better shape that also fits in the existing fittings, casting a new exhaust with that shape, and then installing it, and making sure you haven't broken some other property. That is all going to cost a heck of a lot more than the typical car repair, and is going to be well beyond what the majority of shops can do.
Interestingly, these kinds of services do exist to some extent (the "pimp my ride" style), but they are far fewer and more expensive than car repairs, and few people have ever used one.
> The problem with this utopic vision is that the vast vast majority of users have no power over their software regardless of whether it's proprietary or open source: they just don't know how to write software, so the supposed four freedoms are almost entirely lost on them.
If you have seen any Stallman talks: The idea here is, that in a society people can help each other out. Non-coders can ask their coder friends to look at things. If it is a bigger job to get some wanted changes, maybe they can pay them to do the change.
How often have you helped a friend by coding a patch for their Linux kernel? Why do you think you would do so more for some random iOS app if you were allowed to?
Software "maintenance" is just extremely hard compared to mechanical maintenance, so all of these arguments fall flat when confronted with any significantly-sized code base.
I'm putting maintenance in quotes for software because that is not what is actually required here. Fixing bugs is not actually equivalent to repairing a physical device. It is equivalent to repairing a design flaw in such a device. Which is of course also way beyond any repair service's abilities beyond the simplest flaws.
RMS has always struck me as someone who is confidently correct.
For a start, he doesn't weigh in on everything. He knows where his expertise lie and where it doesn't. Having an opinion means something. It's easier to not have an opinion at all than to invest the brain power in forming one.
But mainly, he is always open to new inputs. That his views haven't changed on Free Software over the years is not because he is staunchly attached to them but because he remains correct, as he always was.
As for copyleft, that has been maligned both by those for whom it benefits to do so, and by those who severely misunderstand it.
The problem with the latter group is people criticise the means and do not consider the ends. The point of copyleft is to disable copyright. Copyright is the enemy of free software and community. Copyleft is the only known way to disable copyright. The means are unfortunate, but they are necessary because copyright exists. There is no way around it. As long as copyright exists for software, copyleft must exist to. Stallman was merely taking the pragmatic approach with copyleft and it's been incredibly successful, even if it's not fully understood.
Have you read stallman’s posts to the emacs and gcc mailing lists over the years? As I have the almost opposite view — he often expresses strong, and wrong, opinions, which have damaged both emacs and gcc over the years.
Disclaimer: I am a lifelong footpedaling, boot-to-fullscreen emacs apologist.
However: I nolonger believe that GPL licensing is free-as-in speech. Especially in an age where stack overflow or GPT code snippets can accidentally cause violations, GPL has become an encumbrance on free software as frustrating OR MORE as the actual copyright/patent law it originally sought to attack. As a developer you have to bite your tongue and that is not free speech.
Times have changed and so has the concept of free software, and RMS' ideology is too absolutist to apply today. Copyleft has just become an alternative copyright system whose fee is all your profit.
In that sense, any license that isn't fully public domain or equivalent is a problem.
Stackoverflow and GPT could also give you secret but leaked Microsoft, Oracle or NSA code. You'll never know, until that black helicopter lands on your doorstep and a legion of lawyers empty your bank account. Just copy&pasting code from somewhere always was risky and always will be, as long as there is copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and crap like that.
Yep copyright is an annoying minefield of rules-by-enforcement, you don't know until you are legally served. Maybe I should have made that more clear in my original comment. My point was that copyleft has instead of clearing some of the mines, just littered the field with MORE mines.
That's an interesting point, but I think you're jumping the gun by a few decades at least. If Stack Overflow and GPT type stuff eventually makes software copyright essentially non-existent then of course the GPL will be obsolete. But we're not there yet. Not by a long way.
I keep repeating that if it's fair use and doesn't violate license or regurgitate entire blocks of code verbatim… why doesn't microsoft train it on the projects of the paying users and their own?
I think this is an effect of its success. Without the FSF we would maybe have software patents and far less open code that we have today. This is essential to supply a developer pipeline.
Some say Stallman is a bad face to stage a revolution, and that might be correct. But this isn't some anarchist uprising and that disregards the achievements many already seem to take for granted.
Sure, GPL to a large degree does mirror the strictness of copyright law. I don't believe that it hinders anything to be honest.
Genuine question: What license should I use for a new open source project? I want to develop a new pay-if-you-want software product. I previously developed one with a GPL license that is successful in its niche. The GPL didn't cause me any problems, but if there's a license that better represents "I want to share this with the world, donate if you want" I'm open to suggestions.
If you don't intend to enforce the terms of GPL against people who borrow parts of your code, it is really not that harmful.. but it would be unnecessarily ambiguous why it would be licenced that way rather than MIT/apache/etc permissible license at that point. Like 'i don't intend to shoot you I just want my pistol loaded and in my hand'
CC0[0] would be the obvious one; spicier and less legalese alternatives that nonetheless amount to about the same thing include the Unlicense[1] and the Do What the Fuck You Want Public License[2]
I like your phrasing of "pay-if-you-want" more than "donate". The former anchors you to think about the fact that this could have been paid software. ie: What would have been an acceptable price if you had to pay for this.
"any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License ."
This reads to me like it requires the entire answer to be published under the GPL.
I guess it does cause accidental violations of the GPL, but in the same way as pasting GPL code without attribution. Or pasting MIT code without attribution.
From a layman's perspective, the only difference is if the comment mixes GPL and some incompatible code in it. But that would be ridiculous under any license, so I actually don't know what to think about it.
>Forty years later, we must admit he was prescient. Every word he said still rings true. Very few celebrated forward thinkers were as right as RMS. Yet, we don’t like his message. We don’t like how he tells it. We don’t like him. As politicians understood quickly, we care more about appearance and feel-good communication than about the truth or addressing the root cause.
Elites understand that while their boasts of being good people fall on deaf ears for all but their most ardent supporters, the cynicism of the public can reliably be weaponized via a concerted campaign of character assassination.
It works against even the most blameless individuals. No guilt needs to actually be established either - a feeling that there is something "off" about the individual can be manufactured simply by throwing enough mud, consistently enough.
If the mud doesnt stick to the individual, you can also throw mud at the supporters.
We saw it with Bernie, with Marianne, with environmental activists, with OWS; with Iraq protesters, with Vietnam protesters, with BLM, with Chomsky, with basically any anti-war media of any kind.
It's really getting quite tiresome to hear people talk shit about RMS, while tech giants continue to harvest our souls and strip-mine our future for ad money.
…at which point the 'Open Source' side of things is unharmed, because they've practiced the realpolitik of giving away their power to giant corporate entities that care nothing for principle but will fight for their interests, against others like them.
The interest is not in freedom. Their interests are in protecting their continued ability to plunder the commons. That's a perfectly real interest, so there's nothing fair about it but it's a line of defense.
I know I'm interested in seeing what happens there. The essay sounds like it's claiming RMS-ness is still declining, and that this is a bad thing. I don't know whether Open Source-ness is keeping a space open for RMS-ness or starving it out, but I do know something's gotta be there, even if it means giving away power to force the corporate monsters to have a vested interest in a commons.
They will steal everything anyway, including anything Richard has, so it's more about how well you can facilitate people sharing who want to share.
Are you saying RMS is not actually an egotistical jerk, or that we should pretend he isn't because you think people would say mean things even if he weren't?
It would have been much better if the title were "We need more of Richard Stallman's ideas, not less". The author even acknowledges this in the preamble.
RMS was right IMHO when he said that software that runs without the permission of its users, doing things to or preventing use of the hardware owned by the user, is an infringement of freedom.
But he goes too far in demanding that all software source be open, scrutinizable, and subject to modification.
As a software dev, that's my work product, my trade secret, my value add. Not the end user's. He's free to turn it off and uninstall it if he doesn't like or trust what it does.
I see two alternatives: The RMS approach, where all software needs to be open, scrutinizable, subject to modification. Ensuring quality and responsibility through openness.
Or the liability approach: Make closed-source developers liable for what they produce, legislate standards for safety and security and have them be responsible for their creations. Because the current state of closed source software got us into the mess of Windows, Stuxnet, self-murdering cars, etc.
A combination of both approaches is possible. But if you want to hide your code, thats fine. If you then take full responsibility for your code.
As a society, we have learned to forbid manufacturers from selling for mass consumption products without divulging what those products generally contain. As a society, why would we allow people to sell for mass execution software without divulging what those products generally do when we historically know (and are currently seeing) how this will end up?
The consumer is free to not consume if they don't trust the manufacturer? No, we generally require a little bit more declaration from the manufacturer on the product. I don't see why we would change this arrangement from physical products to software products.
But certainly that doesn't dictate that the source code is available... we require a list of ingredients but not the recipe. Appliances are required to have power ratings. Other products have emissions ratings, fuel consumption, etc. Such products are also generally certified to certain standards. Open source is actually easier than figuring out how to regulate telemetry, energy consumption, data processing, repair, continuance of service and the host of other things society might want (and is currently beginning to regulate) to be declared by software manufacturers.
I think the difficulty is then shifted though: What if it turns out, that the manufacturer of the code lied to us and the software did something in addition to what they told us? (Which undoubtedly would happen.) Do we as a society revoke their license to ship software or something? Do we let them pay in millions and billions, depending on how many people were affected and how badly? Or do meakly wag a finger? In short: What are the consequences you propose in that system, which will stop the perpetrator from doing it again?
The same thing: you fine them. That's what happens when you find melamine in baby formula, so I don't see why it would be different for software? Even with physical products there are open questions on whether the impact of the fine or punishment is enough.
I don't know, I think that any proprietary software (and I include firmwares in that) should be prohibited by law. Same for hardware, all the schematics and specs should be provided.
What the article fails to address is… We all need food. Yeah it’s great working on GPL code and ensuring it’s all open. But when companies consider your gpl library vs someone else’s mit library they will naturally go with mit. And then they’ll say “well we’re using this free library already might as well donate/fund it”. So suddenly this MIT dev is able to put way more time into the mit library than your gpl library because it becomes their job. Something that feeds them. Their library gets better faster… And more and more companies use it and fund it.
GPL is great if absolutely everyone is on board and everyone is fed. But that’s not the world we live in.
If we only took the time and effort developers work on GPL and AGPL stuff in their free time, and abolished all bad-but-done-for-profit-nevertheless projects, we would probably still make more progress, than we are doing now, when so many developers work on software, that is not only not advancing things or truly helping anyone, but is actually actively harmful, addictive, engagement optimized, advertising for bad products, or helping the overlords to surveil the uninformed masses.
Yes, but it’s much easier said than done. The article talks about FSF being shadowed by all of the funding for MIT licensed code. So funding means of making GPL code more attractive to companies probably should be one of the higher priorities.
Though I’m sure companies also ensure FSF and GPL get bad publicity .
the author is wrong about Bruce Perens and Eric S Raymond though. They are as far removed from libre software as Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were.
Libre software is very radical and it's not about software excellence as Open Source is, but it's a political opinion about the freedom of the users using the software. Any user can turn into a developer in an instant (or not), and if he doesn't have the four freedoms libre software guarantees, most of the time he doesn't get very far or not as far as he wanted. Even Linus doesn't get this, to him free software is only about "tit for tat".
The free software movement died when it stopped being about writing software and more about politics and ideology. Tell me, when was the last time the FSF funded, developed or released any actual software? Their money and influence is instead now used to tell other developers what to do with their labor and general users how to live their lives.
It's simple when you realize that, FSF is about USER FREEDOM. Not DEVELOPER FREEDOM. As a user, I would be thrilled to have all 4 freedoms met. But as a developer with commercial interests, this might not be ideal. Clash between FSF and corporate mindsets are an age old thing. They hate FSF's definition of free software with a passion. A lot of mudslinging at FSF can be traced back someway or another to big corporations and their puppet organizations. WRT RMS, I don't see a much difference between him and young activists these days. Sometimes they can be a pain in the a*.
As a user I also want sustainable software, and for that developers have to also have their cake too.
Where's the equilibrium point? Hard to say, obviously. Usually both users (and other downstream consumers, ie. other developers) and the actual developers of free & open software suffer from a serious information deficit. Users have crazy demands (see any random half-successful project's issue tracker), but also principled developers seriously underestimate the purchasing power of their user base, and useful overlap of common interests.
I still believe that it's possible to build real alternatives to the hyperscale giants, but I have no illusions about doing it with "just focus on the code and principles", just going to comfy conferences funded by said giants, and so on.
Nice to see someone else notice that a statement of fundamental freedoms that doesn’t ship with a statement of concomitant fundamental responsibilities is a statement that is already fatally undermined.
The FSF and the RMS fanbase advocate for a philosophy without a viable business model or skin in the game.
The FSF can stand on principle, but most of the developers who are employed to work on Free Software don't wish to follow it into irrelevance and oblivion. The FSF can advocate for its principles and philosophy, but ultimately it has painted itself into a corner where it has no skin in the game for the impact of the strident interpretation of those principles and philosophies on the developers whose jobs depend on Free Software projects.
The FSF is happy to take credit for the impact and benefit of the GNU Project software packages. And happy to raise money for its efforts based on the impact of the software, although the efforts primarily are advocacy for and enforcement of the licenses, not support for the success of the software projects. The FSF and its advocates mostly are concerned about the purity of the ideology. Anyone or any project that deviates is an apostate.
The FSF and its leadership explicitly have stated that they have inhibited innovation in deference to the ideology. When Free Software was the only option to counter proprietary software, maybe that made sense. With a plethora of Open Source licenses and an explosion of Open Source projects, a reactive approach of waiting until the FSF is forced to allow a technically competitive feature is a losing strategy.
Meh, someone who talked to RMS said that he said that people with disabilities might as well just use Windows and iOS and such, because FOSS wasn't ever gonna focus on making a good experience for us. So no, we don't need more of that, or people calling disabled people's experiences with desktop Linux lies and such. If FOSS is to be welcoming to everyone, it needs to be welcoming to not just sighted, able, nuro-typical men.
I can personally contradict this with my own interactions with RMS, in which he gave serious and continuing thought to development of libre computer interface software for blind people.
Software is a good, and like most goods you can sell it, you can trade it or you can give it away. It is not necessarily a physical good, but the cost of duplicating physical goods has greatly decreased with automation and robotics. They’re digital copies of the original, like high resolution pictures of the painting somebody took months to make.
Free software benefits others, but you can’t choose the membership of “others”.
As someone who directly benefits from software being sold (meaning a pricetag is put on the transfer of software), I don't think software should ever be sold. Labor should be sold, because that's the part that is actually expensive and valuable.
Once software has been written, it should only be limited by network transfer rates and the size of the audience that wants it. Anything else is artificial scarcity for the sake of lining our pockets.
That's not an invalid point of view, but if the expertise, trade secrets, and skill of your labor is evident in the product, and it is now takeable at no cost, you've sold WAY more than your skilled time building the product: you've sold the years you spent developing the skills, finding markets, etc. That just isn't realistically priced in yet.
Not a valid comparison as their work can’t be transferred. This, to me, is arguing that software should be developed for a specific customer and not distributed further. Which probably isn’t what you’re arguing.
If I buy a house that needs work, contract that work to be done, and then sell that house with the work done, I believe I have distributed the result of that labor.
With the proprietary software model, I would not be able to sell a house that I have had electrical work done under contract. That is bogus.
You're actually making the case for licensed software without free distribution here -- the plumber has worked on your house, and possibly installed parts, just as someone may work on a computer, and possibly install software. If you want, you could remove those parts and sell them to your neighbour, but then you wouldn't have them anymore. Or, you could sell the house whole, just as you could sell a computer with software installed (okay, peculiarities of licensing may make that challenging, and I'm in favour of licensing reform).
But what you can't do with plumbing work is have it performed, then copy it to your neighbour's house whilst still keeping it for yourself. You can do that with free software.
Yes, because they don't have a product to sell, just their labor. But software IS a product.
You could argue that there should be no products at all. Again, what would our economic model look like then? You are using a product right now, HN. Among many others, I am sure.
>Yes, because they don't have a product to sell, just their labor. But software IS a product.
I'd argue the end result ofthem connecting tubes, electrical switches, etc can be considered a product in the same sense. Thing is when they leave the owner can transfer their creation to someone else (tho often with the house it was done in), let someone else use it, let someone else look at it and learn from it, let someone else fix it, etc all despite the more restrictive nature of it all.
When it comes to software a lot of this is too often suddenly a problem.
A building would be analogous to an application in my example. The professions I mentioned sell their labor to produce a fully featured building. Software engineers should sell their labor to produce a fully featured application.
The difference here is that buildings naturally succumb to the laws of physics, while software is only subjected to the more liberal laws of information by nature. We apply laws such as copyright to software to create artifical scarcity in order to benefit the authors to an artificial degree, at the expense of general freedom and technological advancement.
Are you against products in general, or just when it comes to treating software as a product? I think that is a question you should answer first.
Furthermore, if software is not allowed to be a product, can you sell a service based on software as a product? If no, services as Netflix cease to exist. If yes, where is the boundary between the software and the service?
Finally, who are you to tell people what they can and cannot sell as a product? Sounds like the worst kind of regulation to me!
> Furthermore, if software is not allowed to be a product, can you sell a service based on software as a product?
Yes.
> If yes, where is the boundary between the software and the service?
At... the boundary...? I think it's pretty clear that services and software are different things. You even called them different things.
If I write software for you, that act is a service. What is produced is software. The former should be monetized rather than the latter.
If I let you use my computer (ie for storage), that is a service. The software for accessing my computer is software. The former should be monetized rather than the latter (which is true in the case of Netflix).
> Finally, who are you to tell people what they can and cannot sell as a product?
Ok, then I will provide you just with services from now on. Internally, I might use software to be able to provide you with that service, but as I provide you just with a service, that doesn't seem to matter to you.
Yes, instead of a software product, I am selling you a SaaS, and apparently you are fine with that.
As far as how they monetize their service, yes. I think it is a shame that their client is malware, and that it's not possible to use the service without their malware client. That is a separate issue though.
Isn't this already true? The article makes that point at the very beginning and many people who cut ties or stopped supporting the FSF and Stallman still seem to be committed to the principles of libre software.
One of the main criteria for picking up a product in my workplace is the product taking the free software path and companies self hosting their own free software product.. We did it with the Graphana labs, Elasticsearch, ... We are paying anyways for such services so now we are Using a service + contributing indirectly to its free software business path and we love it.
Arguably, the GPL license, and the free software politics of Stallman make software less free.
Being forced to distribute changes doesn't represent freedom for users of GPL software.
Removing the ability of others to keep secret their source that uses GPL software isn't freedom.
Limiting the ability of others to commercialise software that uses GPL isn't freedom.
Most of the discussions around GPL have a anti-corporate flavour to them, with a large helping of righteous indignation about said corporations monetising the software. When did free software become about money? The GPL licence has become all about money since it's often offered as a restrictive licence in combination with a commercial licence. I feel like the people most disadvantaged by GPL software are individual programmers and small teams who could most benefit from using open source software and make a living out of it.
Of course people can choose whichever licences they want, but claiming to be the pinnacle of free software is rich, to say the least.
Having source code available is similar to "right to repair" but for software products. It absolutely does give more freedom to users, but at the expense of some monetization opportunities. Whether that trade off is worth it is a matter of much debate.
We need less of Richard Stallman and more of Matthew Garrett. Free software is good. Monomaniacal obsession with free software at the expense of literally everything else is why Stallman's allies are few and far between.
How does the GPL limit the freedom to run? I think you might be misunderstanding it. The only limitations are on distribution: giving the code to others without giving them the sources.
> Need to release your own changes if you distribute the application.
i'm not sure if this is true. if i released version 1.0 to licencees then i have to give them the source, but i don't think i have to give them version 1.1 source, unless i released that to them.
That wouldn't be a fork though. If we really wanted to make progress on this front, we'd work to advance progress in human cloning. And then after that, advance progress in brain uploads and downloads.
Serious question: How are software developers supposed to put a roof over their head and food on the table if software can't be privatized? We can't all be employed by academia or rely on charitable donations. The worst scenario would be if all software becomes "free" but funded by advertising. If you're not the customer, you're the product.
The author rails against capitalist businesses, but what exactly is the author's proposed alternative? Are we going to have a Free Houses Foundation and a Free Furniture Foundation? It feels to me that the FSF take software labor completely for granted, as if it just grows on trees. Is every consumer good supposed to come with instructions for exactly reproducing it? That's a recipe for theft and getting uncut by lazy competition.
All business is about value created, not expenses incurred.
And houses and furniture have marginal costs, where software does not.
How does Linus Torvalds make money when Linux is free? How do commercial Linux or MySQL or Apache companies make money when their IP is free?
It turns out that writing code is the least valuable thing a developer does. Which is a good thing since "turn spec into code" is a job function that will be taken over my AI in... (Checks watch)
I'm fully supportive of close source, but I think it's pretty clear that successful businesses can employ lots of people usi g either model, and also that the greatest threat to code mill developers is not open source.
> All business is about value created, not expenses incurred.
Yes and no. Profit is revenue minus expenses. But you have to pay the expenses no matter what. Revenue and profit don't just magically appear.
> And houses and furniture have marginal costs, where software does not.
This seems to demonstrate what I said about taking software labor for granted. Producing software to operate at scale is actually quite difficult and requires a ton of labor.
> How does Linus Torvalds make money when Linux is free?
Good question. I don't even know. But the real question isn't how a few famous individuals like Torvalds and Stallman make a living. The question is how millions of non-famous individuals can make a living under this "funding model", whatever that happens to be.
> it's pretty clear that successful businesses can employ lots of people usi[n]g either model
Define "lots of people", and compare how many people are employed by open source companies vs. how many are employed by closed source companies.
[EDIT:] I suspect the answer to the question of Linux funding is corporate donors. Which would be pretty ironic, given the anti-capitalist argument here, don't you think? It's just like how Mozilla is funded in large part by Google search revenue.
> Which is a good thing since "turn spec into code" is a job function that will be taken over my AI in... (Checks watch)
You realize that if your prediction comes to bear, that the job of writing code would become much more difficult: writing specs in an imprecise natural language instead of a precise computer language? Try reading anything written by a contract lawyer for why this is not an improved state of affairs.
Depending on the domain, this can be quite challenging, and the challenge isn't limited to FOSS. The non-business consumer market, particularly the desktop computer software market, is probably the most challenging when it comes to monetizing software. Even in the world of proprietary software, software companies still have to compete with pirated copies. This led to the introduction of activation, DRM, app stores, and subscriptions. Moreover, even without piracy, there's an abundance of free-as-in-beer software products that are either ad-funded or are subsidized by revenue from other parts of the business. I imagine that the people working on essential FOSS desktop projects like KDE, GNOME, GIMP, LibreOffice, Inkscape, etc. most likely don't make a full-time living working on these projects unless they're sponsored by a larger company like Red Hat or Google which makes its money from other projects. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear counterexamples.
Of course, not all software is pre-packaged desktop and server software like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft SQL Server. Making money from FOSS may be easier in B2B markets where companies tend to not sell prepackaged software solutions, but custom solutions that fit the customer's needs. Even with FOSS, just because the software can be downloaded and modified freely doesn't mean that the software is ready to use immediately. This may require modifying the code, which may be beyond what many business could handle. They could choose to hire their own in-house software engineers, but they could also choose to pay the software company, whose engineers should be more familiar with the code base. This is where I see more opportunities for making a living with FOSS, since not all software products are straight-out-of-the-box solutions.
>How are software developers supposed to put a roof over their head and food on the table if software can't be privatized?
If an plumber or electrician smartly comes up with a certain configuration or the like how is it that he still makes money when someone else can come in to learn from it? When someone completely unrelated can come in to fix it when it breaks? When someone completely unrelated can copy it even?
I'd say overly restrictive copyright has not protected innovation but hampered it. It potentially says do not build, iterate, improve on such things for way too long in way too many ways.
As a software developer I have benefited plenty from this. I've also probably lost out a lot due to it in the countless little interactions and price calculations that make up our life.
From paying a bit more for an engineered intel/amd duopoly and licensing for some standards extended into perpetuity here and there when making a new pc to paying that extra nth of a cent for a carefully engineered bank transaction system meant to protect Worldline or the like despite carefully limited regulatory efforts to the contrary.
I think you're conflating a number of different things that are distinct:
1) Copyright
2) Reverse engineering
3) Patents
4) DRM
5) EULA
Reverse engineering is legal. Copyright doesn't prohibit reverse engineering. But reverse engineering is also usually very difficult. There's no law that says you have to make it easy for someone to reverse engineer your product, nor should there be IMO.
The current patent system is crazy. Too many simple, overly broad patents granted by a patent office that doesn't even truly understand what they're looking at. I would definitely reform or abolish that system.
IMO the main problem today with anti-consumer products is not copyright but rather DRM. When the seller locks down the product and prevents the consumer from using the product as they please after they pay for the product and bring it home. DRM has a legitimate use to protect theft, but DRM has gone too far: it's not used just to prevent theft but also to control. The solution to this problem is not "free software" but rather protecting consumer legal rights.
Many software developers work for places where selling the software is not how they make money.
Another big example would be "enterprise". You are paid to solve problems for the organization. If the code you write to solve those problems is open source (and you use other open source code to help solve them too) it doesn't really conflict with the ability of the organization to pay your salary.
> Many software developers work for places where selling the software is not how they make money.
But many software developers do work for places where selling the software, or selling products that include the software, is how they make money.
The question isn't whether some companies can make money from software without selling it. Yes, of course. The question is whether outlawing the selling of software would put a lot of companies out of business, and again, the answer is yes, of course.
> If the code you write to solve those problems is open source (and you use other open source code to help solve them too) it doesn't really conflict with the ability of the organization to pay your salary.
I'm not sure it doesn't conflict. Either the software is specific to the organization, in which case it's mostly pointless to open source it, or the software can be used by multiple organizations, and if so, then you may end up losing many or most of your potential customers if you give your software away for free to organizations who aren't already employing you.
The larger issue is, you're still assuming capitalist businesses exist. Why are we singling out software as having to be free in a capitalist economy? This is why I asked about a Free Houses Foundation and a Free Furniture Foundation. If the author wants an alternative to capitalism, it doesn't make sense to talk specifically about software and only software. Software is only one small part of the overall economy. I don't see why software developers have to "unilaterally disarm", as if were.
I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software.
But some, including RMS, are suggesting all open source software as an ideal and goal and possibility for a realistic society. How we get there is a different question; I think RMS would suggest as a voluntary political movement -- of people and organizations choosing to product open source software and boycott non-open source software. Have you seen free software advocates suggest outlawing non-free software and if so where?
Anyway, I was replying to someone saying -- but how could programmers have jobs, if all software was open source? we can't all work in academia.
So I think it's clear there could be lots and lots of programmer jobs even if all software were open source, and not just in academia. I'm not sure you're following my "enterprise" example. There might be a company that produces Widgets, and sells Widgets, but they have developers in-house to produce software that helps them make widgets. There are lots of such in-house programmers.
Now, many companies might say -- but we don't want you to share that software, what if our widget-making competitors got a hold of it, they could compete with us better! I think we developers know it doesn't really work like that -- the software can almost never be used as-is, the other company will always need it's own developers to adapt it. But that also doesn't mean it's useless, parts of it may be useful -- including by those in other industries.
But either way, the issue isn't "losing potential companies", it's the worry that it will make us less competitive if we share the "special sauce". But it seldom works that way.
But sure, some companies business models depend on proprietary software. It's clear the ecnonomy/market woudln't work exactly the same. Perhaps software engineers could no longer count on 99th percentile compensation (although I'm not even sure of that), but that's different than saying it's incompatible with software engineers getting paid, on a wide scale.
I do agree that we should be talking about free houses and free furniture, sure -- but the difference in software is that it can be copied infinitely at no cost. If I produce a chair, if you take my chair i don't have it anymore. If I produce sofware, literally everyone can have it at once, without having to manufacture extra copies at significant prices that must be paid by someone. That's why it's different than houses or chairs. I'm interested in non-capitalist houses and chairs too, but there's no reason we can't discuss free and open source software -- which after all already exists and is a major existing thing in the software ecology -- until we've solved free chairs and houses too.
> I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software.
> boycott non-open source software
Outlawing vs. boycotting is a distinction without a difference. If the boycott is effective, they're practically the same.
> Anyway, I was replying to someone saying -- but how could programmers have jobs, if all software was open source? we can't all work in academia.
That was still me. ;-)
> I'm not sure you're following my "enterprise" example.
I understand it. But please understand that I am an independent developer who sells my software directly to consumers, so this model would put me, for one, out of business.
> I do agree that we should be talking about free houses and free furniture, sure -- but the difference in software is that it can be copied infinitely at no cost.
This is what people seem to be assuming, but it's wrong. Software requires customer support. It requires distribution, which would typically be over the internet now, so there's hosting, bandwidth, web sites, etc. Software requires maintenance to fix bugs and make improvements. The more users there are, the more obscure bugs they'll uncover. And a lot of client software also has some backend service, which at scale requires a ton of labor and often hardware. Users do come at a cost, often a large cost. They can't just scale infinitely for free.
The elephant in the room is that a lot of "successful" large FOSS projects today have well-funded corporate backers. To take one example, Firefox is funded mostly by Google Search money. The cold hard financial reality is that FOSS is largely dependent on for-profit business, so I'm not impressed when people say that we already have FOSS. Its self-funding is extremely limited at best.
I wonder how you would fund recording musicians? You can "just copy" digital music, or indeed any digital asset such as movies, TV shows, and ebooks. Is that really going to be what determines who gets to make money and who has to be defunded?
> Serious question: How are software developers supposed to put a roof over their head and food on the table if software can't be privatized? We can't all be employed by academia or rely on charitable donations. The worst scenario would be if all software becomes "free" but funded by advertising. If you're not the customer, you're the product.
Are you asking, what Stallman thinks about this, or are you asking for more ideas from people here?
I believe Stallman said in some interview, that there would probably be fewer developers, but they would work on free software and services attached to free software, like support, setup, maintenance, customizations, and whatnot.
> I believe Stallman said in some interview, that there would probably be fewer developers
It's crucial to emphasize this in debates about "free" software. I think there would probably be a lot fewer developers. Stallman appears to be advocating for a decimation of the industry.
And I don't think this would help users, because a lot less software would exist.
It would be a better article without the anti-capitalist ranting. Capitalism won, because it is the only economic system compatible with individual rights. We can disagree about the level of taxation, redistribution, regulation, etc. but we’re not getting rid of free markets and private property rights. I wish we had a more precise set of terminology here. Maybe corporatism is a good description of what the author is opposed to?
> Capitalism won, because it is the only economic system compatible with individual rights.
I disagree with all parts of that sentence; certainly all after the comma, but also the "won" depends on the form of capitalism.
Capitalism is the observation that the natural choices in a market can be useful despite greed; that emergent behaviour of greedy actors can be beneficial to all.
Laissez-faire capitalism took that to an extreme, and then the Great Depression happened and the USA looked much like the USSR did when the latter collapsed and then changed the rules without changing the name.
Communism, at least in certain forms, removes private property rights; but it also, when first devised, was a massive increase in personal rights relative to the global norms of the time, recognising things like the equality of women — e.g. that wives shouldn't be treated as the property of husbands, the Communist Manifesto was published about 45 years before New Zealand became the first country to allow women to vote — and the need to educate all children.
Some of the things Communism called for became normalised before the Great Depression, and Post-Great-Depression capitalism has seen them become part of the global definition of civilisation.
But, in recent years, capitalism is also shifting away from personal property and ownership into various permanent rental (and other non-ownership) scenarios: subscription software, Uber, Netflix, etc.
> fruits of the labor are not enjoyed by the workers
How is my salary not the fruit of my labor? We can quibble (as many people have over the centuries) which division of profits between labor and capital is "fair", but stating a modern laborer is not getting anything out of their labor is quite false. Not as much as they want, sure, but it's not zero.
The ways of shifting the balance between groups have also been known for centuries as well btw. Organization of labor into unions on the side of labor, various ways of divide-and-conquer on the side of capital.
The ratio of the distribution of said fruits is an issue as you've stated but just as importantly there's an alienation between the worker and the thing they produce.
Workers who make luxury goods are rarely in a position where they could afford to buy them, even if they saved.
Assembly lines have optimised away the satisfaction and achievement of building something. Tightening the same screw for 12 hours is nothing other than an attack on the psyche. The same is happening in construction, skilled trades that people took pride in have been chopped up and optimised to the point that the guy that hangs the drywall often isn't able to skim it.
I take issue with a system that relies on the constant threat of homelessness and hunger purely to the benefit of those who face no such worries. A system that weaponises that threat to force many to.
The thought of technological progress and automation should bring joy, we imagine that it means people needing to work less, improving their quality of life. The reality has been swathes of people left in poverty while the rich get richer.
Consider the impact and ethics of replacing cleaning staff with foreign workers who are themselves training their AI replacement[0]. The idea of automating this is fantastic when considered independently of our economic system but issues quickly arise when put in context.
How does it affect the people currently doing the job, who now have to compete with workers being paid far less than the cost of living in their own country?
Which country's minimum wage laws should apply?
What are the ramifications of having those workers train their own AI replacements?
Who ultimately benefits from all of this? Does the reduced demand for labour lead to a better work life balance for the wider society, or does it simply make a few people ever more wealthy while creating destitution for the majority?
> but stating a modern laborer is not getting anything out of their labor is quite false. Not as much as they want, sure, but it's not zero.
In many cases the net benefit of working a job is negative, because many places pay below the cost of living. That’s why so many people are running two or three jobs now, in the states.
That's not quite the right definition of "net benefit"; while there are examples of this, it's things like "the total cost of transport to the job is more than the job" (happened to my mum, back in the 70s or 80s she got a car for a part time job that didn't cover the cost of maintaining a second car) or "getting a job means lots of benefits" (UK political meme "benefits trap") — in both cases, it has to be such that not working is better than working for the net benefit to be negative.
It's still a problem when people can't earn enough to get buy, just a different problem.
So, a slave would phrase that "How is the food and shelter I receive from my master not the fruit of my labor?"
Capitalism is a system where the people doing the work are not the ones deciding over the fruits of their labor. This decision is instead made by the entity that owns the means of production.
Yes, that's what I said. Tbh I think it is fair for the provider of capital to be recompensed for their contribution, since factories and machine tools cost (lots of) money and they are an essential part of modern production. There would be no jobs for laborers without the input of capital owners, just as there would be no investment opportunities for capital owners without laborers.
EDIT: WOW what a dishonest way to completely edit your post, and way to escalate this completely. A modern employee is in no way comparable to a slave, especially not the kind of employee likely to visit HN.
I do indeed find it somewhat difficult to call something that people willingly apply for "forced labor". Forced labor is when the Taliban come to your village and force you to work under threat of shooting you and your entire family. I think you'll find very few people willing to volunteer for the Taliban option, while H1B applications were 9x oversubscribed in 2023.
The US could do a lot better when it comes to worker rights, don't get me wrong. But comparing a H1B worker to an actual slave has a very misguided vision to what slavery is, and how it continues to impact people around the world today.
The Slave reference is not as inappropriate as you might think. The vast majority of people living in our modern capitalist systems are no more free to chose their employer than a a Slave in ancient societies or a Serf in medieval ones. They are bound by their respective circumstances and have little negotiation power.
I'm happy that you are in a privileged position with more than enough negotiation power. It still doesn't change the fact that you don't get to enjoy the fruits of your labor, but you are left to enjoy some of the fruits of your labor by your employer.
I'm curious; why do you think that there's a "capitalist" - that has enough resources to build a factory and buy the machines and the tools - and "laborers" in the first place?
I don't see anything in the wikipedia link or elsewhere eluding to what you put:
>Capitalism simply means that the fruits of the labor are not enjoyed by the workers but by those owning the capital.
Side note: Even in US which is supposedly capitalist, nothing is set in stone that says that the owner shall not share the profits with his laborers. The fact that many corporations do not choose to share their profit that is a different subject.
My problem with RMS is that "FSF" now stands for "Fierce Stallman Fanbase" rather than "Free Software Foundation". In the recent (may be still ongoing) process of recruiting new members for the FSF board, while this process has been presented as an opportunity for the FSF to broaden its view and recruit more diverse people, candidates who did not want to give a complete allegiance to RMS were discarded in the first steps of the process. The FSF even demanded that people working with other free software defense groups around the world that at some point said anything not entirely positive about RMS to resign and distance themselves from those other groups to continue the process.
I was extremely disappointed by this attitude.
Anyway, I still think that the FSF is doing an important job and that it is necessary to have such groups. But I just don't think we need more RMS, really not, given what it appears to entail. Groups such as the FSF should really not be so tied to a single individual, whoever that is. And especially not with someone who's behavior has repeatedly been problematic while we need to tackle inclusivity issues in our communities.
Even with the disclaimer at the beginning of the article, this title doesn't work for me. That said, I agree with most of the content of the article. The same article could have been titled "We need more copyleft", and it would be for the best.
EDIT: to answer some comments: nobody's talking about diversity for diversity's sake here, nor specifically about diversity hiring. Inclusivity is also something to enjoy in public events for example, and we need public symbols to emphasizes that, which RMS (who, whether he wants it or not, is de facto a public symbol and a thought leader) is clearly incapable of.
> we need to tackle inclusivity issues in our communities
No, I'd much rather see the FSF's core principles defended and expressed better than see them "tackle inclusivity issues". Wasting time, resources and breath on this kind of thing is the problem.
Making the FSF less inclusive seems like it could hamper their efforts to encourage more people and organizations to choose libre licenses, software, and hardware.
In their zeal to defend Stallman from both fabricated and legitimate complaints the FSF seems to be cultivating a smaller but more fanatical audience. This may make it harder for them to achieve their mission.
FSF's core principles cannot be defended if there's no one willing to defend them.
RMS has been directly responsible for scaring away people from the core mission of the FSF. Not just because of what other people have mentioned, but because he directly insults and threatens other individuals when he doesn't get his way. He's been doing this for decades now [1], long before anyone can claim the current furor is because of 'cancel culture' or whatever. And the end result is a more and more irrelevant FSF.
Exactly. This claims are unfounded rumors spread by people that don't like RMS and want to see him gone. Not because there's actually any objectionable behavior from his side.
The attempts to remove Stallman involved people bringing up stories and incidents of how awful he is to work with or even generally be nearby even beyond the most popular incidents. In turn, multiple open source and FSF organizations cut ties with him and the org when he came back to the FSF which is the whole 'you need people to defend the organization' problem comes from.
And so the FSF becomes more irrelevant because they're more interested in the cult of personality rather than the actual principals of free software.
Personally, i'd rather have RMS stay in place despite all of this than allowing a character assassination to work out. Because i consider the latter more awful.
Edit: First commit of the rms-open-letter is by Molly de Blanc. TIL she is an ethics moralist like Coraline Ada Ehmke, which paints the whole RMS controversy in a new light.
Then you have chosen for the FSF to die on the hill of the cult of RMS. You've clearly staked your ground and nothing can convince you otherwise, even though there are vast instances of the things RMS has said and done from people that have worked with him and around him.
And I hope you realize the deep irony in you complaining about character assassination while you set out to do the same thing to try and prove an irrelevant point.
> Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety.
I think if someone wrote it themselves as a comment here on HN it would constitute flaming and would get flagged.
Advocacy involves 1) understanding your target audience and 2) making an appeal to them.
If the composition of your organization does not reflect the composition of your target audience then both of those tasks become a little harder. This is not specific to the FSF, many organizations hire at least a few people who match their target demographics to do things like research, marketing, messaging, and outreach.
No one was, in the remotest sense, being ageist, sexist, or racist above… seeking to widen the appeal of something beyond an old white male audience isn’t, in any way, to anyone but an absolute dimwit, seeking to discriminate against that old white male audience.
Or, in other words that might make sense to a programmer:
assert (old && white && male) + (!old || !white || !male) >= (old && white && male)
Those are the demographics of "the software community", not "the free software community". Why did you think all those white guys got into the "free" one to begin with?
> and how it compares to tech more broadly
Big citation needed
Attempting to socially engineer your way out of that is a potentially impossible road, lined with injustices.
I can see how you'd think this if you thought that the FSF's role was to "speak."
I think of the FSF as doing something entirely different and the work that it does is valuable in and of itself and also, in addition, enables benefiting humans regardless of anything including what they think or what they say.
That said, Emacs is still rubbish, vim all the way.
Accept that you'll never find the perfect messenger. There's always someone more alienated, someone more disfavored and someone more ignored, someone even less privileged. You can keep finding "better" messengers, but that's just a distraction.
He can be arrogant and eccentric and I am not a fanboy at all, I am much more pragmatic in my views. But his fiercest detractors are much worse.
But I somewhat agree that people that criticise Stallman should be vetted closely as many of the accusations were very dishonest.
I agree that the FSF shouldn't tie itself to an individual, but the behavior of his distractors seem personal and much more "problematic". He has a strong opinion and isn't a people person, but that is certainly not a problem.
We don't really need unqualified market researchers that believe they know what some blurry target group might want to support.
The FSF refused people who explicitly said they were totally ok with RMS being here too, that they just wanted to be able to disagree with him if need be and don't think that he should not be seen as indispensable. They also refused people just because they wanted to continue to work with local free software group that at some point communicated their disagreement with RMS.
Without any further info, I would file that under unfounded rumors.
You have to understand that there was corporate influence that tried to topple him multiple times. So in that regard, yes, sadly his critics must be vetted closely. If that hits valid criticism, I am very sorry for that.
What you call unfounded rumors is what I and others have experienced first-hand. For my part, I still have the mails. Concerning the fact that it was or not valid criticism: it seems what I had to say was valid enough for some people from the current FSF board to insist that I apply to join the board, which I really did not intend to do in the first place. I wish I hadn't listen.
>They also refused people just because they wanted to continue to work with local free software group that at some point communicated their disagreement with RMS.
what kind of disagreement? hard to understand without knowing that.
Nope diversity for diversity sake is how we get shit like the ACLU losing its focus on civil rights issues, and instead going for dumb hot button takes that contradict its mission.
An excellent article that shows that these intramural fights are nothing new:
>The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s. After Skokie, a leader of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild complained of its “poisonous evenhandedness.”
In theory I'd agree, but in practice people criticizing RMS were just hopping on the latest witchhunt train, all in the name of "inclusivity", which is just extremely hypocritical when people outside the norm are exactly the ones you should be protecting, not trying to get them kicked out. So I can very much understand why the FSF would want to keep their distance.
That's not to say you can't criticize RMS, quite the opposite, but that criticism needs to be focused on his position in regards to Free Software, not the person and I really haven't heard much of that.
My concern is not even so much with RMS himself but with how the FSF revolves around him. The FSF as a group need to not be so tied with a single individual. A "bus factor" of one is not admissible for such an important mission. Also, the FSF should be able to have someone on the board who will be able to criticize RMS if need be. Even for just that they're not ready.
It's impossible to criticize RMS now because the cult has fully hardened. The moment anyone does, even if they were on the FSF, you will see the warriors come out with swords and axes ready to commit war against them. That was their #1 mistake when they brought him back and now it will forever plague their mission.
> It's impossible to criticize RMS now because the cult has fully hardened...you will see the warriors come out with swords and axes ready to commit war against them.
Almost all I read is people criticizing him and repeating the idea that he is somehow unassailable.
The FSF has never had as many members as it has now, and most of the new members are from the fierce fanbase.
They became members when there was an attack on RMS from inside and out.
In a way I think one root cause is about professionalism. Corporates like sensible professional behaviour. Activists don't. Activist organisations could be seen as compromising by becoming clean.
Perhaps it's about the hobby internet and big internet businesses via arguements about tone and attitude.
I think every one stands for thinks like diversity and inclusivity until they have to put some thing very personal on the line to lose.
At some point in time you just have to be ok with the best people to the job, doing their jobs. This doesn't even have to be controversial. If you can't do open heart surgery, you can't do it. You shouldn't be allowed to do it. People shouldn't be asked to be ok with not wanting to be treated by sub-standard doctors. I wouldn't be happy with boarding an airplane built by bad engineers, or drive on a bridge built by bad engineers.
This is where it gets controversial. In some places the best person to do the job might not necessarily have the same religious, political, social, racial, economical or whatever view you associate with.
OTOH, you need some of these heroes to run things for you. Don't get me wrong, if everybody could be writing a emacs or gcc, they would already be writing it. Pretty much anything that anyone would need to do something awesome with a computer today is free. The barrier is you.
I'm genuinely interested to know how you would know if an airplane was built by bad engineers, and which ones you personally consider to be safe/unsafe. I think I would go on any aircraft if the pilot was good, as the basic principles of aerodynamics generally result in stable and predictable controls. Putting a twist in an elevator cable is probably the least obvious way for a bad/malicious engineer to make a good airplane dangerous. But I don't think any layperson could have predicted the Boeing 737 MAX 8 failures, as they were caused by invisible problems in the computer control systems; the physical appearance of the aircraft doesn't look too unusual.
>My problem with RMS is that "FSF" now stands for "Fierce Stallman Fanbase" rather than "Free Software Foundation".
I cannot see it being any other way really. He is the founder. He sets the tone. He know exactly what he wants FSF to be.
Maintaining the core principles (especially if they are uncommon) of an organization is really, really hard if you have ever attempted it. You have to actively avoid, or even let go of people who are not near totally aligned with the principles .
The organization and ideas should transcend an individual.
The organization right now seems headed for irrelevance, when the ideas seem to be really more needed now that ever. Right now he’s and his camp are in charge, so if he and the group want to run it into the ground so be it.
Hopefully the ideas live on and some group can carry it forward.
I always thing back to media goblin as something that should be something more than it is. Though I’ll note it’s a “gnu” project which might mean it’s part of the FSF? It’s kinda a mess, but it seems whoever is running that is doing something different with the branding (I knew someone who was a big fan of Mediagoblin)
>The organization and ideas should transcend an individual.
It is never the case is my observation (as much as I want you to be correct). Any attempt to detach individual form the goals/idea of an organization leads to bureaucracy, incompetence, and perhaps most importantly authoritarianism of the evil kind. ( there are relatively benign versions of authoritarianism )
>when the ideas seem to be really more needed now that ever.
Can agree here, but who really steps up? who really want to make that sacrifice at great cost to one's personal comfort? It's easy to criticize RMS, ( or similar people) when one is a arm chair philosopher.
MediaGoblin was headed by Chris Lemmer-Webber. It hasn't been in very active development for quite a few years now, as most of the interest in this space has moved to PeerTube. PeerTube relies on a W3C standard protocol, called ActivityPub, that the very same Lemmer-Webber co-authored. MediaGoblin is officially part of GNU, but PeerTube isn't.
People are understandably angry and concerned because Richard Stallman is a longtime supporter of trans people, women, and social justice[1][2], but was somehow canceled by a disinformation campaign claiming that he was the opposite of all of those things.
The campaign was so intense and extreme it nearly destroyed the FSF. It continues to this day.
Stallman has a 15 year written record of his commitment to these causes. If he and the FSF can be canceled in this way, how are any of us safe?
All of the inclusivity movements that have happened in my workplace have involved hiring people unfit to do their job. I don't care what your background is, I care what you bring to the table.
The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.
The original meaning of diversity was "diversity of thought" -- it has been co-opted to mean something totally different.
You seem to be missing the point. It is about diversity of thought that I'm talking here. The FSF refused people based on them wanting to be able to disagree with RMS, or to continue to work with local free software groups that at some point criticized RMS return to the FSF board based on how it was orchestrated for example.
People like who? Actual diversity of thought or somebody who worked as an "open source and diversity advocate" at Microsoft - i.e. people who would water down the FSF?
You seem to trigger on "diversity" and immediately go into a - slightly troubling if you ask me - rant. Diversity means "diverse group of opinion on free software" in this context, not necessarily "diverse group of humans".
Also for the FSF you may not want the kind of diversity of thought that would allow commercial interests to seep in slowly. In some cases you really want inflexible dogmatic people with singular focus carrying the torch.
> All of the inclusivity movements that have happened in my workplace have involved hiring people unfit to do their job.
Honestly it sounds more like a problem with your job's hiring process than with diversity movements. Even if you restrict your pool of candidates to a minority, if that minority is large enough, it's very likely someone from that community is capable of filling the role.
If you really don't care about the background then you can ally yourself with someone who does and get someone who both increases diversity and is competent at their job.
> The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.
That's not specific to diversity. Dick measurement contests have existed forever. It's a myth that the past was more meritocratic that now. The proof is actually that if it were then the high ranks would be a lot more diverse than they are now. At least if you accept the premise that background is not related to capability (ie you are not racist/misogynic).
This is why I find this discussion so tiresome. Everyone in this thread takes it as an axiom that they have some oracle that takes a candidate as an input and spits out a number representing their suitability for the job which is then fudged for inclusivity. Absolutely zero introspection about how personal and structural biases affect their magic "oracle".
> I don't care what your background is, I care what you bring to the table.
The problem is that there will always be biases in hiring, "meritocracy" is a myth. It has been shown numerous times (e.g. [1]) that there is a significant bias towards men even if male and female candidates are equal, with the most decisive bias being an assumption that women may not be willing/able to work longer hours.
Besides, meritocracy is fraught with other issues as well, see e.g. [2][3][4] for more detailed writeups than I could possibly write here in a HN comment.
> All of the inclusivity movements that have happened in my workplace have involved hiring people unfit to do their job.
I'm starting to think there's more harm than good with these inclusivity movements. It creates two categories of students (and grads) when looking at hiring: people you know are there on merit and people who maybe got a little bit of help from "the quota".
I've heard it (in engineering only meetings) "you know this guy is solid, he went to X and he's Asian so you know he's there for the right reasons". And the thing is, you can't really argue with that logic.
Something I have to wonder is are women and minorities... ok with this?
Well, it's a great example as Dr. Earl Haas patented the first tampons in the early 30s and nobody cared. He then sold the patent to a business woman that made it successful. So effectively a man invented it but failed to market it and sell it well.
> If you're concerned about bias in hiring, then eliminate bias. Do blind interviews and redact resumes, broaden your candidate sources. You don't eliminate bias by... introducing bias.
The "problem" is that when this purist meritocratic approach has been tried, it results in more white men being hired, not less. Therefore such approaches are swiftly cancelled, in favour of introducing deliberate bias on the basis of superficial characteristics. See here as a good example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
I doubt they're anti-diversity, but bringing up this topic in context of RMS and FSF is a bit rich, given the high-profile character assassination attempt directed at RMS, in not so distant past. Free software ecosystem hasn't fully recovered from that yet.
> Free software ecosystem hasn't fully recovered from that yet.
That's what happens when you put all your eggs into one basket, and then realize that basket had a hole. Maybe free software would be better off if the FSF had spent time building a resilient movement rather than a church to RMS.
The attacks on rms have been wholly based on what he actually said, not character assassination.
rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).
This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.
> The attacks on rms have been wholly based on what he actually said, not character assassination.
They weren't. The things he actually said played a minor role in that kerfuffle - it all started with a lot of smears thrown at RMS by a person with some grudge. Additional quotes came later, as people started fishing for them.
> rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).
Why exactly are you defending people being irrational or engaging in power plays? You note yourself what the facts were, so why justify mistaking them?
> This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.
RMS was doing fine until someone decided to destroy him for personal gain. Do you expect every person doing something interesting in a niche community should behave like a Hollywood celebrity or a politician, having their communications managed by teams of spindoctors, on the off chance someone wants to destroy them and picks mass media as their weapon of choice?
He's bad at communicating. It may be because he's autistic, but ultimately that part is not relevant.
The way humans in bulk receive public communications is a fact of nature; it would be like someone swimming in the ocean and drowning and saying that it was bad that the ocean couldn't accept their style of swimming.
He's a public figure and certain actions undertaken by public figures when communicating with millions of people are bad. He undertook those actions and suffered the negative consequences. It's ultimately not related to his neurodivergence; there are autistic people who don't make huge PR blunders.
> Literally none of the factual claims of “RMS said X” have been false, it’s pretty much all been on the record.
On the contrary, literally every single claim about what RMS said or did was fabricated, or pulled out of context so badly you could still see the severed threads trailing behind. The original posts and subsequent press articles were one big patchwork of lies and manipulative statements; this was all trivial to verify and apparent to anyone except those who, for some reason, really wanted to believe it's true.
And even if it wasn't fabricated, it's still character assassination.
Look, if you take any public figure, and spend enough time looking through all the things they ever written or said in their lives, you can probably find some terrible thing to paint them as a terrible person. Someone could be a role model, have a lifetime of charitable work and positive achievements, bbbbbbut years ago they once said they didn't like gay people (or whatever), all of a sudden none of their achievements matter and they're actually monsters!
Any of us with a long posting history on the Internet probably at one time said something that wasn't nice. Cherry picking that one thing and holding it up as the summation of who we are, is character assassination.
From what I remember they plainly called him anti trans or transphobic because he suggested something different than they/them during a default pronouns discussion way back when this was all rather new.
A curious statement given his track record.
I also remember him being called a creep because he used to sleep in his office.
And at no point was any kind of change of opinion and/or public apology even hinted at.
He was advocating for "perse" (as in "person"), which is genius because there's no they/them for "Hello, sir/ma'am". If someone's gender is ambiguous, you're fucked. But you could say, "Hello, perse".
If you want to help your argument, especially since you're looking for an honest attempt at something, it's best to go by facts rather than memories. Another step that could strengthen your argument would be to define who is calling RMS anti-trans.
This is especially important, as time moves forward and people who never even met RMS read about this, to make sure we are relying on contemporary reports and not just fading memories.
Wasn't the primary premise of the cancellation attempt him defending pedophilia? Everything else was anecdotes and general "he is a weirdo" type accusations, which are probably true, but I don't remember much in the way of "factual claims".
> Wasn't the primary premise of the cancellation attempt him defending pedophilia?
That’s certainly the one I remember, and everything else was just people piling on to try and provide more ammo or more legitimacy to that claim because “look he’s a creep in other ways too!”.
But the claim that he defended pedophilia is itself false. The lady making the claim quoted him as saying one thing and then immediately criticised the quote as if it said another thing. I don’t remember the details now, but I remember reading the original open letter at the time and being baffled by how that was considered as evidence against RMS.
Im not saying he’s not a weirdo or creep, I don’t know if he is or not, just that the accusations against him about his comments on minsky’s visit of epstein’s island were strawnan accusations.
For what exactly ? There are countless examples of compagny who innovated or succedded well while everyone being the same race / gender (cf microsoft / apple in the 1990s or literally any china compagny right now).
I doenjoy diversity at work because I don't like when all my peers look / think / speak the same, but it's not exactly "important" beside my personal enjoyment
And there are countless examples of a company that caused serious damage by not being diverse, see as an example the introduction of seatbelts and airbags that were designed by and tested for men and male-sized dummies, and not women or children.
What kind of nonsense reply is this? What in the previous comment lead you to believe they never experienced diversity? They only commented on the impact of their workplace by incompetent managers, which is a very common experience.
> The guy is on video eating skin off his goddam toes while lecturing CS. If that dude or any of his followers are antidiversity, they need to look themself in the mirror.
He is a white male who’s in power despite eating toe gunk, while also supporting an environment hostile to woman. He’s in no way a good representation of diversity simply because he’s odd.
How (or why) do you read "I don't care what your background is, I care what you bring to the table" as "women and minorities suck at their jobs"? OP doesn't say who sucks at their jobs; he says that whoever they are, be they men, women, minorities, or majorities, he doesn't want them.
There's a bit more nuance to this than "minorities suck at their jobs".
Let's say I have two candidates, one is asian and the other is black, and on paper they both look great. They both attended Harvard, and they both interviewed well.
Now if I know that the average SAT score required for Asians to be admitted to Harvard is 1580, and the average SAT score required for Blacks to be admitted to Harvard is 1360, and all other metrics (GPA, conscientiousness, work habits, etc) fall along similar lines of differing standards, then I would have a statistical bias toward selecting the Asian candidate. Not because I'm racist, but because DEI and other equity efforts at Harvard have pre-biased the candidate pool for me.
In the absence of equity efforts, "I went to Harvard" would be a metric that stands on its own, independent of race. But with DEI, it is not. We have eliminated the "I hate them damn blacks" style of racism and replaced it with a more insidious "In order to make a statistically correct decision, I need to be biased against Blacks" style of racism. I'm not sure this is an improvement.
This is an example from college admissions, but the same analogy can be drawn in any environment with strong DEI influence.
I take issue with the idea that diversity is about things like skin color and gender. Even if a group is all of the same race, gender, language, income and nationality, they can still be incredibly diverse when it comes to their views and experiences related to free software.
If we wanted to encourage diversity in the free software space, we should make sure every type of free software user feels welcome. Not just Linux users, but also BSD users, as well as folks who use Windows or MacOS but enjoy free software like Blender.
Of course, free software naturally has a greater appeal to tech-savvy computer users and software developers, which is a group that is overrepresented by Americans, English speakers, men and white people, mostly due to economic reasons. But these characteristics have nothing to do with free software, and there is already a diverse range of viewpoints and user profiles within the free software space.
I agree that those groups are majorities, but I personally think it's more about language than money - or at least, it will be for the generation getting into computing now. You don't need too much money now to buy a computer capable of running modern software. If you can muster 50 US dollars you're basically there. However, English is so prevalent in software that Germans in the industry typically speak to each other in English rather than German!
Diversity in tech as a wideapread social movement was kicked off about ~7-8 years ago purely as an attempt to force down wages. They (tech CEOs) didn't particularly care about having more girl or black developers. They didnt care about freedom or equality. They just wanted more developers - and lower wages.
In the open source world big tech are trying to use the diversity as a way to cynically get representation for themselves. They hire people who hit their diversity quotas and then use them for open source outreach to get their voices amplified among the progressive minded who actually... write all that open source.
The people who would be pushed as candidates for open source boards (e.g. black people doing dev outreach for Microsoft/Google) are blameless (they need a job!) but they are still being used by rich white men to serve a mostly corporate agenda.
This isnt to say that we dont need more diversity, just that we should recognize when the shallow appearance of diversity is being cynically used as a corporate and political weapon by elites to push a regressive agenda.
This strategy is very similar to the one employed by one of the most racist countries on earth, although theyre more blatant and less implicit about their accusations. The strategy works very well, too - progressive minded people can be easily manipulated through guilt.
Most people in computing were women originally. Look up who programmed Eniac. Look up who created the early compilers and who programmed univac. Look at who programmed the flight software for Apollo
The tech industry was built by women, then had their jobs stolen
Yes and no. Coding was a viewed as a "low skilled" job. Everything else, such as design and hard math was done by men.
The problem is that today the supposed CS skills are atrocious. Most self called "engineers" would be laughed at the rest of the world. And, if they dared to stay in an actual engineering job in Europe (with civil accountability) without a proper degree, they would end in jail if something really bad happened. Literally.
If you end up in jail due to 'civil accountability', you need a better lawyer! Personally, I don't believe such incarceration should be lawful, but it does happen from time to time. Causing harm by writing software can (and in my opinion should) be considered an offence as gross negligence, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you hold a degree.
If you call yourself an engineer, you don't get an actual CS degree and some company hires you, on some hard accident you and your company would end in jail here.
Stallmann has, as far as I can tell, been sitting on his hands for the past 15 years. In that time period it does not seem that has accomplished anything of consequence except drama, pissing off many of his remaining allies with powertrips [0], and crippling GCC relative to LLVM. I cannot remember the last time a new piece of software came out of the GNU organization which was actually relevant to users or developers - they and the FSF seem stuck in the 1990s and have done little to attempt to address the general trend towards SaaS / web.
Even if "Stallmann was right", that doesn't mean he's the right person to lead the FSF. Because the increasing irrelevance of the FSF isn't just our fault for not caring enough, but his also, through inaction, poor decisionmaking, unprofessional behavior and terrible PR.
Although it's the statement of the title, it's not really what the article was about. The title is clickbaity, it should really say "Richard Stallman Was Right" or something. This is explained in the disclaimer above the article, and the article itself.
Stallman and the FSF are solely focused on the ideology and not on how to create a practical economy based on the ideology. RMS has not advocated and materially supported software, such as GCC, that implements Free Software principles while he is eager to take credit for and fundraise on the success of those communities.
RMS specifically has prevented GCC from being innovative in ways that would complicate the enforcement of the GPL until the new feature is required to be competitive. First, that is not freedom. Second, that policy may have been viable when GCC was the only viable challenger to proprietary compilers, but not when Open Source compilers with more commercially friendly licenses exist.
The FSF is fighting the last war and believes that corporations are trying to tear down the FSF and the GNU Project software. It's a fantasy to convince themselves that they are relevant.
Richard was a great visionary and is useful to expand the Overton window, but the FSF has not evolved to advocate for a pragmatic approach. If RMS and the FSF wishes to advocate for a purist ideology, that's fine, but they need to accept that it severely limits their appeal and ability to shape policy, even if they are "right".
Stallman is huge. Practically you cannot appoint someone to his position. FSF is meaningless without him. If you could, this would have happened when they fired him.
That's a huge problem for the FSF then, which it should be urgently looking to solve.
He's 70 years old, which means he will need a successor fairly soon in one way or another. If the mission is that important, it shouldn't die with him.
Yes, this is the most important point from an organizational point of view. If only for that, accepting to be so tied to a single individual is a concern.
I 100% agree with you. The inflexibility of the FSF as to adapt to platform capitalism (e.g., address licensing issues of Uber-like platforms and clients) is also a serious concern. When I see the debacle that the coopyleft (with two o, not a typo) licencing of the CoopCycle software platform and client has been, I'm left wondering if the discussion on human users vs software freedom (which is more or less supposed to be the philosophical difference between free and open source) isn't just a hypocritical argument.
I'm afraid this call for freedom is actually narrow ideology.
Consider: what is more 'free'?
A) Here is some code, do whatever with it?
or
B) Here is some code, you can only use it in certain circumstances?
FSF is dead because it's not practical, and the ideologues behind it naively malign 'capitalism' as something terrible for the world.
OSS makers are free to publish as they chose. Apple and MS don't force or cajole anyone to use MIT. If you use copyleft, your software will not likely get used very much and that's that.
'Big companies leverage over small developers!'
True, maybe they should get together and license their software to Large Corporations?
Finally, the conversation started with a giant Photo of Stallman and that hints at the ideological demagoguery right from the start no matter how much they try to play it down, it'd have been better to not opened the discussion with that at all.
In the end, it will not matter, very few will use copyleft because it's just not practical and that's that.
Consider two timelines: immediate, and long-term future. Which world is more free?
A: short term more free: you get to do what you please now, including not giving others the freedoms you got.
B: long term more free: copyleft ensures that a library of code builds up, available for everyone to run, study, and modify, and that it's a hassle to restrict others' freedom to use your modifications.
If practicality is only considered until the next tax period, world A is more attractive. Once you start thinking in human lifetimes, it no longer is.
>Disclaimer: I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. … I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I pretend that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today.
The problem is that the man himself epitomizes his own ideas. A lot of his behavior is a consequence of taking his ideas to their logical conclusion. For example, consider the following interaction [0]:
I’m not sure how forcing the manufacturer of those headphones to make their hardware and firmware fully open source would benefit the world in any way, shape, or form. This sort of demagoguery does way more harm to the Free Software movement than good. If more of RMS’s ideas means more people thinking and behaving like that, we really, really don’t need any more.[0] https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1374460079798292487