9 ms·

Reasons not to use Apple

56 points by e19293001 10y ago

slyzmud 10y ago
I think he has a point in many things. But sadly, he also criticizes every alternative like Google, Microsoft and even some linux distros. It's scary but every day we are closer to the future he has told. I bet that in some years we will be thinking why didn't we listened to him.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Who's "we"? Honestly even after Snowden and the rest the amount of people who really care about privacy and software freedom is tiny, even among technologists and programmers. Most people stop when they realize being "free" means barely using anything, for better or for worse.
  - simbalion 10y ago
    It doesn't mean "barely using anything", it means changing the computer scene from the Macy's bastardization that it has become thanks to corporations and get-rich-quick schemers, and bringing back the community spirit that was spawned in the early days of MIT computer clubs. There's a way of thinking that was born or embraced in those free-software circles which the majority of our consumer world is unaware of, and if we could teach it to them it could have dramatic and positive effects globally. But the corporations don't want that, and they often turn the volume on their ads up to 11 to drown us out.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      > There's a way of thinking that was born or embraced in those free-software circles which ...relies on everyone involved being technically savvy at a very high level in order to survive. Most people aren't like us and that's okay. Unless you're Richard Stallman, I suppose.
      - simbalion 10y ago
        That's not okay, actually. Especially since the people who are "like us" aren't the ones running the world. It's not okay by any stretch of the imagination that there is a gigantic intelligence gap in the human race. It's very very bad.
        throwanem 10y ago
        It's not an intelligence gap. It's a question of priorities. For a Stallman-style world to work, everyone has to be not only able, but willing, to drop the business at hand and spend as much time as necessary, as often as necessary, doing what is basically sysadmin work. The nature of the libre stack, and its interaction with hardware, ensure this is necessary quite a lot. Put simply, most people have more valuable things to do with their time than sysadmin their personal hardware. Even most sysadmins do! It is incumbent upon the free software movement to recognize and accommodate this fact. The inherent penalty for failure to do so is irrelevance, however ideologically pure.
        simbalion 10y ago
        Respectfully, I disagree. One doesn't need the knowledge of a systems administrator to use free software instead of proprietary software. The Debian OS ships with lots of free software to do practically everything you'd ever want to do on your computer. We are 90% of the way to a "Stallman-style" world being a realistic possibility for the 'average user'. Only a few key applications are missing or under-represented, which should be seen as an opportunity for new developers to cut their teeth on some valuable projects. There's more to it than an intelligence gap. There's a propoganda issue where people are being convinced that the subject matter is "too advanced" for them, which is a lie that would-be masters tell the people they wish to enslave. (this has been going on for centuries). But the intelligence gap does play a role and can be traced back to our neglected public education system and the greed of free market capitalism.
        throwanem 10y ago
        > One doesn't need the knowledge of a systems administrator to use free software instead of proprietary software. That's not my experience, nor is it reflected in what I hear from people who do still use Linux on their personal machines. Indeed, Dr. Stallman himself was unable to get VGA output working when he was on the stage at HOPE last month - in the end, the AV staff had to point a camera at his laptop. It's also unreasonable to conclude, from the experience of programmers who actually are prepared to invest considerable time and effort into reworking the software we use, that free software is at, or indeed, near, a point of readiness to support the needs of "average users". One of Dr. Stallman's examples was a comparison between Photoshop and the GIMP; although he chose not to cast it in precisely those terms, it was obvious to which software packages to which he referred. Unfortunately, this comparison, while well suited to the ideological requirements of the Free Software Foundation and those of Dr. Stallman's talk, is not well founded in fact; the reason Photoshop remains the de facto standard for image editing is not, as Dr. Stallman would have it, mere foolish and contemptible intransigence on the part of "average users", but rather because Photoshop has for many years had capabilities which the GIMP still fails even to approximate. Even in the realm of text handling, a task central to the requirements of any graphic designer and almost any other sort of user, today's GIMP falls far short of the mark set by a version of Photoshop from well over a decade ago. This sort of failure cannot be explained by a notional "intelligence gap", or by conspiracy theories around class warfare and capitalist propaganda. If a problem like this were of sufficient concern to the Free Software Foundation to be worth solving, solved it would be, and if achieving such a solution required some modification of an ideology which had proven too strict in its purity to address the needs of reality, such modification would have long since occurred. That it has not, and that fundamental issues of usability and functionality remain in the software FSF advertises as being ready in all respects to replace its proprietary alternatives, demonstrates that, for Dr. Stallman and his organization, ideological concerns are paramount, and outweigh to negligibility the concerns which matter to the same "average users" on whose behalf FSF partisans purport to work. The occasional populism of FSF rhetoric is thus exposed as nothing more than an empty claim, trivially made when convenient and just as trivially discarded when it conflicts with the weird, chilly ideological "hackers uber alles" elitism which, while appealing to few, is at least an honest expression of Stallman's and FSF's true position. Unfortunately, as I said before, the price of purity in such an ideology is irrelevance, and indeed irrelevance is precisely the position in which FSF finds itself today. As long as ideology remains paramount, this will not, indeed cannot, change.
  - technofiend 10y ago
    You had James Bamford writing about phone call monitoring 40 years ago in Puzzle Palace. Nobody cared. You had Cypherpunks on the cover of Wired wearing masks with their PGP key IDs and saying encrypt all your emails. Nobody cared. You had the EFF compromising with the Clinton I administration on Clipper and key escrow. Nobody cared. People of a certain age have discovered the value in ephemeral services after Facebook and other services with long memories have proven to potentially cache embarrassing posts for future employers but there's no cyber utopia with anonymous communication empowered by a vetted web of trust because nobody cares. Just snapchats you hope the recipient doesn't capture.
    - schoen 10y ago
      > You had the EFF compromising with the Clinton I administration on Clipper and key escrow. Nobody cared. Are you sure you're not thinking of CALEA?
      - technofiend 10y ago
        I just remember at the time being shocked that the EFF had endorsed a compromise but no longer remember the details. I'll have to google for it and see if I can find it now.
        schoen 10y ago
        There was a compromise around CALEA which was one of the precipitating factors in EFF's split into CDT and EFF. As an EFF member during the early Crypto Wars and a staff member since just before September 11, I'd be surprised to hear about a compromise on Clipper; I haven't heard any of the 1990s-era employees mention such a thing.
    - rakoo 10y ago
      Survivor bias. For every correct prediction you had 100 wrong predictions, and I'd venture it's the same today.
- zepto 10y ago
  He's right to criticize Google and Microsoft. There is no way in which they are morally superior to Apple.
  - aianus 10y ago
    I think there's a huge difference between Android's Play Store + sideloading + other app stores + unlocked bootloader and the ultra locked down iPhone.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - Jerry2 10y ago
    His criticism of Google is awfully scant. https://stallman.org/google.html https://stallman.org/google.html
- awqrre 10y ago
  Google should do the right thing and allow any Linux applications to be installed on Android
  - mchahn 10y ago
    Google allows absolutely anything to be installed on Android. There's a setting for that.
    - awqrre 10y ago
      Sorry, I must have missed it, what is that setting called?
      - mchahn 10y ago
        settings/security/Unknown sources
        awqrre 10y ago
        That doesn't allow you to install any Linux application, it only allows you to install Android apps that you find outside the Play Store...
        mchahn 10y ago
        All applications need to be ported to a platform before they can run on it. What linux app do you want on Android? It can be ported. You can't do that on ios.
        awqrre 10y ago
        I don't want to port anything... let say I want to run Gimp... I want to run Gimp without having to port it (or without anyone having to port it), that is the whole point. Google could make that easy since Android is based on Linux...
- jaredklewis 10y ago
  It's easy to understand why people don't listen to him: everything he says is so acerbic and barbed, that anyone who doesn't already agree with him will be immediately turned off by his writing. RMS is the Richard Dawkins of free software. If you are already an atheist and enjoy making fun of others, Richard Dawkins is a fun read. If you are a religious person with some doubts, Dawkins is unlikely to convince you of much since he appears to revel so much in calling you an idiot. RMS, like Dawkins, has no sympathy for those with a different point of view. He immediately dismisses anyone not on his team, which is not a great way to gain followers. If RMS cares about the free software movement, my advice to him would be to stop writing and let others with more empathy handle the evangelizing.
chasing 10y ago
> I can't sympathize much with those app developers, since they are making proprietary software. They all deserve to fail. What a shitty, shitty attitude.
- simbalion 10y ago
  Not at all.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  It's not the worst attitude in the world. Wanting a kind of business to fail is not wishing harm on the actual people. But it ignores all the people making apps that do have open licensing.
  - reflexive 10y ago
    Unfortunately, Apple's own App Store Terms of Service don't allow use of GPL software on iOS. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
    - jgord 10y ago
      wow.. that seems unduly aggressive and unnecessary, almost spiteful. If its not illegal, then perhaps it should be.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Yes, that's obnoxious, but you can use MIT or dual license.
    - josephg 10y ago
      I'm confused. I use dozens of iOS apps which are built on react-native (BSD). Signal messenger (which I use daily) is GPLv3 licensed. And I don't know about the client code but I bet 95% of the apps I use depend on GPL code on the servers which power them. The majority of Apple's stack is opensource, too. Take a look through http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/ some time. The kernel and huge swathes of their ecosystem are opensource. I'm writing this comment in chrome, which has millions of lines of opensourced webkit code in it, written by paid Apple engineers. And compiled in clang/llvm, which is developed, maintained by Apple. Oh, and its opensource too. I'm totally confused by the argument that Apple hates opensource. They depend on it. They give back. They're a good citizen. They just aren't huge fans of the GPL, but so what? Neither am I. Neither is Rust (MIT), or Golang (BSD) or the NodeJS community (90%+ BSD/ISC). Opensource simply doesn't need the GPL to bloom in today's world.
sjwright 10y ago
In an ideal world these criticisms would be relevant. The reality is, most people who buy computers aren't RMS, they won't be able to build and support their own stack. These consumers own their computing devices in much the same way as a Nintendo GameBoy or a Thermomix; his principles are contextually irrelevant for anyone looking to purchase a tool to access Facebook. Most of his reasons fall away when you consider the product an appliance rather than a computer. Heck, I'm a computer programmer and I treat my smartphone as an appliance. It makes me wonder how seriously RMS takes his stance. Does he refuse to drive any modern vehicle with an ECU? Does he refuse to refrigerate his milk in any modern fridge with a microcontroller?
- shakethemonkey 10y ago
  At the HOPE conference last month, Stallman said he would on occasion borrow a stranger's smartphone should he be in a public place and need to make a phone call.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    He also called people who don't agree with his stance fools, and said that he holds them in contempt. I guess that doesn't extend to refusing, on principle, to get the benefit of contemptible foolishness when he finds it useful to do so.
    - simbalion 10y ago
      is it wrong to call a fool a fool?
      - sjwright 10y ago
        It's not a question of wrong, it a question of productive.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        It's certainly foolish to ignore every perspective save one's own.
Frondo 10y ago
"I can't sympathize much with those app developers, since they are making proprietary software. They all deserve to fail. However, that doesn't excuse the way Apple treats them." This is one of the first things I read on this page. This kind of uncompromising, unsympathetic view makes me think less that Stallman stands for something valuable, and more that he wants to use his principles to be a dick. I mean, I get it, it's Stallman. He always has a few nuggets of insight, wrapped up in page upon page of pontification. But "they deserve to fail"? The other thing that gets me is how muddled his political views end up being. Like this bit, "Apple is culpable if its products are made by people working a longer workweek than is allowed in the US." Really? They are culpable? Or you think they should be? China's a sovereign nation, it can set its own rules, but that's worth discussing and not just making some blanket assertion. And, for someone who tends to play so pedantic, I'm surprised he's claiming that "the mere practice of referring to service staff as "geniuses" is dishonest already" without actually assessing whether Apple has only hired geniuses for its stores. Last..."iBad"? Where's the eyes-rolling emoticon?
- munin 10y ago
  > This kind of uncompromising, unsympathetic view makes me think less that Stallman stands for something valuable, and more that he wants to use his principles to be a dick. Stallman is at war, and there are casualties in war. He probably feels that the ends justify the means.
  - Frondo 10y ago
    If Stallman's at war, then this attack is, to quote Terry Pratchett, "right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of."
- Snesker 10y ago
  What do you think is a valid excuse for polluting the world with non-free, source-obfuscated software? Do you think hiding what your program does from the user is in that user's interests? Or even a good use of man hours? No need to answer, I know already. I don't even think my comments can be replied to.
toodlebunions 10y ago
Rehashing 2012?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
simbalion 10y ago
"It should be illegal to make or distribute computers which are platforms for censorship." Stallman understands the consequences of these things in a way that most humans are blind to. I am so glad that someone as high profile as him has the guts to stand up and persistently deliver the same message, maybe someday everyone will wake up and figure out they've been paving the road to hell before it's too late (if it's not already..)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sergiotapia 10y ago
Richardo Stallmanu - the quintessential /g/entleman incarnate, no? But hey, here we are talking about him.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Having seen some of the worst of /g/, you're right, he fits right in. And because it has nonfree software in the repos, and doesn't run linux-libre by default, he already hates Arch.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    You hadn't been around /g/ long enough then. Too much discussion about non-libre software/hardware. I believe he even responded to an email once calling it an "inane place devoid of any meaningful conversations". Or something along those lines... Due to the "I should be able to do whatever I want with my computer" crowd being a large part of /g/ though, many people agree with what he says. The user should basically be treated as a god - and not be put under limitations to modify the code running on their computer. It also helps he has a pretty strong track record of being right. Even if his being right isn't recognized until years after the fact.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      The one thing he's consistantly wrong about is that it is acceptable to run a full free-software system RIGHT NOW. For most of us, it would be awkward at best, impossible at worse. It's still better than it used to be...
MicroBerto 10y ago
Here's a shorter list: ~3x the cost for nearly the same thing you can get from Samsung.
hoodoof 10y ago
It's really hard to get on board with such extreme opinions.
- Snesker 10y ago
  What, on the page, do you consider 'extreme'?
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Stallman sticks to his principals, and I can admire him for that. But he's actually outright unpleasant to be around, because he's facist about his ideals in a way that most of us cannot or do not want to be. I get that he's against proprietary software, but calling John Ousterhout a cancer while licking his foot? It's not winning people over. The EFF and Mozilla have done more for Stallman's cause than Stallman ever did. ESR got this one right. Jeez. I never thought I'd say ESR was right about something that wasn't a piece of code. I guess a broken clock really is right twice a day.
- kijin 10y ago
  Stallman has done a great deal of work to move the Overton window [1] in a direction that makes it much easier for EFF and Mozilla to operate, not to mention provided them with the FOSS tools they depend on every day. If Stallman had never existed, Microsoft might have moved the Overton window in the opposite direction and ESR would have sounded too radical for anyone to take seriously. As long as these other people are winning over more people than Stallman is losing, I'd say Stallman is still making a positive contribution to the world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Well, that's one of the the reasons I can't hate stallman. I'm an emacs user: I'd be talking out both sides of my mouth if I wished he didn't exist. OTOH, gpsd... For Rainer's sake, 1) Emacs might not have existed in the first place if it weren't for Stallman, and 2) I use GNU emacs more often then not.
sneak 10y ago
I would pay Real Money for viable alternatives that respect my time and attention and don't fuck up my life. Nobody has built any, sadly.
falcolas 10y ago
Remember: This is Stallman's opinion. If you share his point of view that the rights of the user should be valued above the rights of the programmer and the corporation, then this is the rant for you. But if you don't; if you value convenience, maximizing profits, and minimizing development effort, then this will probably annoy you.
devin 10y ago
Hey, not a big surprise to see this on stallman.org, but I thought I'd drop in to mention Apple created ALAC (which is basically FLAC, just with lock-in), which when I first discovered it, found to be a pretty egregious example.
- sjwright 10y ago
  ...except that Apple ALAC is Free Software released under the Apache License. And it's no more similar to FLAC than any other lossless audio codec. It's widely believed that Apple chose to build their codec rather than simply implement FLAC because their goal was to optimise for maximum battery life efficiency on the iPod. (No such optimisations have been open sourced by Apple, but that doesn't in any way imply their non-existence.)
mankash666 10y ago
Done deal. GNU Hurd FTW. Will post a follow up from my new Hurd workstation. Edit: never really got the display and network cards to work, stuck with my Mac for now
AckSyn 10y ago
His constant distain for anything not GPL'd is rather off-putting, and won't be winning over anyone with the constant derision with comments like "deserve to fail", "iBad" and "iThings". Really, Stallman? Is this the best that he can do? It reads like some angsty teenage, knee-jerk Apple hater bullshit that's reminiscent of the late 90's.
toshka 10y ago
This is what you would expect from Stallman. He's extremely smart guy, but such categorical position makes it impossible to agree with him for utilitarian reasons. I don't wanna to restrict my comfort just to prove a point. Besides, we are all under surveillance regardless.
timewarrior 10y ago
Stallman has done a great service to OSS. However his personality and stances might be detrimental. I happened to meet him around 12 years back and that meeting turned me away from associating with anything which he is involved. I was helping organize the biggest software event in India and as a part of that we had invited him to speak. I was responsible for his arrangements and he was very rude to me throughout. He kept making fun of me because of my accent (which apparently was sufficient to get a leadership role in US at one of the Fortune 15 companies). Needless to say it was very childish and a complete turnoff.
jalami 10y ago
On one hand, I like that Stallman is opinionated and forward about his politics and how we wants the world to work. So many people are silent or inactive about the things they care about, wishing for people at large to just change. You ruffle some feathers when you open up and say what's on your mind, but hopefully after enough rational argument, you come off better and with a better message. On the other, I don't really like everything he says, despite being a pretty firm OSS supporter. He conflates so much with open source it's nauseating. People choose a license for all kinds of reasons and I understand he's a cheerleader, I am too, but conflating everything hurts open source as much as it hurts proprietary actors. It's a market. Some people will want to buy your product because they see its open nature as a benefit they are willing to pay more for, others don't care and will not pay more. The same goes for privacy promises, DRM or which devices you support, the color etc. If people buy or sell things that you would rather not, that's cool. Pointing out that everyone at every level of a proprietary agreement is duped by some nefarious puppet-master and the entire machine should fail is childish. Furthermore, throwing in things like economics and employment fairness into the mix really confuses the message to the determent of OSS developers. In like kind, I may be a vegetarian, but PETA certainly doesn't speak for me. I realize he thinks the current market is trash and slight deviations from the status quo won't bring real change, but most people just don't care enough about what many of us care about. That's the hard truth. Slinging mud and building straw-men isn't how we fix this problem. It just makes OSS proponents look out of touch. Also, some people commented on his sometimes hypocritical impurity. eg. making phone calls on locked down phones and using closed source websites occasionally. Being OSS pure in 2016 is crazy hard and getting harder, again due to market forces. I think there's a lot to fault Stallman on, but his deviation from OSS purity is not one of them.
hoodoof 10y ago
I use Apple Macintosh because, despite the various bugs, it is an outstanding operating system and works extremely well and is built on Unix. Ive followed operating systems closely for more then 30 years and frankly no company or open source effort managed to make anything as good as OSX in a whole range of ways. I don't care much about principles - Apple made the best OS so I use it. If you want me to use something else then it has to be at least as good.
confounded 10y ago
I donate to the FSF (and favor the GPL) in spite of Stallman. I like what me means, but tend to dislike how he says almost everything. I've been quietly hoping that a more personable figurehead for the free software movement might emerge for some time.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  That was Linus, and also ESR before he went batshit insane
mcphage 10y ago
iThings? iBad? Was this written by a 19 year old edgelord? Does he write Microsoft as "M$", too?
NEDM64 10y ago
Nobody cares. Practically everybody is stupid, so GPL will never work, communism will never work, war will never stop. I choose Apple, because the UI/UX is excellent, the whole platform is much more well organised than anything "open", everything works out of the box, and WiFi doesn't fail intermittently and GRUB won't f* up on the next update.

56 points by e19293001 10y ago

I think he has a point in many things. But sadly, he also criticizes every alternative like Google, Microsoft and even some linux distros. It's scary but every day we are closer to the future he has told. I bet that in some years we will be thinking why didn't we listened to him.

sotojuan 10y ago
Who's "we"? Honestly even after Snowden and the rest the amount of people who really care about privacy and software freedom is tiny, even among technologists and programmers. Most people stop when they realize being "free" means barely using anything, for better or for worse.
- simbalion 10y ago
  It doesn't mean "barely using anything", it means changing the computer scene from the Macy's bastardization that it has become thanks to corporations and get-rich-quick schemers, and bringing back the community spirit that was spawned in the early days of MIT computer clubs. There's a way of thinking that was born or embraced in those free-software circles which the majority of our consumer world is unaware of, and if we could teach it to them it could have dramatic and positive effects globally. But the corporations don't want that, and they often turn the volume on their ads up to 11 to drown us out.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > There's a way of thinking that was born or embraced in those free-software circles which ...relies on everyone involved being technically savvy at a very high level in order to survive. Most people aren't like us and that's okay. Unless you're Richard Stallman, I suppose.
    - simbalion 10y ago
      That's not okay, actually. Especially since the people who are "like us" aren't the ones running the world. It's not okay by any stretch of the imagination that there is a gigantic intelligence gap in the human race. It's very very bad.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        It's not an intelligence gap. It's a question of priorities. For a Stallman-style world to work, everyone has to be not only able, but willing, to drop the business at hand and spend as much time as necessary, as often as necessary, doing what is basically sysadmin work. The nature of the libre stack, and its interaction with hardware, ensure this is necessary quite a lot. Put simply, most people have more valuable things to do with their time than sysadmin their personal hardware. Even most sysadmins do! It is incumbent upon the free software movement to recognize and accommodate this fact. The inherent penalty for failure to do so is irrelevance, however ideologically pure.
        simbalion 10y ago
        Respectfully, I disagree. One doesn't need the knowledge of a systems administrator to use free software instead of proprietary software. The Debian OS ships with lots of free software to do practically everything you'd ever want to do on your computer. We are 90% of the way to a "Stallman-style" world being a realistic possibility for the 'average user'. Only a few key applications are missing or under-represented, which should be seen as an opportunity for new developers to cut their teeth on some valuable projects. There's more to it than an intelligence gap. There's a propoganda issue where people are being convinced that the subject matter is "too advanced" for them, which is a lie that would-be masters tell the people they wish to enslave. (this has been going on for centuries). But the intelligence gap does play a role and can be traced back to our neglected public education system and the greed of free market capitalism.
        throwanem 10y ago
        > One doesn't need the knowledge of a systems administrator to use free software instead of proprietary software. That's not my experience, nor is it reflected in what I hear from people who do still use Linux on their personal machines. Indeed, Dr. Stallman himself was unable to get VGA output working when he was on the stage at HOPE last month - in the end, the AV staff had to point a camera at his laptop. It's also unreasonable to conclude, from the experience of programmers who actually are prepared to invest considerable time and effort into reworking the software we use, that free software is at, or indeed, near, a point of readiness to support the needs of "average users". One of Dr. Stallman's examples was a comparison between Photoshop and the GIMP; although he chose not to cast it in precisely those terms, it was obvious to which software packages to which he referred. Unfortunately, this comparison, while well suited to the ideological requirements of the Free Software Foundation and those of Dr. Stallman's talk, is not well founded in fact; the reason Photoshop remains the de facto standard for image editing is not, as Dr. Stallman would have it, mere foolish and contemptible intransigence on the part of "average users", but rather because Photoshop has for many years had capabilities which the GIMP still fails even to approximate. Even in the realm of text handling, a task central to the requirements of any graphic designer and almost any other sort of user, today's GIMP falls far short of the mark set by a version of Photoshop from well over a decade ago. This sort of failure cannot be explained by a notional "intelligence gap", or by conspiracy theories around class warfare and capitalist propaganda. If a problem like this were of sufficient concern to the Free Software Foundation to be worth solving, solved it would be, and if achieving such a solution required some modification of an ideology which had proven too strict in its purity to address the needs of reality, such modification would have long since occurred. That it has not, and that fundamental issues of usability and functionality remain in the software FSF advertises as being ready in all respects to replace its proprietary alternatives, demonstrates that, for Dr. Stallman and his organization, ideological concerns are paramount, and outweigh to negligibility the concerns which matter to the same "average users" on whose behalf FSF partisans purport to work. The occasional populism of FSF rhetoric is thus exposed as nothing more than an empty claim, trivially made when convenient and just as trivially discarded when it conflicts with the weird, chilly ideological "hackers uber alles" elitism which, while appealing to few, is at least an honest expression of Stallman's and FSF's true position. Unfortunately, as I said before, the price of purity in such an ideology is irrelevance, and indeed irrelevance is precisely the position in which FSF finds itself today. As long as ideology remains paramount, this will not, indeed cannot, change.
- technofiend 10y ago
  You had James Bamford writing about phone call monitoring 40 years ago in Puzzle Palace. Nobody cared. You had Cypherpunks on the cover of Wired wearing masks with their PGP key IDs and saying encrypt all your emails. Nobody cared. You had the EFF compromising with the Clinton I administration on Clipper and key escrow. Nobody cared. People of a certain age have discovered the value in ephemeral services after Facebook and other services with long memories have proven to potentially cache embarrassing posts for future employers but there's no cyber utopia with anonymous communication empowered by a vetted web of trust because nobody cares. Just snapchats you hope the recipient doesn't capture.
  - schoen 10y ago
    > You had the EFF compromising with the Clinton I administration on Clipper and key escrow. Nobody cared. Are you sure you're not thinking of CALEA?
    - technofiend 10y ago
      I just remember at the time being shocked that the EFF had endorsed a compromise but no longer remember the details. I'll have to google for it and see if I can find it now.
      - schoen 10y ago
        There was a compromise around CALEA which was one of the precipitating factors in EFF's split into CDT and EFF. As an EFF member during the early Crypto Wars and a staff member since just before September 11, I'd be surprised to hear about a compromise on Clipper; I haven't heard any of the 1990s-era employees mention such a thing.
  - rakoo 10y ago
    Survivor bias. For every correct prediction you had 100 wrong predictions, and I'd venture it's the same today.
zepto 10y ago
He's right to criticize Google and Microsoft. There is no way in which they are morally superior to Apple.
- aianus 10y ago
  I think there's a huge difference between Android's Play Store + sideloading + other app stores + unlocked bootloader and the ultra locked down iPhone.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Jerry2 10y ago
  His criticism of Google is awfully scant. https://stallman.org/google.html https://stallman.org/google.html
awqrre 10y ago
Google should do the right thing and allow any Linux applications to be installed on Android
- mchahn 10y ago
  Google allows absolutely anything to be installed on Android. There's a setting for that.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    Sorry, I must have missed it, what is that setting called?
    - mchahn 10y ago
      settings/security/Unknown sources
      - awqrre 10y ago
        That doesn't allow you to install any Linux application, it only allows you to install Android apps that you find outside the Play Store...
        mchahn 10y ago
        All applications need to be ported to a platform before they can run on it. What linux app do you want on Android? It can be ported. You can't do that on ios.
        awqrre 10y ago
        I don't want to port anything... let say I want to run Gimp... I want to run Gimp without having to port it (or without anyone having to port it), that is the whole point. Google could make that easy since Android is based on Linux...
jaredklewis 10y ago
It's easy to understand why people don't listen to him: everything he says is so acerbic and barbed, that anyone who doesn't already agree with him will be immediately turned off by his writing. RMS is the Richard Dawkins of free software. If you are already an atheist and enjoy making fun of others, Richard Dawkins is a fun read. If you are a religious person with some doubts, Dawkins is unlikely to convince you of much since he appears to revel so much in calling you an idiot. RMS, like Dawkins, has no sympathy for those with a different point of view. He immediately dismisses anyone not on his team, which is not a great way to gain followers. If RMS cares about the free software movement, my advice to him would be to stop writing and let others with more empathy handle the evangelizing.

chasing 10y ago

> I can't sympathize much with those app developers, since they are making proprietary software. They all deserve to fail. What a shitty, shitty attitude.

simbalion 10y ago
Not at all.
Dylan16807 10y ago
It's not the worst attitude in the world. Wanting a kind of business to fail is not wishing harm on the actual people. But it ignores all the people making apps that do have open licensing.
- reflexive 10y ago
  Unfortunately, Apple's own App Store Terms of Service don't allow use of GPL software on iOS. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
  - jgord 10y ago
    wow.. that seems unduly aggressive and unnecessary, almost spiteful. If its not illegal, then perhaps it should be.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Yes, that's obnoxious, but you can use MIT or dual license.
  - josephg 10y ago
    I'm confused. I use dozens of iOS apps which are built on react-native (BSD). Signal messenger (which I use daily) is GPLv3 licensed. And I don't know about the client code but I bet 95% of the apps I use depend on GPL code on the servers which power them. The majority of Apple's stack is opensource, too. Take a look through http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/ some time. The kernel and huge swathes of their ecosystem are opensource. I'm writing this comment in chrome, which has millions of lines of opensourced webkit code in it, written by paid Apple engineers. And compiled in clang/llvm, which is developed, maintained by Apple. Oh, and its opensource too. I'm totally confused by the argument that Apple hates opensource. They depend on it. They give back. They're a good citizen. They just aren't huge fans of the GPL, but so what? Neither am I. Neither is Rust (MIT), or Golang (BSD) or the NodeJS community (90%+ BSD/ISC). Opensource simply doesn't need the GPL to bloom in today's world.

sjwright 10y ago

In an ideal world these criticisms would be relevant. The reality is, most people who buy computers aren't RMS, they won't be able to build and support their own stack. These consumers own their computing devices in much the same way as a Nintendo GameBoy or a Thermomix; his principles are contextually irrelevant for anyone looking to purchase a tool to access Facebook. Most of his reasons fall away when you consider the product an appliance rather than a computer. Heck, I'm a computer programmer and I treat my smartphone as an appliance. It makes me wonder how seriously RMS takes his stance. Does he refuse to drive any modern vehicle with an ECU? Does he refuse to refrigerate his milk in any modern fridge with a microcontroller?

shakethemonkey 10y ago
At the HOPE conference last month, Stallman said he would on occasion borrow a stranger's smartphone should he be in a public place and need to make a phone call.
- throwanem 10y ago
  He also called people who don't agree with his stance fools, and said that he holds them in contempt. I guess that doesn't extend to refusing, on principle, to get the benefit of contemptible foolishness when he finds it useful to do so.
  - simbalion 10y ago
    is it wrong to call a fool a fool?
    - sjwright 10y ago
      It's not a question of wrong, it a question of productive.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      It's certainly foolish to ignore every perspective save one's own.

Frondo 10y ago

"I can't sympathize much with those app developers, since they are making proprietary software. They all deserve to fail. However, that doesn't excuse the way Apple treats them." This is one of the first things I read on this page. This kind of uncompromising, unsympathetic view makes me think less that Stallman stands for something valuable, and more that he wants to use his principles to be a dick. I mean, I get it, it's Stallman. He always has a few nuggets of insight, wrapped up in page upon page of pontification. But "they deserve to fail"? The other thing that gets me is how muddled his political views end up being. Like this bit, "Apple is culpable if its products are made by people working a longer workweek than is allowed in the US." Really? They are culpable? Or you think they should be? China's a sovereign nation, it can set its own rules, but that's worth discussing and not just making some blanket assertion. And, for someone who tends to play so pedantic, I'm surprised he's claiming that "the mere practice of referring to service staff as "geniuses" is dishonest already" without actually assessing whether Apple has only hired geniuses for its stores. Last..."iBad"? Where's the eyes-rolling emoticon?

munin 10y ago
> This kind of uncompromising, unsympathetic view makes me think less that Stallman stands for something valuable, and more that he wants to use his principles to be a dick. Stallman is at war, and there are casualties in war. He probably feels that the ends justify the means.
- Frondo 10y ago
  If Stallman's at war, then this attack is, to quote Terry Pratchett, "right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of."
Snesker 10y ago
What do you think is a valid excuse for polluting the world with non-free, source-obfuscated software? Do you think hiding what your program does from the user is in that user's interests? Or even a good use of man hours? No need to answer, I know already. I don't even think my comments can be replied to.

toodlebunions 10y ago

Rehashing 2012?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

simbalion 10y ago

"It should be illegal to make or distribute computers which are platforms for censorship." Stallman understands the consequences of these things in a way that most humans are blind to. I am so glad that someone as high profile as him has the guts to stand up and persistently deliver the same message, maybe someday everyone will wake up and figure out they've been paving the road to hell before it's too late (if it's not already..)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

sergiotapia 10y ago

Richardo Stallmanu - the quintessential /g/entleman incarnate, no? But hey, here we are talking about him.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Having seen some of the worst of /g/, you're right, he fits right in. And because it has nonfree software in the repos, and doesn't run linux-libre by default, he already hates Arch.
- Nadya 10y ago
  You hadn't been around /g/ long enough then. Too much discussion about non-libre software/hardware. I believe he even responded to an email once calling it an "inane place devoid of any meaningful conversations". Or something along those lines... Due to the "I should be able to do whatever I want with my computer" crowd being a large part of /g/ though, many people agree with what he says. The user should basically be treated as a god - and not be put under limitations to modify the code running on their computer. It also helps he has a pretty strong track record of being right. Even if his being right isn't recognized until years after the fact.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    The one thing he's consistantly wrong about is that it is acceptable to run a full free-software system RIGHT NOW. For most of us, it would be awkward at best, impossible at worse. It's still better than it used to be...

MicroBerto 10y ago

Here's a shorter list: ~3x the cost for nearly the same thing you can get from Samsung.

hoodoof 10y ago

It's really hard to get on board with such extreme opinions.

Snesker 10y ago
What, on the page, do you consider 'extreme'?

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Stallman sticks to his principals, and I can admire him for that. But he's actually outright unpleasant to be around, because he's facist about his ideals in a way that most of us cannot or do not want to be. I get that he's against proprietary software, but calling John Ousterhout a cancer while licking his foot? It's not winning people over. The EFF and Mozilla have done more for Stallman's cause than Stallman ever did. ESR got this one right. Jeez. I never thought I'd say ESR was right about something that wasn't a piece of code. I guess a broken clock really is right twice a day.

kijin 10y ago
Stallman has done a great deal of work to move the Overton window [1] in a direction that makes it much easier for EFF and Mozilla to operate, not to mention provided them with the FOSS tools they depend on every day. If Stallman had never existed, Microsoft might have moved the Overton window in the opposite direction and ESR would have sounded too radical for anyone to take seriously. As long as these other people are winning over more people than Stallman is losing, I'd say Stallman is still making a positive contribution to the world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Well, that's one of the the reasons I can't hate stallman. I'm an emacs user: I'd be talking out both sides of my mouth if I wished he didn't exist. OTOH, gpsd... For Rainer's sake, 1) Emacs might not have existed in the first place if it weren't for Stallman, and 2) I use GNU emacs more often then not.

sneak 10y ago

I would pay Real Money for viable alternatives that respect my time and attention and don't fuck up my life. Nobody has built any, sadly.

falcolas 10y ago

Remember: This is Stallman's opinion. If you share his point of view that the rights of the user should be valued above the rights of the programmer and the corporation, then this is the rant for you. But if you don't; if you value convenience, maximizing profits, and minimizing development effort, then this will probably annoy you.

devin 10y ago

Hey, not a big surprise to see this on stallman.org, but I thought I'd drop in to mention Apple created ALAC (which is basically FLAC, just with lock-in), which when I first discovered it, found to be a pretty egregious example.

sjwright 10y ago
...except that Apple ALAC is Free Software released under the Apache License. And it's no more similar to FLAC than any other lossless audio codec. It's widely believed that Apple chose to build their codec rather than simply implement FLAC because their goal was to optimise for maximum battery life efficiency on the iPod. (No such optimisations have been open sourced by Apple, but that doesn't in any way imply their non-existence.)

mankash666 10y ago

Done deal. GNU Hurd FTW. Will post a follow up from my new Hurd workstation. Edit: never really got the display and network cards to work, stuck with my Mac for now

AckSyn 10y ago

His constant distain for anything not GPL'd is rather off-putting, and won't be winning over anyone with the constant derision with comments like "deserve to fail", "iBad" and "iThings". Really, Stallman? Is this the best that he can do? It reads like some angsty teenage, knee-jerk Apple hater bullshit that's reminiscent of the late 90's.

toshka 10y ago

This is what you would expect from Stallman. He's extremely smart guy, but such categorical position makes it impossible to agree with him for utilitarian reasons. I don't wanna to restrict my comfort just to prove a point. Besides, we are all under surveillance regardless.

timewarrior 10y ago

Stallman has done a great service to OSS. However his personality and stances might be detrimental. I happened to meet him around 12 years back and that meeting turned me away from associating with anything which he is involved. I was helping organize the biggest software event in India and as a part of that we had invited him to speak. I was responsible for his arrangements and he was very rude to me throughout. He kept making fun of me because of my accent (which apparently was sufficient to get a leadership role in US at one of the Fortune 15 companies). Needless to say it was very childish and a complete turnoff.

jalami 10y ago

On one hand, I like that Stallman is opinionated and forward about his politics and how we wants the world to work. So many people are silent or inactive about the things they care about, wishing for people at large to just change. You ruffle some feathers when you open up and say what's on your mind, but hopefully after enough rational argument, you come off better and with a better message. On the other, I don't really like everything he says, despite being a pretty firm OSS supporter. He conflates so much with open source it's nauseating. People choose a license for all kinds of reasons and I understand he's a cheerleader, I am too, but conflating everything hurts open source as much as it hurts proprietary actors. It's a market. Some people will want to buy your product because they see its open nature as a benefit they are willing to pay more for, others don't care and will not pay more. The same goes for privacy promises, DRM or which devices you support, the color etc. If people buy or sell things that you would rather not, that's cool. Pointing out that everyone at every level of a proprietary agreement is duped by some nefarious puppet-master and the entire machine should fail is childish. Furthermore, throwing in things like economics and employment fairness into the mix really confuses the message to the determent of OSS developers. In like kind, I may be a vegetarian, but PETA certainly doesn't speak for me. I realize he thinks the current market is trash and slight deviations from the status quo won't bring real change, but most people just don't care enough about what many of us care about. That's the hard truth. Slinging mud and building straw-men isn't how we fix this problem. It just makes OSS proponents look out of touch. Also, some people commented on his sometimes hypocritical impurity. eg. making phone calls on locked down phones and using closed source websites occasionally. Being OSS pure in 2016 is crazy hard and getting harder, again due to market forces. I think there's a lot to fault Stallman on, but his deviation from OSS purity is not one of them.

hoodoof 10y ago

I use Apple Macintosh because, despite the various bugs, it is an outstanding operating system and works extremely well and is built on Unix. Ive followed operating systems closely for more then 30 years and frankly no company or open source effort managed to make anything as good as OSX in a whole range of ways. I don't care much about principles - Apple made the best OS so I use it. If you want me to use something else then it has to be at least as good.

confounded 10y ago

I donate to the FSF (and favor the GPL) in spite of Stallman. I like what me means, but tend to dislike how he says almost everything. I've been quietly hoping that a more personable figurehead for the free software movement might emerge for some time.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
That was Linus, and also ESR before he went batshit insane

mcphage 10y ago

iThings? iBad? Was this written by a 19 year old edgelord? Does he write Microsoft as "M$", too?

NEDM64 10y ago

Nobody cares. Practically everybody is stupid, so GPL will never work, communism will never work, war will never stop. I choose Apple, because the UI/UX is excellent, the whole platform is much more well organised than anything "open", everything works out of the box, and WiFi doesn't fail intermittently and GRUB won't f* up on the next update.