12 ms·

Stallman’s Law

306 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

atemerev 10y ago
s/corporations/governments/. Or at least "corporations and governments".
- rwh86 10y ago
  Only in the case where the government is compromised by, say, regulatory capture [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
  - laser 10y ago
    What about cases in which the government is compromised by incompetence and/or poor ethics, esp. due to ignorance?
    - spangry 10y ago
      As someone who works in government, you're dead right about incompetence, and I would add 'ignorance'. These are the two things I have seen do the most harm, by an extremely large margin. And I think it's inexcusable. I'd argue the same thing for corporations as I would for governments: we shouldn't tolerate individuals, occupying some powerful position, who harm others due to their own 'ethical carelessness'. In fact, that seems like a reasonable standard to apply to individuals, full stop. Individuals should be held accountable for their actions; we shouldn't shunt the blame to some incorporeal concept (i.e. 'governments', 'corporations').
      - laser 10y ago
        At least on the surface that's an extremely fascinating idea. I guess I would want to understand why we created institutional protections for individuals in the first place before forming any opinion about whether removing such protections is a good idea.
- Maken 10y ago
  A government is just a corporation that manages a country.
  - blowski 10y ago
    You have to ignore reams of political science to believe that claim.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    I think "institution" is the word you are looking for.
roflchoppa 10y ago
Interesting that the more "advance" technology gets, the lower our reasonable expectation of privacy becomes. I want to know when the average person gets on a computer, and surfs around, what data do they expect is kept for just themselves vs shared with the service.
- shmerl 10y ago
  Expectation doesn't become less. But awareness of implications does. People aren't easily digesting realities of digital space. Abusing this lack of awareness and making it look like lower expectation of privacy is evil (and some clearly try to do that, to justify their breaches of others' privacy).
- Slackwise 10y ago
  s/advance/convenient/
- marcus_holmes 10y ago
  I don't think the "average person" even thinks about data privacy at all. I've seen people tell other people to "get off MY feed!" as if it's a thing they own and can control. As long as the platform can maintain this illusion, everyone will be happy.
  - roflchoppa 10y ago
    thats a good point, also interesting that people get territorial over digital space.
  - SixSigma 10y ago
    > get off MY feed! shitposting on public facebook posts is a lot of fun
- omphalos 10y ago
  I think it's because of the common assumption that the system that controls your data must also house the application that interacts with this data. When decentralized applications finally arrive (the inklings are already here) users won't be forced into this false choice. In that sense, companies like Google and Facebook are behind the curve, and don't really represent technological "advancement", but rather a social shift that has legitimized itself by falsely presenting itself as inevitable.
stcredzero 10y ago
Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He's as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison. Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, when it comes to the underlying science. However, much of the tremendous progress that has been made with respect to the global environment has been a tenacious "foot in the door, while they're slamming it" struggle, where allies and politics are vital. This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing. If a group is advocating for freedom, I find it perplexing when they seem to be coercing me to be free in exactly the way they deem correct. While leadership is vital in any movement (I think that leaderless movements generally fall off the rails and tend to spawn extremist groups) one of the primary reasons leadership is vital is to set the tone and morality of the movement. A firm philosophical and intellectual grounding is also vital, but it can't stand alone if the tone and morality of the movement allows it to succumb to any human group's natural tendency towards jingoism. RMS always got the intellectual far-seeing right. In terms of tone and politics: fairly close to dead wrong. Basically, he could impress college aged me, then alienate working aged me.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm... "We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity Their stance has moderated over the decades. Also, it's not only what I've read from them online, I'm also referring to direct person to person interactions. Again, it's not the intellectual underpinnings, it's the stuff around it. If they're cleaning up their act in terms of outreach, then power to them. I would love to see a more politically effective FSF.
necessity 10y ago
`s/corporations/government` and this is still true
- api 10y ago
  The two blur together at the top.
  - grzm 10y ago
    The objectives, roles, and responsibilities are significantly different.
    - scalio 10y ago
      In theory, yes. The problem is that many government officials act to further corporations' objectives for example by enacting laws enabling or making shady activities easier.
      - grzm 10y ago
        Yup. And that is a problem, isn't it? Because it shouldn't be that way. We should work to limit such influence, not just throw up our hands and say they're the same.
        scalio 10y ago
        Oh of course, but do you have any practical suggestions? I fear the whole thing needs to be ripped apart to have any chance of actual change as opposed to the less-than-superficial "yeah that's a problem, gotta do something about that, don't we?" rubs nipples that politicians are spewing out when faced with criticism. Point is, corruption played such a major role in building the modern world it's impossible to get rid of while maintaining capitalism as it stands. The old school solution would be a bloody revolution. Needless to say, not something I'm in favour of. On top of that, modern surveillance makes me very pessimistic as to its outcome. (Could that be a measure to determine what's too much surveillance? When revolution becomes impossible?)
oelmekki 10y ago
And yet, today's big opensource projects often are driven by big corps. I wonder how rms would reconciliate that. Maybe we can get there the difference between opensource and freesoftwares? In any way, having big companies publishing opensource code tell us how past we are the time when every single company will just publish proprietary software and let you guess the specs.
- marcus_holmes 10y ago
  I think there's a few drivers for big corps getting involved in open source: 1. Getting intelligent people to work on projects for free. This is actually rarer than it sounds. But it does happen. 2. Protecting dependencies. Once a large company depends on a piece of technology, it has a vested interest in the future of that piece of technology. For proprietary code bases, this might mean buying the supplier. For open source, it means getting involved in the project. 3. It's their business model. Create a popular open source project and then provide paid support to organisations that use it. 4. Recruitment. Getting involved in the communities where skilled people hang out, and being seen to be involved in those communities, is great for recruiting those skilled people. 5... other reasons (I thought of a few more but decided not to attempt an exhaustive list) It's all commercial reasons - how to make more money from this software project. RMS' view often seems to come from a place where all commercial organisations are inherently evil and out to do their users harm. I believe that 99.9% of the market for a piece of software are never going to be interested in taking responsibility for the safety of that software. You can give them all the rights you like, but they're not going to use them. The supplier of a piece of software will always be held responsible for its safety. It's not surprising that the supplier will attempt to exert some kind of control over the use of the software, if only to reduce their liability. Again, commercial interests. Trying to do the best thing for everyone.
  - oelmekki 10y ago
    > RMS' view often seems to come from a place where all commercial organisations are inherently evil and out to do their users harm. Yes, this was the thinking in early 2000', and indeed this was a proper reaction to the windows context back then. But I don't think that's what rms is fighting for anymore, I would state it more like : "if I bought it, then I own it", like when you buy a house, you can do any change in it you want. That's what is puzzling me in the linked statement, it sounds a lot like we're back in the 2000'. I guess shortness of statement is killing its details.
gaur 10y ago
No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense. Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").
- bertiewhykovich 10y ago
  "If corporations dominate society and write the laws, then each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users." Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.
  - gaur 10y ago
    You've explicitly rewritten it as "if X, then maybe Y", exactly as I said. "If corporations write the laws, then maybe they will restrict or mistreat their users." That's not a law.
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      That's not a "maybe" any more by now. Corporation are meant to maximise profits, at the expense of everything else, except braking the law —and even that is debatable. Some jurisdictions even have laws to enforce that mindset. As soon as profit maximization is at odds with the user's interests (that's pretty much all the time), the corporation will naturally act against the user's interests. From this, I'm pretty sure "law" is a relatively accurate descriptor.
- tehlike 10y ago
  that sounds like you are trying too hard to not see what he's trying to say.
- flukus 10y ago
  > No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense. Well he did, so apparently you can.
kome 10y ago
I had to use an iPad for the first time in my life recently, and I have to say that Stallman is right.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I have no idea when this "law" was written or said, but I think this type of thinking--in 2016--is exactly the cause of what it's prophesizing. Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity. I do understand that all this "open software" movement could have an impact because it was very polarizing and moved a lot of people. But in a world where open source is the norm, it should not be about fighting against corporations. The discussion should be on a higher level. For example, you should think deeper about why it looks like: "While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users". Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant. It's actually pretty simple - money, power. Corporations are amoral machines; if there's something that brings profits and they can get away with legally, some corp will eventually do it (same seems to apply to small companies). > Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity. Thinking like this was always the hallmark of my life. But the more I interact with actual people, and not just high-school friends but random people; CEOs and coworkers and shopowners and cleners - the more I realize there is a split there. Some of us think of humanity as a single entity worth caring about. Others don't give a fuck. They think of "me, family and friends vs. the rest of the world". Which makes it easy to justify fucking "the rest of the world" for profit. I don't really know how humanity is to reconcile those two worldviews.
  - spangry 10y ago
    The thing I sometimes have trouble with is: 1. Corporations behave like sociopaths. 2. Corporations don't really exist. They're a legal fiction that, in reality, is just a group of people working towards a common goal (maximum profit). I wonder if it's counter-productive to think and speak of corporations as some sort of separate entity to the people it is composed of. I think the notion that 'corporations are evil sociopaths' is one of those thought-stopping 'mind-killers'. Corporations don't have intent, good or bad; they don't really exist (except in our minds). As harsh as it may sound, if we want a 'corporation' to behave ethically, then we should assign blame to those that are perpetrating the harm: to the employees, managers and owners of that corporation. It's their collective efforts and actions that have led to unethical outcomes, not the singular effort of some invisible corporate spectre. I think it's the only possible way to fight this 'diffusion of responsibility' that allows a whole bunch of (mostly) normal people to all do tiny unethical acts that, when viewed in aggregate, are abhorrent. I suspect whatever the best solution is will be similar (or analogous) to how you overcome the 'bystander effect': rather than saying 'someone call 911', say 'you, guy in the red shirt (point at him), call 911'. tl;dr - It turns out the Ring of Gyges is not a ring at all. It's a multi-story building filled with rows of cubicles.
makecheck 10y ago
Corporations need to be treated as if they could have radically different managers at any moment (because they can). The Best Company Ever of today could be bought by Worst Corporation In Existence tomorrow. It essentially doesn’t matter what a company is currently doing or “promises” to do or not do, if those behaviors are not legally binding. And even then, if you have to read a hundred-page document to figure out what the legal binding is, assume that the company has carefully placed a nice escape hatch somewhere in their legalese. It was supposed to be true that if one vendor does something you don’t like, you simply “vote with your wallet” and go to one that you do like. That works great when buying toasters. Yet now, with essentially your whole life tied up in one or two devices and key services like Internet being dictated by one company based on where you live, it is REALLY hard to just walk away from one crappy technology experience and find something you like better. This is a real sign that it is not a good idea to have so much technology powered by so few corporations.
- zdw 10y ago
  If anyone needs an example of the first point, look to what happened to Sun's free/open projects and firmware downloads after it's acquisition by Oracle.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  It also works great when you buying a satisfactory toaster is the problem. It works less well when your neighbor buys an insecure IoT toaster that DDoSes the website you want to read an article from.
- Retra 10y ago
  "Voting with your wallet" seems a pretty absurd concept to me anyway. If you could vote with money, there'd be no need to call it a vote. One may as well be a proponent of "voting with bombs" for all the rational good tying power directly to wealth will do you.
- DasIch 10y ago
  You're seriously overestimating how powerful managers are and how difficult it is to change the culture of an organization.
api 10y ago
The opposite happened when mainframes and minis transitioned to PCs, but he's right from the 2000s onward. Something changed, and I'm not 100% sure what. Tech is reflecting the larger political trends of the world where strong man rule and other forms of authoritarianism are ascendant. I do think the driver is democratic to an extent. People seem to be demanding less freedom in exchange for convenience, security, simplicity, etc... in tech and in life.
vonklaus 10y ago
This is tangential, but isn't http://www.root-servers.org/ http://www.root-servers.org/ still the authoritative source for DNS. I was browsing DNS options (switched to open-DNS) but the main http://www.root-servers.org/ http://www.root-servers.org/ site is down. It appears to be cached as recently as this month with a map, but is not responsive. A few other "detector" sites have it down. Is this important, or does it not show up because it is a resolver?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
icomefromreddit 10y ago
Interesting. Sounds very Kaczynski to me: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
known 10y ago
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. --Chomsky
- witty_username 10y ago
  Corporations are democratic because they have shareholders.
known 10y ago
Essential Rules of Tyranny Rule #1: Keep Them Afraid Rule #2: Keep Them Isolated Rule #3: Keep Them Desperate Rule #4: Send Out The Jackboots Rule #5: Blame Everything On The Truth Seekers Rule #6: Encourage Citizen Spies Rule #7: Make Them Accept The Unacceptable http://www.alt-market.com/articles/198-the-essential-rules-of-tyranny http://www.alt-market.com/articles/198-the-essential-rules-o...
- logicallee 10y ago
  Based on the context, I expected your list to remind me of how corporations have been treating users lately (I thought this was the point you're making) - but out of these 7 rules only #7 seems to apply? What I mean is that #1, 2, 3,4, 5, and 6 literally don't seem to be happening? (At least, they don't remind me of anything?)
greyman 10y ago
I worked for a corporation for 12 years, and I was in a team developing software for CT scanner operations. What's wrong with that? Then I also worked for a very small company, where I coded... games. So according to the RMS, that could be morally less wrong. :-)
phn 10y ago
I don' disagree with the law itself. However, each technological advance is also an opportunity to break free from restrictions and mistreatment from the previous status quo.
agumonkey 10y ago
I wish Stallman got back to its printer roots. Hardware is where the battle is. Good enough GPU / DSP / NIC and the rest is set. Sane not too hard to write drivers that works fine under open source OSes, enjoy prolongated lifetime for your devices and more interesting uses.

Stallman’s Law

306 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

atemerev 10y ago

s/corporations/governments/. Or at least "corporations and governments".

rwh86 10y ago
Only in the case where the government is compromised by, say, regulatory capture [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- laser 10y ago
  What about cases in which the government is compromised by incompetence and/or poor ethics, esp. due to ignorance?
  - spangry 10y ago
    As someone who works in government, you're dead right about incompetence, and I would add 'ignorance'. These are the two things I have seen do the most harm, by an extremely large margin. And I think it's inexcusable. I'd argue the same thing for corporations as I would for governments: we shouldn't tolerate individuals, occupying some powerful position, who harm others due to their own 'ethical carelessness'. In fact, that seems like a reasonable standard to apply to individuals, full stop. Individuals should be held accountable for their actions; we shouldn't shunt the blame to some incorporeal concept (i.e. 'governments', 'corporations').
    - laser 10y ago
      At least on the surface that's an extremely fascinating idea. I guess I would want to understand why we created institutional protections for individuals in the first place before forming any opinion about whether removing such protections is a good idea.
Maken 10y ago
A government is just a corporation that manages a country.
- blowski 10y ago
  You have to ignore reams of political science to believe that claim.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  I think "institution" is the word you are looking for.

roflchoppa 10y ago

Interesting that the more "advance" technology gets, the lower our reasonable expectation of privacy becomes. I want to know when the average person gets on a computer, and surfs around, what data do they expect is kept for just themselves vs shared with the service.

shmerl 10y ago
Expectation doesn't become less. But awareness of implications does. People aren't easily digesting realities of digital space. Abusing this lack of awareness and making it look like lower expectation of privacy is evil (and some clearly try to do that, to justify their breaches of others' privacy).
Slackwise 10y ago
s/advance/convenient/
marcus_holmes 10y ago
I don't think the "average person" even thinks about data privacy at all. I've seen people tell other people to "get off MY feed!" as if it's a thing they own and can control. As long as the platform can maintain this illusion, everyone will be happy.
- roflchoppa 10y ago
  thats a good point, also interesting that people get territorial over digital space.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  > get off MY feed! shitposting on public facebook posts is a lot of fun
omphalos 10y ago
I think it's because of the common assumption that the system that controls your data must also house the application that interacts with this data. When decentralized applications finally arrive (the inklings are already here) users won't be forced into this false choice. In that sense, companies like Google and Facebook are behind the curve, and don't really represent technological "advancement", but rather a social shift that has legitimized itself by falsely presenting itself as inevitable.

stcredzero 10y ago

Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He's as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison. Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, when it comes to the underlying science. However, much of the tremendous progress that has been made with respect to the global environment has been a tenacious "foot in the door, while they're slamming it" struggle, where allies and politics are vital. This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing. If a group is advocating for freedom, I find it perplexing when they seem to be coercing me to be free in exactly the way they deem correct. While leadership is vital in any movement (I think that leaderless movements generally fall off the rails and tend to spawn extremist groups) one of the primary reasons leadership is vital is to set the tone and morality of the movement. A firm philosophical and intellectual grounding is also vital, but it can't stand alone if the tone and morality of the movement allows it to succumb to any human group's natural tendency towards jingoism. RMS always got the intellectual far-seeing right. In terms of tone and politics: fairly close to dead wrong. Basically, he could impress college aged me, then alienate working aged me.

ktRolster 10y ago
This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm... "We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."
- stcredzero 10y ago
  I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity Their stance has moderated over the decades. Also, it's not only what I've read from them online, I'm also referring to direct person to person interactions. Again, it's not the intellectual underpinnings, it's the stuff around it. If they're cleaning up their act in terms of outreach, then power to them. I would love to see a more politically effective FSF.

necessity 10y ago

`s/corporations/government` and this is still true

api 10y ago
The two blur together at the top.
- grzm 10y ago
  The objectives, roles, and responsibilities are significantly different.
  - scalio 10y ago
    In theory, yes. The problem is that many government officials act to further corporations' objectives for example by enacting laws enabling or making shady activities easier.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Yup. And that is a problem, isn't it? Because it shouldn't be that way. We should work to limit such influence, not just throw up our hands and say they're the same.
      - scalio 10y ago
        Oh of course, but do you have any practical suggestions? I fear the whole thing needs to be ripped apart to have any chance of actual change as opposed to the less-than-superficial "yeah that's a problem, gotta do something about that, don't we?" rubs nipples that politicians are spewing out when faced with criticism. Point is, corruption played such a major role in building the modern world it's impossible to get rid of while maintaining capitalism as it stands. The old school solution would be a bloody revolution. Needless to say, not something I'm in favour of. On top of that, modern surveillance makes me very pessimistic as to its outcome. (Could that be a measure to determine what's too much surveillance? When revolution becomes impossible?)

oelmekki 10y ago

And yet, today's big opensource projects often are driven by big corps. I wonder how rms would reconciliate that. Maybe we can get there the difference between opensource and freesoftwares? In any way, having big companies publishing opensource code tell us how past we are the time when every single company will just publish proprietary software and let you guess the specs.

marcus_holmes 10y ago
I think there's a few drivers for big corps getting involved in open source: 1. Getting intelligent people to work on projects for free. This is actually rarer than it sounds. But it does happen. 2. Protecting dependencies. Once a large company depends on a piece of technology, it has a vested interest in the future of that piece of technology. For proprietary code bases, this might mean buying the supplier. For open source, it means getting involved in the project. 3. It's their business model. Create a popular open source project and then provide paid support to organisations that use it. 4. Recruitment. Getting involved in the communities where skilled people hang out, and being seen to be involved in those communities, is great for recruiting those skilled people. 5... other reasons (I thought of a few more but decided not to attempt an exhaustive list) It's all commercial reasons - how to make more money from this software project. RMS' view often seems to come from a place where all commercial organisations are inherently evil and out to do their users harm. I believe that 99.9% of the market for a piece of software are never going to be interested in taking responsibility for the safety of that software. You can give them all the rights you like, but they're not going to use them. The supplier of a piece of software will always be held responsible for its safety. It's not surprising that the supplier will attempt to exert some kind of control over the use of the software, if only to reduce their liability. Again, commercial interests. Trying to do the best thing for everyone.
- oelmekki 10y ago
  > RMS' view often seems to come from a place where all commercial organisations are inherently evil and out to do their users harm. Yes, this was the thinking in early 2000', and indeed this was a proper reaction to the windows context back then. But I don't think that's what rms is fighting for anymore, I would state it more like : "if I bought it, then I own it", like when you buy a house, you can do any change in it you want. That's what is puzzling me in the linked statement, it sounds a lot like we're back in the 2000'. I guess shortness of statement is killing its details.

gaur 10y ago

No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense. Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").

bertiewhykovich 10y ago
"If corporations dominate society and write the laws, then each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users." Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.
- gaur 10y ago
  You've explicitly rewritten it as "if X, then maybe Y", exactly as I said. "If corporations write the laws, then maybe they will restrict or mistreat their users." That's not a law.
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    That's not a "maybe" any more by now. Corporation are meant to maximise profits, at the expense of everything else, except braking the law —and even that is debatable. Some jurisdictions even have laws to enforce that mindset. As soon as profit maximization is at odds with the user's interests (that's pretty much all the time), the corporation will naturally act against the user's interests. From this, I'm pretty sure "law" is a relatively accurate descriptor.
tehlike 10y ago
that sounds like you are trying too hard to not see what he's trying to say.
flukus 10y ago
> No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense. Well he did, so apparently you can.

kome 10y ago

I had to use an iPad for the first time in my life recently, and I have to say that Stallman is right.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

I have no idea when this "law" was written or said, but I think this type of thinking--in 2016--is exactly the cause of what it's prophesizing. Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity. I do understand that all this "open software" movement could have an impact because it was very polarizing and moved a lot of people. But in a world where open source is the norm, it should not be about fighting against corporations. The discussion should be on a higher level. For example, you should think deeper about why it looks like: "While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users". Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant. It's actually pretty simple - money, power. Corporations are amoral machines; if there's something that brings profits and they can get away with legally, some corp will eventually do it (same seems to apply to small companies). > Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity. Thinking like this was always the hallmark of my life. But the more I interact with actual people, and not just high-school friends but random people; CEOs and coworkers and shopowners and cleners - the more I realize there is a split there. Some of us think of humanity as a single entity worth caring about. Others don't give a fuck. They think of "me, family and friends vs. the rest of the world". Which makes it easy to justify fucking "the rest of the world" for profit. I don't really know how humanity is to reconcile those two worldviews.
- spangry 10y ago
  The thing I sometimes have trouble with is: 1. Corporations behave like sociopaths. 2. Corporations don't really exist. They're a legal fiction that, in reality, is just a group of people working towards a common goal (maximum profit). I wonder if it's counter-productive to think and speak of corporations as some sort of separate entity to the people it is composed of. I think the notion that 'corporations are evil sociopaths' is one of those thought-stopping 'mind-killers'. Corporations don't have intent, good or bad; they don't really exist (except in our minds). As harsh as it may sound, if we want a 'corporation' to behave ethically, then we should assign blame to those that are perpetrating the harm: to the employees, managers and owners of that corporation. It's their collective efforts and actions that have led to unethical outcomes, not the singular effort of some invisible corporate spectre. I think it's the only possible way to fight this 'diffusion of responsibility' that allows a whole bunch of (mostly) normal people to all do tiny unethical acts that, when viewed in aggregate, are abhorrent. I suspect whatever the best solution is will be similar (or analogous) to how you overcome the 'bystander effect': rather than saying 'someone call 911', say 'you, guy in the red shirt (point at him), call 911'. tl;dr - It turns out the Ring of Gyges is not a ring at all. It's a multi-story building filled with rows of cubicles.

makecheck 10y ago

Corporations need to be treated as if they could have radically different managers at any moment (because they can). The Best Company Ever of today could be bought by Worst Corporation In Existence tomorrow. It essentially doesn’t matter what a company is currently doing or “promises” to do or not do, if those behaviors are not legally binding. And even then, if you have to read a hundred-page document to figure out what the legal binding is, assume that the company has carefully placed a nice escape hatch somewhere in their legalese. It was supposed to be true that if one vendor does something you don’t like, you simply “vote with your wallet” and go to one that you do like. That works great when buying toasters. Yet now, with essentially your whole life tied up in one or two devices and key services like Internet being dictated by one company based on where you live, it is REALLY hard to just walk away from one crappy technology experience and find something you like better. This is a real sign that it is not a good idea to have so much technology powered by so few corporations.

zdw 10y ago
If anyone needs an example of the first point, look to what happened to Sun's free/open projects and firmware downloads after it's acquisition by Oracle.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
It also works great when you buying a satisfactory toaster is the problem. It works less well when your neighbor buys an insecure IoT toaster that DDoSes the website you want to read an article from.
Retra 10y ago
"Voting with your wallet" seems a pretty absurd concept to me anyway. If you could vote with money, there'd be no need to call it a vote. One may as well be a proponent of "voting with bombs" for all the rational good tying power directly to wealth will do you.
DasIch 10y ago
You're seriously overestimating how powerful managers are and how difficult it is to change the culture of an organization.

api 10y ago

The opposite happened when mainframes and minis transitioned to PCs, but he's right from the 2000s onward. Something changed, and I'm not 100% sure what. Tech is reflecting the larger political trends of the world where strong man rule and other forms of authoritarianism are ascendant. I do think the driver is democratic to an extent. People seem to be demanding less freedom in exchange for convenience, security, simplicity, etc... in tech and in life.

vonklaus 10y ago

This is tangential, but isn't http://www.root-servers.org/ http://www.root-servers.org/ still the authoritative source for DNS. I was browsing DNS options (switched to open-DNS) but the main http://www.root-servers.org/ http://www.root-servers.org/ site is down. It appears to be cached as recently as this month with a map, but is not responsive. A few other "detector" sites have it down. Is this important, or does it not show up because it is a resolver?

deleted 10y ago

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icomefromreddit 10y ago

Interesting. Sounds very Kaczynski to me: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

known 10y ago

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. --Chomsky

witty_username 10y ago
Corporations are democratic because they have shareholders.

known 10y ago

Essential Rules of Tyranny Rule #1: Keep Them Afraid Rule #2: Keep Them Isolated Rule #3: Keep Them Desperate Rule #4: Send Out The Jackboots Rule #5: Blame Everything On The Truth Seekers Rule #6: Encourage Citizen Spies Rule #7: Make Them Accept The Unacceptable http://www.alt-market.com/articles/198-the-essential-rules-of-tyranny http://www.alt-market.com/articles/198-the-essential-rules-o...

logicallee 10y ago
Based on the context, I expected your list to remind me of how corporations have been treating users lately (I thought this was the point you're making) - but out of these 7 rules only #7 seems to apply? What I mean is that #1, 2, 3,4, 5, and 6 literally don't seem to be happening? (At least, they don't remind me of anything?)

greyman 10y ago

I worked for a corporation for 12 years, and I was in a team developing software for CT scanner operations. What's wrong with that? Then I also worked for a very small company, where I coded... games. So according to the RMS, that could be morally less wrong. :-)

phn 10y ago

I don' disagree with the law itself. However, each technological advance is also an opportunity to break free from restrictions and mistreatment from the previous status quo.

agumonkey 10y ago

I wish Stallman got back to its printer roots. Hardware is where the battle is. Good enough GPU / DSP / NIC and the rest is set. Sane not too hard to write drivers that works fine under open source OSes, enjoy prolongated lifetime for your devices and more interesting uses.