34 ms·

A short critique of Stallmanism

152 points by thegeomaster 10y ago

throwaway729 10y ago
> it is not a solution for people to simply stop using e.g. Gmail. I strongly disagree with this part. For example, if you think the primary problem with GMail is user privacy, then the only solutions are legal or technical. And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale. The solution to that problem -- one that's been demonstrated effective time and again -- is to make purity utterly pragmatic.
- sprafa 10y ago
  The problem with this is incentives. Without the profit motive, and without revolutionary support programs like the ones Stallman imagines, people simply have got to pay rent somehow. And FOSS, as Stallman describes it, does not pay rent. So programmers end up working in proprietary applications, often building up on top of FOSS or Open-source to build better user capture and lock-in and winning the market share.
  - prodigal_erik 10y ago
    The incentive was supposed to be access to a growing library of copylefted code. But we somehow abandoned POSIX in favor of a half-assed scripting language where a critical mass of desirable code doesn't exist yet.
- milesrout 10y ago
  >And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. Could you elaborate on this? The idea of the law protecting peoples' privacy is not really new or untested. I don't think you need to be anywhere near what I would call draconian to be able to protect peoples' privacy legally.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    Hm, thanks for making me think more about this. I still don't think GMail could've come into existence without the carrot of user data. Maybe now that it does exist Google has a vested interest in keeping people inside its platform, which would mean my statement is incorrect. Maybe I'll just weaken my statement to this: I think a GMail replacement would be far easier to achieve than a strong legal framework protecting users' privacy.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      GMail is GMail because of spam filtering and search. There can be no such thing as GMail that respects your privacy, because without the spam filtering and search efficacy that come from huge training datasets, you have just another Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Zimbra installation.
      - throwaway729 10y ago
        I guess that depends on what you mean by privacy. I tend to define privacy in terms of an intersection of users' expectations and preferences -- data should be used how users expect it to be used, and those expectations should match their preferences. For example, a particularly voyeuristic user might truly prefer -- independent of any transactional considerations -- for marketers to know a bunch of intimate information about them. In that admittedly entirely fictional case, the modern web isn't a privacy violation. My point is that it's possible to use data for a particular purpose without violating users' privacy expectations and preferences. There are both legal and technical mechanisms that enable these sort of use cases. I think it's fair to say that most people expect and are perfectly OK with google using their email to filter spam and improve search. Therefore, I don't consider those use cases to be privacy violations. Also, although search and filtering are two huge features GMail, even a GMail without those features would be quite superior to Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Yahoo! accounts with tiny data limits (which really were the alternatives when GMail launched).
        closeparen 10y ago
- smonff 10y ago
  >The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale. That's why there are some organisations that fight for the right for people to buy a computer without Windows installed-by-default and get the money reimburse if they opt-out of the OS package. Isn't there an hardware company called puri.sm by the way?
trav4225 10y ago
IMO, the fundamental problems with Stallmanism are not to be found in its tactics and execution, but rather in the very core of the philosophy itself.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  Although your comment is a fair one, this critique is tactical/strategic rather than political/ideological. That is, the author assumes you mostly agree with Stallman's end goals, and from there argues for a different set of strategies.
  - trav4225 10y ago
    Definitely agree. I just wanted to point out that, even though it often seems otherwise, there are indeed people in the technological community who have deep problems with the FSF philosophies.
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      Are there? I would believe that there are many who don't care, or many who are dismissive at a rather shallow level. But I'm not aware of having seen a good, intellectual critique of "free" software.
      - throwaway729 10y ago
        There are many criticisms of the various freedoms embodied by Stallmanism's notion of free software (to borrow a term from the article). A thorough rebuttal of the entire viewpoint requires, IMO: 1. An ardent defense of capitalism and private property. 2. A critique of open source as a superior software development methodology. You'll find shades of (1) in various defenses of competing open source licenses (e.g. BSD). But also, (1) is a pretty common attitude in software development circles (a majority of the libertarians I know are software people). (2) is a lot less common in developer crowds, I think in part because when evaluated as a purely factual and categorical claim, it's trivial to prove false. Many of the most successful software projects in the world are open source. The economic argument against (2) is far more common -- and is made in this thread by sprafa for example. Surprisingly, there are also moral arguments against (2) -- see e.g. https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanDrunen2010.pdf https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanD... TBF the moral case against (2) probably really is as rare as you claim (which is a good thing IMO). But the intersection of (1) and (2) isn't impossible to imagine, and I think there are a lot of developers who get close to this confluence of opinions. Or at least a lot closer than they are to "Stallmanist" freedom.
sprafa 10y ago
essentially brilliant. I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code. That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you'd like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn't be able to copy your code directly. My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer/owner authorization. The developer also should not be allowed to stop users from sharing modifications amongst themselves, as long as they were paying for the original code, so as to stop him from using it as a weapon agaisnt users who modify it and wish to share their mods. Any other defence of free software is basically an attack on capitalism itself. Regardless of your opinion on capitalism, this is too radical a change for most people.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you'd like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn't be able to copy your code directly. Hmmm...That's not the lesson I took away from this article, at all. There are only three mentions of DRM in the article, and I don't see any suggestion that the author endorses DRM be used in this way.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  Patents were intended (in part) to have this sort of effect -- free the knowledge while still allowing the creator to profit. It's the kind of thing that makes sense but is incredibly hard to get right technically or politically.
  - disgruntledphd2 10y ago
SwellJoe 10y ago
I assumed this would be yet another "Stallman is gross and old-fashioned and dresses funny" article, but it's actually well-argued and reasonable. And, interestingly, in many regards it makes the case that Stallman isn't extreme enough to be effective (or rather, that while his extremism is very deep it is only in tightly focused areas, and misses the mark for making widespread change that positively effects the general population). As I age, I've kinda come to the conclusion that individualism being the driving motivation of so many people in tech (including both proprietary and Free Software advocates) means that we often miss the forest for the trees. Individualist decision-making doesn't solve a problem for the general public, in cases like this. Free Software "won", by some definition of won, the battle when it became the dominant server and mobile OS. But, it continues to lose the war for people's freedom. I don't actually have a philosophical framework to hang that bit of acquired wisdom on, however, because I, too, have a very individualist mindset that is deeply ingrained. So, coming up with actionable ideas for improving privacy (for example) on a non-individual level is proving difficult; my ideas, thus far, have included helping organize and host cryptoparties, contributing to projects that add encryption to more stuff on the Internet, etc. But, it requires policy, too, probably even moreso, which is far outside of my wheelhouse. Those cryptoparties reached mostly technical users. Those tools for encryption reach mostly technical people who already knew they wanted to encrypt their stuff. When profit motives are aligned against us (where "us" is the general public that is vaguely uncomfortable with being spied on all the time, by corporations and the state), it's tilting at windmills to stand there, using your Free OS and your Free browser and your Free whatever else, while the whole world uses facebook and Google dozens of times a day. There's only so much an individual can do.
geofft 10y ago
Thanks for posting this. I like this a lot and it clearly argues a lot of what I don't like about Stallman's free software advocacy. Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; software is a tool for accomplishing things in the world, including moral or immoral things. When Stallman says that it's better to have no software to do a task than non-free software, it sounds like the Catholic teaching on intrinsically evil acts, which can never be done even if we think they may result in good—but software does not have a moral value of its own. What we do with software is, absolutely, a moral question; as software continues to eat the world, every moral question may one day involve software. But we should look at software freedom with consequentialist eyes: the ends, the good or evil done to people, justify or condemn the means, whether that good or evil can be done with the software at hand. Generally one can do more good, or at least be assured of fighting evil, with free software. But that does not mean that free software itself is an intrinsic moral good. Related, I think, is Mako's 2011 essay "Freedom for Users, Not for Software": http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/freedom-users-not-software http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/freedom-users-not-softwa... But in practice, that ends up being more of a defense of the AGPL than a call for social action - and the AGPL, if widely adopted, would make the goal of using only free software even more of a burden (since it is GPL-incompatible). The FSF seemed to recognize an actual problem well worth solving, but address it through the tool they were comfortable with, writing licenses. (And the minimal adoption of the AGPL indicates that this didn't actually solve problems, so per consequentialism, we must admit that the AGPL did at most minimal social good.) It's also worth talking about the resources required to make effective use of free software; freedom #4 is only realistic if you can actually make the changes. If Chrome OS (to take Mako's example) can be effectively hacked on by the second-largest company in the world, but much less effectively by an individual, is that really better than the closed-source OS which only the largest company in the world can hack on? And has free software really changed the social order for the better, compared to the pre-software days?
- milesrout 10y ago
  >Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; I disagree. Proprietary software is anti-user and anti-developer. In my experience, even the sort of people that don't care either way about whether their operating system is open source get upset at the idea of the View Source button on a webpage going away, for example. Free software is ethically good in comparison to proprietary software, which is definitely ethically bad in its own right.
saghm 10y ago
Interesting read! I agree with most of this, but the I'm not sure I agree with the argument that it would be more effective to convince government agencies to switch to free software by appealing to a civic sense rather than a fiscal one; maybe I'm just overly cynical, but I find it more likely that government agencies would be swayed to adopt free software by showing them how much money they'd save.
- ommunist 10y ago
  Government is not interested in saving. The power of individual in the government is associated with the budget he is responsible for. No costs on software - no budget, no power.
  - saghm 10y ago
    Ah, true. I had forgotten the phenomenon where agencies make sure to spend their whole budget just to make sure they don't get less money the next year.
greyman 10y ago
> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. Therefore I myself do not even recognize this term "free software". I am more than willing to discuss RMS ideas, I agree with many of them, but let's stop messing the language first.
- milesrout 10y ago
  >There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to take something and make it closed source with or without changes. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to restrict end user freedom. The GPL protects the freedom of users. If I license something as GPL then that means I'm saying "I want anyone to be able to use this, and if you want to modify and/or redistribute it you can, but only if you continue to respect users' freedoms as much as I have." The only person 'messing the language' are the people that turn every discussion of free software into a discussion of whether 'free software' or 'open source' is better terminology, and in my experience that's far more coming from your camp than Stallman's these days.
  - greyman 10y ago
    I don't know, I don't feel I am in some camp. His license grants some permissions and forbids something else. I just don't feel the word "freedom" fits into what he wants to achieve. Just let's call it some other way and I am fine with it. This is just grabbing a positive word, twist it, and use for his own agenda. And I am not willing to play such a game.
    - thristian 10y ago
      Let's imagine a world exactly like our current world, except that I am allowed to punch anybody in the nose at any time, with no negative consequences for myself. Is that world "more free" than this one? My point is that "freedom" is a messy concept, and the freedom to do one thing (punch somebody in the nose, or to make proprietary software) is often at odds with the freedom to do another (go about your business without being punched, or to control the software that affects your life). That's not RMS twisting words, that's just an awkward philosophical truth. I guess you could say that the term "free software" is biased because it emphasises society-wide freedoms over personal freedoms, but I think it fits nicely alongside more widely held ideas like "only police should be allowed to fight crime" and "politicians should not write laws that directly benefit themselves". Both those ideas significantly limit personal freedom, yet they're very important parts of a free society.
gumby 10y ago
Here's a sympathetic perspective on some of these issues (note: I've known and worked with RMS since the late 1970s, e.g before he grew his hair long and decided to start the FSF). From the article: > ...crucial mistake: confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation. > ...the familiar liberal ideological mistake of lifestylism: the belief that changes in one's own personal preferences are the beginning and end of political action. I hadn't really known anyone else like RMS, but in the mid 1980s I had a girlfriend from the Bronx. The first time she met her reaction was simply, "oh, one of those." She said she had grown up with a large number of guys just like him. And indeed, when I went back to the jewish neighborhood in the bronx where she had grown up there were in fact a ton of guys around his age, just like him.. Their causes seemed to be a mixture of judaism and socialism, but they expressed the same intensity and belief in the universality (within an interest group) of their cause. This made him a much more sympathetic figure in my eyes. And once I could see this, I could see all sorts of people like him.
- aaronbrethorst 10y ago
  They're not all from the Bronx. Some of them are from Brooklyn ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
  - labster 10y ago
    Heh, I get it, they're both socialists and all. But Bernie is the opposite of what OP describes. Stallman is a purist, Sanders is a realist. Stallman fights to keep "GNU/" attached to "Linux", while Sanders talks about the fake news coming to people on Facebook's closed platform.
    - gkya 10y ago
      Well, want it or not GNU/ is a big part of Linux distros, at least until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top. And even then most of open source has some GNU somewhere in the foundation.
wanderingjew 10y ago
Oh, this is hilarious. The art for this blog post was taken from here: http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ This art was taken without crediting the artist, and without permission from either the artist or the publisher.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  I agree that this is bad form, though, as the original article is very supportive of the Free Software movement, the author may have assumed a Gratis usage of the image. I could not find on Hackaday any specific information about using their content, or not, but they do explicitly mention their general copyrights in their footer... Edit: what I did not say, is that because there is nothing explicit it can not be assumed that you can use it without reference. Accreditation should be given where asked, technically it can not be used unless it was agreed upon. That's what my ... meant.
  - wanderingjew 10y ago
    You can't assume gratis usage of anything. The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that everything is copyrighted at its creation. Copyleft is a 'hack' of sorts of copyright, in that the author or owner of a piece of work gives everyone else explicit permission to use it. You can't have copyleft without copyright, and everything is copyright unless it's explicitly copyleft. This isn't 'bad form'. This is copyright infringement and possibly the best teaching moment you could ever have. The idea that the author of the above post would assume gratis usage of something shows how little even technical people understand how copyright and copyleft works. I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress. As the author of the Hackaday piece, I'm cool with the author of the OP using the graphic, only because it's hilarious. Shout out to our resident artist, joe kim: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ He does awesome work.
gurneyHaleck 10y ago
Oi! Splitter! Oi! You! Yeah, You! Splitter! Splitter!
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
greyman 10y ago
One issue I see with so-called free software is the coming era of AI. The software might be as free as RMS would like, but we still would not be able to decipher what exactly it does.
- wmf 10y ago
  For this reason I wouldn't be surprised to see the FSF advocate using machine learning only as a last resort when normal algorithms can't be used.
hackermailman 10y ago
I've always considered Stallman as somebody who strategizes in decades instead of tomorrow. He sees a future of locked devices that imprison people and so seems radical to everybody stuck in the state of present day. I don't know if his strategy will work but it seems better than any compromises that could lead to dumb terminals running proprietary webasm binaries watching everything you do.
krick 10y ago
I think this is pretty great analysis, really. Sobering, so to say. I know all of this, but tend to ignore quite often. This is because (unlike Stallman) I don't think I'm fighting a war, I'm just living the way I think is "right". But is it really not my war? In the and, I do believe it would be a better world if some goals of Stallman have been achieved. However, this analysis has the same flaws it points out in the movement of stallmanism: pointing out the problem is not the same as proposing a solution. Take this Gmail example. I absolutely hate it and would love it to disappear, but expressing it the usual way — as pointed out — is useless, if not harmful. Why people use Gmail or Google Docs? Because it's handy, obviously. They need something that does something like these services do, and google products simply happen to be better than alternatives. And they seem free too. So what should I do instead of demonstratively avoiding them? Propose something better not only for myself, but for other people too. Give them a better option. Obviously. But the truth is I can't do that. I do not have any "smart solution" and Gmail is "free" not because it costs nothing to operate it, but because Google has shitload of money. And the same is true for nearly every popular service and non-trivial piece of software. We may bring up Linux and Blender all we want, but the sad truth is free software just sucks. There is no open-source alternative for AutoCAD or Native Instruments, because it requires way too much domain-knowledge for your typical Finnish CS student to make one. Making this stuff is expensive as in "money". And "making money" a.k.a "business" is dirty game, so you don't make it easy for your competition to copy stuff you wasted your money to make. Blender is an exception that does not prove the rule. Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism. People outside of USA tend to agree this is nice idea, but we still haven't seen working implementations of that. So, if I don't have a better war strategy, how can I complain? Do I think it would be better if Stallman was not fighting this silly war of his own? I guess I don't. Even if "normal people" tend to make fun of him, at least they know about him and this FOSS stuff. Well, at least some of them do.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  "Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism." Communism is an economic system of physical goods and services, digital and intellectual things aren't either so I don't think it's useful to equate the two. Digital media is easily obtained by anyone so is made with a lock to which the key is sold. The keys are usually some form of digital media, so a central authority is needed to validate the keys. The validation process is also digital, so laws get made to threaten anyone that tries to bypass that process and, instead of preventing attacks on ships, those laws get used to mess up peoples lives that usually don't deserve it. Software is just a big, messy math function, and trying to sell it is just as silly as trying to sell addition. Sell goods; sell services (even the service of writing software); but trying to sell the software itself is pretty much insane; the only way to win at it is to treat your customers like no-good, lying thieves.
sqldba 10y ago
Wow what an idiot.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please comment civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
schoen 10y ago
(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.) This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views. In general, RMS has stood for the effort of trying to find common cause around specific issues and principles among people who might radically disagree about other things (another example was the League for Programming Freedom, a single-issue campaign against software patents that actively aspired to include people who disagree with RMS about free software!). It's true that the big-tent concept could fail as a tactical matter if it turns out that the success of one cause really is indispensable to the success of another, which is a big part of what this article is claiming. But I wish the article had engaged a bit more with the fact that RMS does not appear to agree with this analysis and has consistently wanted people with non-leftist views to join the free software movement, including enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and private property. In other words, it's not an oversight or an accident. (To be clear about this, the classic formulation of RMS's free software philosophy calls for not regarding software as private property -- for example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" -- but stakes out no position on regarding, say, financial instruments, airplanes, factories, companies, plots of land, or apartment buildings as private property. Hence many more people could agree with it.)
- A_COMPUTER 10y ago
  I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    I've been contributing to open-source software projects for more a decade now. I've never seen any connection with left-wing ideology, and no incompatibility with any ideology I can think of. I've seen all kinds of people participating, from communists to objectivists. I think that's why it worked so well. If something can seriously hurt the idea, it's trying to make an narrow political-ideological cause out of it. You may gain some partisan support and budgets on that, but the losses in goodwill would be enormous.
zekevermillion 10y ago
RMS' personal choices are important. I could not live with the same ethical purity myself when it comes to software choices (or for that matter, much of anything else). But I have been personally influenced by reading his essays on ethical topics. If he did not live consistent with his personal ethics, not only would he be much less persuasive, but also he would be at conflict with himself. the critic is right that software freedom does not exist in a vacuum. However, it does not follow that living in an ethical manner is pointless.
- jcora 10y ago
  I have too been influenced by Stallman but I don't see why anyone should be above critique. I've developed as a person, politically, and think that my criticism may be useful to well-intentioned peopled, that's why I wrote this. > However, it does not follow that living in an ethical manner is pointless. I fully disagree. Personal ethics is only important with interpersonal relationships. Anything political transcends the individual and his actions and requires systemic analysis and action. That is the point of the article.
  - smonff 10y ago
    Criticizing Stallman of the "GNU/"Linux precision is like criticizing a plumber of using pipes. The guy is just doing it's job and he is doing it quite well!
  - zekevermillion 10y ago
    Stallman is not above critique, but I don't think you have hit on the more interesting parts of his philosophy to question. If I could eat Chinese with RMS, I would want to ask him about when free hardware will become relevant, and what he thinks about user subjugation that doesn't involve privacy invasion or software restrictions -- like, why isn't it mandatory to boycott every monopoly business? Perhaps at some point he would throw up his hands and say, we're only human! I take comfort from the Biblical parable, Render Unto Caesar.
vivekd 10y ago
I don't agree with everything in this article but I think a part of it really put into words something I had been feeling for some time. I had always found it easy to agree with Stallman's view of free software. I think most reasonable people who didn't have a stake in proprietary software would agree with him. But, something about Stallman that made it hard for me to really take his movement seriously enough to want to take up his banner and follow him, and I think this article hit on why. He is right about the problem but there's a flaw in his approach to solving the problem. While Stallman is right in asserting that software should be free, he moves into Zealotry in insisting that he only use free software and thereby excluding himself from much of the technology available today. I think ordinary people looking at something like this would be reluctant to follow him or take up his cause because the average person's reaction would be "I could never live like that, yes I agree with him, but I'm simply not willing to give up my facebook, or google chrome, or microsoft word." I don't think Stallman would look like a hypocrite or have his point weakened if here were to advocate for legislative changes to make software free while still using proprietary software. If someone challenges him or calls him a hypocrite he could just respond that he is living within the unfortunate realities of the current day, which is dominated by proprietary software, while still fighting for a better tomorrow with free software. I don't think any reasonable person would take him less seriously just for using software that, in many cases, he has no other option but to use. I mean really, this guy doesn't even browse the internet because websites have proprietary software and instead uses some kind of software to get info off the web - that's extreme. I don't think convincing the world to only use free software is a very realistic goal, because most people don't really understand the problem, let along care enough about the problem to make the huge sacrifices that a life without proprietary software would demand. Instead I think he would have a much stronger chance of succeeding if he worked to protest and raise awareness geared towards legislative change to prevent software companies from using the restrictive licensing agreements they use today.
- zekevermillion 10y ago
  Stallman has compromised in some ways, even when it comes to using proprietary software. For example, before there was grub I believe he made an exception and used non-free bios. Ultiamtely, even RMS seems to suggest a convenience standard. If the tradeoff is too harsh, at some point it is permissible to use proprietary software. And this is even leaving aside the various non-relative exceptions he has made, such as use of proprietary software in devices that are not primarily for general purpose computing. So even RMS is OK with proprietary software where there are no free alternatives, or where using proprietary software is somehow not part of a "computer". But now that there is a good free system in Gnu + Linux, the user has no excuse for using proprietary programs in general computing. There is still a sacrifice to live by RMS' standards, but it is relatively small compared with, say, the sacrifices demanded of civil rights campaigners in the 60s. Of course, one could debate whether reasonable free alternatives exist in certain areas. Perhaps to RMS it is only a minor inconvenience to use only free software to view web pages, and to avoid websites that run proprietary scripts or that spy on users. What kind of moral weakling would betray the cause of freedom for the convenience of one-click ordering of crap on Amazon. The obvious weakness to this argument is that there are surely people for which proprietary software offers convenience that they view as essential to their lives. This is a hard problem, both in philosophy and practice.
cbdfghh 10y ago
IMHO, Stallman made two mistakes: 1. He moved into politics (which is in my HO, one of the failure points of a lot of tech people. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but certain people have more talent at politics than others, and certain people have more talents at code than others). He's a great programmer, and could have pushed the FSF community directly by committing and improving code. And even if he can't code anymore, he could have focused on fund-raising/raising awareness in winnable (as in, not facebook)/worthwhile (as in, not HURD) battles, where others would benefit also. Like a free Flash or free CAD (which are "FSF High priority projects", though practically dead). What new coding projects were they involved in since HURD started (OK. Replicant.)? And how did his political rants help the FSF (and the Free Software movement as a whole) lately? 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command? Who'll take over after he passes on? What will the FSF look like in 30 years?
- tedks 10y ago
  """ 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command? Who'll take over after he passes on? What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """ I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least. I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying. I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.
  - Frondo 10y ago
    The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS. (I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p ) What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns. What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker. What RMS did was profound and important for that time in history. The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish. What we need is an RMS for the modern era, i.e. a significant thinker who can speak to the next 20 years of people. Sad to say, like most nonprofits, there's no succession plan.
quitspamming 10y ago
I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't calling this out for what it is, anti capitalist BS. I've seen people talk about tactics, DRM, ethics, but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit. Stallman tries to explain over and over again how free software can be profitable, and the author of this post's whole point is, "nah, it can't be. Want free software? You need socialism." Stupid article pushing tired socialism, in old arguments.
- Mouq 10y ago
  Don't really see why it needs to be called out as such. It's pretty explicitly radical leftist. Is Hacker News exclusively capitalist now? TBF I tend to avoid this site, so maybe it is. If you think materialist analysis isn't useful, well, maybe it's not useful to you. But geez, the author didn't even get into, e.g., Marxist analysis or anything so controversial :P
  - afsina 10y ago
    Actually IMO majority of hacker news commenters are left leaning, and I try avoiding political news here because their rethoric is tiring (to me).
    - vacri 10y ago
      I think it's quite the opposite. There's a lot of people living in the high-paid tech bubble here. Actual lefties seem thin on the ground, and less numerous than libertarians. If HN is seen as left-leaning, then the political diversity spectrum in the US is in truly dire shape.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - witty_username 10y ago
      I was just thinking on this. I notice that the comments usually the fit the article. For example, this has tons of comments sympathetic to Stallman (he's generally pro-socialist). While some other pro-libertarian article would have mostly comments sympathetic to capitalism, libertarian, etc. This occurs on Reddit too. So libertarian/pro-capitalist people see HN as left-leaning, while left-leaning people see HN as pro-capitalist.
ommunist 10y ago
I fail to recognise how confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation is a mistake? I met RMS at Riga Politech when his group campaigned against EU Software Patents, and his logic in the presentation was flawless. I signed petition because of that. When we talked very shortly after the presentation, I concluded for myself that Stallman is indeed very careful with words and the meaning.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Ideologue, idealist, zealot, weird person? All fine with me. I don't like that he starts with some good ideas, but then slippery slopes his way to see existential threats to our life liberty and happiness. It starts out making sense and takes on an air of paranoia.
- chippy 10y ago
  Although it's interesting to see the types of threats he has outlined in the past and how at the time when he was saying it people were calling them paranoid, and looking back we can see that he wasn't paranoid, but on point and predictive. Perhaps the things we think are paranoia now are similar. They may not be apparent, but perhaps they are similarly on point and predictive.
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    I think we agree more than disagree about how paranoia can become reality. The Snowden fallout rewired my thinking, and I'm still recovering from/reconciling the election. But some Stallman stuff I see as hyperbole or just wrong. For example he would label a hobbyist creating a compression utility and choosing to keep code private: - anti-social - an instrument of unjust power - disrespectful of the freedom of others He makes no distinction between government oppression or megacorp monopolies, and 1 person making personal choices. In reality things fall on a spectrum.
tedks 10y ago
As a formerly ardent software freedom lifestylist I hear this criticism and have embraced it myself. I don't encourage the "designers" I know in my life to use GIMP anymore. Much like social revolution can be tragically violent, in 2016 it sometimes falls to us to surrender our computing integrity for a shorter-term tactical gain. This isn't good, but it's not good to avoid either. That said, I think this essay paints an overly narrow view of Stallmanism. Stallman would much prefer systematic change, even though he is a self-identifying liberal; you see this less in the blessed FSF essays and more on stallman.org and similar because he doesn't get so speculative to talk about policy in most of the exhaustively-edited technical specifications on the finer points of software freedom theory. Stallman is I think overly pragmatic. He lives in a society where individualist liberal political action, voting with one's dollar, etc., is the only acceptable method of political change, so he only ever expresses change in these terms. This makes for a weak praxis, because liberalism always makes for a weak praxis. But this isn't Stallmanism; it's just the overpragmatism of rms. Marx thought that electoralism was a good idea, for example, but that doesn't mean communism is inherently electoralist. I think the best thing to do is to explicitly approach software freedom from a collective liberation stance and be ready and willing to point out the contradictions between the totality and the underlying ideological motivations of software freedom. Stallman doesn't need to do this; I think he's contributed quite enough honestly, and that if you want a better praxis, you should provide it yourself, because it isn't hard.
jwildeboer 10y ago
And I hoped this article would be a critique of http://stallmanism.com http://stallmanism.com the religion we created a few years ago. :-(
tnones 10y ago
>problematic >oppressive social relations >conceptualize I just wanna spray Pomo-B-Gone all over this.
vic-traill 10y ago
I think the use of 'Stallmanism ' in the headline (with its obvious reference to 'Stalinism ') is pejorative and click-baitish. Right up there with 'a card-carrying member of the ACLU'[0] and 'sister who was once a thespian'[1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1988 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/24/us/legendary-campaign-pepper-vs-smathers-in-50.html http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/24/us/legendary-campaign-pepp... [edit: fixed typo on 'Stalinism']

152 points by thegeomaster 10y ago

> it is not a solution for people to simply stop using e.g. Gmail. I strongly disagree with this part. For example, if you think the primary problem with GMail is user privacy, then the only solutions are legal or technical. And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale. The solution to that problem -- one that's been demonstrated effective time and again -- is to make purity utterly pragmatic.

sprafa 10y ago
The problem with this is incentives. Without the profit motive, and without revolutionary support programs like the ones Stallman imagines, people simply have got to pay rent somehow. And FOSS, as Stallman describes it, does not pay rent. So programmers end up working in proprietary applications, often building up on top of FOSS or Open-source to build better user capture and lock-in and winning the market share.
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  The incentive was supposed to be access to a growing library of copylefted code. But we somehow abandoned POSIX in favor of a half-assed scripting language where a critical mass of desirable code doesn't exist yet.
milesrout 10y ago
>And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. Could you elaborate on this? The idea of the law protecting peoples' privacy is not really new or untested. I don't think you need to be anywhere near what I would call draconian to be able to protect peoples' privacy legally.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  Hm, thanks for making me think more about this. I still don't think GMail could've come into existence without the carrot of user data. Maybe now that it does exist Google has a vested interest in keeping people inside its platform, which would mean my statement is incorrect. Maybe I'll just weaken my statement to this: I think a GMail replacement would be far easier to achieve than a strong legal framework protecting users' privacy.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    GMail is GMail because of spam filtering and search. There can be no such thing as GMail that respects your privacy, because without the spam filtering and search efficacy that come from huge training datasets, you have just another Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Zimbra installation.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      I guess that depends on what you mean by privacy. I tend to define privacy in terms of an intersection of users' expectations and preferences -- data should be used how users expect it to be used, and those expectations should match their preferences. For example, a particularly voyeuristic user might truly prefer -- independent of any transactional considerations -- for marketers to know a bunch of intimate information about them. In that admittedly entirely fictional case, the modern web isn't a privacy violation. My point is that it's possible to use data for a particular purpose without violating users' privacy expectations and preferences. There are both legal and technical mechanisms that enable these sort of use cases. I think it's fair to say that most people expect and are perfectly OK with google using their email to filter spam and improve search. Therefore, I don't consider those use cases to be privacy violations. Also, although search and filtering are two huge features GMail, even a GMail without those features would be quite superior to Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Yahoo! accounts with tiny data limits (which really were the alternatives when GMail launched).
      - closeparen 10y ago
smonff 10y ago
>The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale. That's why there are some organisations that fight for the right for people to buy a computer without Windows installed-by-default and get the money reimburse if they opt-out of the OS package. Isn't there an hardware company called puri.sm by the way?

trav4225 10y ago

IMO, the fundamental problems with Stallmanism are not to be found in its tactics and execution, but rather in the very core of the philosophy itself.

throwaway729 10y ago
Although your comment is a fair one, this critique is tactical/strategic rather than political/ideological. That is, the author assumes you mostly agree with Stallman's end goals, and from there argues for a different set of strategies.
- trav4225 10y ago
  Definitely agree. I just wanted to point out that, even though it often seems otherwise, there are indeed people in the technological community who have deep problems with the FSF philosophies.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    Are there? I would believe that there are many who don't care, or many who are dismissive at a rather shallow level. But I'm not aware of having seen a good, intellectual critique of "free" software.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      There are many criticisms of the various freedoms embodied by Stallmanism's notion of free software (to borrow a term from the article). A thorough rebuttal of the entire viewpoint requires, IMO: 1. An ardent defense of capitalism and private property. 2. A critique of open source as a superior software development methodology. You'll find shades of (1) in various defenses of competing open source licenses (e.g. BSD). But also, (1) is a pretty common attitude in software development circles (a majority of the libertarians I know are software people). (2) is a lot less common in developer crowds, I think in part because when evaluated as a purely factual and categorical claim, it's trivial to prove false. Many of the most successful software projects in the world are open source. The economic argument against (2) is far more common -- and is made in this thread by sprafa for example. Surprisingly, there are also moral arguments against (2) -- see e.g. https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanDrunen2010.pdf https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanD... TBF the moral case against (2) probably really is as rare as you claim (which is a good thing IMO). But the intersection of (1) and (2) isn't impossible to imagine, and I think there are a lot of developers who get close to this confluence of opinions. Or at least a lot closer than they are to "Stallmanist" freedom.

sprafa 10y ago

essentially brilliant. I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code. That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you'd like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn't be able to copy your code directly. My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer/owner authorization. The developer also should not be allowed to stop users from sharing modifications amongst themselves, as long as they were paying for the original code, so as to stop him from using it as a weapon agaisnt users who modify it and wish to share their mods. Any other defence of free software is basically an attack on capitalism itself. Regardless of your opinion on capitalism, this is too radical a change for most people.

SwellJoe 10y ago
That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you'd like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn't be able to copy your code directly. Hmmm...That's not the lesson I took away from this article, at all. There are only three mentions of DRM in the article, and I don't see any suggestion that the author endorses DRM be used in this way.
throwaway729 10y ago
Patents were intended (in part) to have this sort of effect -- free the knowledge while still allowing the creator to profit. It's the kind of thing that makes sense but is incredibly hard to get right technically or politically.
- disgruntledphd2 10y ago

SwellJoe 10y ago

I assumed this would be yet another "Stallman is gross and old-fashioned and dresses funny" article, but it's actually well-argued and reasonable. And, interestingly, in many regards it makes the case that Stallman isn't extreme enough to be effective (or rather, that while his extremism is very deep it is only in tightly focused areas, and misses the mark for making widespread change that positively effects the general population). As I age, I've kinda come to the conclusion that individualism being the driving motivation of so many people in tech (including both proprietary and Free Software advocates) means that we often miss the forest for the trees. Individualist decision-making doesn't solve a problem for the general public, in cases like this. Free Software "won", by some definition of won, the battle when it became the dominant server and mobile OS. But, it continues to lose the war for people's freedom. I don't actually have a philosophical framework to hang that bit of acquired wisdom on, however, because I, too, have a very individualist mindset that is deeply ingrained. So, coming up with actionable ideas for improving privacy (for example) on a non-individual level is proving difficult; my ideas, thus far, have included helping organize and host cryptoparties, contributing to projects that add encryption to more stuff on the Internet, etc. But, it requires policy, too, probably even moreso, which is far outside of my wheelhouse. Those cryptoparties reached mostly technical users. Those tools for encryption reach mostly technical people who already knew they wanted to encrypt their stuff. When profit motives are aligned against us (where "us" is the general public that is vaguely uncomfortable with being spied on all the time, by corporations and the state), it's tilting at windmills to stand there, using your Free OS and your Free browser and your Free whatever else, while the whole world uses facebook and Google dozens of times a day. There's only so much an individual can do.

geofft 10y ago

Thanks for posting this. I like this a lot and it clearly argues a lot of what I don't like about Stallman's free software advocacy. Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; software is a tool for accomplishing things in the world, including moral or immoral things. When Stallman says that it's better to have no software to do a task than non-free software, it sounds like the Catholic teaching on intrinsically evil acts, which can never be done even if we think they may result in good—but software does not have a moral value of its own. What we do with software is, absolutely, a moral question; as software continues to eat the world, every moral question may one day involve software. But we should look at software freedom with consequentialist eyes: the ends, the good or evil done to people, justify or condemn the means, whether that good or evil can be done with the software at hand. Generally one can do more good, or at least be assured of fighting evil, with free software. But that does not mean that free software itself is an intrinsic moral good. Related, I think, is Mako's 2011 essay "Freedom for Users, Not for Software": http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/freedom-users-not-software http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/freedom-users-not-softwa... But in practice, that ends up being more of a defense of the AGPL than a call for social action - and the AGPL, if widely adopted, would make the goal of using only free software even more of a burden (since it is GPL-incompatible). The FSF seemed to recognize an actual problem well worth solving, but address it through the tool they were comfortable with, writing licenses. (And the minimal adoption of the AGPL indicates that this didn't actually solve problems, so per consequentialism, we must admit that the AGPL did at most minimal social good.) It's also worth talking about the resources required to make effective use of free software; freedom #4 is only realistic if you can actually make the changes. If Chrome OS (to take Mako's example) can be effectively hacked on by the second-largest company in the world, but much less effectively by an individual, is that really better than the closed-source OS which only the largest company in the world can hack on? And has free software really changed the social order for the better, compared to the pre-software days?

milesrout 10y ago
>Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; I disagree. Proprietary software is anti-user and anti-developer. In my experience, even the sort of people that don't care either way about whether their operating system is open source get upset at the idea of the View Source button on a webpage going away, for example. Free software is ethically good in comparison to proprietary software, which is definitely ethically bad in its own right.

saghm 10y ago

Interesting read! I agree with most of this, but the I'm not sure I agree with the argument that it would be more effective to convince government agencies to switch to free software by appealing to a civic sense rather than a fiscal one; maybe I'm just overly cynical, but I find it more likely that government agencies would be swayed to adopt free software by showing them how much money they'd save.

ommunist 10y ago
Government is not interested in saving. The power of individual in the government is associated with the budget he is responsible for. No costs on software - no budget, no power.
- saghm 10y ago
  Ah, true. I had forgotten the phenomenon where agencies make sure to spend their whole budget just to make sure they don't get less money the next year.

greyman 10y ago

> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. Therefore I myself do not even recognize this term "free software". I am more than willing to discuss RMS ideas, I agree with many of them, but let's stop messing the language first.

milesrout 10y ago
>There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to take something and make it closed source with or without changes. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to restrict end user freedom. The GPL protects the freedom of users. If I license something as GPL then that means I'm saying "I want anyone to be able to use this, and if you want to modify and/or redistribute it you can, but only if you continue to respect users' freedoms as much as I have." The only person 'messing the language' are the people that turn every discussion of free software into a discussion of whether 'free software' or 'open source' is better terminology, and in my experience that's far more coming from your camp than Stallman's these days.
- greyman 10y ago
  I don't know, I don't feel I am in some camp. His license grants some permissions and forbids something else. I just don't feel the word "freedom" fits into what he wants to achieve. Just let's call it some other way and I am fine with it. This is just grabbing a positive word, twist it, and use for his own agenda. And I am not willing to play such a game.
  - thristian 10y ago
    Let's imagine a world exactly like our current world, except that I am allowed to punch anybody in the nose at any time, with no negative consequences for myself. Is that world "more free" than this one? My point is that "freedom" is a messy concept, and the freedom to do one thing (punch somebody in the nose, or to make proprietary software) is often at odds with the freedom to do another (go about your business without being punched, or to control the software that affects your life). That's not RMS twisting words, that's just an awkward philosophical truth. I guess you could say that the term "free software" is biased because it emphasises society-wide freedoms over personal freedoms, but I think it fits nicely alongside more widely held ideas like "only police should be allowed to fight crime" and "politicians should not write laws that directly benefit themselves". Both those ideas significantly limit personal freedom, yet they're very important parts of a free society.

gumby 10y ago

Here's a sympathetic perspective on some of these issues (note: I've known and worked with RMS since the late 1970s, e.g before he grew his hair long and decided to start the FSF). From the article: > ...crucial mistake: confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation. > ...the familiar liberal ideological mistake of lifestylism: the belief that changes in one's own personal preferences are the beginning and end of political action. I hadn't really known anyone else like RMS, but in the mid 1980s I had a girlfriend from the Bronx. The first time she met her reaction was simply, "oh, one of those." She said she had grown up with a large number of guys just like him. And indeed, when I went back to the jewish neighborhood in the bronx where she had grown up there were in fact a ton of guys around his age, just like him.. Their causes seemed to be a mixture of judaism and socialism, but they expressed the same intensity and belief in the universality (within an interest group) of their cause. This made him a much more sympathetic figure in my eyes. And once I could see this, I could see all sorts of people like him.

aaronbrethorst 10y ago
They're not all from the Bronx. Some of them are from Brooklyn ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
- labster 10y ago
  Heh, I get it, they're both socialists and all. But Bernie is the opposite of what OP describes. Stallman is a purist, Sanders is a realist. Stallman fights to keep "GNU/" attached to "Linux", while Sanders talks about the fake news coming to people on Facebook's closed platform.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Well, want it or not GNU/ is a big part of Linux distros, at least until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top. And even then most of open source has some GNU somewhere in the foundation.

wanderingjew 10y ago

Oh, this is hilarious. The art for this blog post was taken from here: http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ This art was taken without crediting the artist, and without permission from either the artist or the publisher.

bluejekyll 10y ago
I agree that this is bad form, though, as the original article is very supportive of the Free Software movement, the author may have assumed a Gratis usage of the image. I could not find on Hackaday any specific information about using their content, or not, but they do explicitly mention their general copyrights in their footer... Edit: what I did not say, is that because there is nothing explicit it can not be assumed that you can use it without reference. Accreditation should be given where asked, technically it can not be used unless it was agreed upon. That's what my ... meant.
- wanderingjew 10y ago
  You can't assume gratis usage of anything. The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that everything is copyrighted at its creation. Copyleft is a 'hack' of sorts of copyright, in that the author or owner of a piece of work gives everyone else explicit permission to use it. You can't have copyleft without copyright, and everything is copyright unless it's explicitly copyleft. This isn't 'bad form'. This is copyright infringement and possibly the best teaching moment you could ever have. The idea that the author of the above post would assume gratis usage of something shows how little even technical people understand how copyright and copyleft works. I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress. As the author of the Hackaday piece, I'm cool with the author of the OP using the graphic, only because it's hilarious. Shout out to our resident artist, joe kim: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ He does awesome work.

gurneyHaleck 10y ago

Oi! Splitter! Oi! You! Yeah, You! Splitter! Splitter!

sctb 10y ago
Please don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

greyman 10y ago

One issue I see with so-called free software is the coming era of AI. The software might be as free as RMS would like, but we still would not be able to decipher what exactly it does.

wmf 10y ago
For this reason I wouldn't be surprised to see the FSF advocate using machine learning only as a last resort when normal algorithms can't be used.

hackermailman 10y ago

I've always considered Stallman as somebody who strategizes in decades instead of tomorrow. He sees a future of locked devices that imprison people and so seems radical to everybody stuck in the state of present day. I don't know if his strategy will work but it seems better than any compromises that could lead to dumb terminals running proprietary webasm binaries watching everything you do.

krick 10y ago

I think this is pretty great analysis, really. Sobering, so to say. I know all of this, but tend to ignore quite often. This is because (unlike Stallman) I don't think I'm fighting a war, I'm just living the way I think is "right". But is it really not my war? In the and, I do believe it would be a better world if some goals of Stallman have been achieved. However, this analysis has the same flaws it points out in the movement of stallmanism: pointing out the problem is not the same as proposing a solution. Take this Gmail example. I absolutely hate it and would love it to disappear, but expressing it the usual way — as pointed out — is useless, if not harmful. Why people use Gmail or Google Docs? Because it's handy, obviously. They need something that does something like these services do, and google products simply happen to be better than alternatives. And they seem free too. So what should I do instead of demonstratively avoiding them? Propose something better not only for myself, but for other people too. Give them a better option. Obviously. But the truth is I can't do that. I do not have any "smart solution" and Gmail is "free" not because it costs nothing to operate it, but because Google has shitload of money. And the same is true for nearly every popular service and non-trivial piece of software. We may bring up Linux and Blender all we want, but the sad truth is free software just sucks. There is no open-source alternative for AutoCAD or Native Instruments, because it requires way too much domain-knowledge for your typical Finnish CS student to make one. Making this stuff is expensive as in "money". And "making money" a.k.a "business" is dirty game, so you don't make it easy for your competition to copy stuff you wasted your money to make. Blender is an exception that does not prove the rule. Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism. People outside of USA tend to agree this is nice idea, but we still haven't seen working implementations of that. So, if I don't have a better war strategy, how can I complain? Do I think it would be better if Stallman was not fighting this silly war of his own? I guess I don't. Even if "normal people" tend to make fun of him, at least they know about him and this FOSS stuff. Well, at least some of them do.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
"Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism." Communism is an economic system of physical goods and services, digital and intellectual things aren't either so I don't think it's useful to equate the two. Digital media is easily obtained by anyone so is made with a lock to which the key is sold. The keys are usually some form of digital media, so a central authority is needed to validate the keys. The validation process is also digital, so laws get made to threaten anyone that tries to bypass that process and, instead of preventing attacks on ships, those laws get used to mess up peoples lives that usually don't deserve it. Software is just a big, messy math function, and trying to sell it is just as silly as trying to sell addition. Sell goods; sell services (even the service of writing software); but trying to sell the software itself is pretty much insane; the only way to win at it is to treat your customers like no-good, lying thieves.

sqldba 10y ago

Wow what an idiot.

sctb 10y ago
Please comment civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

schoen 10y ago

(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.) This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views. In general, RMS has stood for the effort of trying to find common cause around specific issues and principles among people who might radically disagree about other things (another example was the League for Programming Freedom, a single-issue campaign against software patents that actively aspired to include people who disagree with RMS about free software!). It's true that the big-tent concept could fail as a tactical matter if it turns out that the success of one cause really is indispensable to the success of another, which is a big part of what this article is claiming. But I wish the article had engaged a bit more with the fact that RMS does not appear to agree with this analysis and has consistently wanted people with non-leftist views to join the free software movement, including enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and private property. In other words, it's not an oversight or an accident. (To be clear about this, the classic formulation of RMS's free software philosophy calls for not regarding software as private property -- for example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" -- but stakes out no position on regarding, say, financial instruments, airplanes, factories, companies, plots of land, or apartment buildings as private property. Hence many more people could agree with it.)

A_COMPUTER 10y ago
I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.
- smsm42 10y ago
  I've been contributing to open-source software projects for more a decade now. I've never seen any connection with left-wing ideology, and no incompatibility with any ideology I can think of. I've seen all kinds of people participating, from communists to objectivists. I think that's why it worked so well. If something can seriously hurt the idea, it's trying to make an narrow political-ideological cause out of it. You may gain some partisan support and budgets on that, but the losses in goodwill would be enormous.

zekevermillion 10y ago

RMS' personal choices are important. I could not live with the same ethical purity myself when it comes to software choices (or for that matter, much of anything else). But I have been personally influenced by reading his essays on ethical topics. If he did not live consistent with his personal ethics, not only would he be much less persuasive, but also he would be at conflict with himself. the critic is right that software freedom does not exist in a vacuum. However, it does not follow that living in an ethical manner is pointless.

jcora 10y ago
I have too been influenced by Stallman but I don't see why anyone should be above critique. I've developed as a person, politically, and think that my criticism may be useful to well-intentioned peopled, that's why I wrote this. > However, it does not follow that living in an ethical manner is pointless. I fully disagree. Personal ethics is only important with interpersonal relationships. Anything political transcends the individual and his actions and requires systemic analysis and action. That is the point of the article.
- smonff 10y ago
  Criticizing Stallman of the "GNU/"Linux precision is like criticizing a plumber of using pipes. The guy is just doing it's job and he is doing it quite well!
- zekevermillion 10y ago
  Stallman is not above critique, but I don't think you have hit on the more interesting parts of his philosophy to question. If I could eat Chinese with RMS, I would want to ask him about when free hardware will become relevant, and what he thinks about user subjugation that doesn't involve privacy invasion or software restrictions -- like, why isn't it mandatory to boycott every monopoly business? Perhaps at some point he would throw up his hands and say, we're only human! I take comfort from the Biblical parable, Render Unto Caesar.

vivekd 10y ago

I don't agree with everything in this article but I think a part of it really put into words something I had been feeling for some time. I had always found it easy to agree with Stallman's view of free software. I think most reasonable people who didn't have a stake in proprietary software would agree with him. But, something about Stallman that made it hard for me to really take his movement seriously enough to want to take up his banner and follow him, and I think this article hit on why. He is right about the problem but there's a flaw in his approach to solving the problem. While Stallman is right in asserting that software should be free, he moves into Zealotry in insisting that he only use free software and thereby excluding himself from much of the technology available today. I think ordinary people looking at something like this would be reluctant to follow him or take up his cause because the average person's reaction would be "I could never live like that, yes I agree with him, but I'm simply not willing to give up my facebook, or google chrome, or microsoft word." I don't think Stallman would look like a hypocrite or have his point weakened if here were to advocate for legislative changes to make software free while still using proprietary software. If someone challenges him or calls him a hypocrite he could just respond that he is living within the unfortunate realities of the current day, which is dominated by proprietary software, while still fighting for a better tomorrow with free software. I don't think any reasonable person would take him less seriously just for using software that, in many cases, he has no other option but to use. I mean really, this guy doesn't even browse the internet because websites have proprietary software and instead uses some kind of software to get info off the web - that's extreme. I don't think convincing the world to only use free software is a very realistic goal, because most people don't really understand the problem, let along care enough about the problem to make the huge sacrifices that a life without proprietary software would demand. Instead I think he would have a much stronger chance of succeeding if he worked to protest and raise awareness geared towards legislative change to prevent software companies from using the restrictive licensing agreements they use today.

zekevermillion 10y ago
Stallman has compromised in some ways, even when it comes to using proprietary software. For example, before there was grub I believe he made an exception and used non-free bios. Ultiamtely, even RMS seems to suggest a convenience standard. If the tradeoff is too harsh, at some point it is permissible to use proprietary software. And this is even leaving aside the various non-relative exceptions he has made, such as use of proprietary software in devices that are not primarily for general purpose computing. So even RMS is OK with proprietary software where there are no free alternatives, or where using proprietary software is somehow not part of a "computer". But now that there is a good free system in Gnu + Linux, the user has no excuse for using proprietary programs in general computing. There is still a sacrifice to live by RMS' standards, but it is relatively small compared with, say, the sacrifices demanded of civil rights campaigners in the 60s. Of course, one could debate whether reasonable free alternatives exist in certain areas. Perhaps to RMS it is only a minor inconvenience to use only free software to view web pages, and to avoid websites that run proprietary scripts or that spy on users. What kind of moral weakling would betray the cause of freedom for the convenience of one-click ordering of crap on Amazon. The obvious weakness to this argument is that there are surely people for which proprietary software offers convenience that they view as essential to their lives. This is a hard problem, both in philosophy and practice.

cbdfghh 10y ago

IMHO, Stallman made two mistakes: 1. He moved into politics (which is in my HO, one of the failure points of a lot of tech people. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but certain people have more talent at politics than others, and certain people have more talents at code than others). He's a great programmer, and could have pushed the FSF community directly by committing and improving code. And even if he can't code anymore, he could have focused on fund-raising/raising awareness in winnable (as in, not facebook)/worthwhile (as in, not HURD) battles, where others would benefit also. Like a free Flash or free CAD (which are "FSF High priority projects", though practically dead). What new coding projects were they involved in since HURD started (OK. Replicant.)? And how did his political rants help the FSF (and the Free Software movement as a whole) lately? 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command? Who'll take over after he passes on? What will the FSF look like in 30 years?

tedks 10y ago
""" 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command? Who'll take over after he passes on? What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """ I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least. I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying. I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.
- Frondo 10y ago
  The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS. (I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p ) What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns. What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker. What RMS did was profound and important for that time in history. The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish. What we need is an RMS for the modern era, i.e. a significant thinker who can speak to the next 20 years of people. Sad to say, like most nonprofits, there's no succession plan.

quitspamming 10y ago

I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't calling this out for what it is, anti capitalist BS. I've seen people talk about tactics, DRM, ethics, but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit. Stallman tries to explain over and over again how free software can be profitable, and the author of this post's whole point is, "nah, it can't be. Want free software? You need socialism." Stupid article pushing tired socialism, in old arguments.

Mouq 10y ago
Don't really see why it needs to be called out as such. It's pretty explicitly radical leftist. Is Hacker News exclusively capitalist now? TBF I tend to avoid this site, so maybe it is. If you think materialist analysis isn't useful, well, maybe it's not useful to you. But geez, the author didn't even get into, e.g., Marxist analysis or anything so controversial :P
- afsina 10y ago
  Actually IMO majority of hacker news commenters are left leaning, and I try avoiding political news here because their rethoric is tiring (to me).
  - vacri 10y ago
    I think it's quite the opposite. There's a lot of people living in the high-paid tech bubble here. Actual lefties seem thin on the ground, and less numerous than libertarians. If HN is seen as left-leaning, then the political diversity spectrum in the US is in truly dire shape.
    - deleted 10y ago
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  - witty_username 10y ago
    I was just thinking on this. I notice that the comments usually the fit the article. For example, this has tons of comments sympathetic to Stallman (he's generally pro-socialist). While some other pro-libertarian article would have mostly comments sympathetic to capitalism, libertarian, etc. This occurs on Reddit too. So libertarian/pro-capitalist people see HN as left-leaning, while left-leaning people see HN as pro-capitalist.

ommunist 10y ago

I fail to recognise how confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation is a mistake? I met RMS at Riga Politech when his group campaigned against EU Software Patents, and his logic in the presentation was flawless. I signed petition because of that. When we talked very shortly after the presentation, I concluded for myself that Stallman is indeed very careful with words and the meaning.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Ideologue, idealist, zealot, weird person? All fine with me. I don't like that he starts with some good ideas, but then slippery slopes his way to see existential threats to our life liberty and happiness. It starts out making sense and takes on an air of paranoia.

chippy 10y ago
Although it's interesting to see the types of threats he has outlined in the past and how at the time when he was saying it people were calling them paranoid, and looking back we can see that he wasn't paranoid, but on point and predictive. Perhaps the things we think are paranoia now are similar. They may not be apparent, but perhaps they are similarly on point and predictive.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  I think we agree more than disagree about how paranoia can become reality. The Snowden fallout rewired my thinking, and I'm still recovering from/reconciling the election. But some Stallman stuff I see as hyperbole or just wrong. For example he would label a hobbyist creating a compression utility and choosing to keep code private: - anti-social - an instrument of unjust power - disrespectful of the freedom of others He makes no distinction between government oppression or megacorp monopolies, and 1 person making personal choices. In reality things fall on a spectrum.

tedks 10y ago

As a formerly ardent software freedom lifestylist I hear this criticism and have embraced it myself. I don't encourage the "designers" I know in my life to use GIMP anymore. Much like social revolution can be tragically violent, in 2016 it sometimes falls to us to surrender our computing integrity for a shorter-term tactical gain. This isn't good, but it's not good to avoid either. That said, I think this essay paints an overly narrow view of Stallmanism. Stallman would much prefer systematic change, even though he is a self-identifying liberal; you see this less in the blessed FSF essays and more on stallman.org and similar because he doesn't get so speculative to talk about policy in most of the exhaustively-edited technical specifications on the finer points of software freedom theory. Stallman is I think overly pragmatic. He lives in a society where individualist liberal political action, voting with one's dollar, etc., is the only acceptable method of political change, so he only ever expresses change in these terms. This makes for a weak praxis, because liberalism always makes for a weak praxis. But this isn't Stallmanism; it's just the overpragmatism of rms. Marx thought that electoralism was a good idea, for example, but that doesn't mean communism is inherently electoralist. I think the best thing to do is to explicitly approach software freedom from a collective liberation stance and be ready and willing to point out the contradictions between the totality and the underlying ideological motivations of software freedom. Stallman doesn't need to do this; I think he's contributed quite enough honestly, and that if you want a better praxis, you should provide it yourself, because it isn't hard.

jwildeboer 10y ago

And I hoped this article would be a critique of http://stallmanism.com http://stallmanism.com the religion we created a few years ago. :-(

tnones 10y ago

>problematic >oppressive social relations >conceptualize I just wanna spray Pomo-B-Gone all over this.

vic-traill 10y ago

I think the use of 'Stallmanism ' in the headline (with its obvious reference to 'Stalinism ') is pejorative and click-baitish. Right up there with 'a card-carrying member of the ACLU'[0] and 'sister who was once a thespian'[1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1988 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/24/us/legendary-campaign-pepper-vs-smathers-in-50.html http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/24/us/legendary-campaign-pepp... [edit: fixed typo on 'Stalinism']