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Happy Birthday indeed. I think there is not enough appreciation how GNU and GPL improved technology in these last decades. Just imagine how many tools we get a
by rdtsc 8y ago
Happy Birthday indeed.
I think there is not enough appreciation how GNU and GPL improved technology in these last decades. Just imagine how many tools we get as open source today and expect to be open source - OS kernels, compilers, databases, desktop environments, browsers, libraries, toolkits, etc. They are not all GPL, but strongly believe that had GPL and Stallman not been there we wouldn't have had other open source licenses either and we would have had to pay for most of it.
At the same time I think we are losing a lot of that due to the trend of everything becoming a service. We losing tremendously in regards to privacy in general. The other story on the front page today is how Facebook is using 2FA phone numbers and selling them to advertisers. Yesterday we talked about Google moving to China where people can and will be imprisoned, tortured and killed as a result of a company like Google turning over users data. The irony there is that many of the tech giants that do those things have built their stack on GNU software (GCC, Linux), can imagine a bit how Stallman would feel about that.
EDIT: Found this recent 2018 interview with him regarding privacy and what the tech giants are doing these days : http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/richard-stallman-rms-on-privacy-data-and-free-software.html http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/richard-stallman-rms-on-p...
- basilgohar 8y agoI think the staying power of GNU and the GPL and associated projects is due in large part to the so-called "viral" nature of the license – code that is GPL'ed must remain GPL'ed, and thus is still available with all the original rights due to the end-user as it had, and never less. I don't think we would be where we are at right now had it not been for this, and for the ardent, strong stand free software advocates that pushed to keep it that way. Is the GPL a panacea? No, and I don't think anyone believes that (even RMS agreed that Vorbis should be BSD licensed when it was released). But the fact that it rubbed some people the wrong way (and still does) was worth it for the long-term beneficial outcome we got because of it.
- holri 8y ago> Found this recent 2018 interview with him regarding > privacy and what the tech giants are doing these days Isn't it an cutting irony that you can not read it without accepting cookies from nymag.com?
- snaky 8y agoThe problem is too many people consider that not a choice but just an little annoyance.
- boomboomsubban 8y agoYou could buy the magazine...
- solarkraft 8y agoYou could stop using software to escape its privacy invasion, but I'd rather not.
- holri 8y agoI am not aware that nymag is available where I live.
- simula67 8y agoNot just privacy though. The larger point of starting the GNU project was to allow for freedom to prosper. Stallman understood an important thing about software : it is a great servent, but a terrible master. He realized that being unable to study the software we use, to modify it and give those improvements to others would mean that it would end up as a tool of oppression. Today, how much control do you have over the technology you depend on ? Search engines can bias search results to get you to think in one way and not another. Social networks can censor you and control what type of information you are allowed to see. Your data is locked up in data centers of Big Tech and they could pull the plug any time causing you a lot of damage. The irony is that some of these companies were built on the software developed by FSF