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I always think he’s mostly right, but a little too uncompromising, but then everything he says comes true. I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the tim

I always think he’s mostly right, but a little too uncompromising, but then everything he says comes true. I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling. As a software author working at startups, am I part of the problem? I don’t understand how to make a good living without locking down the code to some extent, with few exceptions (it’s hard to found red hat)

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
I thought at first that he was a pompous ass who was out of touch and mostly wrong. And slowly, I noticed that he was still a pompous ass, but he was right. And longer I observe, I notice that he wasn't wrong, but ahead of the curve. And instead of being an ass, he was calling these issues out before they reared their ugly heads... but lo and behold they did eventually. That's why I'm a proud member of the FSF.
User23 7y ago
He is literally a genius. The question you should be asking yourself is “why do I have to take freedom away from others to earn a living?”
- Applejinx 7y ago
  No, the question you need to ask yourself is 'how small of a living can I stand?'. I make a living programming audio software that's GPL-compatible (I'm using MIT license on the grounds that nobody succeeds in the music business unless they allow themselves to be exploited). Stallman can use anything of mine, I just can't use the capital F free stuff GPL users create in exchange, but I get to feed 'em if anything I do is worth having. I do make a living, it's just a very poor and insecure living. I sleep a lot easier, though, and it's very unmistakably a 'First World' living even if it's sort of constrained. How small a living can you stand? How rich do you have to be to have 'enough', and do your 'quality of life' calculations include personal guilt over screwing people over, or not doing that? Software freedom matters to my day-to-day life, but so does the fact that my income's low enough that I qualify for Section 8 housing. Without that, I'd lose some things making it possible to be writing the free software. Can you afford to be on the side of good, or do you have to play for team evil in order to keep the doors open? If it's the latter, can you plan for a heel/face turn and execute a dramatic betrayal of Team Evil? I did (sort of). I was selling the audio software for years and merely keeping all my code proprietary (and getting sucked into the hype mechanic, more and more) and when I made my exit and went full Patreon I executed a clear, very public transition from commercial to open source, even reserving that as a threshold for the Patreon to hit. Took a major loss in revenue right away, but made that threshold pretty soon, and now I don't have to go back. But I wouldn't have been able to do it without years of exposure as a commercial developer. Just like doing an IPO or executing an acquisition strategy, you can execute a heel/face turn into Free Software if you handle it properly. You need to care about the values of it, that's part of the return for you, but I'm still seeing annual returns in excess of, say, index funds. I'm growing at about 34% a year (started out more, but that's over the last year and ignores launch) and I feel I can continue to expand at that rate through taking on more interesting (and costly) projects. Note that this is not passive, this is working capital and is continually funding new stuff I'm able to take on. Hey, if it works for Amazon… ;)
  - User23 7y ago
    Using section 8 to fund cottage industry like free software is brilliant. The absurd exploitativeness of contemporary landlords in large part drives the perceived need to be a heel. Frankly you're an inspiration, thanks for this post. Know that I hope your growth rate continues or even increases.
kpU8efre7r 7y ago
He is technically correct, idealistic, and uncompromising. Unfortunately that doesn't really work in the real world unless your name is Richard Stallman. It's not pragmatic. I ignore him.
- rahuldottech 7y ago
  I don't ignore him. There's a lot to be learnt from what he says. You may think it's too idealistic or uncompromising, but his predictions have been proven repeatedly. You should learn from him, not outright ignore him.
- omeid2 7y ago
  You can ignore him but the reality that he has been impressively predicting won't ignore you. It will come for you, just a matter of time, if you keep ignoring it.
- narrator 7y ago
  You know what else is technically correct, idealistic and uncompromising and works in the real world: Bitcoin. That system requires the power of a small European country to do 7 transactions a second generating a max of 1 mb of data volume every 10 minutes. That's like 1970s transaction speeds. Who the heck is ever going to use that?
- rhizome 7y ago
  What ever happened to "the best kind of correct?"
- eric_h 7y ago
  He has shifted the Overton window in the direction of software freedom for a long time. That has made a huge difference in how all software developers work today. He's worth listening to as long as you don't treat him as an idol.
userbinator 7y ago
I think he was a bit off with regards to source code/open source, because while having source code helps in understanding and modification, it's not essential; you could similarly imagine a world in which open-source wasn't a huge movement but instead the right to reverse-engineer (or basically, understand) software was guaranteed, and it would have as great an effect on freedom; perhaps even more so, because now it'd be the norm for people to disassemble/decompile anything they wanted, and the lack of any "chilling effects" would greatly increase advances in program analysis in general. It could even be argued that the rise of open-source lead to a decrease in interest and skills of RE. In fact, PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s used to contain articles specifically about patching software to do interesting things, complete with instructions of the form "change byte at X to Y"; AFAIK they didn't violate any copyrights because they didn't distribute copyrighted material. Then there's the whole series of "undocumented DOS/Windows" books written by people like Matt Pietrek, Andrew Schulman, and Mark Russinovich; all of which required substantial amounts of reverse-engineering and analysis, but instead of them being persecuted, two of them now work at Microsoft. "If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."
- ohazi 7y ago
  Sometimes I wish people had developed an expectation that commercial software should come with the source code, rather than as (only) a binary blob. Licensing terms could be the same, but people would look at you funny and feel cheated if you tried to sell them a binary blob.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    This was a shift in viewpoint -- earlier in the life of computers, the hardware was seen as the really valuable part of a computer. So companies would provide the source code because that was simpler (the software was "just a toy"). But then software became the valuable component, and so businesses (as is a recurring theme in capitalism) didn't want to give away something that might be potentially profitable. And so we now have proprietary software. This shift in viewpoint by users was an intentional move, pushed by soon-to-be proprietary software businesses.
dunstad 7y ago
The system that prevents you from making a good living without locking down code is most of the problem. To the extent you support that, you are likely a part of it. No different from most people nowadays I think, myself included.
pizzazzaro 7y ago
Honestly? Take the mentality you see in the world - the bottom line comes first, the consumer wants easy consumption, security comes first, whatever else - and try to imagine where that comes in conflict with the things you love. What would have caused that conflict? What, if anything, do you see coming out of it? And if you think Stallman was the tinfoil-hat prophet, you gotta hear about this guy Karl Marx. He predicted the economic turmoil of automation back when the US had a war over "States' Rights" to choose whether Slavery was Legal. I predict that the US will slide further and Further into being a 3rd world nation, until suddenly, another collapse happens. US citizens wont break right away... No, they'll suffer it for a while. They'll even go hungry for a while - and I'm not talking about Detroit or Chi-raq. Im talking Seattle, Houston, NYC looking like the Rust belt, complete with bridge collapses and deaths-via-crumbling infrastructure. China's upcoming divorce from the US markets will insulate them from the crash, but their involvement in our real estate market will only worsen the crisis for Americans. Russia, China, and the Eurozone will finally band together with their currency-basket idea upstaging the dollar. And Americans will still think we're special. Then, when the Hoovervilles have swollen enough to be dangerous, someone will have the bright idea to mobilize and radicalize us. Still, we'll do nothing, even in the absence of Netflix and Cable TV. But that wont stop the government from trying to herd us into camps, just like the immigrants... And in those, with the forced absence of soap, sleep, food..., something will snap, and the guillotine will be reborn in fire and fury. The Climate Change problem? Will get so bad it starts on Xenocide before anyone does anything effective - the sole exception being economic collapse. And we're going to have to shoot a few CEOs for the rest of them to take any of it seriously. Everything from human trafficking to drug use is going to boom. You know slavery - just barely behind propaganda, it was the second biggest influence on modern management practices. Psychology just taught us how to sugar coat it better. Speaking of Propaganda, 1984 aint got shit on 2019. And 2030 is gonna make today look adorable.
- solotronics 7y ago
  I wonder what companies would be good investments to hedge for this possible future.
  - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
baroffoos 7y ago
He is always right because his predictions about companies are as cynical as possible. He assumes every company acts entirely in its own interests and will do whatever they can get away with to make the most profit. And of course this ends up being true almost every time.
roenxi 7y ago
> I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling. As I cast my eye over the FSF's basic definition of free software [0] I can't spot much of a mystery. If a user don't have those freedoms, then someone else is in control of their software. It is inevitable that sooner or later the situation will change and the person who does have control the software is going to do disagree with what the user wants to use the software for - and at that point the user is the one with the problem. Stallman isn't using a genius level of insight, but he is avoiding some very common shortcuts people take where they assume that because people are on 'their side' today that they will remain on 'their side' even if the incentives change. They are then shocked to discover that when the incentives change that nobody was ever actually on 'their side', it was just that the shark swimming placidly alongside wasn't hungry before. I'm usually with Stallman's theories, it amazes me people keep being surprised that liking someone doesn't mean that the person is immune to the incentive structures that surround them. People have a remarkable and underappreciated capacity to make decisions that are good for them rather than good in the abstract. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  It's intriguing to witness this phenomenon live, for example with Google: first we were all in love with it, so refreshing, fast, humble when compared with Yahoo, Lycos et all. We loved their "do no evil" mantra. When they started to offer their free e-mail, we were queueing to migrate. Then the phenomenon you're describing started to happen and people are struggling to de-googlify their lives only to discover it's already too late to do it 100%.
  - JoeSamoa 7y ago
    This.
  - spydum 7y ago
    It happens everywhere - similar concerns raised for cloudflare. Diversity is a good thing, big monolithic providers of services CAN be good as long as leadership is aligned, but once they start optimizing towards less altruistic goals it’s scary. You could argue government works the same way.
syshum 7y ago
>>> but a little too uncompromising, You can not compromise on freedom, for once you allow a single exception that allows authoritarians to take your freedom in "limited" situations, they will quickly invent more and more situations to take more and more of your freedom until none remains If you value liberty, uncompromising protection of that liberty is the only way to secure it
reeves23423 7y ago
Its refreshing to see the sentiment among HN crowd has shifted and embracing RMS. Few years ago the comment section was dismissing RMS outright as not being practical.
bmurphy1976 7y ago
We need people like him. He's the anchor that keeps the ship from floating away at sea. If it were entirely left to the more practical people, GNU wouldn't be a thing and the ecosystem would suffer. We would all be worse off.
Synaesthesia 7y ago
The free software movement is really a radical concept. It encourages us to go beyond capitalism and making a buck to more fundamental aspects of humanity. I’m afraid we are all part of the problem, but we can also be part of a solution, particularly if we work collectively.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

I thought at first that he was a pompous ass who was out of touch and mostly wrong. And slowly, I noticed that he was still a pompous ass, but he was right. And longer I observe, I notice that he wasn't wrong, but ahead of the curve. And instead of being an ass, he was calling these issues out before they reared their ugly heads... but lo and behold they did eventually. That's why I'm a proud member of the FSF.

User23 7y ago

He is literally a genius. The question you should be asking yourself is “why do I have to take freedom away from others to earn a living?”

Applejinx 7y ago
No, the question you need to ask yourself is 'how small of a living can I stand?'. I make a living programming audio software that's GPL-compatible (I'm using MIT license on the grounds that nobody succeeds in the music business unless they allow themselves to be exploited). Stallman can use anything of mine, I just can't use the capital F free stuff GPL users create in exchange, but I get to feed 'em if anything I do is worth having. I do make a living, it's just a very poor and insecure living. I sleep a lot easier, though, and it's very unmistakably a 'First World' living even if it's sort of constrained. How small a living can you stand? How rich do you have to be to have 'enough', and do your 'quality of life' calculations include personal guilt over screwing people over, or not doing that? Software freedom matters to my day-to-day life, but so does the fact that my income's low enough that I qualify for Section 8 housing. Without that, I'd lose some things making it possible to be writing the free software. Can you afford to be on the side of good, or do you have to play for team evil in order to keep the doors open? If it's the latter, can you plan for a heel/face turn and execute a dramatic betrayal of Team Evil? I did (sort of). I was selling the audio software for years and merely keeping all my code proprietary (and getting sucked into the hype mechanic, more and more) and when I made my exit and went full Patreon I executed a clear, very public transition from commercial to open source, even reserving that as a threshold for the Patreon to hit. Took a major loss in revenue right away, but made that threshold pretty soon, and now I don't have to go back. But I wouldn't have been able to do it without years of exposure as a commercial developer. Just like doing an IPO or executing an acquisition strategy, you can execute a heel/face turn into Free Software if you handle it properly. You need to care about the values of it, that's part of the return for you, but I'm still seeing annual returns in excess of, say, index funds. I'm growing at about 34% a year (started out more, but that's over the last year and ignores launch) and I feel I can continue to expand at that rate through taking on more interesting (and costly) projects. Note that this is not passive, this is working capital and is continually funding new stuff I'm able to take on. Hey, if it works for Amazon… ;)
- User23 7y ago
  Using section 8 to fund cottage industry like free software is brilliant. The absurd exploitativeness of contemporary landlords in large part drives the perceived need to be a heel. Frankly you're an inspiration, thanks for this post. Know that I hope your growth rate continues or even increases.

kpU8efre7r 7y ago

He is technically correct, idealistic, and uncompromising. Unfortunately that doesn't really work in the real world unless your name is Richard Stallman. It's not pragmatic. I ignore him.

rahuldottech 7y ago
I don't ignore him. There's a lot to be learnt from what he says. You may think it's too idealistic or uncompromising, but his predictions have been proven repeatedly. You should learn from him, not outright ignore him.
omeid2 7y ago
You can ignore him but the reality that he has been impressively predicting won't ignore you. It will come for you, just a matter of time, if you keep ignoring it.
narrator 7y ago
You know what else is technically correct, idealistic and uncompromising and works in the real world: Bitcoin. That system requires the power of a small European country to do 7 transactions a second generating a max of 1 mb of data volume every 10 minutes. That's like 1970s transaction speeds. Who the heck is ever going to use that?
rhizome 7y ago
What ever happened to "the best kind of correct?"
eric_h 7y ago
He has shifted the Overton window in the direction of software freedom for a long time. That has made a huge difference in how all software developers work today. He's worth listening to as long as you don't treat him as an idol.

userbinator 7y ago

I think he was a bit off with regards to source code/open source, because while having source code helps in understanding and modification, it's not essential; you could similarly imagine a world in which open-source wasn't a huge movement but instead the right to reverse-engineer (or basically, understand) software was guaranteed, and it would have as great an effect on freedom; perhaps even more so, because now it'd be the norm for people to disassemble/decompile anything they wanted, and the lack of any "chilling effects" would greatly increase advances in program analysis in general. It could even be argued that the rise of open-source lead to a decrease in interest and skills of RE. In fact, PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s used to contain articles specifically about patching software to do interesting things, complete with instructions of the form "change byte at X to Y"; AFAIK they didn't violate any copyrights because they didn't distribute copyrighted material. Then there's the whole series of "undocumented DOS/Windows" books written by people like Matt Pietrek, Andrew Schulman, and Mark Russinovich; all of which required substantial amounts of reverse-engineering and analysis, but instead of them being persecuted, two of them now work at Microsoft. "If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."

ohazi 7y ago
Sometimes I wish people had developed an expectation that commercial software should come with the source code, rather than as (only) a binary blob. Licensing terms could be the same, but people would look at you funny and feel cheated if you tried to sell them a binary blob.
- cyphar 7y ago
  This was a shift in viewpoint -- earlier in the life of computers, the hardware was seen as the really valuable part of a computer. So companies would provide the source code because that was simpler (the software was "just a toy"). But then software became the valuable component, and so businesses (as is a recurring theme in capitalism) didn't want to give away something that might be potentially profitable. And so we now have proprietary software. This shift in viewpoint by users was an intentional move, pushed by soon-to-be proprietary software businesses.

dunstad 7y ago

The system that prevents you from making a good living without locking down code is most of the problem. To the extent you support that, you are likely a part of it. No different from most people nowadays I think, myself included.

pizzazzaro 7y ago

Honestly? Take the mentality you see in the world - the bottom line comes first, the consumer wants easy consumption, security comes first, whatever else - and try to imagine where that comes in conflict with the things you love. What would have caused that conflict? What, if anything, do you see coming out of it? And if you think Stallman was the tinfoil-hat prophet, you gotta hear about this guy Karl Marx. He predicted the economic turmoil of automation back when the US had a war over "States' Rights" to choose whether Slavery was Legal. I predict that the US will slide further and Further into being a 3rd world nation, until suddenly, another collapse happens. US citizens wont break right away... No, they'll suffer it for a while. They'll even go hungry for a while - and I'm not talking about Detroit or Chi-raq. Im talking Seattle, Houston, NYC looking like the Rust belt, complete with bridge collapses and deaths-via-crumbling infrastructure. China's upcoming divorce from the US markets will insulate them from the crash, but their involvement in our real estate market will only worsen the crisis for Americans. Russia, China, and the Eurozone will finally band together with their currency-basket idea upstaging the dollar. And Americans will still think we're special. Then, when the Hoovervilles have swollen enough to be dangerous, someone will have the bright idea to mobilize and radicalize us. Still, we'll do nothing, even in the absence of Netflix and Cable TV. But that wont stop the government from trying to herd us into camps, just like the immigrants... And in those, with the forced absence of soap, sleep, food..., something will snap, and the guillotine will be reborn in fire and fury. The Climate Change problem? Will get so bad it starts on Xenocide before anyone does anything effective - the sole exception being economic collapse. And we're going to have to shoot a few CEOs for the rest of them to take any of it seriously. Everything from human trafficking to drug use is going to boom. You know slavery - just barely behind propaganda, it was the second biggest influence on modern management practices. Psychology just taught us how to sugar coat it better. Speaking of Propaganda, 1984 aint got shit on 2019. And 2030 is gonna make today look adorable.

solotronics 7y ago
I wonder what companies would be good investments to hedge for this possible future.
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago

baroffoos 7y ago

He is always right because his predictions about companies are as cynical as possible. He assumes every company acts entirely in its own interests and will do whatever they can get away with to make the most profit. And of course this ends up being true almost every time.

roenxi 7y ago

> I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling. As I cast my eye over the FSF's basic definition of free software [0] I can't spot much of a mystery. If a user don't have those freedoms, then someone else is in control of their software. It is inevitable that sooner or later the situation will change and the person who does have control the software is going to do disagree with what the user wants to use the software for - and at that point the user is the one with the problem. Stallman isn't using a genius level of insight, but he is avoiding some very common shortcuts people take where they assume that because people are on 'their side' today that they will remain on 'their side' even if the incentives change. They are then shocked to discover that when the incentives change that nobody was ever actually on 'their side', it was just that the shark swimming placidly alongside wasn't hungry before. I'm usually with Stallman's theories, it amazes me people keep being surprised that liking someone doesn't mean that the person is immune to the incentive structures that surround them. People have a remarkable and underappreciated capacity to make decisions that are good for them rather than good in the abstract. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
It's intriguing to witness this phenomenon live, for example with Google: first we were all in love with it, so refreshing, fast, humble when compared with Yahoo, Lycos et all. We loved their "do no evil" mantra. When they started to offer their free e-mail, we were queueing to migrate. Then the phenomenon you're describing started to happen and people are struggling to de-googlify their lives only to discover it's already too late to do it 100%.
- JoeSamoa 7y ago
  This.
- spydum 7y ago
  It happens everywhere - similar concerns raised for cloudflare. Diversity is a good thing, big monolithic providers of services CAN be good as long as leadership is aligned, but once they start optimizing towards less altruistic goals it’s scary. You could argue government works the same way.

syshum 7y ago

>>> but a little too uncompromising, You can not compromise on freedom, for once you allow a single exception that allows authoritarians to take your freedom in "limited" situations, they will quickly invent more and more situations to take more and more of your freedom until none remains If you value liberty, uncompromising protection of that liberty is the only way to secure it

reeves23423 7y ago

Its refreshing to see the sentiment among HN crowd has shifted and embracing RMS. Few years ago the comment section was dismissing RMS outright as not being practical.

bmurphy1976 7y ago

We need people like him. He's the anchor that keeps the ship from floating away at sea. If it were entirely left to the more practical people, GNU wouldn't be a thing and the ecosystem would suffer. We would all be worse off.

Synaesthesia 7y ago

The free software movement is really a radical concept. It encourages us to go beyond capitalism and making a buck to more fundamental aspects of humanity. I’m afraid we are all part of the problem, but we can also be part of a solution, particularly if we work collectively.