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"For over 30 years, Stallman has been a tireless advocate of a world that hasn’t mattered for the past 15 years." I think that, if anything, the exact opposite
by elteto 7y ago
"For over 30 years, Stallman has been a tireless advocate of a world that hasn’t mattered for the past 15 years."
I think that, if anything, the exact opposite is true after Snowden's revelations.
- new_realist 7y agoSpying in the name of national security and viral software licenses are unrelated. Further, as another point of irrelevancy, Open Source predates, is more popular than, and is more influential than Free Software.
- saon 7y agoYou're right. But you have to recognize it is because corporations recognized they can commodify tons of their code to reduce costs and improve code quality and security. The linux foundation has dozens of multi-million-dollar partner corporations, whereas the FSF has maybe 5000 contributing members globally. But those corporations have no reason to guarantee that your computer will do what you want it to do, and many reasons to guarantee that it will do what they want it to do. This is a pervasive norm now, especially on hackernews where the demographic is primarily entrepreneurial web-only devs. Before deriding free software, ask yourself, who benefits from being able to read the source code of a program that restricts what ebooks you can read?
- alexvoda 7y agoMore popular and more influential I understand but please explain what you mean that it predates.
- shadowgovt 7y agoRemember when Snowden released all those documents and nearly nobody changed the way they behave because it turns out passive, ubiquitous state surveillance wasn't the end of the world it had been made out to be? Good times.