4 ms·

Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it'

by bbanyc 7y ago

Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it's a valid point. Nobody gives a damn about the firmware for your laptop's wi-fi card. Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them." (There's AGPL but it's never won any victories for software freedom. All it means is "buy a commercial license.") It's unfortunate that RMS loyalists will continue to control the FSF for the foreseeable future. This is one of those cases where progress is made one funeral at a time. [1] https://maffulli.net/2019/10/17/why-richard-stallman-doesnt-matter/ https://maffulli.net/2019/10/17/why-richard-stallman-doesnt-...

wardenPresides 7y ago
firmware Yeah, great, so we're all just cool with exploitative APT implants from nation-state actors that can track and fingerprint each of our uniquely identifiable devices, via cellular radio firmware vulns, facial recognition and satellite/aerostat surveillance, so that the next Hong Kong doesn't need to be a Tiananmen Square debacle, and they can quietly round up dissent one-by-one, weeks and months after collecting intel, and then disappearing blacklisted citizens for re-education, slave labor, organ donation, and medical experiments at their leisure, right? It's certainly true that RMS never came up with a good solution, because the only winning move is not to play. But sure, rattle off your agit-comments. You don't sound like you have an agenda at all.
catalogia 7y ago
> "Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them."" I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either trust somebody else (inevitably a for-profit corporation who very often has incentives misaligned with the user) or become their own system administrator (an unreasonable ask for the typical user.) A concrete example: Suppose a user wants a FOSS photograph organization application that supports organizing large numbers of images through tagging. A user coming from the proprietary world might reasonably expect this application to perform face detection and recognition to automatically tag all of their friends in the application. There are FOSS implementations of this kind of ML tech.. but what are the chances any of that heavy duty stuff can run on the users low power smartphone? Snowball's chance in hell. Even if you get it to run, it certainly won't scale as well as the SaaS alternative from Facebook/Google/Apple. What's the answer though? I don't have a great answer to this, RMS obviously doesn't, I don't think any RMS supporters or critics do. Not that I've heard anyway.
- wmf 7y ago
  Apple's on-device ML at least proves it's possible even if the FOSS world would take a while to catch up. A bigger problem may getting access to training data.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    It's only possible to a limited extent. A low power smartphone will simply never be able to do as much ML as a high power server, so there will always be a capability asymmetry here. And that's not even getting into the matter of FOSS drivers for such hardware. And as you say, training these models is a different matter than merely using them. The data and power requirements involved are a huge problem.
saagarjha 7y ago
Cloud services seem like one of the few places where it's easy to make money from AGPL software: you use it, but you charge people because they're using your infrastructure. If your customers don't like something, they're free to set up their own, using their own hardware, running the AGPL software that you are. Many won't, because they don't want to deal with this.
- bbanyc 7y ago
  Precisely my point. Are there any significant AGPL projects that aren't just advertisements for their commercial editions or services? Has anyone actually been forced to contribute back their private changes to AGPLware, or do they just avoid it? (EDIT: AGPL Ghostscript is an ad for Artifex, but it's a very useful one.)

by bbanyc 7y ago

wardenPresides 7y ago

firmware Yeah, great, so we're all just cool with exploitative APT implants from nation-state actors that can track and fingerprint each of our uniquely identifiable devices, via cellular radio firmware vulns, facial recognition and satellite/aerostat surveillance, so that the next Hong Kong doesn't need to be a Tiananmen Square debacle, and they can quietly round up dissent one-by-one, weeks and months after collecting intel, and then disappearing blacklisted citizens for re-education, slave labor, organ donation, and medical experiments at their leisure, right? It's certainly true that RMS never came up with a good solution, because the only winning move is not to play. But sure, rattle off your agit-comments. You don't sound like you have an agenda at all.

catalogia 7y ago

> "Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them."" I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either trust somebody else (inevitably a for-profit corporation who very often has incentives misaligned with the user) or become their own system administrator (an unreasonable ask for the typical user.) A concrete example: Suppose a user wants a FOSS photograph organization application that supports organizing large numbers of images through tagging. A user coming from the proprietary world might reasonably expect this application to perform face detection and recognition to automatically tag all of their friends in the application. There are FOSS implementations of this kind of ML tech.. but what are the chances any of that heavy duty stuff can run on the users low power smartphone? Snowball's chance in hell. Even if you get it to run, it certainly won't scale as well as the SaaS alternative from Facebook/Google/Apple. What's the answer though? I don't have a great answer to this, RMS obviously doesn't, I don't think any RMS supporters or critics do. Not that I've heard anyway.

wmf 7y ago
Apple's on-device ML at least proves it's possible even if the FOSS world would take a while to catch up. A bigger problem may getting access to training data.
- catalogia 7y ago
  It's only possible to a limited extent. A low power smartphone will simply never be able to do as much ML as a high power server, so there will always be a capability asymmetry here. And that's not even getting into the matter of FOSS drivers for such hardware. And as you say, training these models is a different matter than merely using them. The data and power requirements involved are a huge problem.

saagarjha 7y ago

Cloud services seem like one of the few places where it's easy to make money from AGPL software: you use it, but you charge people because they're using your infrastructure. If your customers don't like something, they're free to set up their own, using their own hardware, running the AGPL software that you are. Many won't, because they don't want to deal with this.

bbanyc 7y ago
Precisely my point. Are there any significant AGPL projects that aren't just advertisements for their commercial editions or services? Has anyone actually been forced to contribute back their private changes to AGPLware, or do they just avoid it? (EDIT: AGPL Ghostscript is an ad for Artifex, but it's a very useful one.)