5 ms·

This has been the elephant in the room for more than over a decade, but hardly anyone mentions it apart from occasional posts on HN. Stallman has largely ignor

by ghmdh 6y ago

This has been the elephant in the room for more than over a decade, but hardly anyone mentions it apart from occasional posts on HN. Stallman has largely ignored the web developments. Pushing for the GPL works (almost) as well for companies these days as pushing for the BSD license. I think most new OSS developers are distracted by the thousands of social issues that are made up by corporations to give them the illusion that they are doing meaningful, socially relevant work. So they no longer care about software freedom and overlook that elephant in the room.

api 6y ago
Yeah, the "woke" vs "based" culture war has destroyed the minds of a generation. These are two sides of the same coin. The underlying anti-intellectualism and biological identitarianism/racism is the same. The only difference is where you go with it. Sorry but "we are creating the infrastructure for a future panopticon that will transform the Earth into a global labor camp for the 0.0001%, but we have gender equal HR policies" is not woke for any definition of the term I'd care about. A gender-equal prison is still a prison, and does anyone think that gender equality is going to persist once real totalitarians take power and inherit all that wonderful mass surveillance infrastructure? Fake woke Silicon Valley is building the infrastructure for something that will probably look like a cross between The Handmaid's Tale and alt-America in Man in the High Castle. It's another case of capitalists selling the rope that will be used to hang them. Meanwhile those who see through that have run into a completely different hall of mirrors chasing stupid green frog memes and embracing literal ideologies of enslavement. "We see through your fake woke! So we're going to advocate literal fascism to be edgy!" Playing the record backwards is still playing the record folks. Why has this been obvious to me for years and yet I feel like nobody else sees it?
- cultus 6y ago
  Identity politics is just a way to co-opt and divide left-wing politics by ignoring how oppression of women, immigrants, LGBT, etc., is always inextricably tied to economics. It's a way that corporations, the Democratic Party, and others, have been able to keep the 99% distracted from the real source of their oppression.
kristianpaul 6y ago
There is AGPLv3 for web developments but its adoption is not close to GPL. The web growth happened so fast and then SaaS is born.
zozbot234 6y ago
> Stallman has largely ignored the web developments. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... for Stallman's take on Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). He seems to broadly agree with parent's points wrt. this industry; he's certainly not "ignoring" them.
- crocko 6y ago
  It is irrelevant though whether he is paying attention. The most successful work under the GPL (the Linux Kernel) development is steered by the companies that he attempted to wrestle control back from.

by ghmdh 6y ago

api 6y ago

Yeah, the "woke" vs "based" culture war has destroyed the minds of a generation. These are two sides of the same coin. The underlying anti-intellectualism and biological identitarianism/racism is the same. The only difference is where you go with it. Sorry but "we are creating the infrastructure for a future panopticon that will transform the Earth into a global labor camp for the 0.0001%, but we have gender equal HR policies" is not woke for any definition of the term I'd care about. A gender-equal prison is still a prison, and does anyone think that gender equality is going to persist once real totalitarians take power and inherit all that wonderful mass surveillance infrastructure? Fake woke Silicon Valley is building the infrastructure for something that will probably look like a cross between The Handmaid's Tale and alt-America in Man in the High Castle. It's another case of capitalists selling the rope that will be used to hang them. Meanwhile those who see through that have run into a completely different hall of mirrors chasing stupid green frog memes and embracing literal ideologies of enslavement. "We see through your fake woke! So we're going to advocate literal fascism to be edgy!" Playing the record backwards is still playing the record folks. Why has this been obvious to me for years and yet I feel like nobody else sees it?

cultus 6y ago
Identity politics is just a way to co-opt and divide left-wing politics by ignoring how oppression of women, immigrants, LGBT, etc., is always inextricably tied to economics. It's a way that corporations, the Democratic Party, and others, have been able to keep the 99% distracted from the real source of their oppression.

kristianpaul 6y ago

There is AGPLv3 for web developments but its adoption is not close to GPL. The web growth happened so fast and then SaaS is born.

zozbot234 6y ago

> Stallman has largely ignored the web developments. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... for Stallman's take on Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). He seems to broadly agree with parent's points wrt. this industry; he's certainly not "ignoring" them.

crocko 6y ago
It is irrelevant though whether he is paying attention. The most successful work under the GPL (the Linux Kernel) development is steered by the companies that he attempted to wrestle control back from.