8 ms·

I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contrib

by city41 6y ago

I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.

shadowgovt 6y ago
I don't think that's changed.
naringas 6y ago
I have always thought that he was on to something. I think it's actually quite impressive that he saw something incoming which only now (20 years later) is becoming feasable. then again, a lot of people think I am also crazy, so there's that
robotresearcher 6y ago
By no means all people. He became very well known in the tech community in the 90s because a significant number of people were interested in what he was saying. He won the MacArthur award in 1990.
- konjin 6y ago
  People don't want to listen to Stallman because he talks about motivations. The number of times I've had people downvote me for pointing out all organizations will act to maximize profit regardless the cost to others is extraordinary. It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.
  - amatecha 6y ago
    The FSF is a non-profit organization, so that motivation quite literally doesn't apply to them. All other regular corporations, yes. :)
    - ddingus 6y ago
      They will do it too, only it manifests differently. Instead of money in a bank, they will expand and or do more work, etc... This isn't bad. But it is resonant with what Stallman talks about.
    - konjin 6y ago
      It does. I remember when I said that Mozilla offering women's outreach was the start of the end for them and being called a misogynist for it. Their current market rate speaks for itself.
      - wolco2 6y ago
        That's an interesting point. Regardless of the initiative (could have been rural broadband) by expanding into these areas Mozilla's parent company said.. We have enough money for operations. This extra money will go to this good cause. As someone who might donate I would hold off because they have more than enough. I could use my money directly to support a cause. Not sure how a charity starts giving to another charity (unless that is what they specialize in). That strikes me as greedy. If you have enough don't ask for more. There are local charities who could use the money.
        konjin 6y ago
        People who lead groups want power. You can get more power when you lead more people, or you can get more money and turn that into power. Which is why I'm a huge fan of sortition as a way to run groups of people larger than a dozen.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Google. Mozilla. The FSF. Microsoft. IBM springs to mind. These will all have their time in the spotlight as tech darlings or villains. You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do. It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push them to do and the world becomes a very simple and predictable place. The time to panic isn't when someone threatens you, it is when they have the means & incentive to threaten you. Run or fight then, not later on. If the FSF gains power, it will abuse that power. Sooner or later. They will react to money just as much as the rest of us. Look at what happened to Mozilla.
  - arvinsim 6y ago
    Curious as to why you left our Apple and Amazon.
    - konjin 6y ago
      Because I didn't want to write down every corp with more than 10 people in it.
mjevans 6y ago
Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works creators / maintainers would be good. The hardware still matters too, and much of why _that_ is under attack are greedy actors who want to have a cartel of control and manipulation; so that they own all things and can have them work against end users.
- qz2 6y ago
  That is how Amazon is growing. I fear it. They have managed to push into lots of vertical markets and even critical infrastructure now.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- samatman 6y ago
  We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people. I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Two things: 1) you'd still budget 125k a man-year? Why? That's only needed for devs in SV, NYC, London and other places with mad rent, besides - all you're gonna get in these places are fresh university grads and hipsters, not seasoned people with actual experience that tells them to not use a two months old JS framework for something that is supposed to live long. 2) Why limit it to USA? Other countries have decent programmers too, with way lower cost of employment. 60k is going to fetch you quality in Germany, 30k in Eastern Europe. Besides, the best way to finance all of this, other than pressuring government to procure only/preferred open source is some rich startup exiter putting a couple billion dollars into some sort of trust fund and pay the development from the interest.
qz2 6y ago
What's more worrying is people I speak to regularly now don't even know who he is. And if they do it's because of the toe cheese incident. We're obsessed with celebrity trivia and judge the person rather than the message being delivered. I see that a lot in other areas these days as well. This is a broken society in my mind.
- BigBubbleButt 6y ago
  > What's more worrying is people I speak to regularly now don't even know who he is. And if they do it's because of the toe cheese incident. I've known who Stallman is for a long time, but I had never heard about the toe cheese incident. I just looked it up. My reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc For anyone interested in the toe cheese incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ I'm not trying to malign Stallman here, but you can't deny this is interesting.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I think it's possibly one of the least interesting things about Stallman.
    - BigBubbleButt 6y ago
      It's not that he did something weird that's interesting (everybody does weird stuff) - it's that he did it in public, on camera, while the focus of attention during some sort of exhibit. It's interesting because it's unique. The only other person I can think of that would do something similar is Danny DeVito. Or at least I think it's interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tinco 6y ago
I was too young in the 90's to know about him, but in the early 00's people definitely didn't think him crazy. Linux was doing well and his contributions to its success were recognised, even if he didn't get as much credit as he wanted (should've got?). I feel it's the past ten years that he's become more notorious for his quirks and his gaffes. For someone who was such a large philosophical influence on our industry he had some basic sociological lessons to learn, which in the past ten years have been a more dominant topic in the industry than software freedom. Both are important topics, and it's unfortunate that software freedom has taken a backseat recently. Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often.
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  > Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often. Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a lot more exploitation of software projects and open source software developers and it's almost embarrassing how often open source projects and commercial open source entities are surprised when it happens. I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other, but we don't. If we did, I think we wouldn't even need share-alike licenses. But we don't, so we do.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL How have they put pressure? I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back. If you're talking larger projects, a lot of the big, recent ones have come out of companies--projects like MongoDB, Cassandra, React, Kubernetes. Some like Hadoop were inspired by work at big companies.
mullingitover 6y ago
To be clear, Richard "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" Stallman is totally nuts (although I'll give credit where it's due, he finally walked back his stance on pedophilia). A stopped clock is still right twice a day.
- vslira 6y ago
  Like all humans he is full of faults has a long track record of unfortunate postures and statements, but as a technologist the best analogy for him would be an atomic clock sent back in time to before we understood relativity.
- Zak 6y ago
  This seems like an instance of "what you can't say". The taboo is so strong that to even question it leads observers to speculate about whether the questioner is insane or evil. I suspect the reality is some manner of neurodivergence, either autism or a thing we don't yet have a good name for. I even feel the need to add that I don't share his skepticism, lest I raise suspicion about my own position by posting this.
- salawat 6y ago
  First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened. One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more." If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human species. People with life experience so deep as to have limited exposure to some of the more mundane ones we all take for granted. I'd recommend offering a bit more benefit of a doubt, and a wee bit more effort in terms of investigating context before writing someone off. After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.
  - mullingitover 6y ago
    > First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened. Yes, I pointed out his backtracking on that. > After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them. I don't think of Stallman as an enemy, just a very creepy guy who happened to make some important contributions. Regardless of his backpedaling, I would have extreme reservations about leaving him unsupervised around children. That doesn't mean his ideas were all bad, just that he shouldn't be put on a pedestal. Lots of great ideas came from very flawed people. - Fritz Haber is responsible for the Haber process that unlocked atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer, and saved multitudes from starvation. He was also responsible for horrific suffering thanks to his other project, chemical weapons. - Hans Reiser was a brilliant engineer who created a widely used linux filesystem. He's also a convicted murderer. - Wernher von Braun was a brilliant rocket maker who was responsible in large part for putting Americans on the moon. He was also a Nazi who made weapons that killed many innocent civilians.
peterwwillis 6y ago
He is crazy. Crazy is a subjective cultural term applied to people who exist on some margin of polite society. Crazy people aren't bad, even if the term is intended to denigrate. To me, all radical libertarians are crazy. But the fact that he also doesn't have a grasp on what is acceptable social decorum (don't simulate nasal sex at dinner, don't make an apologist argument for pedophilia in public, etc) is probably what makes other people reach for 'crazy'.
massysett 6y ago
I didn’t think he was wearing a tinfoil hat. I agreed with RMS back then insofar as he saw things like TPM coming. However, he did not understand then and still does not understand that by using any device as complex as a computer, the user must trust _somebody_. His free software ideals lead him to think that if the user can read the source and modify it, he can trust it. But this is true of no one, regardless of his technical acumen. The software is too large, too complex for any one user to audit. So the user must trust someone. Typically this is going to be at a minimum his OS vendor. He might also have to trust other software vendors, and maybe hardware vendors and network operators. That the vendor provides Free Software makes no difference. I have a machine running Debian. I still have to trust Debian. What TPM does is give the OS vendor another tool so I can be assured that I’m running what the vendor provided. Of course the vendor can abuse this. But if he does, I have bigger problems. I want the vendor to be able to provide me with what I asked for and therefore I welcome technologies like TPM. I don’t disagree with RMS because he’s paranoid. I disagree with him because he thinks Freedom is an elixir.
- theonemind 6y ago
  Well, the saying goes that democracy is the worst form of government, besides every other form of government we've tried. Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software. Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free. I'm no ideologue, just sayin'.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I don't think Stallman would have an issue with a vendor being the default trusted entity on a system–but it must be possible to replace this with your own root of trust if you so desire. The issue is that companies hear the first part and go "oh boy, TPM time, let's lock out the user!"
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Indeed. I do not agree with everything he says but he's right about a lot of things. It was only recently that I started to understand the value of computing freedom. To think he's been exploring these ideas since decades ago...
GoofballJones 6y ago
Make no mistake, Stallman is a loon. Yes, a loon that developed some great things and has some good ideas, but he's still a loon. That doesn't mean he's wrong. Just...a loon.
webmaven 6y ago
> I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat. Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so. I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar. I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong. And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that. It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism. I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.

by city41 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago

I don't think that's changed.

naringas 6y ago

I have always thought that he was on to something. I think it's actually quite impressive that he saw something incoming which only now (20 years later) is becoming feasable. then again, a lot of people think I am also crazy, so there's that

robotresearcher 6y ago

By no means all people. He became very well known in the tech community in the 90s because a significant number of people were interested in what he was saying. He won the MacArthur award in 1990.

konjin 6y ago
People don't want to listen to Stallman because he talks about motivations. The number of times I've had people downvote me for pointing out all organizations will act to maximize profit regardless the cost to others is extraordinary. It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.
- amatecha 6y ago
  The FSF is a non-profit organization, so that motivation quite literally doesn't apply to them. All other regular corporations, yes. :)
  - ddingus 6y ago
    They will do it too, only it manifests differently. Instead of money in a bank, they will expand and or do more work, etc... This isn't bad. But it is resonant with what Stallman talks about.
  - konjin 6y ago
    It does. I remember when I said that Mozilla offering women's outreach was the start of the end for them and being called a misogynist for it. Their current market rate speaks for itself.
    - wolco2 6y ago
      That's an interesting point. Regardless of the initiative (could have been rural broadband) by expanding into these areas Mozilla's parent company said.. We have enough money for operations. This extra money will go to this good cause. As someone who might donate I would hold off because they have more than enough. I could use my money directly to support a cause. Not sure how a charity starts giving to another charity (unless that is what they specialize in). That strikes me as greedy. If you have enough don't ask for more. There are local charities who could use the money.
      - konjin 6y ago
        People who lead groups want power. You can get more power when you lead more people, or you can get more money and turn that into power. Which is why I'm a huge fan of sortition as a way to run groups of people larger than a dozen.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Google. Mozilla. The FSF. Microsoft. IBM springs to mind. These will all have their time in the spotlight as tech darlings or villains. You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do. It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push them to do and the world becomes a very simple and predictable place. The time to panic isn't when someone threatens you, it is when they have the means & incentive to threaten you. Run or fight then, not later on. If the FSF gains power, it will abuse that power. Sooner or later. They will react to money just as much as the rest of us. Look at what happened to Mozilla.
- arvinsim 6y ago
  Curious as to why you left our Apple and Amazon.
  - konjin 6y ago
    Because I didn't want to write down every corp with more than 10 people in it.

mjevans 6y ago

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works creators / maintainers would be good. The hardware still matters too, and much of why _that_ is under attack are greedy actors who want to have a cartel of control and manipulation; so that they own all things and can have them work against end users.

qz2 6y ago
That is how Amazon is growing. I fear it. They have managed to push into lots of vertical markets and even critical infrastructure now.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
samatman 6y ago
We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people. I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Two things: 1) you'd still budget 125k a man-year? Why? That's only needed for devs in SV, NYC, London and other places with mad rent, besides - all you're gonna get in these places are fresh university grads and hipsters, not seasoned people with actual experience that tells them to not use a two months old JS framework for something that is supposed to live long. 2) Why limit it to USA? Other countries have decent programmers too, with way lower cost of employment. 60k is going to fetch you quality in Germany, 30k in Eastern Europe. Besides, the best way to finance all of this, other than pressuring government to procure only/preferred open source is some rich startup exiter putting a couple billion dollars into some sort of trust fund and pay the development from the interest.

qz2 6y ago

What's more worrying is people I speak to regularly now don't even know who he is. And if they do it's because of the toe cheese incident. We're obsessed with celebrity trivia and judge the person rather than the message being delivered. I see that a lot in other areas these days as well. This is a broken society in my mind.

BigBubbleButt 6y ago
> What's more worrying is people I speak to regularly now don't even know who he is. And if they do it's because of the toe cheese incident. I've known who Stallman is for a long time, but I had never heard about the toe cheese incident. I just looked it up. My reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc For anyone interested in the toe cheese incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ I'm not trying to malign Stallman here, but you can't deny this is interesting.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I think it's possibly one of the least interesting things about Stallman.
  - BigBubbleButt 6y ago
    It's not that he did something weird that's interesting (everybody does weird stuff) - it's that he did it in public, on camera, while the focus of attention during some sort of exhibit. It's interesting because it's unique. The only other person I can think of that would do something similar is Danny DeVito. Or at least I think it's interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

tinco 6y ago

I was too young in the 90's to know about him, but in the early 00's people definitely didn't think him crazy. Linux was doing well and his contributions to its success were recognised, even if he didn't get as much credit as he wanted (should've got?). I feel it's the past ten years that he's become more notorious for his quirks and his gaffes. For someone who was such a large philosophical influence on our industry he had some basic sociological lessons to learn, which in the past ten years have been a more dominant topic in the industry than software freedom. Both are important topics, and it's unfortunate that software freedom has taken a backseat recently. Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often.

Conan_Kudo 6y ago
> Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often. Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a lot more exploitation of software projects and open source software developers and it's almost embarrassing how often open source projects and commercial open source entities are surprised when it happens. I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other, but we don't. If we did, I think we wouldn't even need share-alike licenses. But we don't, so we do.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL How have they put pressure? I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back. If you're talking larger projects, a lot of the big, recent ones have come out of companies--projects like MongoDB, Cassandra, React, Kubernetes. Some like Hadoop were inspired by work at big companies.

mullingitover 6y ago

To be clear, Richard "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" Stallman is totally nuts (although I'll give credit where it's due, he finally walked back his stance on pedophilia). A stopped clock is still right twice a day.

vslira 6y ago
Like all humans he is full of faults has a long track record of unfortunate postures and statements, but as a technologist the best analogy for him would be an atomic clock sent back in time to before we understood relativity.
Zak 6y ago
This seems like an instance of "what you can't say". The taboo is so strong that to even question it leads observers to speculate about whether the questioner is insane or evil. I suspect the reality is some manner of neurodivergence, either autism or a thing we don't yet have a good name for. I even feel the need to add that I don't share his skepticism, lest I raise suspicion about my own position by posting this.
salawat 6y ago
First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened. One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more." If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human species. People with life experience so deep as to have limited exposure to some of the more mundane ones we all take for granted. I'd recommend offering a bit more benefit of a doubt, and a wee bit more effort in terms of investigating context before writing someone off. After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.
- mullingitover 6y ago
  > First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened. Yes, I pointed out his backtracking on that. > After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them. I don't think of Stallman as an enemy, just a very creepy guy who happened to make some important contributions. Regardless of his backpedaling, I would have extreme reservations about leaving him unsupervised around children. That doesn't mean his ideas were all bad, just that he shouldn't be put on a pedestal. Lots of great ideas came from very flawed people. - Fritz Haber is responsible for the Haber process that unlocked atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer, and saved multitudes from starvation. He was also responsible for horrific suffering thanks to his other project, chemical weapons. - Hans Reiser was a brilliant engineer who created a widely used linux filesystem. He's also a convicted murderer. - Wernher von Braun was a brilliant rocket maker who was responsible in large part for putting Americans on the moon. He was also a Nazi who made weapons that killed many innocent civilians.

peterwwillis 6y ago

He is crazy. Crazy is a subjective cultural term applied to people who exist on some margin of polite society. Crazy people aren't bad, even if the term is intended to denigrate. To me, all radical libertarians are crazy. But the fact that he also doesn't have a grasp on what is acceptable social decorum (don't simulate nasal sex at dinner, don't make an apologist argument for pedophilia in public, etc) is probably what makes other people reach for 'crazy'.

massysett 6y ago

I didn’t think he was wearing a tinfoil hat. I agreed with RMS back then insofar as he saw things like TPM coming. However, he did not understand then and still does not understand that by using any device as complex as a computer, the user must trust _somebody_. His free software ideals lead him to think that if the user can read the source and modify it, he can trust it. But this is true of no one, regardless of his technical acumen. The software is too large, too complex for any one user to audit. So the user must trust someone. Typically this is going to be at a minimum his OS vendor. He might also have to trust other software vendors, and maybe hardware vendors and network operators. That the vendor provides Free Software makes no difference. I have a machine running Debian. I still have to trust Debian. What TPM does is give the OS vendor another tool so I can be assured that I’m running what the vendor provided. Of course the vendor can abuse this. But if he does, I have bigger problems. I want the vendor to be able to provide me with what I asked for and therefore I welcome technologies like TPM. I don’t disagree with RMS because he’s paranoid. I disagree with him because he thinks Freedom is an elixir.

theonemind 6y ago
Well, the saying goes that democracy is the worst form of government, besides every other form of government we've tried. Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software. Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free. I'm no ideologue, just sayin'.
saagarjha 6y ago
I don't think Stallman would have an issue with a vendor being the default trusted entity on a system–but it must be possible to replace this with your own root of trust if you so desire. The issue is that companies hear the first part and go "oh boy, TPM time, let's lock out the user!"

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Indeed. I do not agree with everything he says but he's right about a lot of things. It was only recently that I started to understand the value of computing freedom. To think he's been exploring these ideas since decades ago...

GoofballJones 6y ago

Make no mistake, Stallman is a loon. Yes, a loon that developed some great things and has some good ideas, but he's still a loon. That doesn't mean he's wrong. Just...a loon.

webmaven 6y ago

> I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat. Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so. I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar. I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong. And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that. It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism. I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.