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Philosophy of the GNU Project (2018)

138 points by crazypython 6y ago

nalekberov 6y ago
I personally cannot thank enough GNU project for standing software freedom. We are living in a world where corporations control nearly everything by building proprietary systems. They have more than resources to buy, lobby, manipulate, seem "attractive". We need more of this kind of organization, free society cannot exist without free software.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I would guess that the vast majority of free software is written and paid for by corporations.
  - pornel 6y ago
    It is, but when you have ability to modify or fork a project, it is an insurance against corporations adding anti-features.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      But the corporations gave you that ability to modify or fork their code in the first place.
  - abetusk 6y ago
    Is it? I would really like a reference for that claim. Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations. This gets complicated because are you talking about volume of code created or are you weighing code by its use? Anyway, you might be right, I don't know, but my assumption is that FOSS is mostly developed in spite of lack of corporate resources, not because of it.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations. Massive companies everywhere have thousands and thousands of people collectively working all day on free software as their main job. You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now?
      - xenocyon 6y ago
        > You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now? Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        > Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS. Who said it was? Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all primarily FOSS - they have some proprietary trademark and minor components, but the actual browser core in each is FOSS.
        crpatino 6y ago
        I'd have to disagree... https://policies.google.com/terms https://policies.google.com/terms https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.htm... Maybe there's some code that at one point was FOSS in those products, but the products themselves are nor Free. IMHO a code base that has been forked from a FOSS project cannot be considered FOSS itself even if they keep retrofitting changes back to the original, because you cannot know what is there in the proprietary part. This is specially true if you distribute the derivative product only in binary form.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        You're hell-banned, by the way. But you're also wrong. The trademarked Chrome distribution is built from the free Chromium, where main-line development is done. They don't dump changes over the wall like you're suggesting. That's the same for WebKit and Firefox.
  - max_ 6y ago
    They mean "free" as in freedom not free beer.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      No that’s what I mean as well. Corporations wrote tons of free as in freedom software. You’re probably using a corporate free software browser right now? The idea that free software is a niche done by amateurs is wrong. Most people who work on Linux are paid to do so. Same for Chrome, same for Java, same for LLVM, etc etc all the way up the stack. Free software won, and we have the corporations who funded it to thank.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Linux was started by someone because they could, not because they were paid. Sure, if a project (like Linux) gets big enough, corporations will throw money at developers who work on it, but by and large, FOSS is done by unpaid people. If the majority were paid, GIMP would be on par with Photoshop, Inkscape with Illustrator, etc. But they’re not on par because they don’t have corporations throwing millions of dollars at them like Adobe does.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        Have you ever been somewhere like FOSDEM? Next time walk around and ask people if this is their full time job. In most of the rooms I’m in, it’s everyone’s corporate full time job and they’re there on corporate expense accounts. It’s just not the case that most projects are just random hobbies these days, and it’s bad for the movement to keep pretending it is. It’s grown up and corporations invested - that’s a good thing!
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        No. I haven’t been to FOSDEM and I’d bet the majority of FOSS developers haven’t. And that’s the point. Just because you experience a lot of people getting paid to do it doesn’t mean “the vast majority” are. I guess we’re just arguing past each other. I agree it’s good to recognize money in the industry (many have an aversion to it because of EEE fears), and I also agree that the majority of successful projects are done by paid people. I guess that’s the disconnect: I’m looking at all projects, not just the successful ones.
  - worik 6y ago
    That is the original idea IIRC. The companies that make the hardware should fund the software.
  - jangid 6y ago
    Perhaps, I am in a minority then.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  A shocking number of developers I know who use FOSS have no idea that there is even some kind of philosophy behind free software, relating to politics and ethics. Basically zero idea about licenses outside generic FUD about the viral nature of the GPL etc. The ethical-philosophical free software people are terrible at marketing and getting their message across. It's still just a small niche subculture despite the wide adoption of GNU tools and licenses. You'll never reach further with all the silly in joke stuff like Chief GNUisance etc. You'd need charismatic frontline personalities (there's a wide spectrum to explore between RMS and sleazy snake oil salesmen), who don't immediately put off the general population.
  - temac 6y ago
    Worse, some believe Free Software is worthless if third party companies can not extract money from it in some ways, without any compensation or even just keeping it Free in practice for the users. And I'm OK that some Free Software actually let do that, but the thought that those who don't are somehow bad or a threat to the general concept of "freedom" is... weird. (Like there is a single perfectly defined concensus on the concept of freedom anyway)
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    It feels rather contradictory that people on fora like this are all in favor for being tolerant of neurodiversity – let’s not judge those on the autistic spectrum for lack of social graces because they were born that way – but at the same time there is a lot of disapproval of RMS. If we aim to create a better world, should that not be a world where a figure like RMS would seem perfectly fine, not a weirdo who has to be represented by more "acceptable" figures?
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > It feels rather contradictory You are confusing respecting people differences (e.g. neurodiversity, ethnicity, religion, nationality, orientation and so on) with accepting any behavior with choosing the right person for a given role. This are 3 different things.
feralimal 6y ago
Its a great philosophy! Compare and contrast with using a service like google. Not only do you have 0 idea about the algorithm they use, your data is extracted for their benefit. You don't even know what data they have on you, and how this is used! I know you can takeout info from them about your profile, but let's be honest, what use is that to you then?
- api 6y ago
  Awesome. Now who pays people to write software? Proprietary software, which I agree often contains user hostile elements, also tends to have vastly superior polish and user experience. UI/UX is often the majority of the work required to make good software. Making the software function usually takes a lot less time and effort than making it usable. UI/UX and other aspects of software usability are also often the more boring and grinding aspects of software development. This stuff is not fun, so people have to be paid to do it. But “you can sell free software.” That is true. But by this philosophy software cannot restrict the rights of others to sell it too or it is nonfree. In practice that means third parties who did not write the software but have more money or more time to invest in polish and marketing (because they are not writing the software!) are the ones to profit and they usually give nothing back to the original authors. GitHub didn’t write git. AWS didn’t write Postgres. But they are the ones to profit. They took someone else’s work and marketed it well, or SaaSified it. The original authors get nothing. The original idea of free software was a mutual gift culture where everyone builds and everyone uses. Today it’s a take culture where a few people build, others polish and monetize and give nothing back, and most people use the monetized version because time is more expensive than money and nobody has time to DIY.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    Your desire to make money and this philosophy are orthogonal. They can co-exist, never interacting with each other. Go, be free, make money.
    - api 6y ago
      So that means if I need to make money I should not write free software. The vast majority of people must make a living. So that means free software is only for people with trust funds? This also implies that there will be almost no usable free software, so freedom is only for nerds. The general public gets proprietary malware that spies on them and locks them in, because that is where all the money is by design. There is no money in giving people freedom. I am simply pointing out that your nice utopian ideals are helping create a dystopia. That was not intended, but results matter more than intentions.
nickelcitymario 6y ago
This philosophy is disingenuous. To say it's "not about price" is side-stepping a major issue with the freedom of free software. If I sell you my software with a "free as in freedom" license, you're now free to give it away yourself. So "free as in freedom" does also mean "free as in it costs you nothing" for everyone except the first customer. To be clear, I LOVE free software. I just also think it's more honest to say it's free in every sense of the word. This debate about "free as in free beer" versus "free as in freedom" is pedantic. Pragmatically speaking, I can't give you full freedom to modify and distribute my software without immediately reducing the market value of that software to zero. They go hand in hand. (Does that mean there are no business models for free software? Of course not. There are many proven ones, such as paid hosting of it, paid support and maintenance, paid customizations, etc. But the code itself is free in every sense of the word once you've granted that license to the first buyer.)
- fipar 6y ago
  I agree with what you say, but I think there are valid points in the beer vs speech part. I agree with you that it seems impossible to have free as in speech software that isn't also free as in beer, but you can have free as in beer software that's a gateway to vendor lock-in, for example.
  - ttuominen 6y ago
    Exactly. The OP correctly argued that libre practically implies free-as-in-beer, but I think the point of the distinction is to argue that free-as-in-beer doesn't imply libre. So it's a useful distinction.
    - nickelcitymario 6y ago
      This is certainly true. It's very much possible (and common) to give away software without giving away any rights to it. If that was the only point GNU was trying to make, I'd be in full support. But that doesn't seem to be their only point. As I read it, they're arguing that freedom-of-speech does not imply freedom-from-cost. And I think that's nonsense (again, after the first sale). Am I wrong to read their philosophy this way?
aledthemathguy 6y ago
when I dug into the doing of Stallman I could not help but conclude that he is one of the most important humans who ever lived in terms of our current lives. This is mostly seemed to escape our notion. Perhaps one must die in order to be understood or recognize. Or perhaps we need to look at things which happened a long time ago (history) to fully grasp their importance.
- simonh 6y ago
  He's certainly achieved a lot, but I think that's overstating it. BSD and pcc started 10 years before GNU, and if it wasn't for the failed law suit against it by AT&T there wouldn't have been any need for Linux either. Free and open source software has deep roots, GNU has been a great champion for the movement, but it doesn't represent all of open source and it didn't create the concept.
  - mistrial9 6y ago
    agree source: software developer late 1980s California, in the room with some of these people including Stallman in Palo Alto, discussing and presenting on this topic
  - zokula 6y ago
    > BSD and pcc started 10 years before GNU, and if it wasn't for the failed law suit against it by AT&T there wouldn't have been any need for Linux either. People still believe this myth? 30 years on and still sour grapes from the BSD folk who were too slow and to elitist to adapt.
    - simonh 6y ago
      I haven’t used BSD in 25 years, and even then only briefly, so I wouldn’t consider myself BSD folks. I’m Linux folks by any measure. If you’ve got a point, what is it?
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    If BSD was all there was, would there have been such a movement pushing back against tivoization, binary blobs in devices, etc.? Perhaps only the great idealism of Stallman could produce the GPL and FSF, the BSD license on its own wouldn’t have done it.
jancsika 6y ago
> Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These facilities are why software is useful; we believe a program's users should be free to take advantage of them, not solely its developer. Users take advantage of free software mainly in the few domains where copyright and patent law don't get in the way of free software. Free software is largely irrelevant in the greater number of domains where copyright and patent law prevent the user from doing anything of value with it. E.g., let's go back in time and use free software to build a world encyclopedia. Yay, we made a quintessential use case! And in record time! E.g., let's go back in time and use Lilypond to publish beautiful, diffable text-based TABs, melodies, and lyrics for everyone's favorite songs in the world. Boo, I must have set the time machine too far back and got eaten by a T-rex. Sorry, users. In this way a lot of the most useful Gnu software remains "shadow banned." It gets used for niche projects, and a dev can certainly conceive how, say, some domain would be improved if they just adopted free software so-and-so. But the uses that would attract and benefit massive numbers of users are off the table. And neither Gnu nor FSF has the power or competency to make the changes to copyright/patent law in order to enable those uses.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  You're confusing FOSS software with consumer-ready software. Also, FOSS software is pull-oriented (demand from developers), not push-oriented (marketed to consumers.) Until you understand what I wrote above, you don't understand anything about FOSS, GNU, etc. > Free software is largely irrelevant in the greater number of domains where copyright and patent law prevent the user from doing anything of value with it. Also, copyright is not an issue, unless you know, you copy something. So your sentence above doesn't apply from a standpoint of copyright. Patents are sometimes an issue.
fsflover 6y ago
Ethical Tech Giving Guide following this philosophy: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/ https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/.
cxr 6y ago
Even GNU's philosophy has a few puzzle pieces missing from the box. - JordiGH's "Exercising software freedom on Firefox" <http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/exercising-software-freedom-on-firefox/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/exercising-software-fre...>. Jordi spends a lot of time dealing with the infuriating reality of what it takes to build Firefox. The punchline (not stated in the post) is that Firefox uses an Emacs-like architecture, so basically none of these frustrations or the time wasted on them were actually necessary; the code Jordi wanted to twiddle require no/little actual building. The Firefox team (particularily given how well-funded they are) could enable a contribution path where making an improvement to Firefox is about as easy as opening up an elisp file and making the requisite tweaks, but they don't. Related, and I've mentioned this before—the Zotero app is built on XULRunner/Gecko, but XULRunner was killed by the big brained folks who had the power to do so in an attempt to free up resources for their totally successful designs for the future. Rather than throwing Zotero contributors under the bus and into a potential quagmire of dealing with C++ and Rust compiler output that they don't care about on failed builds, and costing them hours for successful builds (if a successful build is even possible for that contributor's hardware), the Zotero build scripts instead download Firefox and then repack it, et voilà—when you open it you're running Zotero. (Side note: former Mozillian here, and there's no real excuse for why the Firefox contribution process itself hasn't worked like this for the last 10 years except for Mozilla's infamously poor competence at almost all things re project management.) - In "Open Source is not enough" <http://web.archive.org/web/20150828195814/http://adamspitz.com/avocado/2011/05/05/open-source-is-not-enough/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150828195814/http://adamspitz.c...>, Spitz succinctly lays out the problem. Open source may remove legal barriers and some of the practical ones, but not enough of the practical ones to actually enable the sort of mastery and control that is often talked about when people describe FOSS. (Spitz uses the term "open source" throughout, which is unfortunate, because Spitz's overall motivation has a lot in common with the GNU philosophy and serves as an incidental critique of the GNU project's actions which perpetuate a world with less of the "software freedom" that it advocates. A casual reader might mike the mistake of thinking that Spitz's essay either treads the same ground as Stallman's Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software, or that it is endemic of the problem that Stallman's essay exhorts people to acknowledge [and where the prescription is prioritizing GNU-style "software freedom" over "open source" ideals], although it's neither.) - The ind.ie folks (now the Small Technology Foundation) attempted(?) to build some mindshare around their Ethical Design Manifesto <https://2017.ind.ie/ethical-design/ https://2017.ind.ie/ethical-design/>. I think this, too, makes an unfortunate choice of words, but despite the name, I see it as aligned with what Spitz and others are trying to shed light on. Funnily enough, I recently contacted one of the Small Tech folks about a simple error on one of their pages, where the fix for it was straightforward—fixing a typo, or fixing a broken link or removing it or something like that. The response was essentially an acknowledgement of the problem and an admission that it wouldn't be fixed immediately, as a nod to how mildly cumbersome it would be go in and make the change. Deep lessons about malleability and habitability (see below) lie here, waiting to be absorbed. - In "Free software is not enough" <https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html>, jfred relies unknowingly on an eerily similar hook as the one from Spitz's take. The problem described is the same, but jfred goes on in more detail, with references to Smalltalk and OLPC, and to its further benefit does so by referring throughout to "free software", thus avoiding the pitfall in Spitz's piece. jfred also introduces something that will probably prove useful in the long run if we are to actually address this problem: the notion of what he calls practical user freedom, nudging us to discuss it in the same terms. (I know at least one other person, Mike Gerwitz, who's claimed to at least have used or thought about using the same term privately.) Also of interest is that jfred uses modifying one's web browser as an example as well. - Independently, on the mailing lists for IceCat—the official project to maintain a FSF-approved fork of Firefox—there are occasional mentions of folks' inability to get the thing to build. I suspect there are many more private failures than public mentions, maybe even 10 to 1. In fact, in the past, I've explicitly referenced the problem here on HN and elsewhere of what is probably tens of thousands of potential contributors who quietly drop out after a private bout of trying to do basic things that any given project's own maintainers and existing contributors take for granted, like just achieving a successful build from source. I'm fond of referencing Soledad Penadés's post "How to keep contributors when they are not even contributors yet" <https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2015/how-to-keep-contributors-when-they-are-not-even-contributors-yet/ https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2015/how-to-keep-contributo...>, although granted I do so much for the title than the content, really. In that vein, more recently I've taken to pointing people towards Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert's "They Might Never Tell You It's Broken" <https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel...>. Considering GNU's advocacy and messaging about what the IceCat project means for software freedom, in contrast to the reality of the situation, this is a problem. When I take this in at the same time as contemplating what has to be mountains of unactualized talent and aborted attempts to expand software freedom in light of so many people quietly scuttling their work after a failure reach the most basic milestone of being able to reproduce the conditions for a successful build and then to achieve one, I can't help but think about Feynman's comments wrt the oil drop experiment and his exhortations about what not to "fool ourselves" about. It doesn't quite fit, but the connection is there in my mind. - More recently, I've re-visited Kartik Agaram's essay on "habitability" <http://akkartik.name/post/habitability http://akkartik.name/post/habitability>. Most people have failed to achieve systems that exhibit habitability. Not just ordinary non-programmers of the sort that would first come to mind when you read an essay like "An app can be a home-cooked meal" <https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/>, but as shown in the Small Tech and IceCat examples, the principled FOSS types fail to achieve it for themselves, too. So how can they hope to achieve it in systems that other computer operators are supposed to be able to inhabit? - The Malleable Systems Collective <https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/> was introduced this past spring, but seems to have fizzled since then, possibly due to COVID-related dampening effects. I think the term is a useful one, although I'm still seeking something that fits in between "habitability" and "malleable" but manages to be something like 5–10x more useful because of its "obvious" meaning. I suspect that in the meantime I will get a lot of mileage by relying for now on terms like "practical software freedom" and others' being adequately initiated to be able to understand what that means. - Stanislav at Loper OS lays lays down his Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing <http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284>. Each one is interesting and worthy of consideration, but what I see as the most pressing matter is Law IV - Preserves meaning. What I see as a major problem is the continued use of 1980s-era infrastructure and practices. Compilers conceived originally as a tool to enable "autocoding" to a given machine's instruction set gave way to the now-familiar division between source code and the "binary" executables that are produced by mangling the source code. By now, doing away with traditional compilation entirely should be feasible by JITting everything—or caching the products but in such a way that the average programmer cares about them and deals with them no more than the typical programmer cares about and deals with the actual machine instructions that the compiler's code generator stuffs into the binary. That's one way to go, and probably what we should ultimately aim for. Another way to would be to adopt "non-destructive compilation" techniques to bring about a world where "package distribution is source distribution" at least in the interim <https://wiki.triplescripts.org/wiki/SDIPD https://wiki.triplescripts.org/wiki/SDIPD>. To summarize, part of a reason why the enemy that GNU seeks to take down manages to persist is due to a failure to acknowledge the circumstances that allow it to, and a failure to look back, see where and how the current strategy has failed, is continuing to fail, and indeed sometimes exacerbates the problem, and adjust accordingly. I think it should be clear by this point, but none of the above is meant to say anything like, "The GNU philosophy is bad; choose BSD/MIT/ISC instead", a conflict which the GNU Project unfortunately directs too much attention to. You can just look at history and even the comments on this post to get a feel for how much human attention and energy has been wasted in that vein. So I add this only as a pre-emptive attempt to ward off low-effort and ill-considered potshots, because what I'm saying is very much the opposite—GNU doesn't go far enough.
max_ 6y ago
Stallman's ideas are are important & maybe even required. But my problem is that his ideas are too rooted in Kumabya reasoning. For instance there is almost no literature on how people can adequately profit while still maintaining this philosophy. It's a great idea, but they need to talk more about how to real people actually use it. Not just what it's about
- Tyr42 6y ago
  Check out /dev/lawyer if you are interested in the topic of balancing paying bills with open source. I think he covers that topic nicely and deserves more traffic.
  - max_ 6y ago
    Hi, Where can I inspect that path? Could u help with a link?
    - cure 6y ago
      https://writing.kemitchell.com/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/
boogies 6y ago
Is this really “(2018)”? The top article on https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/latest-articles.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/latest-articles.html links to a 2019 article (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-rocket.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-rocket.html → https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18683455/nasa-space-angels-contracts-government-investment-spacex-air-force https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18683455/nasa-space-angel...).
jjice 6y ago
It's incredible that the software industry has made free software such a common and very usable thing. How many other industries have so much freedom associated with their products? I help quite a bit that distribution of software via the internet has negligible costs.
- spindle 6y ago
  I totally agree! It is incredible. But, just because I can't resist answering a direct question: I'm a philosopher, and a lot of the best of my industry's products is available easily and free - e.g., https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html
crazypython 6y ago
I'd like to add that Stallman notes that the Free Software movement is about freedom as well as social solidarity: sharing and cooperation.
jabl 6y ago
Over the years I have thought a lot about FOSS licensing and related issues. Perhaps more than warranted by my actual FOSS contributions, but I digress. I used to be hard-core in the free software camp, and while I wouldn't say I have abandoned it, my stance has certainly softened. A couple of recent articles and presentations that have affected (or mirrored?) my own thinking: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison A couple of quick takes - The tivoization issue: The rejection of GPLv3 by the Linux kernel in practice means that the free software movement has failed here. I'm hoping activists pushing for Right to Repair and similar legislation will prove more successful in enabling people more control over their own devices. - The cloud service provider loophole: The almost complete rejection of AGPL by, well, more or less everybody, means that the free software movement has also failed here. Plain GPL doesn't provide more protection against a service provider "leeching" your code than a permissive license. If copyleft has failed here, what are alternative approaches here then? Data portability and anti-trust legislation? - Protection against leeching by evil corporations vs maximizing usage: If, like some of the core Linux kernel people have said, "there's no value in driving freeloaders away", is copyleft worth the trouble? - The end user vs. developers argument: The FSF spends a lot on this, about protecting the rights of the end user. But if we look around at non-techie people, largely they just don't give a shit. Perhaps the copyleft movement needs to work on its messaging, or is this a completely lost cause. - FOSS business models: To begin with, trite as it sounds, "write FOSS" is not a business model. The more interesting question is perhaps how build FOSS communities that can, in one way or another, sustain themselves economically. - If you don't have a plan to make money, does leeching (see above) matter? And no, "I'll license my code under (A)GPL, if somebody wants another license call me and lets talk $$$" is for the vast majority of cases not a realistic business model either. - Dual licensing: Not really applicable for trying to build a community. Why would an outsider contribute and assign copyright to a project under a "poison pill" license so that someone else can make a buck off that work? - Open core: Evidently successful (see e.g. cossi list), but is this really FOSS, or is it proprietary software with an open source loss leader? - Commodity community: Essentially sharing the maintenance burden of the non-differentiated part of whatever you're doing. The Linux kernel being a good example of this. - Support or selling "LTS" licenses: E.g. redhat. Can work, but seldom achieves the kind of growth numbers that makes VC's salivate (if that matters to you).
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I just want to use my computer. Why does it have to be more complicated than that? Why does it need to be a social movement?
- rmujica 6y ago
  If it wasn't for the social movement, it might be the computer (and those who make the computer work) the one using you.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    We have already been there and nobody enjoyed it. Transformation of the market didn't require a social movement.

138 points by crazypython 6y ago

I personally cannot thank enough GNU project for standing software freedom. We are living in a world where corporations control nearly everything by building proprietary systems. They have more than resources to buy, lobby, manipulate, seem "attractive". We need more of this kind of organization, free society cannot exist without free software.

chrisseaton 6y ago
I would guess that the vast majority of free software is written and paid for by corporations.
- pornel 6y ago
  It is, but when you have ability to modify or fork a project, it is an insurance against corporations adding anti-features.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    But the corporations gave you that ability to modify or fork their code in the first place.
- abetusk 6y ago
  Is it? I would really like a reference for that claim. Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations. This gets complicated because are you talking about volume of code created or are you weighing code by its use? Anyway, you might be right, I don't know, but my assumption is that FOSS is mostly developed in spite of lack of corporate resources, not because of it.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations. Massive companies everywhere have thousands and thousands of people collectively working all day on free software as their main job. You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now?
    - xenocyon 6y ago
      > You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now? Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        > Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS. Who said it was? Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all primarily FOSS - they have some proprietary trademark and minor components, but the actual browser core in each is FOSS.
        crpatino 6y ago
        I'd have to disagree... https://policies.google.com/terms https://policies.google.com/terms https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.htm... Maybe there's some code that at one point was FOSS in those products, but the products themselves are nor Free. IMHO a code base that has been forked from a FOSS project cannot be considered FOSS itself even if they keep retrofitting changes back to the original, because you cannot know what is there in the proprietary part. This is specially true if you distribute the derivative product only in binary form.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        You're hell-banned, by the way. But you're also wrong. The trademarked Chrome distribution is built from the free Chromium, where main-line development is done. They don't dump changes over the wall like you're suggesting. That's the same for WebKit and Firefox.
- max_ 6y ago
  They mean "free" as in freedom not free beer.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    No that’s what I mean as well. Corporations wrote tons of free as in freedom software. You’re probably using a corporate free software browser right now? The idea that free software is a niche done by amateurs is wrong. Most people who work on Linux are paid to do so. Same for Chrome, same for Java, same for LLVM, etc etc all the way up the stack. Free software won, and we have the corporations who funded it to thank.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Linux was started by someone because they could, not because they were paid. Sure, if a project (like Linux) gets big enough, corporations will throw money at developers who work on it, but by and large, FOSS is done by unpaid people. If the majority were paid, GIMP would be on par with Photoshop, Inkscape with Illustrator, etc. But they’re not on par because they don’t have corporations throwing millions of dollars at them like Adobe does.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        Have you ever been somewhere like FOSDEM? Next time walk around and ask people if this is their full time job. In most of the rooms I’m in, it’s everyone’s corporate full time job and they’re there on corporate expense accounts. It’s just not the case that most projects are just random hobbies these days, and it’s bad for the movement to keep pretending it is. It’s grown up and corporations invested - that’s a good thing!
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        No. I haven’t been to FOSDEM and I’d bet the majority of FOSS developers haven’t. And that’s the point. Just because you experience a lot of people getting paid to do it doesn’t mean “the vast majority” are. I guess we’re just arguing past each other. I agree it’s good to recognize money in the industry (many have an aversion to it because of EEE fears), and I also agree that the majority of successful projects are done by paid people. I guess that’s the disconnect: I’m looking at all projects, not just the successful ones.
- worik 6y ago
  That is the original idea IIRC. The companies that make the hardware should fund the software.
- jangid 6y ago
  Perhaps, I am in a minority then.
bonoboTP 6y ago
A shocking number of developers I know who use FOSS have no idea that there is even some kind of philosophy behind free software, relating to politics and ethics. Basically zero idea about licenses outside generic FUD about the viral nature of the GPL etc. The ethical-philosophical free software people are terrible at marketing and getting their message across. It's still just a small niche subculture despite the wide adoption of GNU tools and licenses. You'll never reach further with all the silly in joke stuff like Chief GNUisance etc. You'd need charismatic frontline personalities (there's a wide spectrum to explore between RMS and sleazy snake oil salesmen), who don't immediately put off the general population.
- temac 6y ago
  Worse, some believe Free Software is worthless if third party companies can not extract money from it in some ways, without any compensation or even just keeping it Free in practice for the users. And I'm OK that some Free Software actually let do that, but the thought that those who don't are somehow bad or a threat to the general concept of "freedom" is... weird. (Like there is a single perfectly defined concensus on the concept of freedom anyway)
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  It feels rather contradictory that people on fora like this are all in favor for being tolerant of neurodiversity – let’s not judge those on the autistic spectrum for lack of social graces because they were born that way – but at the same time there is a lot of disapproval of RMS. If we aim to create a better world, should that not be a world where a figure like RMS would seem perfectly fine, not a weirdo who has to be represented by more "acceptable" figures?
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > It feels rather contradictory You are confusing respecting people differences (e.g. neurodiversity, ethnicity, religion, nationality, orientation and so on) with accepting any behavior with choosing the right person for a given role. This are 3 different things.

feralimal 6y ago

Its a great philosophy! Compare and contrast with using a service like google. Not only do you have 0 idea about the algorithm they use, your data is extracted for their benefit. You don't even know what data they have on you, and how this is used! I know you can takeout info from them about your profile, but let's be honest, what use is that to you then?

api 6y ago
Awesome. Now who pays people to write software? Proprietary software, which I agree often contains user hostile elements, also tends to have vastly superior polish and user experience. UI/UX is often the majority of the work required to make good software. Making the software function usually takes a lot less time and effort than making it usable. UI/UX and other aspects of software usability are also often the more boring and grinding aspects of software development. This stuff is not fun, so people have to be paid to do it. But “you can sell free software.” That is true. But by this philosophy software cannot restrict the rights of others to sell it too or it is nonfree. In practice that means third parties who did not write the software but have more money or more time to invest in polish and marketing (because they are not writing the software!) are the ones to profit and they usually give nothing back to the original authors. GitHub didn’t write git. AWS didn’t write Postgres. But they are the ones to profit. They took someone else’s work and marketed it well, or SaaSified it. The original authors get nothing. The original idea of free software was a mutual gift culture where everyone builds and everyone uses. Today it’s a take culture where a few people build, others polish and monetize and give nothing back, and most people use the monetized version because time is more expensive than money and nobody has time to DIY.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Your desire to make money and this philosophy are orthogonal. They can co-exist, never interacting with each other. Go, be free, make money.
  - api 6y ago
    So that means if I need to make money I should not write free software. The vast majority of people must make a living. So that means free software is only for people with trust funds? This also implies that there will be almost no usable free software, so freedom is only for nerds. The general public gets proprietary malware that spies on them and locks them in, because that is where all the money is by design. There is no money in giving people freedom. I am simply pointing out that your nice utopian ideals are helping create a dystopia. That was not intended, but results matter more than intentions.

nickelcitymario 6y ago

This philosophy is disingenuous. To say it's "not about price" is side-stepping a major issue with the freedom of free software. If I sell you my software with a "free as in freedom" license, you're now free to give it away yourself. So "free as in freedom" does also mean "free as in it costs you nothing" for everyone except the first customer. To be clear, I LOVE free software. I just also think it's more honest to say it's free in every sense of the word. This debate about "free as in free beer" versus "free as in freedom" is pedantic. Pragmatically speaking, I can't give you full freedom to modify and distribute my software without immediately reducing the market value of that software to zero. They go hand in hand. (Does that mean there are no business models for free software? Of course not. There are many proven ones, such as paid hosting of it, paid support and maintenance, paid customizations, etc. But the code itself is free in every sense of the word once you've granted that license to the first buyer.)

fipar 6y ago
I agree with what you say, but I think there are valid points in the beer vs speech part. I agree with you that it seems impossible to have free as in speech software that isn't also free as in beer, but you can have free as in beer software that's a gateway to vendor lock-in, for example.
- ttuominen 6y ago
  Exactly. The OP correctly argued that libre practically implies free-as-in-beer, but I think the point of the distinction is to argue that free-as-in-beer doesn't imply libre. So it's a useful distinction.
  - nickelcitymario 6y ago
    This is certainly true. It's very much possible (and common) to give away software without giving away any rights to it. If that was the only point GNU was trying to make, I'd be in full support. But that doesn't seem to be their only point. As I read it, they're arguing that freedom-of-speech does not imply freedom-from-cost. And I think that's nonsense (again, after the first sale). Am I wrong to read their philosophy this way?

aledthemathguy 6y ago

when I dug into the doing of Stallman I could not help but conclude that he is one of the most important humans who ever lived in terms of our current lives. This is mostly seemed to escape our notion. Perhaps one must die in order to be understood or recognize. Or perhaps we need to look at things which happened a long time ago (history) to fully grasp their importance.

simonh 6y ago
He's certainly achieved a lot, but I think that's overstating it. BSD and pcc started 10 years before GNU, and if it wasn't for the failed law suit against it by AT&T there wouldn't have been any need for Linux either. Free and open source software has deep roots, GNU has been a great champion for the movement, but it doesn't represent all of open source and it didn't create the concept.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  agree source: software developer late 1980s California, in the room with some of these people including Stallman in Palo Alto, discussing and presenting on this topic
- zokula 6y ago
  > BSD and pcc started 10 years before GNU, and if it wasn't for the failed law suit against it by AT&T there wouldn't have been any need for Linux either. People still believe this myth? 30 years on and still sour grapes from the BSD folk who were too slow and to elitist to adapt.
  - simonh 6y ago
    I haven’t used BSD in 25 years, and even then only briefly, so I wouldn’t consider myself BSD folks. I’m Linux folks by any measure. If you’ve got a point, what is it?
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  If BSD was all there was, would there have been such a movement pushing back against tivoization, binary blobs in devices, etc.? Perhaps only the great idealism of Stallman could produce the GPL and FSF, the BSD license on its own wouldn’t have done it.

jancsika 6y ago

> Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These facilities are why software is useful; we believe a program's users should be free to take advantage of them, not solely its developer. Users take advantage of free software mainly in the few domains where copyright and patent law don't get in the way of free software. Free software is largely irrelevant in the greater number of domains where copyright and patent law prevent the user from doing anything of value with it. E.g., let's go back in time and use free software to build a world encyclopedia. Yay, we made a quintessential use case! And in record time! E.g., let's go back in time and use Lilypond to publish beautiful, diffable text-based TABs, melodies, and lyrics for everyone's favorite songs in the world. Boo, I must have set the time machine too far back and got eaten by a T-rex. Sorry, users. In this way a lot of the most useful Gnu software remains "shadow banned." It gets used for niche projects, and a dev can certainly conceive how, say, some domain would be improved if they just adopted free software so-and-so. But the uses that would attract and benefit massive numbers of users are off the table. And neither Gnu nor FSF has the power or competency to make the changes to copyright/patent law in order to enable those uses.

redis_mlc 6y ago
You're confusing FOSS software with consumer-ready software. Also, FOSS software is pull-oriented (demand from developers), not push-oriented (marketed to consumers.) Until you understand what I wrote above, you don't understand anything about FOSS, GNU, etc. > Free software is largely irrelevant in the greater number of domains where copyright and patent law prevent the user from doing anything of value with it. Also, copyright is not an issue, unless you know, you copy something. So your sentence above doesn't apply from a standpoint of copyright. Patents are sometimes an issue.

fsflover 6y ago

Ethical Tech Giving Guide following this philosophy: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/ https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/.

cxr 6y ago

Even GNU's philosophy has a few puzzle pieces missing from the box. - JordiGH's "Exercising software freedom on Firefox" <http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/exercising-software-freedom-on-firefox/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/exercising-software-fre...>. Jordi spends a lot of time dealing with the infuriating reality of what it takes to build Firefox. The punchline (not stated in the post) is that Firefox uses an Emacs-like architecture, so basically none of these frustrations or the time wasted on them were actually necessary; the code Jordi wanted to twiddle require no/little actual building. The Firefox team (particularily given how well-funded they are) could enable a contribution path where making an improvement to Firefox is about as easy as opening up an elisp file and making the requisite tweaks, but they don't. Related, and I've mentioned this before—the Zotero app is built on XULRunner/Gecko, but XULRunner was killed by the big brained folks who had the power to do so in an attempt to free up resources for their totally successful designs for the future. Rather than throwing Zotero contributors under the bus and into a potential quagmire of dealing with C++ and Rust compiler output that they don't care about on failed builds, and costing them hours for successful builds (if a successful build is even possible for that contributor's hardware), the Zotero build scripts instead download Firefox and then repack it, et voilà—when you open it you're running Zotero. (Side note: former Mozillian here, and there's no real excuse for why the Firefox contribution process itself hasn't worked like this for the last 10 years except for Mozilla's infamously poor competence at almost all things re project management.) - In "Open Source is not enough" <http://web.archive.org/web/20150828195814/http://adamspitz.com/avocado/2011/05/05/open-source-is-not-enough/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150828195814/http://adamspitz.c...>, Spitz succinctly lays out the problem. Open source may remove legal barriers and some of the practical ones, but not enough of the practical ones to actually enable the sort of mastery and control that is often talked about when people describe FOSS. (Spitz uses the term "open source" throughout, which is unfortunate, because Spitz's overall motivation has a lot in common with the GNU philosophy and serves as an incidental critique of the GNU project's actions which perpetuate a world with less of the "software freedom" that it advocates. A casual reader might mike the mistake of thinking that Spitz's essay either treads the same ground as Stallman's Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software, or that it is endemic of the problem that Stallman's essay exhorts people to acknowledge [and where the prescription is prioritizing GNU-style "software freedom" over "open source" ideals], although it's neither.) - The ind.ie folks (now the Small Technology Foundation) attempted(?) to build some mindshare around their Ethical Design Manifesto <https://2017.ind.ie/ethical-design/ https://2017.ind.ie/ethical-design/>. I think this, too, makes an unfortunate choice of words, but despite the name, I see it as aligned with what Spitz and others are trying to shed light on. Funnily enough, I recently contacted one of the Small Tech folks about a simple error on one of their pages, where the fix for it was straightforward—fixing a typo, or fixing a broken link or removing it or something like that. The response was essentially an acknowledgement of the problem and an admission that it wouldn't be fixed immediately, as a nod to how mildly cumbersome it would be go in and make the change. Deep lessons about malleability and habitability (see below) lie here, waiting to be absorbed. - In "Free software is not enough" <https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html>, jfred relies unknowingly on an eerily similar hook as the one from Spitz's take. The problem described is the same, but jfred goes on in more detail, with references to Smalltalk and OLPC, and to its further benefit does so by referring throughout to "free software", thus avoiding the pitfall in Spitz's piece. jfred also introduces something that will probably prove useful in the long run if we are to actually address this problem: the notion of what he calls practical user freedom, nudging us to discuss it in the same terms. (I know at least one other person, Mike Gerwitz, who's claimed to at least have used or thought about using the same term privately.) Also of interest is that jfred uses modifying one's web browser as an example as well. - Independently, on the mailing lists for IceCat—the official project to maintain a FSF-approved fork of Firefox—there are occasional mentions of folks' inability to get the thing to build. I suspect there are many more private failures than public mentions, maybe even 10 to 1. In fact, in the past, I've explicitly referenced the problem here on HN and elsewhere of what is probably tens of thousands of potential contributors who quietly drop out after a private bout of trying to do basic things that any given project's own maintainers and existing contributors take for granted, like just achieving a successful build from source. I'm fond of referencing Soledad Penadés's post "How to keep contributors when they are not even contributors yet" <https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2015/how-to-keep-contributors-when-they-are-not-even-contributors-yet/ https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2015/how-to-keep-contributo...>, although granted I do so much for the title than the content, really. In that vein, more recently I've taken to pointing people towards Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert's "They Might Never Tell You It's Broken" <https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel...>. Considering GNU's advocacy and messaging about what the IceCat project means for software freedom, in contrast to the reality of the situation, this is a problem. When I take this in at the same time as contemplating what has to be mountains of unactualized talent and aborted attempts to expand software freedom in light of so many people quietly scuttling their work after a failure reach the most basic milestone of being able to reproduce the conditions for a successful build and then to achieve one, I can't help but think about Feynman's comments wrt the oil drop experiment and his exhortations about what not to "fool ourselves" about. It doesn't quite fit, but the connection is there in my mind. - More recently, I've re-visited Kartik Agaram's essay on "habitability" <http://akkartik.name/post/habitability http://akkartik.name/post/habitability>. Most people have failed to achieve systems that exhibit habitability. Not just ordinary non-programmers of the sort that would first come to mind when you read an essay like "An app can be a home-cooked meal" <https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/>, but as shown in the Small Tech and IceCat examples, the principled FOSS types fail to achieve it for themselves, too. So how can they hope to achieve it in systems that other computer operators are supposed to be able to inhabit? - The Malleable Systems Collective <https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/> was introduced this past spring, but seems to have fizzled since then, possibly due to COVID-related dampening effects. I think the term is a useful one, although I'm still seeking something that fits in between "habitability" and "malleable" but manages to be something like 5–10x more useful because of its "obvious" meaning. I suspect that in the meantime I will get a lot of mileage by relying for now on terms like "practical software freedom" and others' being adequately initiated to be able to understand what that means. - Stanislav at Loper OS lays lays down his Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing <http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284>. Each one is interesting and worthy of consideration, but what I see as the most pressing matter is Law IV - Preserves meaning. What I see as a major problem is the continued use of 1980s-era infrastructure and practices. Compilers conceived originally as a tool to enable "autocoding" to a given machine's instruction set gave way to the now-familiar division between source code and the "binary" executables that are produced by mangling the source code. By now, doing away with traditional compilation entirely should be feasible by JITting everything—or caching the products but in such a way that the average programmer cares about them and deals with them no more than the typical programmer cares about and deals with the actual machine instructions that the compiler's code generator stuffs into the binary. That's one way to go, and probably what we should ultimately aim for. Another way to would be to adopt "non-destructive compilation" techniques to bring about a world where "package distribution is source distribution" at least in the interim <https://wiki.triplescripts.org/wiki/SDIPD https://wiki.triplescripts.org/wiki/SDIPD>. To summarize, part of a reason why the enemy that GNU seeks to take down manages to persist is due to a failure to acknowledge the circumstances that allow it to, and a failure to look back, see where and how the current strategy has failed, is continuing to fail, and indeed sometimes exacerbates the problem, and adjust accordingly. I think it should be clear by this point, but none of the above is meant to say anything like, "The GNU philosophy is bad; choose BSD/MIT/ISC instead", a conflict which the GNU Project unfortunately directs too much attention to. You can just look at history and even the comments on this post to get a feel for how much human attention and energy has been wasted in that vein. So I add this only as a pre-emptive attempt to ward off low-effort and ill-considered potshots, because what I'm saying is very much the opposite—GNU doesn't go far enough.

max_ 6y ago

Stallman's ideas are are important & maybe even required. But my problem is that his ideas are too rooted in Kumabya reasoning. For instance there is almost no literature on how people can adequately profit while still maintaining this philosophy. It's a great idea, but they need to talk more about how to real people actually use it. Not just what it's about

Tyr42 6y ago
Check out /dev/lawyer if you are interested in the topic of balancing paying bills with open source. I think he covers that topic nicely and deserves more traffic.
- max_ 6y ago
  Hi, Where can I inspect that path? Could u help with a link?
  - cure 6y ago
    https://writing.kemitchell.com/ https://writing.kemitchell.com/

boogies 6y ago

Is this really “(2018)”? The top article on https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/latest-articles.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/latest-articles.html links to a 2019 article (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-rocket.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-rocket.html → https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18683455/nasa-space-angels-contracts-government-investment-spacex-air-force https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18683455/nasa-space-angel...).

jjice 6y ago

It's incredible that the software industry has made free software such a common and very usable thing. How many other industries have so much freedom associated with their products? I help quite a bit that distribution of software via the internet has negligible costs.

spindle 6y ago
I totally agree! It is incredible. But, just because I can't resist answering a direct question: I'm a philosopher, and a lot of the best of my industry's products is available easily and free - e.g., https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

crazypython 6y ago

I'd like to add that Stallman notes that the Free Software movement is about freedom as well as social solidarity: sharing and cooperation.

jabl 6y ago

Over the years I have thought a lot about FOSS licensing and related issues. Perhaps more than warranted by my actual FOSS contributions, but I digress. I used to be hard-core in the free software camp, and while I wouldn't say I have abandoned it, my stance has certainly softened. A couple of recent articles and presentations that have affected (or mirrored?) my own thinking: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison A couple of quick takes - The tivoization issue: The rejection of GPLv3 by the Linux kernel in practice means that the free software movement has failed here. I'm hoping activists pushing for Right to Repair and similar legislation will prove more successful in enabling people more control over their own devices. - The cloud service provider loophole: The almost complete rejection of AGPL by, well, more or less everybody, means that the free software movement has also failed here. Plain GPL doesn't provide more protection against a service provider "leeching" your code than a permissive license. If copyleft has failed here, what are alternative approaches here then? Data portability and anti-trust legislation? - Protection against leeching by evil corporations vs maximizing usage: If, like some of the core Linux kernel people have said, "there's no value in driving freeloaders away", is copyleft worth the trouble? - The end user vs. developers argument: The FSF spends a lot on this, about protecting the rights of the end user. But if we look around at non-techie people, largely they just don't give a shit. Perhaps the copyleft movement needs to work on its messaging, or is this a completely lost cause. - FOSS business models: To begin with, trite as it sounds, "write FOSS" is not a business model. The more interesting question is perhaps how build FOSS communities that can, in one way or another, sustain themselves economically. - If you don't have a plan to make money, does leeching (see above) matter? And no, "I'll license my code under (A)GPL, if somebody wants another license call me and lets talk $$$" is for the vast majority of cases not a realistic business model either. - Dual licensing: Not really applicable for trying to build a community. Why would an outsider contribute and assign copyright to a project under a "poison pill" license so that someone else can make a buck off that work? - Open core: Evidently successful (see e.g. cossi list), but is this really FOSS, or is it proprietary software with an open source loss leader? - Commodity community: Essentially sharing the maintenance burden of the non-differentiated part of whatever you're doing. The Linux kernel being a good example of this. - Support or selling "LTS" licenses: E.g. redhat. Can work, but seldom achieves the kind of growth numbers that makes VC's salivate (if that matters to you).

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I just want to use my computer. Why does it have to be more complicated than that? Why does it need to be a social movement?

rmujica 6y ago
If it wasn't for the social movement, it might be the computer (and those who make the computer work) the one using you.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  We have already been there and nobody enjoyed it. Transformation of the market didn't require a social movement.