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I believe that Stallman is correct in most of what he says. When he started his movements the threats were lower than there are now. But looking at the current

I believe that Stallman is correct in most of what he says. When he started his movements the threats were lower than there are now. But looking at the current state of the industry things are scarier than I ever imagined to be 10 years ago. People cannot even imagine how much data is collected from them each day. And the simplest way to collect data is to sell people phones, and make them install apps instead of letting them use the site (with potential ad blockers). I've made some experiments on my phones (bot Android and IOS), and you would surprise how many of the apps are "calling home". Because those apps are closed source, God knows what information they are sending back to their servers.

ilovecaching 5y ago
In one of his talks (it was some TED talk) he even drew pictures of companies with leashes around the necks of their users. In his words, if the source code is not available, the software owns the user, the user doesn't own the software. I think this is something that the majority of programmers don't care about. I mean, most programmers only concern themselves with engineering. They rarely care about the societal affects of what they build, let alone how it's built. One area I agree with RMS on is that open source is essential to transparency from companies as to what they are doing with our inputs.
- nomemory 5y ago
  That's unfortunate... and I recognize myself in the programmer you've mentioned. I've written software that i am not proud of ... from an ethical perspective. In the last months I've become a little bit more concerned of the things I am building.