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> “Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it. I get that

> “Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it. I get that Stallman's shtick is being as hardline as possible about free software, but it really feels like sometimes this hurts the free software movement. Imagine trying to bring in a normal, non-technical person who plays video games as one of their hobbies (describes a lot of my friends at least), and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them - non-free games (which make up 99.999% of the market) are "harmful for them"? It's hard enough for me (a trusted friend) to explain the free software movement to them after seeing stuff like this, imagine a random person just stumbling upon it. And yes, every community has their super-idealistic members that make extreme hyperbolic statements, but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement (and the founder of it!). Sometimes I feel like we could get a lot more done for free software with a tiny bit of pragmatism - for example, in the video game space, pushing for Valve to open source the Steam client, which feels like the most likely high-impact goal to push for rather than the lost battle of trying to change the entire industry at once.

dangom 5y ago
Stallman has a vision that you and I should be typing our comments and playing our games from machines that are under our control, i.e., whereby we can inspect and modify all of the code that is running on them. That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better.
- worik 5y ago
  > From there since Free Software has only lost ground No it has not. I exclusively use Free Software outside my working life (for my sins, developing iOS software with Swift. A bit like Linux in 1997 - it mostly works)
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. Right, but to most people, that's still an extreme position. Because again, like 99.99% of games are non-free, and especially the way he phrased it is gonna come across as a crank. Stallman strikes me very much as the kind of person who communicates poorly, in an inflammatory way, and gives zero shits how much this bothers anyone else. Which for a random individual is probably fine, or at least tolerable, but is less good when you're the face of a movement.
  - dangom 5y ago
    It's 2022 and it's close to impossible for you and me to own a computer that we control. Even the thought of owning a computer we control is now seen as "extreme". If we did go through hops to have a machine that we control, it'd be practically impossible to use it to communicate with our friends and family, because all of our communications go through third party servers that we do not control. In exactly which way is Stallman being inflammatory here?
    - TulliusCicero 5y ago
      By framing playing virtually all video games in existence as being "bad for you".
      - toastercat 5y ago
        I read that more to mean that by playing games that are non-free, you are fueling the existence of more non-free games, and thus doing damage to yourself in the sense of "freedom" since you are perpetuating non-free software. The game itself is not causing harm to you.
        Ensorceled 5y ago
        > I read that more to mean that by playing games that are non-free ... If it has to be interpreted, it is poorly communicated.
      - 5y ago
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- dralley 5y ago
  >From there since Free Software has only lost ground That's not true, it gained ground for a long time after that. "Free" as in freedom software, by Stallman's definition, probably peaked in the early 2000s. And I would say that the losses mostly started happening when the FSF stopped producing software that people wanted to use. They effectively ignored the entire internet revolution.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Not even close. We have Linux-libre backed distros today.
    - dralley 5y ago
      I don't think the number of distros endorsed by the FSF is a great metric for the influence of the FSF and free software on users and developers.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  > The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better. Or maybe the FSF has absolutely miserably failed at actually getting their message out there? The Right to Repair movement has been more successful; there's quite a bit of overlap between the concept of Free Software and Right To Repair: both are fundamentally about "I can do to the machine I bought whatever I want!" And it seems both the public and lawmakers are receptive to this argument. Right to Repair hasn't been as successful as I'd like (yet), but a lot more successful than Free Software. It seems to me that part of the blame squarely lies with FSF's inability to actually communicate their message effectively. Open Source has been more successful either. I never like this kind of externalizing of issues and blame other people/corporations/governments because it's just not helpful. Even if you're 100% correct about all of that, you can't change what other people/organisations do where you have no influence, but you can influence what you do, so it's almost always better to think about "what can I/we do better?" rather than "what can they do better?"
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    I think right to repair is easier for the average person to understand. You can just go to a repair shop and they can fix your device. Easy to understand. When you have a computer it can just work regardless if you are using free software or not. For the average person they won't see any visible / tangible benefit to free software. I don't think FSF communication really has that much of an impact on the success. Even if the average person understands the benefit to free software it just doesn't impact them in the same way that right to repair does and that will result in them not really caring about it.
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
      The average person also buys into the standard copyright argument of "you should own your creativity"; accepting software freedom requires, at a minimum, rejecting software copyright categorically[0]. This is a left-of-Marx view: even the extreme left does not touch copyright beyond anticapitalist generalities. In contrast, right to repair does not require abandoning the entire framework of copyright. In fact, it barely touches it. Furthermore, Louis Rossman is way better at explaining the problems with anti-repair bullshit than RMS is at explaining the harms of proprietary software. [0] Yes I know GPL relies upon copyright to work. That was the backup plan - if we can't force all software to be Free we can at least keep our own software from being locked down.
- causality0 5y ago
  all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. That is just plain not true. If it were, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately that's only part of Stallman's message, and a good portion of the rest of it is either simply unworkable or batshit insane. To quote David Schlesinger after RMS got up on stage and talked about how "women who have not been introduced to emacs are emacs virgins and 'relieving them of their virginity is a sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs'", Stallman continues to embarrass us all
  - worik 5y ago
    I have paid a lot of attention to RMS over the years. I took him out to dinner once, my wife and I, and had a lovely evening talking mostly about his childhood experiences. He was extremely respectful to the staff at the restaurant I recall. Going out of his way to compliment them on the food. That at some point he said: "women who have not been introduced to emacs...sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs" is entirely possible. We all have said stupid things. Out of context especially, had these things been recorded, we would be ashamed. To use that quote to define RMS is a gross insult, intellectually fraudulent, it is a political attack. I do think it is important to play nice in politics. So if you have criticisms of RMS' stand on software, make them. This sort of thing is insulting to all of us who do our best to imperfectly maintain standards of debate
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      People are defined by what they say though. And a quick google search reveals that RMS’s “emacs virgins” comment wasn’t just an out of character remark he made once in passing
      - worik 5y ago
        Perhaps because I do not use google (are you in a bubble?) I did not have that result searching. Before I commented I tried to find the source, interesting digressions ensued, but nothing that suggests this is typical. Also I mentioned I have been following him for a long time (nearly three decades, golly). I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips. So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
- kome 5y ago
  > From there since Free Software has only lost ground I mean, we live in a world powered by Free Software, so, I don't know, really. If anything, corporation were kinda successful making money out of free software, but that's another can of worms.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground I used computers in 1985. To suggest that the free software movement has only lost ground since then is completely absurd. Has it gone anywhere nearly as far as Stallman and others hoped it would? No. Has it gone much further than anyone who was around in 1985 to watch this being born thought it would go? Absolutely.
- rnd0 5y ago
  >The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc. There have been setbacks, and it does look like the tide is turning towards everything becoming closed again but it's untrue to say that Free Software has "only lost ground" since 1985 -hell, GCC didn't even come out until what, 1987, 1988 or so?
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    Yes, and no limited-time demo version to try things out - you bought a copy-protected disk in a box in shrink-wrapped plastic from a shop. I remember when Turbo Pascal came out - at below $100 and not copy-protected it seemed revolutionary, virtually free, like they were giving it away, it was so much cheaper than the usual $500 price tag.
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Buttons840 5y ago
On this topic: Tales of Maj'eyal is an open source game, but the game content is not. I was surprised to learn this, and it seems open source games isn't a complete non-starter like you might expect.
- abetusk 5y ago
  Richard Stallman has a policy of putting his non-engineering works under a non-libre license (CC-BY-ND 3.0) [0] [1], so maybe he wouldn't have a problem with this non-libre game as the underlying code is libre, just not the assets. In my opinion, this is one of the problems with Stallman's "moral authority" approach to the FSF. I would very much like to hear about these cases where a game's source is libre licensed but not it's content and see what Stallman actually has to say about it. Not for nothing, but there are many network/online games that have both source and content libre licensed. Here are a few: * Teeworlds - https://www.teeworlds.com/ https://www.teeworlds.com/ * Minetest - https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ * Battle for Wesnoth - https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth I'm sure there are many others of note but those are just the few that I have at least some passing familiarity with. [0] https://stallman.org/#thanks https://stallman.org/#thanks [1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
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Beltalowda 5y ago
A few years ago I saw an indie game developer recount his experience with Stallman[1]; he doesn't see how he can release his games as Free Software while making a living, pay his rent, pay for his children's education, etc. So he asked Stallman what to do about that. Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical." To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shutting down any conversation and exploration and how we can improve things. There are a whole bunch of things one can think of: release the code but keep the assets (graphics, sound, music, etc.) proprietary, release under some sort of "source available" license, keep the core rendering parts proprietary SO/DLLs and release the rest as free software, and maybe a few other things. All of that would be a huge improvement over "100% closed". But Stallman isn't open to any of that, and because the FSF is still very much Stallman's organisation, neither is the FSF. For at least 20 years the FSF has done nothing except preaching to the choir, and certainly hasn't actually made many significant meaningful every-day improvements. In the above situation the game dev essentially asked was "what is the best way to make my software more free?" and all he got was a rather insulting and condensing shutdown of that conversation before it could even take off. [1]: I don't have the source for that right now; I think it was somewhere on YouTube. It may have been an interview with Lunduke, but I'm not sure.
- mr_johnson22 5y ago
  The real surprise is that Stallman restrained himself from telling the dev that having children is unethical.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
  - snvzz 5y ago
    He can actually keep on topic when it comes to free software. Yet GNU and FSF aren't everything RMS is, so he has his own personal website. I would assume you've learned about his views on having children there.
    - 5y ago
Flankk 5y ago
He is fighting an unwinnable war, to be sure. Most people will never be technically savvy enough to care about these issues. Apple will probably start soldering their cases shut. Sadly I don't think it makes much difference what Stallman thinks, even though I think he is mostly right.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement If you really think so, I’d argue that his hardline position is then justified. To me Stallman doesn’t have any specific unfair advantage over anyone who would get on their soapboax and preach for a different approach. You or me could make blogposts and go talk to conferences, and rally people around a different approach. If we were to gain traction, there is no hidden lever for Stallman to pull that throws us in dark cave and nobody hears from us ever. What gives Stallman his influence is that pragmatic approaches have at most kept the status quo, at worse allowed way more encroachment on our software and devices ownership. Even if we don’t reach the 100% free ideal, setting the goal at “a bit freer than now” won’t help in my opinion. More and more the “realistic” approach feels close to accepting cops have some amount of violent abuse, because non abusing cops make 90% of the workforce and we better be in friendly terms with them to make things progress, right ?
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  As others have pointed out, the Right to Repair movement has achieved far more practical progress than Stallman has. Stallman can't/won't even defend the GPL in court; others have had to organize outside the FSF to do so because the FSF is only interested in stroking its beards.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    Right to Repair and the other foundations fighting to defend GPL don't seem to be in conflict with Stallman's position, nor what the FSF does, so your point would be that the FSF is not as efficient as you want it to be ? In my opinion, if Stallman is an hermit that only serves as an anchoring for other people to move toward the right direction, I'd argue it's plenty enough. Now I don't know much about the FSF finances and what we should really be expecting from it.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Many gamers deeply resent the gaming industry and they are at least a "warm" audience. Microtransactions, DRM that imposes a significant performance penalty, single player games that refuse to work if not online (or worse, have multiplayer aspects required to progress in the game, but servers get shut down), massive pre-order hype-trains for games that turn out to be hot messes, games purposefully turned into grind-fests (right now, people are hating on Forza for heading this way.) Then there's the bullshit like (initially) variable refresh rate monitors that only worked with a particular brand of video card despite industry standards for VRR. Basic peripherals that require bloated, proprietary, borderline-spyware drivers to work. Benchmark manipulation. Etc etc. Talking to gamers about the evils of paid proprietary software and hardware should be relatively easy. But because Stallman is so fundamentally incapable of reading the room, and so exceptionally talented at alienating people, he manages to put out something that gamers look at, laugh, maybe make a meme or two out of, and then forget about. > but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement Stallman hasn't been influential in at least two decades. He's so extremist that anyone actually interested in getting shit done has ignored him. He is completely lacking in perspective-taking, empathy, viewing anyone as anything approaching a peer, or even managing just to not talk at/down to them. He openly pities everyone, thinks us all stupid fools. I think there was limited respect for Stallman's original concepts and his vision. But in the decades since, he's generated little to no work product, and mostly come off as jealous and bitter. Any mainstream-open-source-community respect he had, he lost much of when all the stories about him being a serial sexual harasser (if not borderline predator) came out, and then his comments about underage sex...which to make the matter even worse, he's been nothing but petulant and defensive about. Stallman is not a statesman, a diplomat, ambassador, or a leader. He's just an ideological zealot who has held back the open software movement by refusing to acknowledge his skill set, demeanor, and behavior are not suitable for representing and advancing the open source movement, and that if he truly cared about said movement, he would have long since changed his methods or let someone else take a whirl. Some folks see him as a genius, but all I see is man who has spent over four decades yelling (largely) the same thing from the top of a mountain, thinking that one day everyone will suddenly see the genius and wisdom of his grand plan. Who lacks the self-awareness to recognize his lack of effectiveness, and the selflessness to step aside and let someone else try carrying the mantle.
gameswithgo 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
>and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them it literally sounds like a religious cult at this point. When I was growing up I had a friend from an actual cult and the family literally had their own invented board games (which were terrible) purged of all kinds of "immoral" references because they weren't allowed to touch anything out of mainstream culture. Whenver I see this depluralizing behavior as if non-free software causes some sort of metaphysical corruption I have to think back to this.
systemvoltage 5y ago
> Sometimes I feel like we could get a lot more done for free software with a tiny bit of pragmatism This is wrong and disastrous. We need mostly pragmatism, may be a tiny bit of free-spirit and idealism.
lumost 5y ago
Honestly, the public interest in the free software movement was always about developers not wanting to jump through N legal/business hoops to use software or figure out how something worked. The most aggressive licenses helped this for a time by forcing corporations to participate. The software industry without open-source is like Automotive Engineers not seeing how cars work. The other stuff seems kinda BS.
eckza 5y ago
That all sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is that Richard Stallman is one of the few anchors left, keeping the Overton window of the politics of software from falling all of the way into the ocean. Personally, I used to think that Stalmman was a crank. And as time passed, and as I watched some of his prophecies come true and as I noted ways in my own life in which my own devices became harder to use, and my own data became harder to store and retrieve in the ways that I wanted to - I began to change my mind. Without that irascible, loud-mouthed, doom-sandwich-board-wearing maniac... who else would exist at the intersection of "knows enough to know what he's talking about to speak with authority" and "has nothing left to lose"? My advice to anyone reading this is to not be so quick to "solution" on his behalf, or to reason against his ideas, in advocacy of a more "moderate" approach.
nine_k 5y ago
To everyone who says that Stallman isunrealistic. We have plenty enough realistic people, right on this forum, and across the world. It may be useful to listen to a person who sounds unrealistic, but also proved to be right on some pretty important issues, like DRM and the cloud. It does not mean we should immediately switch away from anything proprietary. But it does mean it's worth being aware.
linuxhansl 5y ago
I think it's important to take a hard line here. Otherwise in the future we are not going to own any of the devices we buy. We're almost there with our phones. At least on Android one can install 3rd party apps. So I think RMS is spot on. I like to own my device. Write, compile, and install software of my choosing on it, without some company getting into the way of that. Companies want to control and monetize every possible use of our devices. We can't let that happen unchecked. The again, in reality I take a less idealistic stance: - I accept that the BIOS, drivers for the graphics card and the wifi chip are - for the time being - proprietary. - For everything else I see absolutely no reason why I should use any closed source software. - My OS is open source, all applications are open source, all games I (occasionally) play are open source.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Not sure how it's now, but some oldish proprietary games were moddable. You didn't have all source, but you had relevant source - the game script, and it could be changed and run, I did it.
passivate 5y ago
It completely depends on how you approach the term idealism, and what your consider ethical. You're framing the argument as-if goals should be above ones ideals. If you can't convince people about the importance of free-software then the project should die off. I don't see the value in diluting the mission. Someone who thinks eating sick animals (most meat products) is unethical, isn't going to compromise their personal values just because you're treating them to a meal at the local steakhouse.

dangom 5y ago

Stallman has a vision that you and I should be typing our comments and playing our games from machines that are under our control, i.e., whereby we can inspect and modify all of the code that is running on them. That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better.

worik 5y ago
> From there since Free Software has only lost ground No it has not. I exclusively use Free Software outside my working life (for my sins, developing iOS software with Swift. A bit like Linux in 1997 - it mostly works)
TulliusCicero 5y ago
> That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. Right, but to most people, that's still an extreme position. Because again, like 99.99% of games are non-free, and especially the way he phrased it is gonna come across as a crank. Stallman strikes me very much as the kind of person who communicates poorly, in an inflammatory way, and gives zero shits how much this bothers anyone else. Which for a random individual is probably fine, or at least tolerable, but is less good when you're the face of a movement.
- dangom 5y ago
  It's 2022 and it's close to impossible for you and me to own a computer that we control. Even the thought of owning a computer we control is now seen as "extreme". If we did go through hops to have a machine that we control, it'd be practically impossible to use it to communicate with our friends and family, because all of our communications go through third party servers that we do not control. In exactly which way is Stallman being inflammatory here?
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    By framing playing virtually all video games in existence as being "bad for you".
    - toastercat 5y ago
      I read that more to mean that by playing games that are non-free, you are fueling the existence of more non-free games, and thus doing damage to yourself in the sense of "freedom" since you are perpetuating non-free software. The game itself is not causing harm to you.
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        > I read that more to mean that by playing games that are non-free ... If it has to be interpreted, it is poorly communicated.
    - 5y ago
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dralley 5y ago
>From there since Free Software has only lost ground That's not true, it gained ground for a long time after that. "Free" as in freedom software, by Stallman's definition, probably peaked in the early 2000s. And I would say that the losses mostly started happening when the FSF stopped producing software that people wanted to use. They effectively ignored the entire internet revolution.
- anthk 5y ago
  Not even close. We have Linux-libre backed distros today.
  - dralley 5y ago
    I don't think the number of distros endorsed by the FSF is a great metric for the influence of the FSF and free software on users and developers.
Beltalowda 5y ago
> The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better. Or maybe the FSF has absolutely miserably failed at actually getting their message out there? The Right to Repair movement has been more successful; there's quite a bit of overlap between the concept of Free Software and Right To Repair: both are fundamentally about "I can do to the machine I bought whatever I want!" And it seems both the public and lawmakers are receptive to this argument. Right to Repair hasn't been as successful as I'd like (yet), but a lot more successful than Free Software. It seems to me that part of the blame squarely lies with FSF's inability to actually communicate their message effectively. Open Source has been more successful either. I never like this kind of externalizing of issues and blame other people/corporations/governments because it's just not helpful. Even if you're 100% correct about all of that, you can't change what other people/organisations do where you have no influence, but you can influence what you do, so it's almost always better to think about "what can I/we do better?" rather than "what can they do better?"
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  I think right to repair is easier for the average person to understand. You can just go to a repair shop and they can fix your device. Easy to understand. When you have a computer it can just work regardless if you are using free software or not. For the average person they won't see any visible / tangible benefit to free software. I don't think FSF communication really has that much of an impact on the success. Even if the average person understands the benefit to free software it just doesn't impact them in the same way that right to repair does and that will result in them not really caring about it.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    The average person also buys into the standard copyright argument of "you should own your creativity"; accepting software freedom requires, at a minimum, rejecting software copyright categorically[0]. This is a left-of-Marx view: even the extreme left does not touch copyright beyond anticapitalist generalities. In contrast, right to repair does not require abandoning the entire framework of copyright. In fact, it barely touches it. Furthermore, Louis Rossman is way better at explaining the problems with anti-repair bullshit than RMS is at explaining the harms of proprietary software. [0] Yes I know GPL relies upon copyright to work. That was the backup plan - if we can't force all software to be Free we can at least keep our own software from being locked down.
causality0 5y ago
all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. That is just plain not true. If it were, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately that's only part of Stallman's message, and a good portion of the rest of it is either simply unworkable or batshit insane. To quote David Schlesinger after RMS got up on stage and talked about how "women who have not been introduced to emacs are emacs virgins and 'relieving them of their virginity is a sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs'", Stallman continues to embarrass us all
- worik 5y ago
  I have paid a lot of attention to RMS over the years. I took him out to dinner once, my wife and I, and had a lovely evening talking mostly about his childhood experiences. He was extremely respectful to the staff at the restaurant I recall. Going out of his way to compliment them on the food. That at some point he said: "women who have not been introduced to emacs...sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs" is entirely possible. We all have said stupid things. Out of context especially, had these things been recorded, we would be ashamed. To use that quote to define RMS is a gross insult, intellectually fraudulent, it is a political attack. I do think it is important to play nice in politics. So if you have criticisms of RMS' stand on software, make them. This sort of thing is insulting to all of us who do our best to imperfectly maintain standards of debate
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    People are defined by what they say though. And a quick google search reveals that RMS’s “emacs virgins” comment wasn’t just an out of character remark he made once in passing
    - worik 5y ago
      Perhaps because I do not use google (are you in a bubble?) I did not have that result searching. Before I commented I tried to find the source, interesting digressions ensued, but nothing that suggests this is typical. Also I mentioned I have been following him for a long time (nearly three decades, golly). I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips. So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
kome 5y ago
> From there since Free Software has only lost ground I mean, we live in a world powered by Free Software, so, I don't know, really. If anything, corporation were kinda successful making money out of free software, but that's another can of worms.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground I used computers in 1985. To suggest that the free software movement has only lost ground since then is completely absurd. Has it gone anywhere nearly as far as Stallman and others hoped it would? No. Has it gone much further than anyone who was around in 1985 to watch this being born thought it would go? Absolutely.
rnd0 5y ago
>The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc. There have been setbacks, and it does look like the tide is turning towards everything becoming closed again but it's untrue to say that Free Software has "only lost ground" since 1985 -hell, GCC didn't even come out until what, 1987, 1988 or so?
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Yes, and no limited-time demo version to try things out - you bought a copy-protected disk in a box in shrink-wrapped plastic from a shop. I remember when Turbo Pascal came out - at below $100 and not copy-protected it seemed revolutionary, virtually free, like they were giving it away, it was so much cheaper than the usual $500 price tag.

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Buttons840 5y ago

On this topic: Tales of Maj'eyal is an open source game, but the game content is not. I was surprised to learn this, and it seems open source games isn't a complete non-starter like you might expect.

abetusk 5y ago
Richard Stallman has a policy of putting his non-engineering works under a non-libre license (CC-BY-ND 3.0) [0] [1], so maybe he wouldn't have a problem with this non-libre game as the underlying code is libre, just not the assets. In my opinion, this is one of the problems with Stallman's "moral authority" approach to the FSF. I would very much like to hear about these cases where a game's source is libre licensed but not it's content and see what Stallman actually has to say about it. Not for nothing, but there are many network/online games that have both source and content libre licensed. Here are a few: * Teeworlds - https://www.teeworlds.com/ https://www.teeworlds.com/ * Minetest - https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ * Battle for Wesnoth - https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth I'm sure there are many others of note but those are just the few that I have at least some passing familiarity with. [0] https://stallman.org/#thanks https://stallman.org/#thanks [1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

deleted 5y ago

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Beltalowda 5y ago

A few years ago I saw an indie game developer recount his experience with Stallman[1]; he doesn't see how he can release his games as Free Software while making a living, pay his rent, pay for his children's education, etc. So he asked Stallman what to do about that. Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical." To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shutting down any conversation and exploration and how we can improve things. There are a whole bunch of things one can think of: release the code but keep the assets (graphics, sound, music, etc.) proprietary, release under some sort of "source available" license, keep the core rendering parts proprietary SO/DLLs and release the rest as free software, and maybe a few other things. All of that would be a huge improvement over "100% closed". But Stallman isn't open to any of that, and because the FSF is still very much Stallman's organisation, neither is the FSF. For at least 20 years the FSF has done nothing except preaching to the choir, and certainly hasn't actually made many significant meaningful every-day improvements. In the above situation the game dev essentially asked was "what is the best way to make my software more free?" and all he got was a rather insulting and condensing shutdown of that conversation before it could even take off. [1]: I don't have the source for that right now; I think it was somewhere on YouTube. It may have been an interview with Lunduke, but I'm not sure.

mr_johnson22 5y ago
The real surprise is that Stallman restrained himself from telling the dev that having children is unethical.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
- snvzz 5y ago
  He can actually keep on topic when it comes to free software. Yet GNU and FSF aren't everything RMS is, so he has his own personal website. I would assume you've learned about his views on having children there.
  - 5y ago

Flankk 5y ago

He is fighting an unwinnable war, to be sure. Most people will never be technically savvy enough to care about these issues. Apple will probably start soldering their cases shut. Sadly I don't think it makes much difference what Stallman thinks, even though I think he is mostly right.

makeitdouble 5y ago

> Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement If you really think so, I’d argue that his hardline position is then justified. To me Stallman doesn’t have any specific unfair advantage over anyone who would get on their soapboax and preach for a different approach. You or me could make blogposts and go talk to conferences, and rally people around a different approach. If we were to gain traction, there is no hidden lever for Stallman to pull that throws us in dark cave and nobody hears from us ever. What gives Stallman his influence is that pragmatic approaches have at most kept the status quo, at worse allowed way more encroachment on our software and devices ownership. Even if we don’t reach the 100% free ideal, setting the goal at “a bit freer than now” won’t help in my opinion. More and more the “realistic” approach feels close to accepting cops have some amount of violent abuse, because non abusing cops make 90% of the workforce and we better be in friendly terms with them to make things progress, right ?

KennyBlanken 5y ago
As others have pointed out, the Right to Repair movement has achieved far more practical progress than Stallman has. Stallman can't/won't even defend the GPL in court; others have had to organize outside the FSF to do so because the FSF is only interested in stroking its beards.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Right to Repair and the other foundations fighting to defend GPL don't seem to be in conflict with Stallman's position, nor what the FSF does, so your point would be that the FSF is not as efficient as you want it to be ? In my opinion, if Stallman is an hermit that only serves as an anchoring for other people to move toward the right direction, I'd argue it's plenty enough. Now I don't know much about the FSF finances and what we should really be expecting from it.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Many gamers deeply resent the gaming industry and they are at least a "warm" audience. Microtransactions, DRM that imposes a significant performance penalty, single player games that refuse to work if not online (or worse, have multiplayer aspects required to progress in the game, but servers get shut down), massive pre-order hype-trains for games that turn out to be hot messes, games purposefully turned into grind-fests (right now, people are hating on Forza for heading this way.) Then there's the bullshit like (initially) variable refresh rate monitors that only worked with a particular brand of video card despite industry standards for VRR. Basic peripherals that require bloated, proprietary, borderline-spyware drivers to work. Benchmark manipulation. Etc etc. Talking to gamers about the evils of paid proprietary software and hardware should be relatively easy. But because Stallman is so fundamentally incapable of reading the room, and so exceptionally talented at alienating people, he manages to put out something that gamers look at, laugh, maybe make a meme or two out of, and then forget about. > but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement Stallman hasn't been influential in at least two decades. He's so extremist that anyone actually interested in getting shit done has ignored him. He is completely lacking in perspective-taking, empathy, viewing anyone as anything approaching a peer, or even managing just to not talk at/down to them. He openly pities everyone, thinks us all stupid fools. I think there was limited respect for Stallman's original concepts and his vision. But in the decades since, he's generated little to no work product, and mostly come off as jealous and bitter. Any mainstream-open-source-community respect he had, he lost much of when all the stories about him being a serial sexual harasser (if not borderline predator) came out, and then his comments about underage sex...which to make the matter even worse, he's been nothing but petulant and defensive about. Stallman is not a statesman, a diplomat, ambassador, or a leader. He's just an ideological zealot who has held back the open software movement by refusing to acknowledge his skill set, demeanor, and behavior are not suitable for representing and advancing the open source movement, and that if he truly cared about said movement, he would have long since changed his methods or let someone else take a whirl. Some folks see him as a genius, but all I see is man who has spent over four decades yelling (largely) the same thing from the top of a mountain, thinking that one day everyone will suddenly see the genius and wisdom of his grand plan. Who lacks the self-awareness to recognize his lack of effectiveness, and the selflessness to step aside and let someone else try carrying the mantle.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

>and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them it literally sounds like a religious cult at this point. When I was growing up I had a friend from an actual cult and the family literally had their own invented board games (which were terrible) purged of all kinds of "immoral" references because they weren't allowed to touch anything out of mainstream culture. Whenver I see this depluralizing behavior as if non-free software causes some sort of metaphysical corruption I have to think back to this.

systemvoltage 5y ago

> Sometimes I feel like we could get a lot more done for free software with a tiny bit of pragmatism This is wrong and disastrous. We need mostly pragmatism, may be a tiny bit of free-spirit and idealism.

lumost 5y ago

Honestly, the public interest in the free software movement was always about developers not wanting to jump through N legal/business hoops to use software or figure out how something worked. The most aggressive licenses helped this for a time by forcing corporations to participate. The software industry without open-source is like Automotive Engineers not seeing how cars work. The other stuff seems kinda BS.

eckza 5y ago

That all sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is that Richard Stallman is one of the few anchors left, keeping the Overton window of the politics of software from falling all of the way into the ocean. Personally, I used to think that Stalmman was a crank. And as time passed, and as I watched some of his prophecies come true and as I noted ways in my own life in which my own devices became harder to use, and my own data became harder to store and retrieve in the ways that I wanted to - I began to change my mind. Without that irascible, loud-mouthed, doom-sandwich-board-wearing maniac... who else would exist at the intersection of "knows enough to know what he's talking about to speak with authority" and "has nothing left to lose"? My advice to anyone reading this is to not be so quick to "solution" on his behalf, or to reason against his ideas, in advocacy of a more "moderate" approach.

nine_k 5y ago

To everyone who says that Stallman isunrealistic. We have plenty enough realistic people, right on this forum, and across the world. It may be useful to listen to a person who sounds unrealistic, but also proved to be right on some pretty important issues, like DRM and the cloud. It does not mean we should immediately switch away from anything proprietary. But it does mean it's worth being aware.

linuxhansl 5y ago

I think it's important to take a hard line here. Otherwise in the future we are not going to own any of the devices we buy. We're almost there with our phones. At least on Android one can install 3rd party apps. So I think RMS is spot on. I like to own my device. Write, compile, and install software of my choosing on it, without some company getting into the way of that. Companies want to control and monetize every possible use of our devices. We can't let that happen unchecked. The again, in reality I take a less idealistic stance: - I accept that the BIOS, drivers for the graphics card and the wifi chip are - for the time being - proprietary. - For everything else I see absolutely no reason why I should use any closed source software. - My OS is open source, all applications are open source, all games I (occasionally) play are open source.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

Not sure how it's now, but some oldish proprietary games were moddable. You didn't have all source, but you had relevant source - the game script, and it could be changed and run, I did it.

passivate 5y ago

It completely depends on how you approach the term idealism, and what your consider ethical. You're framing the argument as-if goals should be above ones ideals. If you can't convince people about the importance of free-software then the project should die off. I don't see the value in diluting the mission. Someone who thinks eating sick animals (most meat products) is unethical, isn't going to compromise their personal values just because you're treating them to a meal at the local steakhouse.