3 ms·

Stallman reminds me of a character in a Greek tragedy. He ends up bringing in the very thing he is fighting against. He makes GPL to give users control over pr

Stallman reminds me of a character in a Greek tragedy. He ends up bringing in the very thing he is fighting against. He makes GPL to give users control over programs. Companies end up using GPL software to power server side software which ends up giving users even less control than proprietary on-device software. He makes GCC to break free of vendors dominating compiler development. IBM(through Redhat) ends up being the major GCC contributor. He is worried that companies will use their proprietary software that is sold in exchange for money to maximize revenue by squeezing users. Companies and up using open source software to create proprietary services that are sold in exchange for attention, and to maximize revenue optimize for “engagement” which is now tearing society apart. Most computer users are using proprietary systems, but now they are cheaper to build thanks to open source software. Who had/has more control over their data, a Windows 95 user running Microsoft Office on a PC, or a modern Chromebook user running Google Docs? The later incorporates a lot more open source software.

omoikane 5y ago
Related, the reason why Clang was created is because GCC was specifically made to prevent it from being used with non-free software. You can find that quote around 3:17 of this talk: https://youtu.be/NURiiQatBXA?t=185 https://youtu.be/NURiiQatBXA?t=185 It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.
celeritascelery 5y ago
And related to that I find that free-software focus often misses one of the biggest issues of our day; privacy. I care much more about software privacy then I do about software freedom (though I still want both). But when the FSF was founded the internet didn’t exist (so privacy was not as much a concern) and they have never brought that under their umbrella. Even though they are very related concepts.
jcelerier 5y ago
On the other hand it's 2022 and my GNU/Linux/KDE system is very close from 100% free software, and allows to do pretty much anything I want - audio and video creation and editing with Kdenlive, LMMS, Ardour, writing and typesetting (I mostly use LaTeX but LibreOffice works well enough to be used in most of the administration of my country - I'm nearly 30 and have had the luck of almost never having been exposed to MS Office either in school or professionaly), making presentations (I use QML but there's LO, Beamer or whatever Markdown or JS presentation framework of the day), browsing the web with firefox, managing and processing RAW pictures with Darktable, and then there are entire toolchains and development tools which are more than competitive with proprietary alternatives... and I forget a ton of things. I am thankful every day of being able to live in the world where this is possible and having been able to do so from a quite young age - at first because when I was a kid my parents did not have the money to buy any software at all so learning how to use free software & systems has quickly been a necessity, and now because I know that whenever there's a bug somewhere in the stack I have good chances of being able to peek at the exact issue and if not fixing it myself, at least reporting it to the person who most likely wrote the code almost directly .
moth-fuzz 5y ago
I think this is what a lot of people mean when they say that FOSS (and Open Source in general) 'lost' in the grand scheme of things. Sure, FOSS is running the entire show from sites to servers to databases to build systems to programming languages, but, whether or not you can actually see the code seems to hold little sway when the war is really over personal data and privacy. Who cares if I can see the tensorflow source code when the real danger is in the models these companies are building, which themselves are aggregated of petabytes of 'anonymous' user data. You'd have to open-source the data, too, to see how these businesses are truly run.
- mpol 5y ago
  If the war has shifted to open/closed data, does it mean the battle for free software was won? Saying we lost is a bit early. I do see lots of projects aiming for open data. That battle has not been decided yet, it's a long game.
randomsearch 5y ago
That’s a good point. Relatedly, Jaron Lanier says something quite insightful on the topic that gets to the root (pun) of the problem. If you think all information should be free, like all software, then the creators of information are not being financially rewarded for creating it. That’s how you end up with cloud data centres making huge profits whilst most OSS projects struggle for cash. It’s also where the business models of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok arise. Lanier makes a rather odd statement about how web links should be two way to solve this problem. I get his drift, but a better idea is that the web should be built on a more rigorous foundation (see Joe Armstrong’s talk - “the mess we’ve made” - for how it could work). But the general idea is correct - in an information economy either everyone is fairly rewarded for the valuable information they provide, or else you end up with giant companies capturing all the value instead, which leads to gross inequality. Tbf to Stallman, he is more focused on constraining the worst commercial uses of software, but his fundamental idea that (as per this post) “knitting patterns should be free”, originally something that sounded like an exciting and inspiring idea, has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. He was maybe philosophically correct but in practice, the idea does not serve the best interests of most people. Information shouldn’t be free (!!! I said that on HN) but rather information should be provided at a cost that is based on both (a) the cost of its provision and (b) the economic value that recipients of that information derive from it. So, for example, OSS authors writing code that underpinned Google’s empire or someone’s SaaS, should get a (small) slice of that pie. I think once you recognise this, you end up in a really exciting place: like, how could this work in practice? What new concepts do we need to apply to information to do it? Some of the ideas of crypto should come in here: we need to be able to identify information uniquely, for example, so we can track its value. We need to know how many SaaS products are using Bootstrap or whatever. A new type of economy based on fair reward for information is possible. And for once, we do actually need a technical solution to a social problem.

omoikane 5y ago

Related, the reason why Clang was created is because GCC was specifically made to prevent it from being used with non-free software. You can find that quote around 3:17 of this talk: https://youtu.be/NURiiQatBXA?t=185 https://youtu.be/NURiiQatBXA?t=185 It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.

celeritascelery 5y ago

And related to that I find that free-software focus often misses one of the biggest issues of our day; privacy. I care much more about software privacy then I do about software freedom (though I still want both). But when the FSF was founded the internet didn’t exist (so privacy was not as much a concern) and they have never brought that under their umbrella. Even though they are very related concepts.

jcelerier 5y ago

On the other hand it's 2022 and my GNU/Linux/KDE system is very close from 100% free software, and allows to do pretty much anything I want - audio and video creation and editing with Kdenlive, LMMS, Ardour, writing and typesetting (I mostly use LaTeX but LibreOffice works well enough to be used in most of the administration of my country - I'm nearly 30 and have had the luck of almost never having been exposed to MS Office either in school or professionaly), making presentations (I use QML but there's LO, Beamer or whatever Markdown or JS presentation framework of the day), browsing the web with firefox, managing and processing RAW pictures with Darktable, and then there are entire toolchains and development tools which are more than competitive with proprietary alternatives... and I forget a ton of things. I am thankful every day of being able to live in the world where this is possible and having been able to do so from a quite young age - at first because when I was a kid my parents did not have the money to buy any software at all so learning how to use free software & systems has quickly been a necessity, and now because I know that whenever there's a bug somewhere in the stack I have good chances of being able to peek at the exact issue and if not fixing it myself, at least reporting it to the person who most likely wrote the code almost directly .

moth-fuzz 5y ago

I think this is what a lot of people mean when they say that FOSS (and Open Source in general) 'lost' in the grand scheme of things. Sure, FOSS is running the entire show from sites to servers to databases to build systems to programming languages, but, whether or not you can actually see the code seems to hold little sway when the war is really over personal data and privacy. Who cares if I can see the tensorflow source code when the real danger is in the models these companies are building, which themselves are aggregated of petabytes of 'anonymous' user data. You'd have to open-source the data, too, to see how these businesses are truly run.

mpol 5y ago
If the war has shifted to open/closed data, does it mean the battle for free software was won? Saying we lost is a bit early. I do see lots of projects aiming for open data. That battle has not been decided yet, it's a long game.

randomsearch 5y ago

That’s a good point. Relatedly, Jaron Lanier says something quite insightful on the topic that gets to the root (pun) of the problem. If you think all information should be free, like all software, then the creators of information are not being financially rewarded for creating it. That’s how you end up with cloud data centres making huge profits whilst most OSS projects struggle for cash. It’s also where the business models of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok arise. Lanier makes a rather odd statement about how web links should be two way to solve this problem. I get his drift, but a better idea is that the web should be built on a more rigorous foundation (see Joe Armstrong’s talk - “the mess we’ve made” - for how it could work). But the general idea is correct - in an information economy either everyone is fairly rewarded for the valuable information they provide, or else you end up with giant companies capturing all the value instead, which leads to gross inequality. Tbf to Stallman, he is more focused on constraining the worst commercial uses of software, but his fundamental idea that (as per this post) “knitting patterns should be free”, originally something that sounded like an exciting and inspiring idea, has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. He was maybe philosophically correct but in practice, the idea does not serve the best interests of most people. Information shouldn’t be free (!!! I said that on HN) but rather information should be provided at a cost that is based on both (a) the cost of its provision and (b) the economic value that recipients of that information derive from it. So, for example, OSS authors writing code that underpinned Google’s empire or someone’s SaaS, should get a (small) slice of that pie. I think once you recognise this, you end up in a really exciting place: like, how could this work in practice? What new concepts do we need to apply to information to do it? Some of the ideas of crypto should come in here: we need to be able to identify information uniquely, for example, so we can track its value. We need to know how many SaaS products are using Bootstrap or whatever. A new type of economy based on fair reward for information is possible. And for once, we do actually need a technical solution to a social problem.