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> there was a huge amount of moaning by free software absolutists I'm kinda glad that happens, even though I don't participate and the pragmatist in me sometim

> there was a huge amount of moaning by free software absolutists I'm kinda glad that happens, even though I don't participate and the pragmatist in me sometimes disagrees. I am glad Stallman exists and maintains his ultra-absolutionist hard line. I respect hom greatly for that, and while I often roll my eyes at his intentional foot-gunning of his own use of technology, I also 100% believe he's done an order of magnitude more to improve society than the more pragmatic open source advocates like esr. In my head, the opposite end of the bellcurve is companies like Oracle. And they're _way_ better funded and more politically powerful than Stallman or esr or the entire "open source" movement put together. Without "extreme fringe wing nut GPL virality advocating loudmouths", Larry Ellison will drag software philosophy "the middle ground" so far to his end that we will all lose out. So big shoutouts from me to the free software absolutists, even if I don't join in on your chorus (or internet dogpiles). My personal software philosophy probably is grounded in my mid 90's Perl hacking, and I'm very much behind Larry Wall's GPL/Artistic dual license approach. (I do though have ongoing doubts in my head about whether or not the recent spate of "non-open source" licenses aimed at restricting the cloud hyper scalers from SaaS-ing your stuff without contributing anything at all. I respect what they're trying to do at Mongo and Redis. I'm not sure if it will (or even if it should) work.)

znpy 4y ago
> I am glad Stallman exists and maintains his ultra-absolutionist hard line. I’m glad too. Whenever I read some of his writings, I cannot stop the feeling that he had bee right all along, and had seen most of the current dystopia coming, something like almost 20-30 years before it happened.
rrss 4y ago
Stallman’s hard line is pretty incoherent / absurd when it comes to firmware. The FSF does not care about proprietary firmware, provided that the firmware “installation is not intended after the user obtains the product.” https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria So if you have a product that needs a ton of proprietary software to run, RMS will go berserk if you run that software on the CPU, but if you shift it to run on another processor in the product and make sure users can’t change it then all is good, have a RYF certification. This does not make sense. Maybe it made sense 30 years ago. If you’re stallman, proprietary firmware isn’t bad so long as it’s suitably hidden so it can’t offend your sensibilities. So pretend CPU microcode updates don’t exist and add secondary processors to deal with blobs (purism). Does ensuring users cannot upgrade firmware make them more free?
- bigiain 4y ago
  I agree about the eye rolling absurdity there. But I also suspect stuff like the opening up of various bits of RaspberryPi firmware blobs wouldn’t have happened without people who share his philosophy there. Same with hardware (and software) like Bunnie Huangs Precursor, a piece of as close as practically fully upon source hardware, where the cpu is implemented as an open source FPGA, and the Xous OS for it is written ground up in Rust. That’s a hell of a complex project, and a fascinating , that in my opinion would probably never have been worth anyones time to even start on, if they didn’t share (and possibly exceed) some of Stallman’s philosophical absurdity. Like I said, I acknowledge the “ extreme fringe wing nut GPL virality advocating loudmouths” and appreciate their existence, if only as a balance to the “make Larry Ellison infinitely rich and powerful” kind of alternatives.

znpy 4y ago

> I am glad Stallman exists and maintains his ultra-absolutionist hard line. I’m glad too. Whenever I read some of his writings, I cannot stop the feeling that he had bee right all along, and had seen most of the current dystopia coming, something like almost 20-30 years before it happened.

rrss 4y ago

Stallman’s hard line is pretty incoherent / absurd when it comes to firmware. The FSF does not care about proprietary firmware, provided that the firmware “installation is not intended after the user obtains the product.” https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria So if you have a product that needs a ton of proprietary software to run, RMS will go berserk if you run that software on the CPU, but if you shift it to run on another processor in the product and make sure users can’t change it then all is good, have a RYF certification. This does not make sense. Maybe it made sense 30 years ago. If you’re stallman, proprietary firmware isn’t bad so long as it’s suitably hidden so it can’t offend your sensibilities. So pretend CPU microcode updates don’t exist and add secondary processors to deal with blobs (purism). Does ensuring users cannot upgrade firmware make them more free?

bigiain 4y ago
I agree about the eye rolling absurdity there. But I also suspect stuff like the opening up of various bits of RaspberryPi firmware blobs wouldn’t have happened without people who share his philosophy there. Same with hardware (and software) like Bunnie Huangs Precursor, a piece of as close as practically fully upon source hardware, where the cpu is implemented as an open source FPGA, and the Xous OS for it is written ground up in Rust. That’s a hell of a complex project, and a fascinating , that in my opinion would probably never have been worth anyones time to even start on, if they didn’t share (and possibly exceed) some of Stallman’s philosophical absurdity. Like I said, I acknowledge the “ extreme fringe wing nut GPL virality advocating loudmouths” and appreciate their existence, if only as a balance to the “make Larry Ellison infinitely rich and powerful” kind of alternatives.