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Reasons Not to Use Google (2015)
- alex_lav 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- regularjack 4y agoWhy? Stallman has been an influential figure in open source software for decades, and this post seems to discuss topics many HNers care about.
- dangwhy 4y agoi think he was cancelled at some point. don't remember any details though.
- 908B64B197 4y agoSomeone published some anonymous blog post to get him cancelled.
- ftxbro 4y agoHe said some bad stuff and got cancelled on twitter and fired from his own company.
- knodi123 4y agoThe stuff that got him cancelled was grossly and willfully misinterpreted by malicious journalists.
- alex_lav 4y ago[flagged]
- ergonaught 4y agoProve that RMS supports sexual intercourse with prepubescent children or stop breaking the law slandering the man.
- alex_lav 4y ago[flagged]
- margalabargala 4y agoWhat you linked to: > Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it. The position you claim he holds, is the opposite of the opinion he holds. Do you believe that people should be judged based on the worst opinion they have ever held in their past, or based on the opinions they hold now?
- alex_lav 4y ago[flagged]
- margalabargala 4y agoSo to be clear: 1) You believe people should be judged based on the opinions they hold now rather than their past opinions. 2) You think that the person's current opinion is different than they say it is, and are judging them based on what you imagine their true opinion to be, rather than what they say it is. Do you have specific basis for thinking he is lying? Stallman tends very much to voice his true opinion regardless of how it may be received, so if he claims to have changed his thinking I would tend to believe it unless there's an actual reason to think otherwise.
- Toutouxc 4y agoYou can find some 100 % Stallmanesque, extremely pedantic and tone-deaf quotes from him on pedophilia and rape. Some people are understanding, some are not.
- alex_lav 4y ago[flagged]
- unity1001 4y agoTherefore, his contributions in the field of Open Source and software freedom are null and void, is it. Because, everyone has to be a prophet who we can take as a 'role model'. ... This obsession with making Jesuses out of everyone to follow as 'role models' in the US is really alien to those of us who live elsewhere in the world. Its amazing how you people did not 'cancel' literally every. single. prominent figure in near and distant history. All of them had something that would require canceling at this very moment - Washington had dentures made of slaves' teeth, Edison stole inventions and electrocuted elephants, Schweitzer believed that black people were inferior and so on. ... In this particular topic, what is defined as 'pedophilia' isnt even clear: Is it prepubescent children? Or is it a 16 year old sleeping with an 18 year old? Even as 16 is a legal age for marrying and joining the military and dying in almost everywhere around the world, including various European countries? Or are 25 year olds still 'children' like how some lunatics are trying to popularize?
- ryandrake 4y agoPeople seem to have major difficulty separating the person from the message. Look at the current HN "Nuclear Power movie" thread. Most of the comments have devolved into a debate about whether Oliver Stone is a good person or not, totally irrelevant. Any time a prominent figure is mentioned here, there's always someone who crawls out of the woodwork to comb back through everything the figure wrote just so he can post "bbbbbbut look! On February 12, 2004, he said a racist thing, so obviously nothing else he has said in his entire life should be listened to!"
- 4y ago
- grapesurgeon 4y ago[dead]
- ergonaught 4y agoWhy be surprised? He had a point and a bunch of kneejerkers emoted everywhere. You appear interested in doing that, and so do the commenters, but that’s hardly the only thing that happens on HN. Obviously. There are areas where his opinions probably come close to qualifying as facts, and he’s relevant, so he’ll continue to show up. If that’s “problematic”, I assure you that RMS is not the actual problem.
- vlunkr 4y agoIt's pretty lame to assume that everyone has the exact same moral views as you. Most people would probably agree that he's said some highly questionable things, but what about the age-old question of separating the art from the artist? It seems that your position is to entirely cancel rms from history, but not everyone is going to agree. He's one of the most important figures in computing history, should we really just throw it all away regardless of any context?
- Soykaf 4y ago[flagged]
- ftxbro 4y agoI'm not defending Stallman, or Google for that matter, but it was last updated 2019.
- re-thc 4y agoMaybe the world last updated in 2019
- willbw 4y agoThis doesn't contribute to the discussion. Nor make sense?
- knodi123 4y agoYeah, it was silly. /shrug
- TchoBeer 4y agoI wonder who flipped my calendar to 2023 then.
- golemotron 4y agoGPT was last updated in 2021. Maybe the world is stopping in slow motion?
- stoniejohnson 4y agoGreat free-form comedy, thanks for elevating this discussion with it, hitting you with an upvote
- mateo411 4y agoSome of this should be updated to reflect current GDPR/CCPA regulations. For example can download all of your youtube history if you want. That's part of an access request.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago[flagged]
- dima55 4y agoIt's not useful. The article was about google.
- forclarity 4y agoFrom your link: "suggesting that the financier's victims somehow consented to the sex trafficking scheme" This is incorrect. He said that the victims would have appeared to Minsky to have consented, because the coercion would have been out of sight. That is an awkward statement in several ways and it deserves pushback. But it is a different statement than the assertion that the victims consented, it is in no sense a defense of Epstein, and pretending Stallman said something he did not say is not helpful.
- enriquto 4y agoThis is an interesting list of reasons. Even if it is long, I'd say it's still somewhat incomplete... I was motivated by this list to stop depending so much on google. But it's harder than it seems. For example, if you purchase a fastmail account, you still need a google account to install the app in your non-google phone, because fastmail only provides the apk files via the google play store. There's so many such "roadblocks" in de-googlification that you inevitably give up at some point.
- smnrg 4y agoYou can use the Aurora store and no account.
- enriquto 4y agoThanks! I'm going to try it! But how can you be sure that you are getting the real thing? Fastmail does not publish checksums of their apks. I asked their user support (which is otherwise excellent) if they could publish apks or at least the checksums, and they basically said "thanks for your suggestion".
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoThe Aurora store apps are an exact duplicate of Google Play Store. You are literally still getting it from Google.
- 31337Logic 4y agoYes but without the Google.
- esperent 4y agoDoes this still work? I recently got a new tablet and tried to avoid creating a new Google account for it. Installed the Aurora store. When you start that you're given three options: anonymous session, another type of anonymous session, or log in with a Google account. Both types of anonymous session timed out repeatedly over a period of about three days so I eventually caved and made a throwaway Google account for it. In which case I should have just used the Play store.
- wilg 4y agoI'd much rather read of list of reasons why I should use an alternative, and which alternative.
- NERD_ALERT 4y agoStallman isn't interested in practical/useful technology. I doubt the guy who has a panic attack at the thought of his browser executing javascript without his permission and uses an email client to download raw HTML has a good alternative to suggest. His main concern is shaming technology that isn't free and open source. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- wilg 4y agoI think Blender might be literally the only GPL-licensed GUI-based software that is any good.
- mahmoudhossam 4y agoWhat about GIMP?
- _8j50 4y agoI make a point out of excluding google out of mg workflow. I don't have any google devices and don't use any google services personally with the exceptions of searching stuff I know ddg isn't being good at or youtube. Haven't had a google account in several years. I don't hate and despise google like I do companies like fb. Google to me, if it was a person would be someone that is incredibly and impressively smart and capable yet chooses to be a dick a lot because of poor social skills but also because he/she is so rich they can afford to harm you and not worry about their reputation or legal fees if you sue them. I suppose what makes it hard for me to hate them completley is that some of their products are actually impressive and they don't have any usable social media services which makes them less harmful to society at large which isn't the case for any fb or linkedin service. The only other tech company that is like Google is Microsoft in my opinion. I really hope laws catch up to address the scumminess of these companies and places like Google get a change in leadership and culture. It's like Google was great for like 2 minutes and then became a really modern and super innovative version of comcast lol.
- haburka 4y agoThere should be a blog post about reasons to not listen to richard stallman.
- rwalle 4y agoI think Stallman's opinions should be regarded no differently from what a random person on the street would say. His contributions in software does not mean his words on arbitrary subjects are more valuable than others. In fact I avoid reading his articles because they don't apply to real world (or at least not how things work for 99.99% developers and companies) and they often turn out to be a complete waste of time. If those articles were presented without his name, you would normally think they come from a mad man ranting on reddit/Twitter.
- ashwagary 4y agoHard to disagree with any of the points Stallman listed but this stood out as especially egregious and petty. >Google cuts off accounts for users that resell Pixel phones [0]. They lose access to all of their mail and documents stored in Google servers under that account. >It should be illegal to put any "terms of service" on a physical product. It should also be illegal to close an account on a service without letting the user download whatever was stored there. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-suspends-customer-accounts-for-reselling-pixel-phones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...
- lambdasquirrel 4y agoYeah that's pretty bad... I've given away two of the phones I've owned. Would I have gotten my GMail accounts cut off for that?
- op00to 4y agoNo.
- doodlesdev 4y agoWait, what? You think users shouldn't have the right to resell hardware _they bought_? Can you clarify further what you disagree with here? edit: Oh I misread, I thought you disagreed with him, sorry.
- Alupis 4y agoYou make it sound like someone sold their used Pixel phone on Craigslist and then had their Gmail account banned - that's not what happened. The Google customers had all bought the phones from the company’s Project Fi mobile carrier, and had them shipped directly to a reseller in New Hampshire, a US state with no sales tax. In return, the reseller split the profit with the customers. Such an arrangement is against Google’s terms of service, which state that customers “may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”. From what I gather, a bunch of users bought heavily-subsidized phones intended for Google-Fi customers, shipped them to a commercial reseller who sold them at regular prices, then split the profit of a couple hundred bucks per phone. Doesn't sound very savory to me.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoI am glad that Richard Stallman and Greta Thunberg live according to their principles and maybe their stances will eventually give me more alternatives to choose from. I am just not personally interested in doing the same. Corporations suck, governments suck, people suck. Constant quest for purity will just mean that I spend all my energy on that and not on doing anything productive myself.
- medion 4y agoBoth of your examples seem to be pretty productive people, no?
- kethinov 4y agoThey are famous because they're rare. There's only so much room in the economy for that kind of purity. Try getting a tech job almost anywhere and insist on a pure GNU stack running on hardware that has no nonfree firmware and see how far that gets ya.
- medion 4y agoI think history shows those who seek a very high level of moral purity have had to forge their own paths, rather than get any old job/occupation which corrupts their beliefs. Rare, but inspiring. Such reaching also involves much sacrifice, it must be lonely.
- EngManagerIsMe 4y agoBut equally, I think dismissing their concerns as a pursuit of ideological purity undermines them. Like, I work for a FAANG, I have for a long time. But I also do good within and outside that FAANG. I do habitat restoration, I get involved with political organizations that align with my views (mutual aid, socialism, etc.) One doesn't have to care 100% or 0%, one can live with the understanding that we are in a system where you gotta pay your bills and have problematic favorites, while still trying to make things better where you can.
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago(2015)
- ChrisArchitect 4y agosome previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342941
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Reasons Not to Use Google (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829715 - Aug 2019 (114 comments) Reasons Not to Use Google (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342941 - Jan 2017 (81 comments)
- 1970-01-01 4y agoReasons to use Google: Easy, fast, free. Pick all 3.
- bruce511 4y agoI feel like it's a long list of fairly standard complaints about Google, when really the objection could just be "the server-side code is non-free". For example, He spends a lot of time talking about the You Tube JavaScript code, while not talking about the You Tube server code. Which seems backwards to me. It seems to me that the JavaScript part, while not licensed, is closer to free software (you can read it etc) than the server side. The tracking of information, privacy issues and so on seem unrelated to Free Software and are just a laundry list of bad corporate behaviour, which aren't a secret (and can be easily sumarized.) Frankly there are so many reasons to avoid Google that have nothing to do with the notion of Free Software, that the JavaScript license part is irrelevant. It's like saying that smoking kills you, and the packaging also sux. So I guess his page covers all the bases, but if bad corporate behaviour is the new Stallman Standard, then I guess pretty much any company is off limits.
- nextaccountic 4y ago> when really the objection could just be "the server-side code is non-free". That's exactly it. The move to cloud / saas is very convenient as a way to alienate software users from the software. You can use it, but only in pre-approved ways. You can use it but only until the software gets cancelled (when that happens nobody else can use anymore, instantly). You can use it but don't ever think about modifying it for your needs. Actually Stallman himself talks about this (like rebranding saas as "service as a software substitute" [0] rather than "software as a service") and that's really the crucial point, all the rest follows from Google's utter control of the software. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
- bruce511 4y agoI get that. So the long diatribe about Google (or any SaaS) is unnecessary. Whole article could be reduced to "see SaaS".
- pyuser583 4y ago“Free” in Stallmans sense is only an issue once the product is distributed. Being deployed server-side doesn’t usually count. If you keep it to yourself, even extreme copyleft licenses don’t require you to share changes.
- ThorsBane 4y agoIt's too late to worry about Google having data on everyone. Every major corporation has all that data. The Corporation has it too. At this point, hope that when each of these Corp AIs wakes up...that they like who you've been as a person. They'll know who has been consistent and authentic and who hasn't.
- bena 4y agoAh, Stallman. Even when he has a point, the sheer amount of wankery surrounding that point makes sifting through the pretentious bullshit not worth the effort. Like, no, you should not use AirBnB. But not because it requires you to "identify yourself". So do hotels, my man. And if someone doesn't want to do business with you, they should be allowed that freedom of choice as well. Just because someone provides a service, it doesn't mean they should be forced to provide it to you if they find you to be abusing their service in some fashion.
- xslvrxslwt 4y agoIdk about Google but this website as a whole is so damn autistic, whoever the author is needs to be locked up in the room and tied to the bed for safety purposes.