14 ms·

I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known

I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is. While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”, while DRM goes deeper into our lives, and while everything is becoming a “hosted service”, one can only hope for (and put efforts into) going back to the ideals he proposed and pushing back on the elements that control us and seek to do even more so. We all don’t have to be absolutists (it comes at the cost of convenience, which most people prefer), but there are enough of such people around the world as far as FOSS is concerned. Whenever I see FOSS meetups and people connecting over it, that’s something I’m grateful for and wholeheartedly support (though I’m not one of them).

bitmadness 3y ago
Does he have a reputation for poor hygiene?
- camoleon 3y ago
  I think that might be referring to an incident where he picked at his foot then ate the pickings.
  - scaredginger 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ
- op00to 3y ago
  Years and years ago he talked at my university lug. I picked him up in my car from the train. The BO smell remained in my car for WEEKS. Dude had a serious aroma.
  - shafyy 3y ago
    Classic Seinfeld
    - op00to 3y ago
      stallman and jon voight both well known assholes!
  - systemtest 3y ago
    A lot of people would pay good money to have their car smell like Stallman for weeks.
    - solarman5000 3y ago
      I'm one of them. I want my children to meet him so badly. This news about his health is heart breaking
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    On the other side, back in college to earn extra money, I was his typist for around 10 hours (3 or so hours at a stint), meaning he sat diagonally behind me, reading the screen I was typing on. The only thing I noticed was his hair was a little wild. That was a few decades ago, so perhaps things have changed, but he was well within normal odor back in the early 90s.
    - pcl 3y ago
      What were you typing for him?
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Everything. He would sit behind me and dictate keystrokes (mostly driving emacs, of course) to do email, edit code, and generally operate the computer. I don't want to talk about someone else's medical situation, but I think it's well-enough-known that rms had a period of RSI so severe that he was barred from using a keyboard to let his wrists/hands recover. A few hours in a row of hearing and typing C-Space C-u 2 4 M-w C-x C-b <RET> C-y C-x C-s is exhausting. It was also amusing (in retrospect) to get a polite-enough admonishment to "don't think about what the keystrokes are doing; please just type what I say" when he could tell that I was slowing down because I was paying too much attention to what the intent behind the keystrokes was.
- kriberg 3y ago
  More anectodal evidence: I've eaten pizza with him twice. Didn't notice anything.
  - toasteros 3y ago
    Also anectdotal: Ate at a Chinese restaurant with him, he's not gross at the table. I did hug him later and he was very sweaty - but we did just traipse across London in a bit of a rush and he was absolutely exhausted.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  more like people like to exaggerate anecdotes for karma points
- xk_id 3y ago
  FWIW, there is a rare medical condition some people have, where their body odour is abnormally high. I knew a girl in high school, very attractive and a wonderful person, but she sufferred from this condition, despite her best efforts to manage it. She would be regularly bullied by the girls and rejected by the boys for it.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    stallman doesn't have some highly rare medical condition, he's just a lazy hippy programmer type. and it sounds like he's got reasonably decent hygiene.
- ryder9 3y ago
  [dead]
hutzlibu 3y ago
"We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely." But what is he known for, outside tech circles, if he is known at all? When you want to deliver a message, it matters a lot, how you deliver it.
- hkt 3y ago
  There are phases in which change happens: Stallman's preaching to people who can actually make free software (eg, people you might find on HN) has accomplished a huge amount of capacity building. He's tremendously good at encouraging it, and always has been. That provides the raw material for people who are perhaps a little more adoption focused (and apt) which is work that can't happen if there's no capacity.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Well, I am also good at making software, share the goal of a world where everyone fully controls their devices - yet I am appalled by many things around him. Mostly the "superior" ethical stance. You do things this (my) way, then it is ethical and you love freedom or you are not ethical and don't want freedom. Sorry, but I just have some different opinions about some things, but I rather feel not like working together with people who consider me lower. So the result is not cooperation but lot's of fragmentation in the free software/open source world. I do not think that helped the common cause. Otherwise we would not be where we are. Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.
    - hkt 3y ago
      Yet there are enormous amounts of cooperation within free software. There are the various organisations like the GNOME foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Debian, and many more beside. Thousands of volunteers keep these things going to produce well integrated, usable software. Not to mention the common principles in most free software around interoperability and loose coupling. Apple and Microsoft (and the rest) have less to do on this, because they don't have to make their software nearly as generic. Microsoft famously fixed something in SimCity at the OS level. Google and Facebook don't have to worry about interoperability, which undoubtedly removes a lot of complexity for them. In some ways, free software has a greater burden to carry. The problem with usability in free software is not one of culture or cooperation, it is one of capital. The fact is, Apple and Microsoft have at this point invested hundreds of billions in finding the best engineers and designers around the world and paying them to focus on polishing their operating system. By comparison, Debian's (very impressive) 3500 or so developers, maintainers, and contributors, are almost exclusively volunteers and working at most part time on their chosen packages. If you want to see better free software, what I'd suggest to you and everyone else is this: Next time you want to buy a phone, pick something cheaper, and donate the difference to a developer of free software. If you're an iPhone user and you switch to a Fairphone 5, say, you can throw £600 at someone like Joey Hess, or just pick an organisation that makes good stuff and give it to them if you don't want to find a specific author. Let's remind ourselves that if 1000 people did this, it'd be £600k of funding to improve free software. Personally, I'd recommend a donation to the NLNet foundation: https://nlnet.nl/ https://nlnet.nl/ (plug for nlnet, they're currently taking proposals and will fund successful ones: https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20230801-call.html https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20230801-call.html )
dEnigma 3y ago
I feel similarly. While I absolutely can't and won't operate under the severe restrictions that an ideologically pure stance on software freedom ala Stallman would impose, I'm glad that there are some people, like Stallman himself, who take it to those extremes, tirelessly advocate for improvement and thus move the needle towards a better middle ground for everyone.
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  It's a lot more understandable if you consider the state of computing he experienced while growing up: Programs were way simpler, and shipping the source code in paper was the de facto way of distribution. It's not like he was a wacko around his peers. He just created what seemed a logical step from that. I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    It’s commonly said that his inspiration was from wanting to improve a printer driver but couldn’t because it was proprietary. I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability. These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS. Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
    - ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
      I think you might not be considering personal bugfixes (X interaction is great for the common denominator, annoying to me), long-term support (I want to use my device securely in 2045), or custom features (I want to be able to do X, but only 0.001% of people care so Apple doesn't). I use Android, so I can't be more specific. I have heard the unverified complaint that Apple sometimes slows down old devices as new ones are released, which would be impossible in FOSS. Apple is ultimately going to work in their own best interest. Their particular brand aligns that with the consumer fairly well, but there will be disconnects.
nailer 3y ago
That was a beautiful comment, but I want to make an important point: > While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available” The OSD is very much compatible with the FSFs list of freedoms. “Source available” is a new name for “shared source” and is fake open source proprietary trash.
- reidrac 3y ago
  You're right. I guess one difference would be the part where the free software tell us "why". But in practical terms, it is too complicated (ethics!), so all is down to copyleft or not, which I believe is what the parent comment was referring to. Perhaps that's what we should be using: copyleft vs open source, instead of free software vs open source.
  - palata 3y ago
    > Perhaps that's what we should be using: copyleft vs open source, instead of free software vs open source. Unless I misunderstand them, what about using the actual definitions? - Proprietary software can be closed-source or source-available - Open-source software can be under a permissive or copyleft license - Free software is a philosophy around open-source software, but in practice FOSS and OSS are mostly the same thing.
    - reidrac 3y ago
      These are good definitions but the original post wasn't referring to people not taking into account the philosophical part of free software, unless it really meant "copyleft". A permissive licence doesn't really transmit the intent of the author, philosophy or not (it doesn't really matter, the licence is the same). A copyleft licence, on the other hand, backs the philosophy behind free software via the actual licence. But you are right, it should be "copyleft vs permissive open source".
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    All copyleft software is free software, but not all free software is copyleft, since some free software may be distributed under permissive licenses that do not require derivative works to maintain the same freedoms or licensing terms. The MIT License is a permissive free software license that isn't copyleft, as it allows proprietary modifications. https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.en.html https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.en.html >This is a scan of the “Copyleft (L)” sticker on the back of the envelope mailed from Don Hopkins to Richard Stallman on 1984. The envelope contained a 68000 manual that Don borrowed from Richard, that he was returning. The sticker inspired Richard to use the word “Copyleft” for licensing free software. >attention: >READ NOTE BEFORE OPENING! >Copyleft (L) >The material contained in this envelope is Copyleft (L) 1984 by an amoeba named “Tom”. Any violation of this stringent pact with person or persons who are to remain un-named will void the warrantee of every small appliance in your kitchen, and furthermore, you will grow a pimple underneath your fingernail. Breaking the seal shows that you agree to abide by Judith Martin's guidelines concerning the choosing of fresh flowers to be put on the dining room table. Failure to break the seal on a weekday is […]
corethree 3y ago
The idealists had it right about global warming too. It's our own incapability to be idealists that will inevitably and ultimately bring about the worst case scenario for global warming.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  The idealists have it right today. Global warming is one ecological problem out of dozens and we'll economically outscale it even if we don´t do anything special about it. Damage to human health and infrastructure plus spending in adaptation will be a steady drag that will be much slower than our increasing ability to withstand its effects. In the meantime, we have tons of global and local issues caused by human activity that have next to nothing to do with global warming: destruction of natural habitats; invasive species; overfishing; plastics; toxic and/or long life chemicals/medicines... We have a couple of resource issues coming up: cobalt, helium, rare earths; hydrocarbs; hell even copper might become a problem soon-ish... We are faced with the effects of being able to reliably control our own reproduction, a revolution that we're absolutely not ready for as a species and that requires us to rethink a 100.000 years old societal structure pretty much from scratch. We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail. Again that's a first for any social species.
  - hedora 3y ago
    > We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail. This isn't new. Read up on the dark ages, and how Gutenberg ended them with the printing press. As technologists, the best thing we can do is figure out how to build technology that scales down enough to be wielded by individuals. That includes education and media distribution technologies. Also, climate change models that estimate economic damage project annual damage from extreme weather exceeding global GDP in a few decades. Humanity will probably survive, but its unclear that anything resembling the modern economy will.
7e 3y ago
OSS predates GNU, and GNU's influence is waning. I wouldn't say Stallman's impact was that large. OSS was a thing before Stallman and will remain after Stallman.
- TheCondor 3y ago
  You’re mistaken. His impact has changed the industry.
- PaulRobinson 3y ago
  OSS pre-dates GNU, sure. But has any other license had the same impact as GPL? Has any other set of OSS tools enabled so much as the GNU command line tools which were (and are) the foundation of Linux? I put him up for the night once. I'm a BSD guy, ran the local FreeBSD society. He was pleasant enough about BSD we could hang out a bit. I know what my preferences are, but I'm not so arrogant as to believe I'm anywhere near in a majority, and his influence through his work (including GNU), is completely obvious. Without him, we'd all be paying Microsoft, Sun, IBM or HP through the nose for licenses to much worse technology than we have today.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I agree, he has been overall a great benefit to society. He once got irritated with me in an email because I wouldn’t do something (release one of my old Lisp books under a FSF document license), but I happily accepted that irritation because I understand where he was coming from. Richard, get well.
Kye 3y ago
None of the criticisms I have of the guy are the sort of thing where him dying could actually improve the world. He's no vicious and influential religious firebrand wishing hurricanes on gay people. I hope he comes though it okay.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hedora 3y ago
I'm a bit worried about the health of the GPL ecosystem. GPL 3 is basically an anti-TiVo and (now) anti-Apple license, but it leaves giant loopholes for Google and other service providers. The whole point of the GPL was to empower users, and it's pretty clearly failing at that. SaaS providers provide access to GPL software, but users can't decide which version to run, or move their data, or even use an old version of the software if the new one comes with unreasonable restrictions, surveillance clauses, or unreasonable price tags. At this point, FOSS isn't even free-as-in-beer for most people. On top of that, Red Hat has basically said they're not going to abide by the GPL any more. They're taking third party code, modifying it, distributing binaries, and if you exercise your rights under the GPL, then they'll stop giving you access to the code or the binaries. Ironically, BSD and Apache licenses seem to be better at preserving user freedom at this point. They allow commercial distribution on hardware and as a SaaS. GPL 3 forces *aaS business models in practice. I hope RMS makes a quick recovery, but I'm pretty bummed about how the GPL has played out at this point.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  The solution is simple: don't pay for SaaS products. And that's if you consider it a problem. When email was created, you didn't care what the remote mail server's software was, as long as it conformed to the protocol, you're good.
  - hedora 3y ago
    That's not a solution, and it's certainly not simple. For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities. Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and insurance and collect my paychecks, so my taxes would be simpler next year.) Even if I somehow managed to connect to the Internet without indirectly paying for a SaaS, I wouldn't be able to browse it in practice without agreeing to ToS contracts from companies I haven't even heard of. Don't agree with the cloudflare, google and aws ToS agreements? Try blocking all their servers (since continuing to use the services implies agreeing to continuously-updated ToS terms). If you succeed, you'll find that the internet doesn't work at all. You can't even use email normally, since it's unclear what addresses get routed through which service providers, and what terms you have to agree with to "use" their SMTP services.
Aspie96 3y ago
While I agree with most of your comment (and upvoted it), I'm not sure about this: > While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”, Free software and open source are the same category of software and licenses (except for sporadic instances that are at the very edge of that one category, as categories tend to be blurred). Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available. There are companies trying to push source available proprietary software as "open source", perhaps hoping for such replacement, and this has had some success in some specific areas, but the open source community is pushing against it. Or, at least, the wise ones in it are.
- newscracker 3y ago
  > Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available. GP here. I agree. I should’ve worded it better to say that a lot of “*source” terms are used to make it seem as if the publishers are meeting a great ideal (like FLOSS), but are muddling things more and more. I shouldn’t have listed “source available in the very same sentence” without being clear. I don’t have stats, but “open source” and similar terms have been used as buzzwords for marketing while the publishers really want their SaaS to be the one people ultimately pay for and use.
minerva23 3y ago
> We need absolutists like him I agree we need passionate people working tirelessly for software freedom. The broader free software community agrees we don't need people like him though. From Wikipedia: > The FSF board on April 12 [2021] made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman. > Multiple organizations criticized, defunded and/or cut ties with the FSF, including: Red Hat, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Software Freedom Conservancy, SUSE, the OSI, the Document Foundation, the EFF, and the Tor Project. For those out of the loop, the Richard Stallman had repeatedly defended adults having sex with children over many years and he most recently said sex slaves aren't raped.

bitmadness 3y ago

Does he have a reputation for poor hygiene?

camoleon 3y ago
I think that might be referring to an incident where he picked at his foot then ate the pickings.
- scaredginger 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ
op00to 3y ago
Years and years ago he talked at my university lug. I picked him up in my car from the train. The BO smell remained in my car for WEEKS. Dude had a serious aroma.
- shafyy 3y ago
  Classic Seinfeld
  - op00to 3y ago
    stallman and jon voight both well known assholes!
- systemtest 3y ago
  A lot of people would pay good money to have their car smell like Stallman for weeks.
  - solarman5000 3y ago
    I'm one of them. I want my children to meet him so badly. This news about his health is heart breaking
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- sokoloff 3y ago
  On the other side, back in college to earn extra money, I was his typist for around 10 hours (3 or so hours at a stint), meaning he sat diagonally behind me, reading the screen I was typing on. The only thing I noticed was his hair was a little wild. That was a few decades ago, so perhaps things have changed, but he was well within normal odor back in the early 90s.
  - pcl 3y ago
    What were you typing for him?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Everything. He would sit behind me and dictate keystrokes (mostly driving emacs, of course) to do email, edit code, and generally operate the computer. I don't want to talk about someone else's medical situation, but I think it's well-enough-known that rms had a period of RSI so severe that he was barred from using a keyboard to let his wrists/hands recover. A few hours in a row of hearing and typing C-Space C-u 2 4 M-w C-x C-b <RET> C-y C-x C-s is exhausting. It was also amusing (in retrospect) to get a polite-enough admonishment to "don't think about what the keystrokes are doing; please just type what I say" when he could tell that I was slowing down because I was paying too much attention to what the intent behind the keystrokes was.
kriberg 3y ago
More anectodal evidence: I've eaten pizza with him twice. Didn't notice anything.
- toasteros 3y ago
  Also anectdotal: Ate at a Chinese restaurant with him, he's not gross at the table. I did hug him later and he was very sweaty - but we did just traipse across London in a bit of a rush and he was absolutely exhausted.
peoplefromibiza 3y ago
more like people like to exaggerate anecdotes for karma points
xk_id 3y ago
FWIW, there is a rare medical condition some people have, where their body odour is abnormally high. I knew a girl in high school, very attractive and a wonderful person, but she sufferred from this condition, despite her best efforts to manage it. She would be regularly bullied by the girls and rejected by the boys for it.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  stallman doesn't have some highly rare medical condition, he's just a lazy hippy programmer type. and it sounds like he's got reasonably decent hygiene.
ryder9 3y ago
[dead]

hutzlibu 3y ago

"We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely." But what is he known for, outside tech circles, if he is known at all? When you want to deliver a message, it matters a lot, how you deliver it.

hkt 3y ago
There are phases in which change happens: Stallman's preaching to people who can actually make free software (eg, people you might find on HN) has accomplished a huge amount of capacity building. He's tremendously good at encouraging it, and always has been. That provides the raw material for people who are perhaps a little more adoption focused (and apt) which is work that can't happen if there's no capacity.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Well, I am also good at making software, share the goal of a world where everyone fully controls their devices - yet I am appalled by many things around him. Mostly the "superior" ethical stance. You do things this (my) way, then it is ethical and you love freedom or you are not ethical and don't want freedom. Sorry, but I just have some different opinions about some things, but I rather feel not like working together with people who consider me lower. So the result is not cooperation but lot's of fragmentation in the free software/open source world. I do not think that helped the common cause. Otherwise we would not be where we are. Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.
  - hkt 3y ago
    Yet there are enormous amounts of cooperation within free software. There are the various organisations like the GNOME foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Debian, and many more beside. Thousands of volunteers keep these things going to produce well integrated, usable software. Not to mention the common principles in most free software around interoperability and loose coupling. Apple and Microsoft (and the rest) have less to do on this, because they don't have to make their software nearly as generic. Microsoft famously fixed something in SimCity at the OS level. Google and Facebook don't have to worry about interoperability, which undoubtedly removes a lot of complexity for them. In some ways, free software has a greater burden to carry. The problem with usability in free software is not one of culture or cooperation, it is one of capital. The fact is, Apple and Microsoft have at this point invested hundreds of billions in finding the best engineers and designers around the world and paying them to focus on polishing their operating system. By comparison, Debian's (very impressive) 3500 or so developers, maintainers, and contributors, are almost exclusively volunteers and working at most part time on their chosen packages. If you want to see better free software, what I'd suggest to you and everyone else is this: Next time you want to buy a phone, pick something cheaper, and donate the difference to a developer of free software. If you're an iPhone user and you switch to a Fairphone 5, say, you can throw £600 at someone like Joey Hess, or just pick an organisation that makes good stuff and give it to them if you don't want to find a specific author. Let's remind ourselves that if 1000 people did this, it'd be £600k of funding to improve free software. Personally, I'd recommend a donation to the NLNet foundation: https://nlnet.nl/ https://nlnet.nl/ (plug for nlnet, they're currently taking proposals and will fund successful ones: https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20230801-call.html https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20230801-call.html )

dEnigma 3y ago

I feel similarly. While I absolutely can't and won't operate under the severe restrictions that an ideologically pure stance on software freedom ala Stallman would impose, I'm glad that there are some people, like Stallman himself, who take it to those extremes, tirelessly advocate for improvement and thus move the needle towards a better middle ground for everyone.

leidenfrost 3y ago
It's a lot more understandable if you consider the state of computing he experienced while growing up: Programs were way simpler, and shipping the source code in paper was the de facto way of distribution. It's not like he was a wacko around his peers. He just created what seemed a logical step from that. I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It’s commonly said that his inspiration was from wanting to improve a printer driver but couldn’t because it was proprietary. I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability. These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS. Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
  - ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
    I think you might not be considering personal bugfixes (X interaction is great for the common denominator, annoying to me), long-term support (I want to use my device securely in 2045), or custom features (I want to be able to do X, but only 0.001% of people care so Apple doesn't). I use Android, so I can't be more specific. I have heard the unverified complaint that Apple sometimes slows down old devices as new ones are released, which would be impossible in FOSS. Apple is ultimately going to work in their own best interest. Their particular brand aligns that with the consumer fairly well, but there will be disconnects.

nailer 3y ago

That was a beautiful comment, but I want to make an important point: > While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available” The OSD is very much compatible with the FSFs list of freedoms. “Source available” is a new name for “shared source” and is fake open source proprietary trash.

reidrac 3y ago
You're right. I guess one difference would be the part where the free software tell us "why". But in practical terms, it is too complicated (ethics!), so all is down to copyleft or not, which I believe is what the parent comment was referring to. Perhaps that's what we should be using: copyleft vs open source, instead of free software vs open source.
- palata 3y ago
  > Perhaps that's what we should be using: copyleft vs open source, instead of free software vs open source. Unless I misunderstand them, what about using the actual definitions? - Proprietary software can be closed-source or source-available - Open-source software can be under a permissive or copyleft license - Free software is a philosophy around open-source software, but in practice FOSS and OSS are mostly the same thing.
  - reidrac 3y ago
    These are good definitions but the original post wasn't referring to people not taking into account the philosophical part of free software, unless it really meant "copyleft". A permissive licence doesn't really transmit the intent of the author, philosophy or not (it doesn't really matter, the licence is the same). A copyleft licence, on the other hand, backs the philosophy behind free software via the actual licence. But you are right, it should be "copyleft vs permissive open source".
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  All copyleft software is free software, but not all free software is copyleft, since some free software may be distributed under permissive licenses that do not require derivative works to maintain the same freedoms or licensing terms. The MIT License is a permissive free software license that isn't copyleft, as it allows proprietary modifications. https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.en.html https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.en.html >This is a scan of the “Copyleft (L)” sticker on the back of the envelope mailed from Don Hopkins to Richard Stallman on 1984. The envelope contained a 68000 manual that Don borrowed from Richard, that he was returning. The sticker inspired Richard to use the word “Copyleft” for licensing free software. >attention: >READ NOTE BEFORE OPENING! >Copyleft (L) >The material contained in this envelope is Copyleft (L) 1984 by an amoeba named “Tom”. Any violation of this stringent pact with person or persons who are to remain un-named will void the warrantee of every small appliance in your kitchen, and furthermore, you will grow a pimple underneath your fingernail. Breaking the seal shows that you agree to abide by Judith Martin's guidelines concerning the choosing of fresh flowers to be put on the dining room table. Failure to break the seal on a weekday is […]

corethree 3y ago

The idealists had it right about global warming too. It's our own incapability to be idealists that will inevitably and ultimately bring about the worst case scenario for global warming.

cultureswitch 3y ago
The idealists have it right today. Global warming is one ecological problem out of dozens and we'll economically outscale it even if we don´t do anything special about it. Damage to human health and infrastructure plus spending in adaptation will be a steady drag that will be much slower than our increasing ability to withstand its effects. In the meantime, we have tons of global and local issues caused by human activity that have next to nothing to do with global warming: destruction of natural habitats; invasive species; overfishing; plastics; toxic and/or long life chemicals/medicines... We have a couple of resource issues coming up: cobalt, helium, rare earths; hydrocarbs; hell even copper might become a problem soon-ish... We are faced with the effects of being able to reliably control our own reproduction, a revolution that we're absolutely not ready for as a species and that requires us to rethink a 100.000 years old societal structure pretty much from scratch. We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail. Again that's a first for any social species.
- hedora 3y ago
  > We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail. This isn't new. Read up on the dark ages, and how Gutenberg ended them with the printing press. As technologists, the best thing we can do is figure out how to build technology that scales down enough to be wielded by individuals. That includes education and media distribution technologies. Also, climate change models that estimate economic damage project annual damage from extreme weather exceeding global GDP in a few decades. Humanity will probably survive, but its unclear that anything resembling the modern economy will.

7e 3y ago

OSS predates GNU, and GNU's influence is waning. I wouldn't say Stallman's impact was that large. OSS was a thing before Stallman and will remain after Stallman.

TheCondor 3y ago
You’re mistaken. His impact has changed the industry.
PaulRobinson 3y ago
OSS pre-dates GNU, sure. But has any other license had the same impact as GPL? Has any other set of OSS tools enabled so much as the GNU command line tools which were (and are) the foundation of Linux? I put him up for the night once. I'm a BSD guy, ran the local FreeBSD society. He was pleasant enough about BSD we could hang out a bit. I know what my preferences are, but I'm not so arrogant as to believe I'm anywhere near in a majority, and his influence through his work (including GNU), is completely obvious. Without him, we'd all be paying Microsoft, Sun, IBM or HP through the nose for licenses to much worse technology than we have today.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I agree, he has been overall a great benefit to society. He once got irritated with me in an email because I wouldn’t do something (release one of my old Lisp books under a FSF document license), but I happily accepted that irritation because I understand where he was coming from. Richard, get well.

Kye 3y ago

None of the criticisms I have of the guy are the sort of thing where him dying could actually improve the world. He's no vicious and influential religious firebrand wishing hurricanes on gay people. I hope he comes though it okay.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hedora 3y ago

I'm a bit worried about the health of the GPL ecosystem. GPL 3 is basically an anti-TiVo and (now) anti-Apple license, but it leaves giant loopholes for Google and other service providers. The whole point of the GPL was to empower users, and it's pretty clearly failing at that. SaaS providers provide access to GPL software, but users can't decide which version to run, or move their data, or even use an old version of the software if the new one comes with unreasonable restrictions, surveillance clauses, or unreasonable price tags. At this point, FOSS isn't even free-as-in-beer for most people. On top of that, Red Hat has basically said they're not going to abide by the GPL any more. They're taking third party code, modifying it, distributing binaries, and if you exercise your rights under the GPL, then they'll stop giving you access to the code or the binaries. Ironically, BSD and Apache licenses seem to be better at preserving user freedom at this point. They allow commercial distribution on hardware and as a SaaS. GPL 3 forces *aaS business models in practice. I hope RMS makes a quick recovery, but I'm pretty bummed about how the GPL has played out at this point.

linuxftw 3y ago
The solution is simple: don't pay for SaaS products. And that's if you consider it a problem. When email was created, you didn't care what the remote mail server's software was, as long as it conformed to the protocol, you're good.
- hedora 3y ago
  That's not a solution, and it's certainly not simple. For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities. Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and insurance and collect my paychecks, so my taxes would be simpler next year.) Even if I somehow managed to connect to the Internet without indirectly paying for a SaaS, I wouldn't be able to browse it in practice without agreeing to ToS contracts from companies I haven't even heard of. Don't agree with the cloudflare, google and aws ToS agreements? Try blocking all their servers (since continuing to use the services implies agreeing to continuously-updated ToS terms). If you succeed, you'll find that the internet doesn't work at all. You can't even use email normally, since it's unclear what addresses get routed through which service providers, and what terms you have to agree with to "use" their SMTP services.

Aspie96 3y ago

While I agree with most of your comment (and upvoted it), I'm not sure about this: > While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”, Free software and open source are the same category of software and licenses (except for sporadic instances that are at the very edge of that one category, as categories tend to be blurred). Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available. There are companies trying to push source available proprietary software as "open source", perhaps hoping for such replacement, and this has had some success in some specific areas, but the open source community is pushing against it. Or, at least, the wise ones in it are.

newscracker 3y ago
> Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available. GP here. I agree. I should’ve worded it better to say that a lot of “*source” terms are used to make it seem as if the publishers are meeting a great ideal (like FLOSS), but are muddling things more and more. I shouldn’t have listed “source available in the very same sentence” without being clear. I don’t have stats, but “open source” and similar terms have been used as buzzwords for marketing while the publishers really want their SaaS to be the one people ultimately pay for and use.

minerva23 3y ago

> We need absolutists like him I agree we need passionate people working tirelessly for software freedom. The broader free software community agrees we don't need people like him though. From Wikipedia: > The FSF board on April 12 [2021] made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman. > Multiple organizations criticized, defunded and/or cut ties with the FSF, including: Red Hat, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Software Freedom Conservancy, SUSE, the OSI, the Document Foundation, the EFF, and the Tor Project. For those out of the loop, the Richard Stallman had repeatedly defended adults having sex with children over many years and he most recently said sex slaves aren't raped.