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Stallman Was Right
- TheRoque 2y agoThere's a whole subreddit dedicated to this, r/StallmanWasRight
- rramadass 2y agoHa, Ha, but seriously; Stallman has been right from the very beginning and people have forgotten what the movement he started has delivered to the World in terms of egalitarian access to Computers and Software. Much of the developing world would have been shut out of this revolution if it weren't for his uncompromising and forceful viewpoints.
- orionblastar 2y agohttps://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc Apple imagined a future where 1984 wouldn't be like 1984.
- nullc 2y agoWe all misunderstood that advertisement, Jobs issue wasn't the oppression it was that he wanted to be on the other side of the screen, directing a gleaming glass and steel dystopia rather than the dusty one pictured. Behold the iphone and app-store paradigm: "A garden of pure ideology, where every worker may bloom, secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths" indeed.
- gary_0 2y agoIronically that Twitter link won't work for me unless I switch browsers and sign up for an account. Or is that the joke?
- potatoball 2y agoTerrible that the privacy fronted for twitter (Nitter) is no longer maintained. Archive.today seems to work though: https://archive.is/Q2dZJ https://archive.is/Q2dZJ
- masfuerte 2y agoNitter's developers were not the problem. Xitter changed the rules. But thank you for the working link.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- api 2y agoThe beatings will continue until people actually modify their buying behavior on the basis of concerns like privacy and autonomy. Right now nobody cares, where "cares" is defined as "alters buying behavior." If you don't alter your buying behavior in response to this stuff you don't "care."
- 34679 2y agoI agree with you, but.. If the world's largest window manufacturer added a clause that they could send employees to your home to look through your windows at any time, day or night, the government would likely step in and put a stop to it. I don't see how this is any different. We have privacy laws and consumer protection agencies. They are failing us.
- hm-nah 2y agoHahaaha! “Windows” is the absolute PERFECT analogy for this. Microsoft Windows.
- api 2y agoThat's because we have a well established sense of a boundary between your home and the rest of the world. Your home is private property. We basically threw that away in computing in exchange for ease of use.
- caseyy 2y agoI feel like it would take years and much debate for most governments to step in to be honest. Just think of the stock market if the largest window manufacturer has an unprofitable quarter!
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoYep. The solution is government regulation. Vote with your votes, not your wallet. (The latter is just pain for ephemeral gain, if any gain at all. Laws are actual gains.)
- raincom 2y agoThe government wants to use the data collected by these giant corporations. At least in the US, third-party doctrine allows for the govt to snoop on people--esp useful if they want to go after opponents.
- bfrog 2y agoHe was right about licenses with compilers as well.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- potatoball 2y agoArchive.today sites work for twitter links: https://archive.is/Q2dZJ https://archive.is/Q2dZJ
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- darby_nine 2y agoOf course he was! Doesn't mean that his proposed solution worked (or will ever work, though fingers are crossed).
- nehal3m 2y agoI pulled out of all clouds when it comes to my personal stuff recently (including streaming stuff, I just store music, movies and shows locally like I did 15 years ago). I didn't realize I missed the simplicity so much. Just back up your stuff every now and again and you're fine, no fees, no syncing, no requirement for a connection. Offline first. Storage is cheap as chips now so there's not much of a barrier for I imagine most people.
- dogma1138 2y agoThe problem is that it’s very hard to do so either legally or affordable and often both.
- nehal3m 2y agoI disagree, 192kpbs music and DVD quality movies and shows are fine with me and the disk space requirements are low. Classics are dirt cheap and ripping them is trivial.
- dogma1138 2y agoGetting hard copy content is getting quite difficult and very expensive, that may work for “classics” especially if you can get them 2nd hand. But the amount of new content that isn’t released on anything but digital media is very significant. DVDs of new movies are £10-15 in the UK still, shows are much more than that if they even get a DVD or a non-digital release to begin with. Unless your content consumption is low it’s going to cost many multiples than what even paying for 2-3 streaming services does per year.
- nehal3m 2y agoI get music and DVD's from thrift stores and my local eBay equivalent. So yeah there's definitely a cutoff. You're right, the newer stuff is difficult if not impossible to get a physical copy of. I just don't bother. I go see a movie in theaters every now and again but I'm 500% done with modern streaming platforms.
- gavinhoward 2y agoAnd this is why the industry needs to professionalize, with a code of ethics and regulations so that we can tell our bosses no when they tell us to do this stuff. https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-from-the-cra-and-improve-cybersecurity/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...
- cm277 2y agoWe need regulation, laws and enforcement, enough with ethics. Stallman basically preached a Communist manifesto where the tech workers should own the means of production/compute. Communism became popular in the early 20th century because people were scared of a feudal-capitalist future that didn't come to pass --yes, partly because of Communism. However, Big Tech has managed to build exactly that kind of feudal/rentier capitalism without regulation, without oversight and with full market control. In the end, I don't think Stallman was right wrt the tools needed to stop that future; the GPL was embraced (and then undermined) by Big Tech and became irrelevant. By actually commoditizing the base platform layers, OSS probably enabled the massive cloud/application behemoths on top. More importantly, OSS was useful as a pseudo-competitor to the monopolists --remember when in them midst of the Microsoft-DOJ fracas, MS kept bringing up Linux as its nemesis? how did that turn out? what percentage of Azure are Linux machines? what Big Tech behemoth does NOT run on OSS these days? But, to his credit, the future that Stallman warned us about did come to pass; his diagnosis was correct, but not the cure he prescribed. The internet is now run by feudal lords that extract rents from anyone trying to work or live on it.
- gavinhoward 2y agoThose things you mention are necessary, but without ethics, we can't say no. I want that power.
- goliv04053 2y ago*still
- jrepinc 2y agoStallman is still right, almost 100% of the time, sadly. And looking at the direction and trends of big enshittification all GAFAM/BigTech corproations are going he will be even more right in the future.
- rramadass 2y agoVery True. I still remember when the first iPhone/Android device came out looking for a setting to share my phone storage via SMB/NFS which is almost the first thing you do on a laptop/desktop and not finding any but that you have to pay to buy some app which will allow you to do it. It was then that i realized something very fundamental has changed in the computing services paradigm and for the worse. Services which were taken for granted from the OS were no longer available and every OS feature has been made into an "app for sale", something which was unthinkable when i started off in this industry in the early nineties. And then the "Cloud" happened and finally the users lost all control over data and software services.
- bishbosh 2y agoI wish we could stop with the deification of this creep as though he was the only person arguing that proprietary software has concerns.
- smegsicle 2y agoyou can just go around calling people creeps now for being neurodivergent?
- krapp 2y agoYou can just go around excusing creepy behavior as "being neurodivergent?" As far as I know, the only person who has diagnosed Richard Stallman with anything is Richard Stallman, and I doubt he has even an honorary doctorate that would qualify him to make such a diagnosis. Maybe he is neurodivergent, maybe he isn't. If he were, that wouldn't excuse his behavior, as plenty of neurodivergent people don't act the way he does. It's not a "get out of social consequences free" card. And honestly, if Richard Stallman is so neurodivergent that he isn't capable of interacting with people in a reasonable way, despite being middle aged and no doubt having been told about his behavior many, many times, he shouldn't be in the position he's in.
- NikkiA 2y agoHe's 71, he's not middle aged, but yes, he should know better at his age.
- createaccount99 2y agoSober take, though the ad hominem wasn't needed.
- rho138 2y ago[flagged]
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- pieter_mj 2y agoThe only guy who is literally unreplaceable and understands freedom at a mitochondrial level.
- krapp 2y agoI guess it's gonna suck when he dies and the entire free software movement collapses.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoStallman is always right if you're willing to wait long enough.
- kaycey2022 2y agoPeople threw Stallman under the bus just because he is a bit of a creep and maybe unfunny and certainly looks like an ogre. But he was always right. His contributions to OSS cannot be understated.
- krapp 2y ago[flagged]
- f33d5173 2y agoComplete slander. The people who invented lies about him should face consequences.
- krapp 2y ago[flagged]
- histories 2y agoCare to provide sources for your statements?
- krapp 2y agoFeel free to trudge through any of the dozens of threads and literal thousand-plus comment discussions on HN about the matter, or any of the articles written online, some by people who have known RMS for years. I'm not relitigating any of it here, as I know full well how utterly futile it would be to even attempt.
- Rant423 2y agoYou could've just said "no"
- Yoric 2y agoSeen from a distance, it feels like it's mostly a case of social awkwardness strong enough to cause creepiness, rather than sexual predator. Did I miss something?
- hello_computer 2y agoI think a lot of this generative AI is going to be like fiber deployment in the late 90s. The movers and shakers are paying top-dollar for improvements that will have a brief shelf-life. Just as the googles and facebooks were able to buy dark fiber for pennies-on-the-dollar in the early 00s, some other upstart is going to bargain AI tools and talent from the adobes and openais of the world for a similar discount. That is to say, adobe is most likely doing this to train models that will put their current customers out of business. They probably think they're cutting-out the middleman for a better margin, but this seems like a greedy bet that could easily go sideways.