14 ms·

Richard Stallman on his experience in Cuba

39 points by mapleoin 18y ago

hendler 18y ago
Good article. RMS has an honest take on Cuba. Open source can lead to other freedoms - some good discussion of software freedom. "DT: I've editorialized that U.S. companies should be allowed to compete in Cuba. What's your position on that? RMS: I really don't care. From my point of view, business issues are minor in comparison with issues of human rights and general well-being. "
- biohacker42 18y ago
  Depends on what he means by business issues. A very good argument can be easily made that a fiat currency is a necessary but not sufficient element in modern well-being. Prior to fiat currencies there was a fixed amount of gold, and every coin in your pocket was a coin out of someone else's pocket. Imagine a fixed number of software copies, a gold based currency is a lot like DRM for money. Further more you can easily argue that making health care part of employer compensation (as is common in the US) leads to less well-being then making it a separate (in Europe often nationalized) good. Those are two business issues with a direct impact on general well-being, and that's just off the top of my head.
  - hendler 18y ago
    Good point - business issues and quality of life are not mutually exclusive. But for me, I interpreted the statement as "When business issues and quality of life issues are in conflict and you have to choose one over the other, I choose quality of life issues". Maybe I misread.
  - jacoblyles 18y ago
    You're wrong on the fiat-money/gold standard point. You're forgetting about the price level. Any given economy can be run on any given supply of money, the prices and currency denominations just need to adjust. A gold standard doesn't transform an economy into a zero-sum game. Pure fiat money has been functioning in the West since only 1971 when Nixon suspended the dollar's conversion to gold as a prelude to a rather shitty decade in terms of economic performance. Fiat currency has been tried plenty of times over the last few centuries; it was never a stable monetary regime. Our experiment with fiat is new and bold, and as yet unproven. If it turns out to be successful, it would be the first time.
    - biohacker42 18y ago
      What happens if new value is added to the economy? Perhaps I've just discovered a cure for the common cold. The same amount of money is now chasing a bigger pot. Suppose lots of people pay me for my cure, and I just save all the money, what happens to the restaurant down the road? Also fiat currencies predate Nixon, the paper contracts between members of the Hanseatic League can be thought of as a form of fiat currency.
      - jacoblyles 18y ago
        The same amount of money chasing fewer goods leads to deflation - each unit of currency can buy more goods. When this occurs due to an increase in productivity, such as in the example you describe, deflation can accompany economic growth. Deflation was paired with economic growth in the United States under the gold standard for about 30 years at the end of the 19th century. This was a good recent article on a related topic. Selgin is a well-known monetary economist: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/09/00014/ http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/09/00014/
        biohacker42 18y ago
        From the article: After all, technology was improving, so goods cost less to produce. Why shouldn’t prices reflect that reality? When it's cheaper and easier to pull MORE gold out of the ground, that's not strictly speaking a fixed money supply. When Rome (the empire) dumped a whole bunch of new found (stolen) gold on Rome (the city) that caused inflation too. If your money supply is growing - it's growing. Now if you have far too lose a monetary policy and you're inflating the money supply way too much and way too fast, that can be disastrous. But if Alan Greenspan had found a way to convert led into gold, we would have gotten the real estate bubble even with a gold standard.
        corentin 18y ago
        Except he hasn't. Under the gold standard, there is a feedback loop allowing the market to control inflation (that is, people can invest more or less in mining technologies/companies). To some extent, this feedback loop also exists in a central banking system; it's far from being as efficient.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  Business freedoms lead to human rights and general well-being. Having a thriving private economy gives people choice over their profession. Increased wealth means people have more choice over their lives. Cuba legalized the private purchase of cell phones and computers in 2008, but most people are far too poor to buy one. If that were to change, it would be a clear improvement in Cubans' lives. Let us not forget the legions of Cubans who have risked their lives on makeshift rafts to find a better life in the United States.
  - rbanffy 18y ago
    "Business freedoms lead to human rights and general well-being" Business freedoms are also a consequence of other rights, like the right to property. They are nice, but not required.
  - kragen 18y ago
    While it is true that increased wealth means that people have more choice in their lives, it does not necessarily follow that business freedoms lead to general well-being or to what is normally understood as human rights. As a matter of history, there have been very many places and times where business was relatively unrestricted, while labor and political activity were tightly regulated, and where the wealth from business failed to improve the lots of most of the population. Current examples of some of these tendencies might include Dubai, Singapore, and some parts of mainland China. Examples in the past include Chile under Pinochet, Nazi Germany, and at times, ancient Rome. Places at risk include London.
    - jacoblyles 18y ago
      If you wanted to pick a warning example, you could have done much better than Singapore. Singapore was a third-world country when the current ruling party took over in the mid-60s. Today, it has a higher per capita GDP than the United States, and three times that of neighboring Malaysia. In the dark days of the 60s, Singapore was threatened by the communist plague sweeping over Southeast Asia, racial tensions and riots, and hostile neighbor states. The fact that it survives and thrives today is remarkable. Yes, its government violated "human rights" along the way. In the 60s it aggressively persecuted communists, forbid their literature, and drove communist labor movements out of the country. This offends our Western sensibilities, but it did allow Singapore to avoid the fate of Vietnam and Cambodia. Was it worth it? I think the citizens of Singapore, both then and now, would say "yes". In most circumstances I am a Western liberal. But I refuse to follow any ideology blindly to the point that it leads me to advocating catastrophe. Today, Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world. It is regularly ranked by international organizations as one of the 10 least corrupt, often beating the United States. Maybe its people are lacking "human rights", but their quality of life is matched by few peoples of the world, and none in Southeast Asia. The fact that it appears to be an example for the China "communists" gives me hope for the future of that country.
narag 18y ago
From the article: So I said, "Cuba has an important resource - lots of people who have never learned to use Windows. And here you are, destroying that resource, gratuitously. If you are not ready yet to switch these clubs so that they teach people free software, at least you should shut them down until they can." Does he say this seriously? I've seen people using this kind of hyperbole when in a partisan environment to have a laughs. But I have no clue from the article that this is humorous.
- corentin 18y ago
  He certainly is serious. But as long as his ridiculous totalitarian/communist ideas only apply to software, he's mostly harmless.
  - gaius 18y ago
    I think Stallman's $1M grant from the MacArthur Foundation has given him a rather skewed idea about how economics works for most people even in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
  - alecco 18y ago
    HN, wtf. Stallman is many things but would never, ever be "totalitarian/communist." Who is voting this troll up? Come on, this is supposed to be a hacker site. He even talks about regime change in Cuba to open up.
    - galactus 18y ago
      I think he just forgot "unamerican"
    - corentin 18y ago
      That's not what I'm talking about. Stallman declared he'd rather see computer clubs closed than using Windows. He wants to convert (I'm quoting the article) the "important resource" (read: people 'unspoiled' by Windows) to free software (just like Che Guevara who went to Africa to convert people unspoiled by capitalism to the ideal of communism). So I rest my case: as far as software is concerned, he is a totalitarian.
wallflower 18y ago
"One of the things we see when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs, and we see this in the U.S. all the time. The U.S. government has ceased to effectively monitor the market to make sure it works well. Instead, it is a tool in the hands of big business." I think Stallman's views tend towards the extreme but I have to agree with this one.
- tjic 18y ago
  > when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs It's called Regulatory Capture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture It happens all the time. The vast majority of regulation ends up doing nothing more than giving the existing large competitors in a space a tool to keep out new entrants and smaller, scrappier competitors. One of the reasons that the software industry is do dynamic is because it's not regulated.
  - electromagnetic 18y ago
    An illustration of this point is that in the UK the regulations for electricians, and building contractors in general, actually promotes small companies. They're usually either a two-man team or a father-son op. In fact the largest I ever saw was a three man team, which was a two-man team with one of their sons. The point is, is that the regulations actually keep the income evenly disbursed. Essentially everyone is earning between £60,000 and £100,000 a year depending on what you do and how well you do it. However, when you work for a company (companies seem to exclusively do large businesses like factories and the few that don't have very bad reps) you earn much less, some get paid between £40,000 and £60,000. You, of course, get you tools paid for but they're a one time purchase, I mean our most expensive piece of equipment was a £1,000 tester and it has a 10 year warranty on it, so there is literally no incentive to go with one of those companies. The companies actually run a scam, they hire people who aren't certified electricians, which is perfectly acceptable and legal. However they'll never train them to be certified, they just use already-certified electricians to certify everyone's work is done correctly. Again this is unfair on the certified electricians because if anyone screws up and he doesn't catch it, he's liable and that can include a prison sentence if someone dies from shoddy work. My point is that regulation can be used in many ways. Big business takes over the regulators, but when used effectively a regulator can actually promote smaller business and stop economic pyramid schemes forming (AKA big business, people work for minimum wage so that the people at the top can earn over a million a year). The fact that software isn't regulated is a good thing right now. There's lots of competition and there's self-regulation going on. There's lots of virus' out there, but if you stick to the sites certified by Microsoft and don't go on any sites that google suggests may be harmful to your computer, then you're largely to be fine. However, if companies like Google and Microsoft weren't providing some form of assistance to users, then I believe the software industry would need regulation, which would probably kill millions of blogs and social websites.
Hexstream 18y ago
"Well, they were probably a bit surprised, because they never thought about these things in these terms. But now I'm in touch with somebody who has converted one youth club to use free software, and he's now talking with the people who run the other youth clubs in his region, trying to convert them. So something's finally getting done." Notice the religious terminology. The Church of Emacs, eh. edit: Is it possible to use bold here?
- blasdel 18y ago
  No, you no can has bold. Italics are allowed because they allow you to annotate emphasis without making the text stand out more than normal -- you only notice it inline. Allowing bold would lead to asshats writing like Jeff Atwood.
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    I wouldn't mind if there was a limit (maybe as few as 3) on the number of words you can make bold. Or a percentage of your post, or something. Now that I think about it the same solution could be used to support blockquote (ex: max 2 blockquotes in a post + other restrictions). After all the argument against implementing it was that excessive use of quoting is often bad style. I think it's pretty ridiculous not to support useful features just because 1% of people might misuse it.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

39 points by mapleoin 18y ago

Good article. RMS has an honest take on Cuba. Open source can lead to other freedoms - some good discussion of software freedom. "DT: I've editorialized that U.S. companies should be allowed to compete in Cuba. What's your position on that? RMS: I really don't care. From my point of view, business issues are minor in comparison with issues of human rights and general well-being. "

biohacker42 18y ago
Depends on what he means by business issues. A very good argument can be easily made that a fiat currency is a necessary but not sufficient element in modern well-being. Prior to fiat currencies there was a fixed amount of gold, and every coin in your pocket was a coin out of someone else's pocket. Imagine a fixed number of software copies, a gold based currency is a lot like DRM for money. Further more you can easily argue that making health care part of employer compensation (as is common in the US) leads to less well-being then making it a separate (in Europe often nationalized) good. Those are two business issues with a direct impact on general well-being, and that's just off the top of my head.
- hendler 18y ago
  Good point - business issues and quality of life are not mutually exclusive. But for me, I interpreted the statement as "When business issues and quality of life issues are in conflict and you have to choose one over the other, I choose quality of life issues". Maybe I misread.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  You're wrong on the fiat-money/gold standard point. You're forgetting about the price level. Any given economy can be run on any given supply of money, the prices and currency denominations just need to adjust. A gold standard doesn't transform an economy into a zero-sum game. Pure fiat money has been functioning in the West since only 1971 when Nixon suspended the dollar's conversion to gold as a prelude to a rather shitty decade in terms of economic performance. Fiat currency has been tried plenty of times over the last few centuries; it was never a stable monetary regime. Our experiment with fiat is new and bold, and as yet unproven. If it turns out to be successful, it would be the first time.
  - biohacker42 18y ago
    What happens if new value is added to the economy? Perhaps I've just discovered a cure for the common cold. The same amount of money is now chasing a bigger pot. Suppose lots of people pay me for my cure, and I just save all the money, what happens to the restaurant down the road? Also fiat currencies predate Nixon, the paper contracts between members of the Hanseatic League can be thought of as a form of fiat currency.
    - jacoblyles 18y ago
      The same amount of money chasing fewer goods leads to deflation - each unit of currency can buy more goods. When this occurs due to an increase in productivity, such as in the example you describe, deflation can accompany economic growth. Deflation was paired with economic growth in the United States under the gold standard for about 30 years at the end of the 19th century. This was a good recent article on a related topic. Selgin is a well-known monetary economist: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/09/00014/ http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/09/00014/
      - biohacker42 18y ago
        From the article: After all, technology was improving, so goods cost less to produce. Why shouldn’t prices reflect that reality? When it's cheaper and easier to pull MORE gold out of the ground, that's not strictly speaking a fixed money supply. When Rome (the empire) dumped a whole bunch of new found (stolen) gold on Rome (the city) that caused inflation too. If your money supply is growing - it's growing. Now if you have far too lose a monetary policy and you're inflating the money supply way too much and way too fast, that can be disastrous. But if Alan Greenspan had found a way to convert led into gold, we would have gotten the real estate bubble even with a gold standard.
        corentin 18y ago
        Except he hasn't. Under the gold standard, there is a feedback loop allowing the market to control inflation (that is, people can invest more or less in mining technologies/companies). To some extent, this feedback loop also exists in a central banking system; it's far from being as efficient.
jacoblyles 18y ago
Business freedoms lead to human rights and general well-being. Having a thriving private economy gives people choice over their profession. Increased wealth means people have more choice over their lives. Cuba legalized the private purchase of cell phones and computers in 2008, but most people are far too poor to buy one. If that were to change, it would be a clear improvement in Cubans' lives. Let us not forget the legions of Cubans who have risked their lives on makeshift rafts to find a better life in the United States.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  "Business freedoms lead to human rights and general well-being" Business freedoms are also a consequence of other rights, like the right to property. They are nice, but not required.
- kragen 18y ago
  While it is true that increased wealth means that people have more choice in their lives, it does not necessarily follow that business freedoms lead to general well-being or to what is normally understood as human rights. As a matter of history, there have been very many places and times where business was relatively unrestricted, while labor and political activity were tightly regulated, and where the wealth from business failed to improve the lots of most of the population. Current examples of some of these tendencies might include Dubai, Singapore, and some parts of mainland China. Examples in the past include Chile under Pinochet, Nazi Germany, and at times, ancient Rome. Places at risk include London.
  - jacoblyles 18y ago
    If you wanted to pick a warning example, you could have done much better than Singapore. Singapore was a third-world country when the current ruling party took over in the mid-60s. Today, it has a higher per capita GDP than the United States, and three times that of neighboring Malaysia. In the dark days of the 60s, Singapore was threatened by the communist plague sweeping over Southeast Asia, racial tensions and riots, and hostile neighbor states. The fact that it survives and thrives today is remarkable. Yes, its government violated "human rights" along the way. In the 60s it aggressively persecuted communists, forbid their literature, and drove communist labor movements out of the country. This offends our Western sensibilities, but it did allow Singapore to avoid the fate of Vietnam and Cambodia. Was it worth it? I think the citizens of Singapore, both then and now, would say "yes". In most circumstances I am a Western liberal. But I refuse to follow any ideology blindly to the point that it leads me to advocating catastrophe. Today, Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world. It is regularly ranked by international organizations as one of the 10 least corrupt, often beating the United States. Maybe its people are lacking "human rights", but their quality of life is matched by few peoples of the world, and none in Southeast Asia. The fact that it appears to be an example for the China "communists" gives me hope for the future of that country.

narag 18y ago

From the article: So I said, "Cuba has an important resource - lots of people who have never learned to use Windows. And here you are, destroying that resource, gratuitously. If you are not ready yet to switch these clubs so that they teach people free software, at least you should shut them down until they can." Does he say this seriously? I've seen people using this kind of hyperbole when in a partisan environment to have a laughs. But I have no clue from the article that this is humorous.

corentin 18y ago
He certainly is serious. But as long as his ridiculous totalitarian/communist ideas only apply to software, he's mostly harmless.
- gaius 18y ago
  I think Stallman's $1M grant from the MacArthur Foundation has given him a rather skewed idea about how economics works for most people even in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
- alecco 18y ago
  HN, wtf. Stallman is many things but would never, ever be "totalitarian/communist." Who is voting this troll up? Come on, this is supposed to be a hacker site. He even talks about regime change in Cuba to open up.
  - galactus 18y ago
    I think he just forgot "unamerican"
  - corentin 18y ago
    That's not what I'm talking about. Stallman declared he'd rather see computer clubs closed than using Windows. He wants to convert (I'm quoting the article) the "important resource" (read: people 'unspoiled' by Windows) to free software (just like Che Guevara who went to Africa to convert people unspoiled by capitalism to the ideal of communism). So I rest my case: as far as software is concerned, he is a totalitarian.

wallflower 18y ago

"One of the things we see when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs, and we see this in the U.S. all the time. The U.S. government has ceased to effectively monitor the market to make sure it works well. Instead, it is a tool in the hands of big business." I think Stallman's views tend towards the extreme but I have to agree with this one.

tjic 18y ago
> when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs It's called Regulatory Capture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture It happens all the time. The vast majority of regulation ends up doing nothing more than giving the existing large competitors in a space a tool to keep out new entrants and smaller, scrappier competitors. One of the reasons that the software industry is do dynamic is because it's not regulated.
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  An illustration of this point is that in the UK the regulations for electricians, and building contractors in general, actually promotes small companies. They're usually either a two-man team or a father-son op. In fact the largest I ever saw was a three man team, which was a two-man team with one of their sons. The point is, is that the regulations actually keep the income evenly disbursed. Essentially everyone is earning between £60,000 and £100,000 a year depending on what you do and how well you do it. However, when you work for a company (companies seem to exclusively do large businesses like factories and the few that don't have very bad reps) you earn much less, some get paid between £40,000 and £60,000. You, of course, get you tools paid for but they're a one time purchase, I mean our most expensive piece of equipment was a £1,000 tester and it has a 10 year warranty on it, so there is literally no incentive to go with one of those companies. The companies actually run a scam, they hire people who aren't certified electricians, which is perfectly acceptable and legal. However they'll never train them to be certified, they just use already-certified electricians to certify everyone's work is done correctly. Again this is unfair on the certified electricians because if anyone screws up and he doesn't catch it, he's liable and that can include a prison sentence if someone dies from shoddy work. My point is that regulation can be used in many ways. Big business takes over the regulators, but when used effectively a regulator can actually promote smaller business and stop economic pyramid schemes forming (AKA big business, people work for minimum wage so that the people at the top can earn over a million a year). The fact that software isn't regulated is a good thing right now. There's lots of competition and there's self-regulation going on. There's lots of virus' out there, but if you stick to the sites certified by Microsoft and don't go on any sites that google suggests may be harmful to your computer, then you're largely to be fine. However, if companies like Google and Microsoft weren't providing some form of assistance to users, then I believe the software industry would need regulation, which would probably kill millions of blogs and social websites.

Hexstream 18y ago

"Well, they were probably a bit surprised, because they never thought about these things in these terms. But now I'm in touch with somebody who has converted one youth club to use free software, and he's now talking with the people who run the other youth clubs in his region, trying to convert them. So something's finally getting done." Notice the religious terminology. The Church of Emacs, eh. edit: Is it possible to use bold here?

blasdel 18y ago
No, you no can has bold. Italics are allowed because they allow you to annotate emphasis without making the text stand out more than normal -- you only notice it inline. Allowing bold would lead to asshats writing like Jeff Atwood.
- Hexstream 18y ago
  I wouldn't mind if there was a limit (maybe as few as 3) on the number of words you can make bold. Or a percentage of your post, or something. Now that I think about it the same solution could be used to support blockquote (ex: max 2 blockquotes in a post + other restrictions). After all the argument against implementing it was that excessive use of quoting is often bad style. I think it's pretty ridiculous not to support useful features just because 1% of people might misuse it.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]