8 ms·

The tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't and businesses still will use any tactic possible to milk their accumulated crop of consu

by meaty 14y ago

The tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't and businesses still will use any tactic possible to milk their accumulated crop of consumers dry and protect them from other wolves. Better start listening to stallman if you want all that (I certainly do).

crusso 14y ago
Better start listening to stallman if you want all that Why? Stallman has written some software and posited some interesting ideas, but his philosophical bent lacks any kind of holistic approach to problem solving in the real world. When Stallman tries to extend his ideas to larger contexts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd), he fails because he's not a big picture guy. He's a laser-focused ideologue. If you want that Star Trekky future, you're better off listening to the words of those who built business models (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Walt Disney, etc.), not operating system libraries and software licenses.
- meaty 14y ago
  I think you missed his point, and mine. His solution is simply that the real world is broken and needs fixing, which it sorely does. If you want that Star Trekky future, throw the corporations out who want to partition everyone into markets like cattle. Then build stuff for the good of humanity, not for cash. Oh wait - there's GNU already in that space. Jobs, Bezos, Disney just worked out how to sell shit, not respect our freedoms or improve the world.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    That is a tricky issue and comes down to financing riskier innovation. It is worth remembering that GNU originally existed as a way to clone a non free system in a way that made it free. A lot of open source development is also done or funded by corporations to help build commoditize the parts they need in order to create platforms for software and media that are in many cases fairly walled garden. Stallman and the like may have produced fine C compilers and text editors but it would seem unlikely for them to come up with something like the iPhone.
    - meaty 14y ago
      I think you overestimate the importance of the smartphone. A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network and to be honest, isn't required for humanity to function. It's an accessory, not a necessity. If they disappeared overnight, the world would still turn. The same is not true for the text editor and compiler.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        The same could be said about most pieces of technology. If emacs disappeared tomorrow the HN server would probably be crushed under the weight of angsty developers but stuff would still keep happening. It's not like GNU developed the first C compiler or text editor either, Stallman seems to believe the priority should be on developing free alternatives to things that have already been made (i.e the risk taken) by a proprietary company. This is reflected in the FSF "high priority" list: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ If you want a Star Trek future you need to develop all the little pieces of technology that are required incrementally.
      - schiffern 14y ago
        >A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network You know what else is a non-free network? The entire internet. Clearly humanity would still turn if computers didn't exist at all, but I would argue that the internet has been directly responsible for more social change than the text editor and the compiler. If you want to trivially argue that the text editor and compiler are prerequisites for the internet, then I would point out that James Maxwell should deserve far more credit than either Steve Jobs or Richard Stallman. >The same is not true for the text editor and compiler. Now I know you're joking.
        vacri 14y ago
        Given that the internet is dependent on the text editor and the compiler, you can't separate them like that.
        14y ago
  - theorique 14y ago
    Well, one could argue that they improved the world in certain focused ways. For example, Amazon and Apple have raised the bar in online sales, delivery logistics, smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. This doesn't absolve them from the fact that some of their revolution has taken place behind a paywall. But to say that they haven't improved the world because it didn't happen perfectly, is not quite correct. My life - and that of many of my peers - is substantially better due to the actions of Amazon and Apple.
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      "is substantially better" That's ... not the normal definition of "substantial". Your life is materially more convenient, probably much much more so. The argument here is that the small and widely distributed negatives inherent in that model affect social things that are literally "substantial" and the gain in individual convenience is a poor tradeoff.
      - theorique 14y ago
        All I mean that I can point to several specific ways in which my life is improved ("materially more convenient", if you prefer) because of the actions of these companies. I'm not sure what specifically you mean by "small and widely distributed negatives", but the balance of convenience against cost is something that each customer decides. If being a customer of Apple, Amazon (or whoever) is perceived as a net benefit, people become a customer. If not, then they don't.
        freshhawk 14y ago
        But the argument was that they "improved the world", not that they were a good cost/benefit tradeoff for each individual consumer. One of those has to take negative externalities (aka social/legal consequences or the "small and widely distributed negatives" I was referring to) and the other does not. You don't get a "star trek future" by trading freedom for micro-improvements in convenience.
    - zem 14y ago
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    You're apparently not keeping up with the times, Stallman is imminently practical and realistic: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/richard-stallman-software-patents/ http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/richard-stallman-softwa... There's also the whole GPL, one of, if not the, most widely used software licenses in the world.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    > His solution is simply that the real world is broken and needs fixing, which it sorely does. That's not a solution, that's a problem.
- Androsynth 14y ago
  Long after Steve Jobs is relegated to the dustbin of Past Industrialists and Apple has regressed to the mean, Stallmans work will still be moving both technology and our society forward in ways that are meaningful and positive.
  - rimantas 14y ago
    Sorry, but that is utter bullshit. Somehow Stallman's importance is somewhere in foggy future with a lot of handwaving and FUD. The real relevance of his ideas is already in the past. I won't be surprised a bit if at the time you are talking about most OSS will be under MIT/BSD type licenses not GPL.
    - jacquesm 14y ago
      Strong disagree. GPL licensed software is powering an ever increasing fraction of all devices. Far more than I would have ever believed in only a decade ago. There are some interesting network effects at work here. Th e more GPL'd software there is out there the bigger the chunk you have to write yourself (or pay someone to write) would have to be if you want to forego it. Hence Linksys and Android. Those would have never gotten as far as they did without the GPL's software underneath their externally visible features as a foundation to build on. Linux on the desktop may never happen, but linux in your pocket is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point.
      - Evbn 14y ago
        Internet killed GPL. AGPL tried to win the Inernet, and the corporations dodged it.
        rhizome 14y ago
        The internet killed the GPL? Tell that to my home servers.
        freyrs3 14y ago
        Most of the internet runs on a kernel that is GPL'd.
- voyou 14y ago
  If you want a Star Trek future, the last people you should be listening to are Jobs or Disney: http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/ http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of...
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    >as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. Wow, that's frustrating. It's not communist, it's post scarcity! Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited? Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money? Communism, in contrast, is a different approach to dealing with finite resources. That is, if all resources were infinite we wouldn't need communism either. Otherwise the article looks good, but I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order.
    - greggman 14y ago
      This seems way off topic but too fun not to discuss Even in a world with replicators someone gets the penthouse, someone else gets the first floor. Someone gets the 1br apartment in Detroit. Someone else gets the beachfront mansion. That's just one example of the things a replicator will not make less scarce. Another is people's time. Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.
      - TeMPOraL 14y ago
        > Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces. Why would you like to make a next CoD? Because you think it's fun and many people would enjoy it. You know they want it. There are likely to be more than 200 talented people wanting to take part in making this game. For fun, because they like the idea, they want the game to be made. In post-scarcity society you and others won't have much extrinsic motivators; the intrinsic ones would run the society.
- ippisl 14y ago
  open source is a co-operation model. Historically new and sucsessfull cooperation models(democracy, capitalism , scientific method) had a larger effect than new products and services. One interesting example is the industrial revolution: some claim that the technical innovations at that time are the result of England becoming a capitalist state based on competition(starting with land owners encouraging competition between farmers on productivity). Will stallman succeed ? I don't know. But i wonder if the option he opened of extremely open source software has made companies more receptive to various kinds of open source licenses and business models that led to the large open source ecosystem we have today.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    How is capitalism a cooperation model? How is Democracy, for that matter?
    - czr80 14y ago
      Capitalism is built on cooperation - its foundation is mutually beneficial trades.
      - Radim 14y ago
        Not to split hairs, but that would be "free markets". Free markets are neither necessary nor sufficient condition for capitalism. Compare the US in its heyday vs. the present day "state capitalism" in Europe and China.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - ippisl 14y ago
      Democracy - The ability to vote peridically and demonstrate , the constitution are all various institutions that give power to citizens to influence the decisions of the ruler. Capitalism - a combination of cooperation and competition by companies to achieve goals many consumers cooperate on getting(by paying). BTW when a few companies compete on the same goal , it's also a kind of cooperation.
- rhizome 14y ago
  Funny you should use those companies as examples of RMS's disconnection from "problem solving in the real world," since Apple's resurgence over the past 10 years is directly attributable to their adoption of BSD Unix as the basis for OSX, and Amazon's (and Pixar's) tech stack has been highly dependent (dependent) on Linux and Perl (Python in Pixar's case) over the years. All of these technologies owe all or most of their existence (existence) to the efforts of RMS, full-stop.
- pi18n 14y ago
  Apple and Disney are two of the most egregious campaigning against freedom via patent and copyright law. It's not going to be a Star Trek-like future when you are only allowed to sell ships without rounded rectangle displays and only allowed to use warp drive software from the single distributor.
nicholassmith 14y ago
Even Stallman wants you to live in an ecosystem, it's just his vision of an ecosystem.
- pjscott 14y ago
  Stallman's vision of an ecosystem is one in which you're not locked in by your data, since it's all in open formats and under your control. That makes his ideology very easy to get along with.
  - zem 14y ago
    easy for us; not so easy for people aligned with the "lock your customers in as a revenue stream" model.
crag 14y ago
"tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't " I think consumers "can" be smarter. Given a chance. Right now they (we) are inundated with marketing. It's everywhere. So much so, that's hard to make an informed decision (this is especially true in politics). Corporations (and many politicians) aren't interested in "truth". They're interested in making the sale. And the best way to do that is emphasized the good of the product and ignore the bad. Every "product" in the world does this. From Coke to a credit cards.

by meaty 14y ago

crusso 14y ago

Better start listening to stallman if you want all that Why? Stallman has written some software and posited some interesting ideas, but his philosophical bent lacks any kind of holistic approach to problem solving in the real world. When Stallman tries to extend his ideas to larger contexts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd), he fails because he's not a big picture guy. He's a laser-focused ideologue. If you want that Star Trekky future, you're better off listening to the words of those who built business models (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Walt Disney, etc.), not operating system libraries and software licenses.

meaty 14y ago
I think you missed his point, and mine. His solution is simply that the real world is broken and needs fixing, which it sorely does. If you want that Star Trekky future, throw the corporations out who want to partition everyone into markets like cattle. Then build stuff for the good of humanity, not for cash. Oh wait - there's GNU already in that space. Jobs, Bezos, Disney just worked out how to sell shit, not respect our freedoms or improve the world.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  That is a tricky issue and comes down to financing riskier innovation. It is worth remembering that GNU originally existed as a way to clone a non free system in a way that made it free. A lot of open source development is also done or funded by corporations to help build commoditize the parts they need in order to create platforms for software and media that are in many cases fairly walled garden. Stallman and the like may have produced fine C compilers and text editors but it would seem unlikely for them to come up with something like the iPhone.
  - meaty 14y ago
    I think you overestimate the importance of the smartphone. A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network and to be honest, isn't required for humanity to function. It's an accessory, not a necessity. If they disappeared overnight, the world would still turn. The same is not true for the text editor and compiler.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      The same could be said about most pieces of technology. If emacs disappeared tomorrow the HN server would probably be crushed under the weight of angsty developers but stuff would still keep happening. It's not like GNU developed the first C compiler or text editor either, Stallman seems to believe the priority should be on developing free alternatives to things that have already been made (i.e the risk taken) by a proprietary company. This is reflected in the FSF "high priority" list: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ If you want a Star Trek future you need to develop all the little pieces of technology that are required incrementally.
    - schiffern 14y ago
      >A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network You know what else is a non-free network? The entire internet. Clearly humanity would still turn if computers didn't exist at all, but I would argue that the internet has been directly responsible for more social change than the text editor and the compiler. If you want to trivially argue that the text editor and compiler are prerequisites for the internet, then I would point out that James Maxwell should deserve far more credit than either Steve Jobs or Richard Stallman. >The same is not true for the text editor and compiler. Now I know you're joking.
      - vacri 14y ago
        Given that the internet is dependent on the text editor and the compiler, you can't separate them like that.
        14y ago
- theorique 14y ago
  Well, one could argue that they improved the world in certain focused ways. For example, Amazon and Apple have raised the bar in online sales, delivery logistics, smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. This doesn't absolve them from the fact that some of their revolution has taken place behind a paywall. But to say that they haven't improved the world because it didn't happen perfectly, is not quite correct. My life - and that of many of my peers - is substantially better due to the actions of Amazon and Apple.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    "is substantially better" That's ... not the normal definition of "substantial". Your life is materially more convenient, probably much much more so. The argument here is that the small and widely distributed negatives inherent in that model affect social things that are literally "substantial" and the gain in individual convenience is a poor tradeoff.
    - theorique 14y ago
      All I mean that I can point to several specific ways in which my life is improved ("materially more convenient", if you prefer) because of the actions of these companies. I'm not sure what specifically you mean by "small and widely distributed negatives", but the balance of convenience against cost is something that each customer decides. If being a customer of Apple, Amazon (or whoever) is perceived as a net benefit, people become a customer. If not, then they don't.
      - freshhawk 14y ago
        But the argument was that they "improved the world", not that they were a good cost/benefit tradeoff for each individual consumer. One of those has to take negative externalities (aka social/legal consequences or the "small and widely distributed negatives" I was referring to) and the other does not. You don't get a "star trek future" by trading freedom for micro-improvements in convenience.
  - zem 14y ago
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  You're apparently not keeping up with the times, Stallman is imminently practical and realistic: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/richard-stallman-software-patents/ http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/richard-stallman-softwa... There's also the whole GPL, one of, if not the, most widely used software licenses in the world.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  > His solution is simply that the real world is broken and needs fixing, which it sorely does. That's not a solution, that's a problem.
Androsynth 14y ago
Long after Steve Jobs is relegated to the dustbin of Past Industrialists and Apple has regressed to the mean, Stallmans work will still be moving both technology and our society forward in ways that are meaningful and positive.
- rimantas 14y ago
  Sorry, but that is utter bullshit. Somehow Stallman's importance is somewhere in foggy future with a lot of handwaving and FUD. The real relevance of his ideas is already in the past. I won't be surprised a bit if at the time you are talking about most OSS will be under MIT/BSD type licenses not GPL.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Strong disagree. GPL licensed software is powering an ever increasing fraction of all devices. Far more than I would have ever believed in only a decade ago. There are some interesting network effects at work here. Th e more GPL'd software there is out there the bigger the chunk you have to write yourself (or pay someone to write) would have to be if you want to forego it. Hence Linksys and Android. Those would have never gotten as far as they did without the GPL's software underneath their externally visible features as a foundation to build on. Linux on the desktop may never happen, but linux in your pocket is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Internet killed GPL. AGPL tried to win the Inernet, and the corporations dodged it.
      - rhizome 14y ago
        The internet killed the GPL? Tell that to my home servers.
      - freyrs3 14y ago
        Most of the internet runs on a kernel that is GPL'd.
voyou 14y ago
If you want a Star Trek future, the last people you should be listening to are Jobs or Disney: http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/ http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of...
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  >as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. Wow, that's frustrating. It's not communist, it's post scarcity! Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited? Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money? Communism, in contrast, is a different approach to dealing with finite resources. That is, if all resources were infinite we wouldn't need communism either. Otherwise the article looks good, but I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order.
  - greggman 14y ago
    This seems way off topic but too fun not to discuss Even in a world with replicators someone gets the penthouse, someone else gets the first floor. Someone gets the 1br apartment in Detroit. Someone else gets the beachfront mansion. That's just one example of the things a replicator will not make less scarce. Another is people's time. Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.
    - TeMPOraL 14y ago
      > Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces. Why would you like to make a next CoD? Because you think it's fun and many people would enjoy it. You know they want it. There are likely to be more than 200 talented people wanting to take part in making this game. For fun, because they like the idea, they want the game to be made. In post-scarcity society you and others won't have much extrinsic motivators; the intrinsic ones would run the society.
ippisl 14y ago
open source is a co-operation model. Historically new and sucsessfull cooperation models(democracy, capitalism , scientific method) had a larger effect than new products and services. One interesting example is the industrial revolution: some claim that the technical innovations at that time are the result of England becoming a capitalist state based on competition(starting with land owners encouraging competition between farmers on productivity). Will stallman succeed ? I don't know. But i wonder if the option he opened of extremely open source software has made companies more receptive to various kinds of open source licenses and business models that led to the large open source ecosystem we have today.
- Evbn 14y ago
  How is capitalism a cooperation model? How is Democracy, for that matter?
  - czr80 14y ago
    Capitalism is built on cooperation - its foundation is mutually beneficial trades.
    - Radim 14y ago
      Not to split hairs, but that would be "free markets". Free markets are neither necessary nor sufficient condition for capitalism. Compare the US in its heyday vs. the present day "state capitalism" in Europe and China.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - ippisl 14y ago
    Democracy - The ability to vote peridically and demonstrate , the constitution are all various institutions that give power to citizens to influence the decisions of the ruler. Capitalism - a combination of cooperation and competition by companies to achieve goals many consumers cooperate on getting(by paying). BTW when a few companies compete on the same goal , it's also a kind of cooperation.
rhizome 14y ago
Funny you should use those companies as examples of RMS's disconnection from "problem solving in the real world," since Apple's resurgence over the past 10 years is directly attributable to their adoption of BSD Unix as the basis for OSX, and Amazon's (and Pixar's) tech stack has been highly dependent (dependent) on Linux and Perl (Python in Pixar's case) over the years. All of these technologies owe all or most of their existence (existence) to the efforts of RMS, full-stop.
pi18n 14y ago
Apple and Disney are two of the most egregious campaigning against freedom via patent and copyright law. It's not going to be a Star Trek-like future when you are only allowed to sell ships without rounded rectangle displays and only allowed to use warp drive software from the single distributor.

nicholassmith 14y ago

Even Stallman wants you to live in an ecosystem, it's just his vision of an ecosystem.

pjscott 14y ago
Stallman's vision of an ecosystem is one in which you're not locked in by your data, since it's all in open formats and under your control. That makes his ideology very easy to get along with.
- zem 14y ago
  easy for us; not so easy for people aligned with the "lock your customers in as a revenue stream" model.

crag 14y ago

"tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't " I think consumers "can" be smarter. Given a chance. Right now they (we) are inundated with marketing. It's everywhere. So much so, that's hard to make an informed decision (this is especially true in politics). Corporations (and many politicians) aren't interested in "truth". They're interested in making the sale. And the best way to do that is emphasized the good of the product and ignore the bad. Every "product" in the world does this. From Coke to a credit cards.