6 ms·

Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beijing, China)

84 points by drydot 12y ago

danford 12y ago
Unfortunately too many people just give you a blank stare when you mention that 100 years from now we'll be printing up everything we can't augment. We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? Just go with whatever laws the corporations come up with? Are we going to continue to deprive children of software knowledge so that they're dependent on downloading worthless digital copies of closed source code with who knows what coded into it? Thing is once everyone can code, free and open-source digital goods will undoubtedly prevail.
- tzs 12y ago
  > We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? We can memorize copyrighted media now, without needing brain-machine-interfaces. I have hundreds (probably thousands) of copyrighted works memorized. My memory is not perfect, but it retains enough of these works that if I were to recall them and write down my recollections and distribute that, I would be infringing their copyrights. I don't foresee copyright law needing to be or actually being changed in response to the development of more efficient ways to get copyrighted media into our brains, such as brain-machine-interfaces.
  - sieisteinmodel 12y ago
    You cannot distribute it with 100% accuracy right now. Given the BMI assumption proves true, you will be. Thus, you can spread copyrighted material. Big difference.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  > How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? That's easy. DRM for machine-to-brain interfaces. Who's going to stop that from happening? Mozilla? The scary part will begin when they'll be able to delete our memories remotely, because we "stole" their media, or perhaps the content owner simply withdrew the license from the distributor, and now you're not allowed to "own" it anymore and keep it inside your brain. Or think about what happened inside the DoD when the Snowden leaks or the Wikileaks ones came out, and banned all employees from reading the articles about it. If you think that in the future we won't need "computers" anymore, because our brains will act as the computers of today, I could see the government setting up "infrastructure" to ban such leaks from getting accessed by people, or also deleting them remotely.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    Or, we could rise up and demand total control of our own minds. Freedom of thought, things like that. We need to educate the general public before they surrender their mind to proprietary software, though. And if people have no choice, there is still jail-breaking. And if jail-breaking is forbidden, I'll do it anyway. And possibly start a career as a runner. That would probably get me killed, but if I don't, I may not be able to look at my reflection in a mirror.
- general_failure 12y ago
  Everyone can code is a pipe dream. It requires high skill and specialization. It's like saying all of us can at some point make cars, houses, electricity and so on.
  - lwhalen 12y ago
    I disagree. Others have said (much more eloquently than I) that software is the new literacy. In a hundred years, I believe someone who can't at least read code will be at a disadvantage similar to someone who can't read English today.
    - loup-vaillant 12y ago
      I try not to make prediction that long in the future, because intelligence explosion is likely to happen sooner than that. http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ Once it does, we will likely fall into one of three outcomes: Heaven, Hell, or Annihilation —most likely Annihilation if we're not careful. Any finer point will be moot. (EDIT: Before you down-vote the singularity crap, please follow the link. The arguments are long, but serious. Machines will take over the world at some point. We just need to ensure they're gentle about it.)
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Programming is craftsmanship, not really literacy. The difference is that most people don't like crafting, but they do like communicating. Most people are consumers.
    - teacup50 12y ago
      Literacy is not the same thing as the ability and interest necessary to write a novel.
      - danford 12y ago
        But it is the ability to read and (for the most part) understand that novel, which is important. There are definitely more books (and things in general) being written in the age of literacy than there was before.
EGreg 12y ago
Do I even have t read this article? I bet I know what it will say. It's by Richard Stallman.
- judk 12y ago
  RMS's ideas don't quite square with Chinese law, and Chinese law doesn't take kindly to that sort of thing, which makes this interesting.
LiweiZ 12y ago
Just let you guys know that China is keeping increasing control of online content. And the new leader has his plan to push it to another extent. Not a nice outlook.
xuesj 12y ago
I do agree with freedom of individual,and free software is ok if it's authors want to free.
octref 12y ago
I found two relevant pictures: http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g14j.jpg http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g1... http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g49t.jpg http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g4... Does this custome has any culture-specific connotation? As a Chinese student I don't quite understand why RMS's dressing like this. Below is my comment on this news: Two years ago, when I left China for US college, I feel most people around me don't care about FOSS, or respect originality & copyright. - They use cracked software. You can buy a disk that installs cracked Windows for less than 1 dollar. Cracked Photoshop & MS Office & whatever licensed software are all over the internet. - They download music & movie for free. - China's internet is full of copycats because the original websites aren't available due to censorship. (Like FB & Twitter). One of the largest IT Company, Tencent, is full of copied products. But now I feel China is making some progress. Like: - Online streaming companies are paying for copyrighted material, and you can't easily download movie/anime for free as you do in the past. - As Apple becomes more popular, many people start paying for music in iTunes. To my delight, websites like http://mou.li/ http://mou.li/ even let people buy Sublime Text & Alfred & 1Password easily in China. I really can't believe people would pay over $50 for a text editor two years ago, but now some of them do. - A recent example. A very large company in China named Guokr launched a website: http://www.15yan.com/ http://www.15yan.com/ . It's a blatant copy of medium. And in their about page, they are literally saying something like "Our product is currently a copycat of Medium, and we'll adpat it to Chinese market to make it better". Shortly after the website went public, someone asked a question in a Chinese Q&A website: "Can we tolerate such blatant plagiarism?" Take a look at it: http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 . I know you can't read Chinese but take a look at the pictures in the highest upvoted(2130)[1] and third highest(756)[2] answers. Two Chinese Web-Devs compared the CSS and HTML of these two sites, expressed their anger, and described the copycat as "humiliating" and "disgusting". Nearly all the answerers requested this copycat going down immediately and said they'd never use it. I'm really happy China is really making some progress on this matter. [1]: http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m.jpg http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m... [2]: http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m.jpg http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
matt__rose 12y ago
RMS, once again, missing the forest for the trees.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  I believe your statement needs to be flushed out. It's very unclear and uninformative.
  - matt__rose 12y ago
    deignan's comment says it best here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080 If I were Chinese, the license of the software I was using would be far, far down my list of "Freedoms" that I was concerned about.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - icebraining 12y ago
      And rms would be the first to agree with you that there are more important freedoms: "I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom, because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say free software is as important as they are." And he explains why he speaks about Free Software: "It's the responsibility that I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them." "I wish I knew how to make a major difference on those bigger issues, because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard and lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working on them and have gotten only so far," he says. "But as I see it, while other people were defending against these big visible threats, I saw another threat that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against that threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was the only one there." Like any activist, he speaks of what he knows. That doesn't mean he considers the rest unimportant. Source: http://sisudoc.org/markup_samples.sisu_fn/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman/5.en.html http://sisudoc.org/markup_samples.sisu_fn/free_as_in_freedom...
rahimnathwani 12y ago
Can anyone who attended this comment on the content and, particularly, the reaction and questions from the audience? (It's already 9pm here in Beijing; the event was scheduled for 2pm-5pm.)
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Ya, it ended 4 hours ago, a bit late to post an invitation.
  - rahimnathwani 12y ago
    He's talking at FUDCon (Fedora Users' and Developers' Conference) on the same topic next weekend: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule
mark_l_watson 12y ago
This is one of Richard's recurring topics, and I agree with matt__rose and higherpurpose that there is some irony since China, along with a few other countries like the USA, Iran, Russia, could do with a more free and open internet. The Internet should be basic infrastructure, inexpensive, and very secure. That is the goal. I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages. Edit: typo
- sam11 12y ago
  I know I have the minority opinion Is that really the case on Hacker News? I often feel like a rebel outcast here for thinking that technology being proprietary is a desirable thing.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    Now that's interesting. Could you lay out, or point to, some arguments?
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  BTW, by "all kinds of open source" I meant to say that there are good use cases for GPL, Apache, etc. licenses, depending on the projects and the desires of the creators.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  The USA has a great firewall like china, Russia, and Iran? Well, til (or you could be exaggerating a connection between the USA and Chinese Internet, which would be very much BS).
- rockymeza 12y ago
  Please try using the Internet from China before you put it in the same sentence as the Internet in the USA.
- dengnan 12y ago
gbog 12y ago
I regret I missed the event. It should be noted that rms came to China already quite a few times. I hope his message goes thru and reaches a wide audience here, because keeping full control on ones digital life is as important in China as in other places, or even more. (And I think the main threat for laymen is not from government, but from companies who would sell their users' souls for a short-term increase of their market shares.)
- zhte415 12y ago
  I regret so too. Having just checked the FSF website, there will be a similar function on May 19th, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Admission open to the public, with or without registration. http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou For readers unfamiliar with Chinese academic institutions, both UCAS (May 17th) and Zhejiang (May 19th) are institutions noted nationally and internationally for graduate and research programs especially in sciences and engineering.
  - bbody 12y ago
    I went but there were so many people that the lecture hall was overflowing so I left.

84 points by drydot 12y ago

Unfortunately too many people just give you a blank stare when you mention that 100 years from now we'll be printing up everything we can't augment. We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? Just go with whatever laws the corporations come up with? Are we going to continue to deprive children of software knowledge so that they're dependent on downloading worthless digital copies of closed source code with who knows what coded into it? Thing is once everyone can code, free and open-source digital goods will undoubtedly prevail.

tzs 12y ago
> We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? We can memorize copyrighted media now, without needing brain-machine-interfaces. I have hundreds (probably thousands) of copyrighted works memorized. My memory is not perfect, but it retains enough of these works that if I were to recall them and write down my recollections and distribute that, I would be infringing their copyrights. I don't foresee copyright law needing to be or actually being changed in response to the development of more efficient ways to get copyrighted media into our brains, such as brain-machine-interfaces.
- sieisteinmodel 12y ago
  You cannot distribute it with 100% accuracy right now. Given the BMI assumption proves true, you will be. Thus, you can spread copyrighted material. Big difference.
higherpurpose 12y ago
> How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? That's easy. DRM for machine-to-brain interfaces. Who's going to stop that from happening? Mozilla? The scary part will begin when they'll be able to delete our memories remotely, because we "stole" their media, or perhaps the content owner simply withdrew the license from the distributor, and now you're not allowed to "own" it anymore and keep it inside your brain. Or think about what happened inside the DoD when the Snowden leaks or the Wikileaks ones came out, and banned all employees from reading the articles about it. If you think that in the future we won't need "computers" anymore, because our brains will act as the computers of today, I could see the government setting up "infrastructure" to ban such leaks from getting accessed by people, or also deleting them remotely.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  Or, we could rise up and demand total control of our own minds. Freedom of thought, things like that. We need to educate the general public before they surrender their mind to proprietary software, though. And if people have no choice, there is still jail-breaking. And if jail-breaking is forbidden, I'll do it anyway. And possibly start a career as a runner. That would probably get me killed, but if I don't, I may not be able to look at my reflection in a mirror.
general_failure 12y ago
Everyone can code is a pipe dream. It requires high skill and specialization. It's like saying all of us can at some point make cars, houses, electricity and so on.
- lwhalen 12y ago
  I disagree. Others have said (much more eloquently than I) that software is the new literacy. In a hundred years, I believe someone who can't at least read code will be at a disadvantage similar to someone who can't read English today.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    I try not to make prediction that long in the future, because intelligence explosion is likely to happen sooner than that. http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ Once it does, we will likely fall into one of three outcomes: Heaven, Hell, or Annihilation —most likely Annihilation if we're not careful. Any finer point will be moot. (EDIT: Before you down-vote the singularity crap, please follow the link. The arguments are long, but serious. Machines will take over the world at some point. We just need to ensure they're gentle about it.)
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Programming is craftsmanship, not really literacy. The difference is that most people don't like crafting, but they do like communicating. Most people are consumers.
  - teacup50 12y ago
    Literacy is not the same thing as the ability and interest necessary to write a novel.
    - danford 12y ago
      But it is the ability to read and (for the most part) understand that novel, which is important. There are definitely more books (and things in general) being written in the age of literacy than there was before.

EGreg 12y ago

Do I even have t read this article? I bet I know what it will say. It's by Richard Stallman.

judk 12y ago
RMS's ideas don't quite square with Chinese law, and Chinese law doesn't take kindly to that sort of thing, which makes this interesting.

LiweiZ 12y ago

Just let you guys know that China is keeping increasing control of online content. And the new leader has his plan to push it to another extent. Not a nice outlook.

xuesj 12y ago

I do agree with freedom of individual,and free software is ok if it's authors want to free.

octref 12y ago

I found two relevant pictures: http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g14j.jpg http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g1... http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g49t.jpg http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g4... Does this custome has any culture-specific connotation? As a Chinese student I don't quite understand why RMS's dressing like this. Below is my comment on this news: Two years ago, when I left China for US college, I feel most people around me don't care about FOSS, or respect originality & copyright. - They use cracked software. You can buy a disk that installs cracked Windows for less than 1 dollar. Cracked Photoshop & MS Office & whatever licensed software are all over the internet. - They download music & movie for free. - China's internet is full of copycats because the original websites aren't available due to censorship. (Like FB & Twitter). One of the largest IT Company, Tencent, is full of copied products. But now I feel China is making some progress. Like: - Online streaming companies are paying for copyrighted material, and you can't easily download movie/anime for free as you do in the past. - As Apple becomes more popular, many people start paying for music in iTunes. To my delight, websites like http://mou.li/ http://mou.li/ even let people buy Sublime Text & Alfred & 1Password easily in China. I really can't believe people would pay over $50 for a text editor two years ago, but now some of them do. - A recent example. A very large company in China named Guokr launched a website: http://www.15yan.com/ http://www.15yan.com/ . It's a blatant copy of medium. And in their about page, they are literally saying something like "Our product is currently a copycat of Medium, and we'll adpat it to Chinese market to make it better". Shortly after the website went public, someone asked a question in a Chinese Q&A website: "Can we tolerate such blatant plagiarism?" Take a look at it: http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 . I know you can't read Chinese but take a look at the pictures in the highest upvoted(2130)[1] and third highest(756)[2] answers. Two Chinese Web-Devs compared the CSS and HTML of these two sites, expressed their anger, and described the copycat as "humiliating" and "disgusting". Nearly all the answerers requested this copycat going down immediately and said they'd never use it. I'm really happy China is really making some progress on this matter. [1]: http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m.jpg http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m... [2]: http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m.jpg http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

matt__rose 12y ago

RMS, once again, missing the forest for the trees.

jimktrains2 12y ago
I believe your statement needs to be flushed out. It's very unclear and uninformative.
- matt__rose 12y ago
  deignan's comment says it best here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080 If I were Chinese, the license of the software I was using would be far, far down my list of "Freedoms" that I was concerned about.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - icebraining 12y ago
    And rms would be the first to agree with you that there are more important freedoms: "I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom, because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say free software is as important as they are." And he explains why he speaks about Free Software: "It's the responsibility that I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them." "I wish I knew how to make a major difference on those bigger issues, because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard and lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working on them and have gotten only so far," he says. "But as I see it, while other people were defending against these big visible threats, I saw another threat that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against that threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was the only one there." Like any activist, he speaks of what he knows. That doesn't mean he considers the rest unimportant. Source: http://sisudoc.org/markup_samples.sisu_fn/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman/5.en.html http://sisudoc.org/markup_samples.sisu_fn/free_as_in_freedom...

rahimnathwani 12y ago

Can anyone who attended this comment on the content and, particularly, the reaction and questions from the audience? (It's already 9pm here in Beijing; the event was scheduled for 2pm-5pm.)

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Ya, it ended 4 hours ago, a bit late to post an invitation.
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  He's talking at FUDCon (Fedora Users' and Developers' Conference) on the same topic next weekend: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule

mark_l_watson 12y ago

This is one of Richard's recurring topics, and I agree with matt__rose and higherpurpose that there is some irony since China, along with a few other countries like the USA, Iran, Russia, could do with a more free and open internet. The Internet should be basic infrastructure, inexpensive, and very secure. That is the goal. I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages. Edit: typo

sam11 12y ago
I know I have the minority opinion Is that really the case on Hacker News? I often feel like a rebel outcast here for thinking that technology being proprietary is a desirable thing.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  Now that's interesting. Could you lay out, or point to, some arguments?
mark_l_watson 12y ago
BTW, by "all kinds of open source" I meant to say that there are good use cases for GPL, Apache, etc. licenses, depending on the projects and the desires of the creators.
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
The USA has a great firewall like china, Russia, and Iran? Well, til (or you could be exaggerating a connection between the USA and Chinese Internet, which would be very much BS).
rockymeza 12y ago
Please try using the Internet from China before you put it in the same sentence as the Internet in the USA.
dengnan 12y ago

gbog 12y ago

I regret I missed the event. It should be noted that rms came to China already quite a few times. I hope his message goes thru and reaches a wide audience here, because keeping full control on ones digital life is as important in China as in other places, or even more. (And I think the main threat for laymen is not from government, but from companies who would sell their users' souls for a short-term increase of their market shares.)

zhte415 12y ago
I regret so too. Having just checked the FSF website, there will be a similar function on May 19th, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Admission open to the public, with or without registration. http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou For readers unfamiliar with Chinese academic institutions, both UCAS (May 17th) and Zhejiang (May 19th) are institutions noted nationally and internationally for graduate and research programs especially in sciences and engineering.
- bbody 12y ago
  I went but there were so many people that the lecture hall was overflowing so I left.