8 ms·

“Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

136 points by jpatokal 12y ago

lziz 12y ago
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom Off to a great start persuading the everyman once again, Stallman Agreed on the more salient point of the pervasive record-keeping and the government have full access to them, though. Shoulda lead with that.
cjbprime 12y ago
> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard RMS make. What the hell.
- agildehaus 12y ago
  It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.
  - glesica 12y ago
    > Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive. Seems like this is really his point, if it isn't going to be preemptive, then (he feels) we should stop the jobs from going away.
    - baddox 12y ago
      And that's the problem. If basic income won't happen until technological advancement causes mass unemployment, and governments ban technological advancement that might lead to mass unemployment, then we will get neither technological advancement nor basic income.
      - tharga8616 12y ago
        Absolutely right
      - glesica 12y ago
        Why can't basic income happen first? Or why can't basic income be phased in smoothly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree with you that basic income is unlikely to happen until there has been an incredible amount of pain and suffering, but does it have to be that way? Not necessarily. If we, as a society, set compensating policies as a condition for technological progress, then the progress might come more slowly, but it will still come. Of course I'm probably being a crazy person thinking that our government might act rationally. :(
      - ThomPete 12y ago
        It's not just about job loss it's as much about salaries stagnating and thus making people poor. Especially here in the US it's a problem since it in return affect things like ones ability to pay for healthcare.
    - kamaal 12y ago
      >>we should stop the jobs from going away. We can't stop anything from going away. Technology progress by and large has always been incremental. Large changes haven't occurred since the time of Industrial revolution. And I guess the next one won't occur until we get Artificial general intelligence. Until then affairs of the world will go on as they always have. AGI would alter the very course of economy in a way the whole concept of a job and a income would be very largely irrelevant. Heck you may not even need a basic income, because you only need to bootstrap a few machines and from there on they are going to do every single thing for you.
  - pdpi 12y ago
    "I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." Indirectly, perhaps. Application-level software projects do tend to have the "automate people's jobs away" effect, but AFAIK, Stallman has been mostly involved in infrastructure-ish "enable some people to work (on automating away other people's jobs)" projects.
    - agildehaus 12y ago
      Exactly. He's responsible for many of the tools which make it much easier for everyone else to automate jobs away.
  - larrys 12y ago
    " I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)
    - xsmasher 12y ago
      That sounds remarkably like the broken window fallacy. What does your company do with that extra money now? Throw it in a barrel and burn it?
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        What are Uber and passengers going to do with the extra money? In both cases, we see the loss of specific jobs and (at least) short term pain for the people who were relying on them.
        xsmasher 12y ago
        Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use. The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy.
        dllthomas 12y ago
        "Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use." Right. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be considering it. The short term matters - we spend a lot of time there. "The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy." Well, there's nothing to say the money is redistributed to labor, and it's hard to run a consumer economy when only a few people have any money to pay for anything. That said, I don't really get that vibe from the parent comment in the first place...
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    >I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Great point. It's hard to quantify though. OSS gives companies access to a quality software stack for minimal cost. On the other hand, those companies are not now buying software from proprietary vendors. I don't know which is more: jobs created by having access to inexpensive quality software, or jobs lost due to less spending on application code.
- Thlom 12y ago
  He could just go the non-free software route on this point as well ...
- rando3826 12y ago
  First off, that's not what he said. Secondly, lots of smart people have been talking about the need for basic income when robots take over large portions of the labor force. I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.
  - cjbprime 12y ago
    > First off, that's not what he said. Can you elaborate on the divide between his claim and my interpretation, operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow? I honestly don't see it. For the record, I also advocate strongly for basic income. But I don't think that robots taking jobs leads to particularly poor outcomes. For example! Driving a car 17 hours a day (or at all!), as described in the Uber article, is a needlessly dangerous activity for a human to be performing.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      "operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow" Uber is not automating its fleet tomorrow, either.
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      Basic income was included to show that removing jobs is not necessarily bad, but it can have immediate negative effects. This is just an instance of consolidating wealth. It is moving a system which distributes wealth to many taxi drivers into a system which distributes wealth to a few people who run Uber. When there's no system in place to correct this imbalance, it contributes to the wealth gap between rich and poor which is accelerating in many other ways. When we see a massive shift of resources to just a few people, it leaves everyone worse off, even the wealthy ones, because we all have to live in a world in which more people are more disempowered and desperate. He just didn't go into detail because he likes short statements.
  - gnaritas 12y ago
    > I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy. Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist. Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?
- jeremiep 12y ago
  > unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. This. There's far more to his argument than merely "lets prevent people from losing jobs."
  - cjbprime 12y ago
    If I were to argue "We should declare war on Canada, unless/until everyone in the US has free healthcare", you would be right to respond with "What? Declaring war on Canada is a terrible idea!" rather than "Well, there's more to his argument than merely declaring war on Canada".
- geofft 12y ago
  What happens if the digital meter/dispatch thing in the taxi runs non-free software, and there's no free replacement? Wouldn't it be an ethical imperative for all taxi drivers to quit their jobs rather than use non-free software?
- baddox 12y ago
  It's an extremely common liberal argument.
- skylan_q 12y ago
  I'd take this all with a grain of salt. Reading this from RMS is like taking financial advice from Michael Jordan or medical advice from Albert Einstein. This is Russel Brand level thinking.
  - thizzbuzz 12y ago
    MJ is a billionaire and most of that is not directly from his NBA salary. I'd take financial advice from him.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  The argument for Basic Income was a Hacker News thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265
- rokhayakebe 12y ago
  You have TRULY misquoted the author. Actually you did not, you said something entirely different. He said "let's ban this," with this referring to Uber. Secondly even if he said "let's ban ANY techno...," he did add "Unless/until every ..," which is more than a valid argument.
- deeviant 12y ago
  I agree. Also, if Uber doesn't introduce robotic cars, some other company surely will. Uber seems to be the cool company to hate, but when I talk to Uber drivers that unanimously seemed to think it was a good gig. The talked about the money(how it was much better than what they were doing), they talked about the hours(whenever they would like to work), and they talked about the pleasure of working for themselves. When the switch to robotic cars comes, in it will impacts the world over, and Ubers interaction with the robotic car revolution will be a very small part of the impact self driving cars have, in my own humble opinion. I'm not even convinced Uber can hold onto it's market share when self-driving cars take over, the space will seems ripe for competition.
  - kazagistar 12y ago
    The kids working at sweatshops probably think it is a good gig too; it pays more then digging through piles of trash.
- MaysonL 12y ago
  Fuck banning technology; isn't the logical thing to do to make it a free (i.e. tax-supported) public good, like health care should be, or roads? I mean, why should the roads be free, and the cars not?
- asdrty 12y ago
  that is pretty much what Orlando just did... a taxi lobbyist made them introduce a minimum price for rides provided by Uber and Lyft that I think is higher then taxis... http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-lyft-changes-orlando-20141215-story.html http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-ly... but I think that Lyft and Uber still have a chance to appeal the ruling...
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
I was following the arguments until I came across the one where the company is to blame because some customers are afraid of being harassed by drivers with the conclusion: "this problem comes directly out of the practices listed above that mistreat all users of Uber". No it doesn't. It's a non sequitur.
xbonez 12y ago
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you can pay cash; you can be anonymous. And even with Uber around, you can still do that. No one's taken that choice away. Use Lyft/Uber if you're comfortable with it. If not, user a regular cab.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Well, he makes the point later that if Uber/Lyft/etc are sufficiently successful they could displace regular cabs. You can disagree with that point, but it probably deserves to be addressed rather than ignored.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
GabrielF00 12y ago
RMS doesn't use credit cards and walks around town wearing a "Don't be tracked. Pay with cash" button. Even if Uber addressed every single point on his list, he still wouldn't use them.
- johnloeber 12y ago
  I do respect him for his unwavering commitment to his principles.
  - taurath 12y ago
    I see the value in his principles but I feel like it could use a more marketable steward.
    - blhack 12y ago
      "More marketable" is how you end up compromising on your ideals. Stallman is nuts, but he is an extremely important type of nuts. The world needs more people like him.
      - johnloeber 12y ago
        On that note, can you think of more people quite like RMS? In other fields, perhaps?
        jpatokal 12y ago
        Plenty of political prisoners fit the bill. Here's one guy who spent 23 years in prison in Singapore because he refused to sign a statement renouncing violence -- not being he likes violence, but because that would have implied he supported violence earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh On release into house arrest, he refused a government job because that would have "muzzled" him. 32 years aftert his initial arrest, all restrictions were finally lifted -- and the first thing he did was call for the abolition of the act used to arrest him. Also Mandela, Gandhi, etc.
enjo 12y ago
That's all well and good. Except that I still need to get around, and Uber (and it's competitors) remains better than my local cab system. That's true of basically every city I've ever visited as well. Until that is no longer true, I'll continue to be an extremely satisfied Uber user.
- eps 12y ago
  Comfort/convenience vs principles/ethics. To each his own.
  - larrys 12y ago
    Actually all of this is almost certainly something like "where I draw the line is the right line anyone who does less has failed anyone who has done more is taking it to far". As someone else is this thread has mentioned, RMS addressed the issue of Uber wanting to put drivers out of jobs as bad but ironically the comment pointed out that the "free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."
amelius 12y ago
Actually, many of these arguments apply to a lot of other companies too; small ones like AirBnB, but also big ones like Google and Apple.
nvader 12y ago
His points start out idealistic and abstract, and full of Free Software rhetoric. The list then turns to more concrete and specific objections, whatever their validity may be. Talk about burying the lede :P I think it would resonate with a larger audience if he just flipped the order of his bullet points.
diminoten 12y ago
Modern taxis fail every one of these "tests", so the fact that RMS wouldn't use Uber but would continue to use taxis at all is merely RMS riding a hatred bandwagon in an effort to stay relevant. Fortunately for us, he hasn't said anything remotely new, so we can continue to think of him as the 20th century man he is.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  You can pay cash for a cab.
- lambda 12y ago
  Uh, no. You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later. While I don't agree with all of his reasoning here, he is correct that taxis offer you substantially more privacy than Uber, and Uber has been known to abuse the data they collect on passengers in several instances, so it's far more than just a theoretical concern.
  - nemothekid 12y ago
    http://gawker.com/the-public-nyc-taxicab-database-that-accidentally-track-1646724546 http://gawker.com/the-public-nyc-taxicab-database-that-accid...
  - diminoten 12y ago
    > You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later. No you can't. Plenty of taxis record the backseats of their cars, and you have no way of knowing which do/don't. Taxis don't offer you enough privacy over Uber, and the reason he's coming after Uber is because he wants to stay relevant, not because Uber is particularly bad.
    - jpatokal 12y ago
      But if you pay by cash, there's no easy way to match that recording to you. Also, I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't give a fig about "relevance". He's just applying his principles to the world as he sees it, and he's been doing this literally for decades: https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html
birken 12y ago
Or... Why you shouldn't use any ride sharing company. Numbers 4-6 are even more broad, they basically apply to any situation where you are required to use a credit card to pay (which identifies you), which is basically every single app. I'm empathetic to the issue that there is no way to anonymously take an Uber (a real downgrade as compared to cabs), but for your average person where a massive upgrade in convenience offsets the slight loss of anonymity, this is going to be a tough sell.
- bkor 12y ago
  Why compare this with ride sharing? That's not what Uber is. It doesn't matter that Uber calls itself a ride sharing company, it is not. This has been mentioned before: with Uber someone takes you from a place to somewhere you specify. They drive the way that you want because you requested it from them. Further, you pay their expenses and a bit more. Exactly like a taxi. Ride sharing is where someone was already going somewhere and you share the costs. IMO you could use a ride sharing company where you're more anonymous. E.g. public transport :-P (though not in my country :()
sshconnection 12y ago
I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin. I WANT my driver to be identified and for them to track who picks me up. He claims that it's troublesome for a female passenger to be identifiable to a driver. How about if you're a female (or male) driver driving in your spare time? Would she not feel safer picking up someone who is at least somewhat identified versus a shady looking stranger? One of the crucial components of sharing apps is the building of trust and accountability. Identification is part of that. This list of complaints doesn't hold water for me.
- click170 12y ago
  Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over them because of some errant points at the beginning. We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally. Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership over my data that many companies are making. We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our trust or demonstrating accountability. Edit: changed some loaded phrasing
  - GauntletWizard 12y ago
    The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means. He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at before.
    - 12y ago
mb0 12y ago
Couldn't it also be argued that the GNU limits user freedom by requiring users never use non-free software?
- dllthomas 12y ago
  No, because they don't require that they just advocate it.
- steven777400 12y ago
  No, because GNU licenses place no limitation on the use of the software, only on how it is distributed and combined with other software. That's why it's ok to run a non-free program on top of Linux or install a non-free driver, etc.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  There's the rub. It all depends on how you define 'free'. Under the FSF definition, it isn't. They would (maybe) argue that this isn't a valid definition of 'free' because it would be like saying you're not 'free' unless you have the right to subjugate your neighbor.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
It should be no major surprise that RMS would be against booking travel through a proprietary computer network that is privately data-mined.
KyleBrandt 12y ago
I find Taxis to be very stressful when traveling for two main reasons: * I'd guess about 10% of the time they don't show up, so I have to bake in extra travel time for that. With uber I can see on my phone that they are actually coming. * With uber I know payment is all set, Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken. I imagine these problems could start to get solved with a good open source software suite (with client mobile apps) and an organization to bring this technology to cab companies. Of course, creating something is hard, raising complaints is not. The cognitive dissonance for me is that a creator like RMS would write something like this instead of trying to lead people towards creating a solution.
- simoncion 12y ago
  > Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken. Then, insist that they break out the manual credit-card processor and carbon paper. If they refuse, offer to have them call the cops. Their payment-processing hardware will probably magically start working.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Even if that eventually gets to your desired outcome, it's dramatically more difficult and uncomfortable than Uber.
  - KyleBrandt 12y ago
    That sort of confrontation is where some of the stress comes from. Also when that happens I just say I don't have enough cash (which is generally true).
johnloeber 12y ago
>Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. >It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. So what? This is the way of technology: obsolete work becomes automated. Extending RMS' argument to its logical conclusion means reinstating many forms of manual labor (that are now done by machines) in effort to reduce unemployment. Do you want to plow your land with your bare hands? No! Do you want to drive taxis? No! There's a special point regarding driving taxis: it's one of the most dangerous jobs currently available. Moreover, the taxi industry is infamously exploitative of drivers, such that the competition from Uber/Lyft is actually raising taxi drivers' wages in the interim.[0] I did not expect the logical conclusion of RMS' argument to be ludditism. I find this surprising. > Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers arbitrarily. I think this is an unrealistic long-term view. The rideshare market has low barriers to entry and a high potential for competition, such that I expect to eventually see this market fragmented among many isomorphic companies (Lyft, Uber, SideCar, etc.), perhaps more so on a local than on a global level. I've laid out my thoughts on the issue in an essay.[1] [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-and-uber-will-raise-taxi-drivers-incomes-not-lower-them/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-... [1] http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf
- ThomPete 12y ago
  "So what?" The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living. The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want. There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary. This for instance is worrying http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/destroying.jobs_.chart1x910_0.jpg http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/d... The luddite fallacy is well known by many yet there are an increasingly worrying trend that indicates that the fallacy is a fallacy itself. The consequence is that as technology does what technology do, it will leave an increasingly larger and larger group of people unable to find new jobs. The real competitors arent china, its automation and people really dont give it enough credit.
zhng 12y ago
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). https://m.uber.com/ https://m.uber.com/ doesn't require the app to be installed.
- M2Ys4U 12y ago
  install != run. Using that mobile site still requires one to run non-free Javascript, which RMS also has a problem with.
  - aembleton 12y ago
    Javascript is an interpreted language. You can view the javascript that your machine is going to execute and step through it line by line. Therefore it is free (as in speech) for you to inspect.
    - krapp 12y ago
      I think the problem is javascript that's not 'free' as in explicitly licensed as free software. The web, as a concept, seems to conflict with his ideals in a number of ways, at least superficially. For instance, you can't modify and redistribute the source code of any site you visit, since by definition you only get the response of that site. Technically, every URL leads to a black box. Although many sites use free libraries and might offer their source code as a repo, you never really know what they're actually running. Hacker News is a perfect example. It's only barely "open source" in that you can download an old version of the Arc forum, and it's known that the HN staff have made their own edits to the software, which no one can contribute to, or fork, or even see, since they don't want people to be able to game the system. What people are interacting with is pretty much a closed source and proprietary service. But on the other hand, you interact with the html, and you can mess with it in the browser all you want. Still not technically free, though.
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      Does Uber's javascript code come with a license that gives you these freedoms: * Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose; * Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish; * Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour, and * Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits? No? Then it's not "free software".
packetized 12y ago
Interesting. Mr. Stallman should check with the local laws of any given municipality regarding taxis - in some, not only can you not hail a cab on the street, but you must also provide extensive contact information in order to summon one via phone. To wit, Birmingham, AL has precisely these restrictions & regulations.
enoch_r 12y ago
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom. > Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Which is a bigger case of "trampling freedom": voluntarily using someone's closed-source program, or having the government tell me they'll put me in jail if I offer to sell someone a ride in my self-driving car?
- macspoofing 12y ago
  Good point. I'd guess Stallman would lean towards the former. His politics are leftist/socialist/anarchocommunist.
netik 12y ago
Yet another reason why working with or talking to RMS is impossible. I think we can apply many of these arguments to Taxi cabs as well. Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber. Taxis are a regulated market, but the medallion market is largel unregulated and a near-monopoly. Taxi drivers complain they are underpaid and beholden to the medallion owners. And so on...
- ot 12y ago
  > Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. "I have a credit card, but I use it as rarely as possible. Effectively, only for airline tickets, car rental, and hotel checkin — because they demand identification anyway." https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html
  - kuschku 12y ago
    Yup, same for me. I don’t even have a credit card, and I only pay electronically for large payments or where identification would be done anyway. And it’s cheaper for the merchants as well, with cards they lose 3% of the income, some merchants even make losses with every card customer.
- nhaehnle 12y ago
  RMS has an extreme stance, but it's actually quite refreshing that he just puts it out there in an easily digestable form. Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. And I think RMS cares less about that. No doubt he will be unhappy about the taxi driver's/company's choice to run non-free software; however, regular taxi companies are willing to do business with free software users - Uber refuses to do so. That's a pretty significant difference. Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber. Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber. The medallion issues are oddities of a few (not even all!) cities particularly in the US. You are right to complain about them as that system is ridiculous; however, the comparison with Uber is unfair because Uber is trying to take over the world.
utternerd 12y ago
I couldn't even make it through this entire article, almost like it was satire, yet sadly it wasn't.
sighsigh 12y ago
"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed." Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work. Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement. Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors: 1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?) 2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials. The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!") TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it.
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  Very cool vision of the future. I'm trying to imagine more consequences of the price of human labor going negative. After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services. Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services. We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion. It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.
dash2 12y ago
One of RMS's points is that Uber exploits its drivers by paying them low wages. I've taken several Ubers in the past month. The drivers tell me that they get 80% of the cost of the ride. One guy said that his previous company took 60%. I also met a student who said that he liked being able to work the part time hours.
- cjbprime 12y ago
  You should be more skeptical when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs, especially given the presence of numerous press articles quoting many dissatisfied Uber drivers. There's a significant chance that they are telling you they love their jobs because if they told you they hate Uber and feel trapped by it, you would give them a bad rating and they would get fired.
  - larrys 12y ago
    "when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs" Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).
    - smacktoward 12y ago
      The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte. The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_Never_Do_Again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...), called the "professional smile": This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee... Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile? And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.
colund 12y ago
I find it interesting that he thinks anonymous taxi travelling is important and that sexual services should be legal.
gregthompsonjr 12y ago
Richard Stallman is engineering's smartest conspiracy theorist in the world. He's great at his sport, but getting to his level of expertise has clearly taken a toll on his ability to distinguish paranoia from reality. The tinfoil is doing something... The whole post is both objectionable and somewhat warranted/understandable at the same time.
- alecco 12y ago
  Yeah, only he was right about spying and tracking by government. In fact, his "conspiracy" theories fell quite short to the brutal reality of AT&T, Wikileaks, and Snowden revelations.
kevining 12y ago
> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). I'm not sure if I agree with this, unless you consider the web to be non-free. Uber also runs a really great mobile website[1], which is one of the few reasons I use Uber not owning an iPhone or Android device. [1] https://m.uber.com/ https://m.uber.com/
- umanwizard 12y ago
  Stallman definitely considers web sites not licensed under a Free Software license to be non-free. Why would the web be somehow different from any other mechanism for delivering sotware?
- chippy 12y ago
  Can you book Uber cars using their website on your desktop?
  - onedev 12y ago
    Yes you can. I've done it when my phone was dead and I had forgotten my charging cable at work.
    - macspoofing 12y ago
      Simply running a web-app on desktop wouldn't satisfy Stallman. He'd want the entire stack to be open-source (front-end and back-end code).
michaelvkpdx 12y ago
"Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going?" RMS is right on again, as always. The problem is that the younger generation wants Big Brother to know everything, and that is sad and scary. One need look no further than the comments on this thread for proof. We are not teaching our children the value of humanity, and the way that privacy creates a sense of self. "Self" is now what you make it on Twitter/Facebook/SocialNetDuJour. Sharing everything in a way that government/Facebook/Google can monitor ("Big Brother") is like breathing to the youth who've had iPhones since before puberty. So many younger programmers think RMS is absurd. They don't even have context to understand where he comes from. RMS has been foretelling the future since the days of the GNU wars. He's an ideologue, yes, but one whose points have always been valid. Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder how many younger programmers would know that.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  I haven't really noticed any trend on "younger programmers" believing RMS is absurd. On HN, yes. But then again HN is heavily slanted towards startup culture, which typically clashes with the ideals of RMS in a lot of places. On the contrary, younger programmers benefit from and frequently use the results of RMS' activism and labor. The term "free software" did get diverted and slandered by the OSI, but other than that free software is bigger than ever. The last three sentences of yours are a plain troll.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  >Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder how many younger programmers would know that. Probably most of them. 1984 is required reading in many highschools in america.
vvpan 12y ago
I started taking RMS much more seriously after Snowden.
chroma 12y ago
Stallman isn't quite right on a few points. For example, you can summon an Uber via SMS or a mobile site. No app or smartphone required. But let's address the core of his argument instead of nitpicking. Yes, Uber's behavior has been pretty unethical. They track customers and drivers. They mine their data to figure out who had one-night stands. They shirk regulations so they can expand quickly. But all of those points are moot for one reason: Uber is incredibly convenient. People rarely sacrifice quality of life for their ideals. If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective. The only way to win is to make a more compelling product. If your open source, non-tracking version is worse than Uber, only the tiny population of die-hard idealists will use it. I don't think RMS understands this, since he is one of the die-hard idealists.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  > If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective. "If you want to sink Big Tobacco, the activism route is not effective." "If you want to sink child labor, the activism route is not effective." "If you want to sink slavery, the activism route is not effective." &etc. Your fatalism is unwarranted. There's plenty of examples in history of people making real, substantial change in society via activism. Moreover, some problems can only be solved via activism. If Uber's tracking yields an economic advantage, and you consider that tracking to be a moral/ethical problem, then it's a problem you can't fix with "a better product" because a company that doesn't follow Uber's lead won't be economically competitive. It will be leaving money on the table that Uber does not. The only way out of the trap is for the problematic behavior to be off limits to everybody.
  - chroma 12y ago
    RMS isn't calling for Uber to be outlawed. He's calling for a boycott. I'm glad the problems you listed are much smaller than they used to be, but none of them were solved with grassroots boycotts. Many of them went away due to changes in economic conditions and an expanding moral sphere. And I was being realistic, not fatalistic. There are countless examples of people engaging in immoral behavior for better quality of life. Here are a few: - Eating meat. It's bad for the environment, not-that-great for one's health, and visits immense suffering upon animals. But bacon tastes good, so people rationalize their behavior. - Driving a gas car. It pollutes the environment, aids immoral regimes such as Saudi Arabia, and contributes to climate change. But again, they're so convenient. Except for Tesla, electric cars are slow, small, and short range. The reason Tesla is an exception is because Elon Musk recognizes that, in order to be successful, electric cars must be better than gas cars. - Pirating content. Piracy deprives artists of income and violates the principles of contract law. If you don't like the cost or terms, then don't consume the content. - Not conserving resources (electricity, water, etc). Some individuals do some of these things, but never civilization as a whole. At the macro scale, this sort of activism is a rounding error.
CyberDildonics 12y ago
If you have a robotic job, you need to learn something less robotic to not be replaced by a robot. And people need to stop with the basic income ridiculousness. No one is there yet. Giving people money doesn't mean they will better themselves with it. Uniform high quality education and healthcare are what lifts a community of people up. Why do schools get funding based on the taxes of the local neighborhood? Why is even extreme emergency healthcare so privatized? Why is it that basic financial knowledge is not taught in schools? Why is college so expensive and the preparation for a career so poor by comparison? There are big problems that come before basic income.
eltondegeneres 12y ago
I'm not a fan of Uber either, but there is an unofficial python client out there.[1] If you've already made an Uber account and have issues with running nonfree software, but not sketchy business practices, you can still use Uber through the terminal. [1]: https://github.com/tals/uber.py https://github.com/tals/uber.py
macspoofing 12y ago
>Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay. Yeah. If you deal with money, there is no other way to build a business. Right or wrong, you just can't anonymize financial transactions. >Uber's clever policy of not being directly responsible for anything that goes wrong extends to harassment by drivers, and its practice of identifying passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger is. That's a good point. I don't think it would hold up in court if something were to happen (e.g. driver robs or kills a passenger). >Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. If Uber doesn't do it, somebody else will. Can't stop progress. The privacy issues that he raises in other points are pretty good as well. On a separate matter, though I was never a FSF zealot it pains me to see how irrelevant the FSF and Stallman became this decade.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I make regular financial transactions all the time with people who have not the slightest clue what my name is.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    Cash? I'm not sure you can make an online business without disclosing some data about yourself.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Financial transactions don't require ID. Cash, alternative currencies (not that BTC is anonymous), or prepaid credit cards all work. The anti-progress-cause-jobs is silly and makes RMS look bad and hypocritical.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Financial transactions don't require ID. Cash, alternative currencies (not that BTC is anonymous), or prepaid credit cards all work. The anti-progress-cause-jobs is silly and makes RMS look bad and hypocritical. Of course, adding in crazy claims is part of the RMS marketing MO.
don_draper 12y ago
Uber is super easy to use and it helps prevent DUI's. nuff said
arihant 12y ago
A hole in RMS' line of thinking is this - he extends only one end of the argument, the end which says Uber will massively grow. He doesn't acknowledge the fact that there will undeniably be other competitors to Uber, a bunch of them might end up being free software. If history has taught us anything, somebody somewhere always tries to copy every closed source project in the name of freedom and open source. Why does RMS think this would be any different? Also, he mentions only bad side of oversight. Even with such oversight, there are rape cases, mugging and other crimes done by Uber drivers. Without tracking, how does he propose he will solve the problem? Maybe he should protest for no oversight when his own daughter takes a GNU/Cab. Why mock what you don't understand? Contrary to RMS standard belief, the invisible hand in the world is not stupid, people put up with what he calls "sins" because there is an offsetting value they are receiving. Uber in current world is equivalent of someone entering the room, trying to find a light switch, not knowing what we will find. RMS' complaint is that he is vegan and the guy finding the light bulb is wearing leather shoes. And Uber does have competitors, and they are solving points he mentioned. In India, Ola is one competitor that allows cash, and allows anonymous bookings via a call centre that does not require me even telling my name. But even Ola knows it wouldn't exist without Uber in this world. Why shoot the guy who is trying to push the envelope?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
nadams 12y ago
> Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going? Walk? Bike? Hitch a ride Back To The Future style with your hoverboard?
ryan-allen 12y ago
I haven't used Uber since their 'glory ride' post or whatever it was. I'm back to using regular taxis.
em3rgent0rdr 12y ago
A free software coder needs to develop a p2p distributed ride-sharing server+client system.
fiatjaf 12y ago
You may not consider it, but > Uber also records where you get the cab and where you go with it. The US government can get those records, and any lawsuit (such as a divorce lawsuit) can subpoena them. Is a serious thing.
dllthomas 12y ago
"It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app)." It looks like with Uber's API, one could potentially issue requests without running any non-free software on your own device. If that's the case, this one is weakened a tiny bit - though certainly I don't think there is currently a FLO client and Uber can rightly (through this lens) be criticized for not providing one.

136 points by jpatokal 12y ago

lziz 12y ago

> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom Off to a great start persuading the everyman once again, Stallman Agreed on the more salient point of the pervasive record-keeping and the government have full access to them, though. Shoulda lead with that.

cjbprime 12y ago

> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard RMS make. What the hell.

agildehaus 12y ago
It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.
- glesica 12y ago
  > Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive. Seems like this is really his point, if it isn't going to be preemptive, then (he feels) we should stop the jobs from going away.
  - baddox 12y ago
    And that's the problem. If basic income won't happen until technological advancement causes mass unemployment, and governments ban technological advancement that might lead to mass unemployment, then we will get neither technological advancement nor basic income.
    - tharga8616 12y ago
      Absolutely right
    - glesica 12y ago
      Why can't basic income happen first? Or why can't basic income be phased in smoothly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree with you that basic income is unlikely to happen until there has been an incredible amount of pain and suffering, but does it have to be that way? Not necessarily. If we, as a society, set compensating policies as a condition for technological progress, then the progress might come more slowly, but it will still come. Of course I'm probably being a crazy person thinking that our government might act rationally. :(
    - ThomPete 12y ago
      It's not just about job loss it's as much about salaries stagnating and thus making people poor. Especially here in the US it's a problem since it in return affect things like ones ability to pay for healthcare.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    >>we should stop the jobs from going away. We can't stop anything from going away. Technology progress by and large has always been incremental. Large changes haven't occurred since the time of Industrial revolution. And I guess the next one won't occur until we get Artificial general intelligence. Until then affairs of the world will go on as they always have. AGI would alter the very course of economy in a way the whole concept of a job and a income would be very largely irrelevant. Heck you may not even need a basic income, because you only need to bootstrap a few machines and from there on they are going to do every single thing for you.
- pdpi 12y ago
  "I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." Indirectly, perhaps. Application-level software projects do tend to have the "automate people's jobs away" effect, but AFAIK, Stallman has been mostly involved in infrastructure-ish "enable some people to work (on automating away other people's jobs)" projects.
  - agildehaus 12y ago
    Exactly. He's responsible for many of the tools which make it much easier for everyone else to automate jobs away.
- larrys 12y ago
  " I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs." No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)
  - xsmasher 12y ago
    That sounds remarkably like the broken window fallacy. What does your company do with that extra money now? Throw it in a barrel and burn it?
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      What are Uber and passengers going to do with the extra money? In both cases, we see the loss of specific jobs and (at least) short term pain for the people who were relying on them.
      - xsmasher 12y ago
        Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use. The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy.
        dllthomas 12y ago
        "Right; short term pain while the money is redistributed to somewhere it can be of more efficient use." Right. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be considering it. The short term matters - we spend a lot of time there. "The parent made it sound like the loss of jobs was going to collapse the economy." Well, there's nothing to say the money is redistributed to labor, and it's hard to run a consumer economy when only a few people have any money to pay for anything. That said, I don't really get that vibe from the parent comment in the first place...
- macspoofing 12y ago
  >I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Great point. It's hard to quantify though. OSS gives companies access to a quality software stack for minimal cost. On the other hand, those companies are not now buying software from proprietary vendors. I don't know which is more: jobs created by having access to inexpensive quality software, or jobs lost due to less spending on application code.
Thlom 12y ago
He could just go the non-free software route on this point as well ...
rando3826 12y ago
First off, that's not what he said. Secondly, lots of smart people have been talking about the need for basic income when robots take over large portions of the labor force. I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.
- cjbprime 12y ago
  > First off, that's not what he said. Can you elaborate on the divide between his claim and my interpretation, operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow? I honestly don't see it. For the record, I also advocate strongly for basic income. But I don't think that robots taking jobs leads to particularly poor outcomes. For example! Driving a car 17 hours a day (or at all!), as described in the Uber article, is a needlessly dangerous activity for a human to be performing.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "operating under the extremely obvious assumption that the world is not switching to universal basic income tomorrow" Uber is not automating its fleet tomorrow, either.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    Basic income was included to show that removing jobs is not necessarily bad, but it can have immediate negative effects. This is just an instance of consolidating wealth. It is moving a system which distributes wealth to many taxi drivers into a system which distributes wealth to a few people who run Uber. When there's no system in place to correct this imbalance, it contributes to the wealth gap between rich and poor which is accelerating in many other ways. When we see a massive shift of resources to just a few people, it leaves everyone worse off, even the wealthy ones, because we all have to live in a world in which more people are more disempowered and desperate. He just didn't go into detail because he likes short statements.
- gnaritas 12y ago
  > I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy. Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist. Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?
jeremiep 12y ago
> unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. This. There's far more to his argument than merely "lets prevent people from losing jobs."
- cjbprime 12y ago
  If I were to argue "We should declare war on Canada, unless/until everyone in the US has free healthcare", you would be right to respond with "What? Declaring war on Canada is a terrible idea!" rather than "Well, there's more to his argument than merely declaring war on Canada".
geofft 12y ago
What happens if the digital meter/dispatch thing in the taxi runs non-free software, and there's no free replacement? Wouldn't it be an ethical imperative for all taxi drivers to quit their jobs rather than use non-free software?
baddox 12y ago
It's an extremely common liberal argument.
skylan_q 12y ago
I'd take this all with a grain of salt. Reading this from RMS is like taking financial advice from Michael Jordan or medical advice from Albert Einstein. This is Russel Brand level thinking.
- thizzbuzz 12y ago
  MJ is a billionaire and most of that is not directly from his NBA salary. I'd take financial advice from him.
eastbayjake 12y ago
The argument for Basic Income was a Hacker News thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184265
rokhayakebe 12y ago
You have TRULY misquoted the author. Actually you did not, you said something entirely different. He said "let's ban this," with this referring to Uber. Secondly even if he said "let's ban ANY techno...," he did add "Unless/until every ..," which is more than a valid argument.
deeviant 12y ago
I agree. Also, if Uber doesn't introduce robotic cars, some other company surely will. Uber seems to be the cool company to hate, but when I talk to Uber drivers that unanimously seemed to think it was a good gig. The talked about the money(how it was much better than what they were doing), they talked about the hours(whenever they would like to work), and they talked about the pleasure of working for themselves. When the switch to robotic cars comes, in it will impacts the world over, and Ubers interaction with the robotic car revolution will be a very small part of the impact self driving cars have, in my own humble opinion. I'm not even convinced Uber can hold onto it's market share when self-driving cars take over, the space will seems ripe for competition.
- kazagistar 12y ago
  The kids working at sweatshops probably think it is a good gig too; it pays more then digging through piles of trash.
MaysonL 12y ago
Fuck banning technology; isn't the logical thing to do to make it a free (i.e. tax-supported) public good, like health care should be, or roads? I mean, why should the roads be free, and the cars not?
asdrty 12y ago
that is pretty much what Orlando just did... a taxi lobbyist made them introduce a minimum price for rides provided by Uber and Lyft that I think is higher then taxis... http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-lyft-changes-orlando-20141215-story.html http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-ly... but I think that Lyft and Uber still have a chance to appeal the ruling...

stefantalpalaru 12y ago

I was following the arguments until I came across the one where the company is to blame because some customers are afraid of being harassed by drivers with the conclusion: "this problem comes directly out of the practices listed above that mistreat all users of Uber". No it doesn't. It's a non sequitur.

xbonez 12y ago

> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you can pay cash; you can be anonymous. And even with Uber around, you can still do that. No one's taken that choice away. Use Lyft/Uber if you're comfortable with it. If not, user a regular cab.

dllthomas 12y ago
Well, he makes the point later that if Uber/Lyft/etc are sufficiently successful they could displace regular cabs. You can disagree with that point, but it probably deserves to be addressed rather than ignored.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

GabrielF00 12y ago

RMS doesn't use credit cards and walks around town wearing a "Don't be tracked. Pay with cash" button. Even if Uber addressed every single point on his list, he still wouldn't use them.

johnloeber 12y ago
I do respect him for his unwavering commitment to his principles.
- taurath 12y ago
  I see the value in his principles but I feel like it could use a more marketable steward.
  - blhack 12y ago
    "More marketable" is how you end up compromising on your ideals. Stallman is nuts, but he is an extremely important type of nuts. The world needs more people like him.
    - johnloeber 12y ago
      On that note, can you think of more people quite like RMS? In other fields, perhaps?
      - jpatokal 12y ago
        Plenty of political prisoners fit the bill. Here's one guy who spent 23 years in prison in Singapore because he refused to sign a statement renouncing violence -- not being he likes violence, but because that would have implied he supported violence earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh On release into house arrest, he refused a government job because that would have "muzzled" him. 32 years aftert his initial arrest, all restrictions were finally lifted -- and the first thing he did was call for the abolition of the act used to arrest him. Also Mandela, Gandhi, etc.

enjo 12y ago

That's all well and good. Except that I still need to get around, and Uber (and it's competitors) remains better than my local cab system. That's true of basically every city I've ever visited as well. Until that is no longer true, I'll continue to be an extremely satisfied Uber user.

eps 12y ago
Comfort/convenience vs principles/ethics. To each his own.
- larrys 12y ago
  Actually all of this is almost certainly something like "where I draw the line is the right line anyone who does less has failed anyone who has done more is taking it to far". As someone else is this thread has mentioned, RMS addressed the issue of Uber wanting to put drivers out of jobs as bad but ironically the comment pointed out that the "free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."

amelius 12y ago

Actually, many of these arguments apply to a lot of other companies too; small ones like AirBnB, but also big ones like Google and Apple.

nvader 12y ago

His points start out idealistic and abstract, and full of Free Software rhetoric. The list then turns to more concrete and specific objections, whatever their validity may be. Talk about burying the lede :P I think it would resonate with a larger audience if he just flipped the order of his bullet points.

diminoten 12y ago

Modern taxis fail every one of these "tests", so the fact that RMS wouldn't use Uber but would continue to use taxis at all is merely RMS riding a hatred bandwagon in an effort to stay relevant. Fortunately for us, he hasn't said anything remotely new, so we can continue to think of him as the 20th century man he is.

dllthomas 12y ago
You can pay cash for a cab.
lambda 12y ago
Uh, no. You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later. While I don't agree with all of his reasoning here, he is correct that taxis offer you substantially more privacy than Uber, and Uber has been known to abuse the data they collect on passengers in several instances, so it's far more than just a theoretical concern.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  http://gawker.com/the-public-nyc-taxicab-database-that-accidentally-track-1646724546 http://gawker.com/the-public-nyc-taxicab-database-that-accid...
- diminoten 12y ago
  > You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later. No you can't. Plenty of taxis record the backseats of their cars, and you have no way of knowing which do/don't. Taxis don't offer you enough privacy over Uber, and the reason he's coming after Uber is because he wants to stay relevant, not because Uber is particularly bad.
  - jpatokal 12y ago
    But if you pay by cash, there's no easy way to match that recording to you. Also, I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't give a fig about "relevance". He's just applying his principles to the world as he sees it, and he's been doing this literally for decades: https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html

birken 12y ago

Or... Why you shouldn't use any ride sharing company. Numbers 4-6 are even more broad, they basically apply to any situation where you are required to use a credit card to pay (which identifies you), which is basically every single app. I'm empathetic to the issue that there is no way to anonymously take an Uber (a real downgrade as compared to cabs), but for your average person where a massive upgrade in convenience offsets the slight loss of anonymity, this is going to be a tough sell.

bkor 12y ago
Why compare this with ride sharing? That's not what Uber is. It doesn't matter that Uber calls itself a ride sharing company, it is not. This has been mentioned before: with Uber someone takes you from a place to somewhere you specify. They drive the way that you want because you requested it from them. Further, you pay their expenses and a bit more. Exactly like a taxi. Ride sharing is where someone was already going somewhere and you share the costs. IMO you could use a ride sharing company where you're more anonymous. E.g. public transport :-P (though not in my country :()

sshconnection 12y ago

I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin. I WANT my driver to be identified and for them to track who picks me up. He claims that it's troublesome for a female passenger to be identifiable to a driver. How about if you're a female (or male) driver driving in your spare time? Would she not feel safer picking up someone who is at least somewhat identified versus a shady looking stranger? One of the crucial components of sharing apps is the building of trust and accountability. Identification is part of that. This list of complaints doesn't hold water for me.

click170 12y ago
Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over them because of some errant points at the beginning. We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally. Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership over my data that many companies are making. We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our trust or demonstrating accountability. Edit: changed some loaded phrasing
- GauntletWizard 12y ago
  The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means. He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at before.
  - 12y ago

mb0 12y ago

Couldn't it also be argued that the GNU limits user freedom by requiring users never use non-free software?

dllthomas 12y ago
No, because they don't require that they just advocate it.
steven777400 12y ago
No, because GNU licenses place no limitation on the use of the software, only on how it is distributed and combined with other software. That's why it's ok to run a non-free program on top of Linux or install a non-free driver, etc.
macspoofing 12y ago
There's the rub. It all depends on how you define 'free'. Under the FSF definition, it isn't. They would (maybe) argue that this isn't a valid definition of 'free' because it would be like saying you're not 'free' unless you have the right to subjugate your neighbor.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

It should be no major surprise that RMS would be against booking travel through a proprietary computer network that is privately data-mined.

KyleBrandt 12y ago

I find Taxis to be very stressful when traveling for two main reasons: * I'd guess about 10% of the time they don't show up, so I have to bake in extra travel time for that. With uber I can see on my phone that they are actually coming. * With uber I know payment is all set, Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken. I imagine these problems could start to get solved with a good open source software suite (with client mobile apps) and an organization to bring this technology to cab companies. Of course, creating something is hard, raising complaints is not. The cognitive dissonance for me is that a creator like RMS would write something like this instead of trying to lead people towards creating a solution.

simoncion 12y ago
> Taxi's will often say that their credit card machine is broken. Then, insist that they break out the manual credit-card processor and carbon paper. If they refuse, offer to have them call the cops. Their payment-processing hardware will probably magically start working.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Even if that eventually gets to your desired outcome, it's dramatically more difficult and uncomfortable than Uber.
- KyleBrandt 12y ago
  That sort of confrontation is where some of the stress comes from. Also when that happens I just say I don't have enough cash (which is generally true).

johnloeber 12y ago

>Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. >It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. So what? This is the way of technology: obsolete work becomes automated. Extending RMS' argument to its logical conclusion means reinstating many forms of manual labor (that are now done by machines) in effort to reduce unemployment. Do you want to plow your land with your bare hands? No! Do you want to drive taxis? No! There's a special point regarding driving taxis: it's one of the most dangerous jobs currently available. Moreover, the taxi industry is infamously exploitative of drivers, such that the competition from Uber/Lyft is actually raising taxi drivers' wages in the interim.[0] I did not expect the logical conclusion of RMS' argument to be ludditism. I find this surprising. > Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers arbitrarily. I think this is an unrealistic long-term view. The rideshare market has low barriers to entry and a high potential for competition, such that I expect to eventually see this market fragmented among many isomorphic companies (Lyft, Uber, SideCar, etc.), perhaps more so on a local than on a global level. I've laid out my thoughts on the issue in an essay.[1] [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-and-uber-will-raise-taxi-drivers-incomes-not-lower-them/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-... [1] http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf http://johnloeber.com/w/uber.pdf

ThomPete 12y ago
"So what?" The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living. The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want. There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary. This for instance is worrying http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/destroying.jobs_.chart1x910_0.jpg http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/d... The luddite fallacy is well known by many yet there are an increasingly worrying trend that indicates that the fallacy is a fallacy itself. The consequence is that as technology does what technology do, it will leave an increasingly larger and larger group of people unable to find new jobs. The real competitors arent china, its automation and people really dont give it enough credit.

zhng 12y ago

> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). https://m.uber.com/ https://m.uber.com/ doesn't require the app to be installed.

M2Ys4U 12y ago
install != run. Using that mobile site still requires one to run non-free Javascript, which RMS also has a problem with.
- aembleton 12y ago
  Javascript is an interpreted language. You can view the javascript that your machine is going to execute and step through it line by line. Therefore it is free (as in speech) for you to inspect.
  - krapp 12y ago
    I think the problem is javascript that's not 'free' as in explicitly licensed as free software. The web, as a concept, seems to conflict with his ideals in a number of ways, at least superficially. For instance, you can't modify and redistribute the source code of any site you visit, since by definition you only get the response of that site. Technically, every URL leads to a black box. Although many sites use free libraries and might offer their source code as a repo, you never really know what they're actually running. Hacker News is a perfect example. It's only barely "open source" in that you can download an old version of the Arc forum, and it's known that the HN staff have made their own edits to the software, which no one can contribute to, or fork, or even see, since they don't want people to be able to game the system. What people are interacting with is pretty much a closed source and proprietary service. But on the other hand, you interact with the html, and you can mess with it in the browser all you want. Still not technically free, though.
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    Does Uber's javascript code come with a license that gives you these freedoms: * Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose; * Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish; * Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour, and * Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits? No? Then it's not "free software".

packetized 12y ago

Interesting. Mr. Stallman should check with the local laws of any given municipality regarding taxis - in some, not only can you not hail a cab on the street, but you must also provide extensive contact information in order to summon one via phone. To wit, Birmingham, AL has precisely these restrictions & regulations.

enoch_r 12y ago

> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom. > Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Which is a bigger case of "trampling freedom": voluntarily using someone's closed-source program, or having the government tell me they'll put me in jail if I offer to sell someone a ride in my self-driving car?

macspoofing 12y ago
Good point. I'd guess Stallman would lean towards the former. His politics are leftist/socialist/anarchocommunist.

netik 12y ago

Yet another reason why working with or talking to RMS is impossible. I think we can apply many of these arguments to Taxi cabs as well. Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber. Taxis are a regulated market, but the medallion market is largel unregulated and a near-monopoly. Taxi drivers complain they are underpaid and beholden to the medallion owners. And so on...

ot 12y ago
> Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. "I have a credit card, but I use it as rarely as possible. Effectively, only for airline tickets, car rental, and hotel checkin — because they demand identification anyway." https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html
- kuschku 12y ago
  Yup, same for me. I don’t even have a credit card, and I only pay electronically for large payments or where identification would be done anyway. And it’s cheaper for the merchants as well, with cards they lose 3% of the income, some merchants even make losses with every card customer.
nhaehnle 12y ago
RMS has an extreme stance, but it's actually quite refreshing that he just puts it out there in an easily digestable form. Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. And I think RMS cares less about that. No doubt he will be unhappy about the taxi driver's/company's choice to run non-free software; however, regular taxi companies are willing to do business with free software users - Uber refuses to do so. That's a pretty significant difference. Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber. Taxis can be paid in cash, unlike Uber. The medallion issues are oddities of a few (not even all!) cities particularly in the US. You are right to complain about them as that system is ridiculous; however, the comparison with Uber is unfair because Uber is trying to take over the world.

utternerd 12y ago

I couldn't even make it through this entire article, almost like it was satire, yet sadly it wasn't.

sighsigh 12y ago

"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed." Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work. Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement. Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors: 1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?) 2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials. The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!") TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it.

droopyEyelids 12y ago
Very cool vision of the future. I'm trying to imagine more consequences of the price of human labor going negative. After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services. Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services. We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion. It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.

dash2 12y ago

One of RMS's points is that Uber exploits its drivers by paying them low wages. I've taken several Ubers in the past month. The drivers tell me that they get 80% of the cost of the ride. One guy said that his previous company took 60%. I also met a student who said that he liked being able to work the part time hours.

cjbprime 12y ago
You should be more skeptical when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs, especially given the presence of numerous press articles quoting many dissatisfied Uber drivers. There's a significant chance that they are telling you they love their jobs because if they told you they hate Uber and feel trapped by it, you would give them a bad rating and they would get fired.
- larrys 12y ago
  "when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs" Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).
  - smacktoward 12y ago
    The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte. The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_Never_Do_Again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...), called the "professional smile": This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee... Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile? And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.

colund 12y ago

I find it interesting that he thinks anonymous taxi travelling is important and that sexual services should be legal.

gregthompsonjr 12y ago

Richard Stallman is engineering's smartest conspiracy theorist in the world. He's great at his sport, but getting to his level of expertise has clearly taken a toll on his ability to distinguish paranoia from reality. The tinfoil is doing something... The whole post is both objectionable and somewhat warranted/understandable at the same time.

alecco 12y ago
Yeah, only he was right about spying and tracking by government. In fact, his "conspiracy" theories fell quite short to the brutal reality of AT&T, Wikileaks, and Snowden revelations.

kevining 12y ago

> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). I'm not sure if I agree with this, unless you consider the web to be non-free. Uber also runs a really great mobile website[1], which is one of the few reasons I use Uber not owning an iPhone or Android device. [1] https://m.uber.com/ https://m.uber.com/

umanwizard 12y ago
Stallman definitely considers web sites not licensed under a Free Software license to be non-free. Why would the web be somehow different from any other mechanism for delivering sotware?
chippy 12y ago
Can you book Uber cars using their website on your desktop?
- onedev 12y ago
  Yes you can. I've done it when my phone was dead and I had forgotten my charging cable at work.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    Simply running a web-app on desktop wouldn't satisfy Stallman. He'd want the entire stack to be open-source (front-end and back-end code).

michaelvkpdx 12y ago

"Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going?" RMS is right on again, as always. The problem is that the younger generation wants Big Brother to know everything, and that is sad and scary. One need look no further than the comments on this thread for proof. We are not teaching our children the value of humanity, and the way that privacy creates a sense of self. "Self" is now what you make it on Twitter/Facebook/SocialNetDuJour. Sharing everything in a way that government/Facebook/Google can monitor ("Big Brother") is like breathing to the youth who've had iPhones since before puberty. So many younger programmers think RMS is absurd. They don't even have context to understand where he comes from. RMS has been foretelling the future since the days of the GNU wars. He's an ideologue, yes, but one whose points have always been valid. Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder how many younger programmers would know that.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I haven't really noticed any trend on "younger programmers" believing RMS is absurd. On HN, yes. But then again HN is heavily slanted towards startup culture, which typically clashes with the ideals of RMS in a lot of places. On the contrary, younger programmers benefit from and frequently use the results of RMS' activism and labor. The term "free software" did get diverted and slandered by the OSI, but other than that free software is bigger than ever. The last three sentences of yours are a plain troll.
Igglyboo 12y ago
>Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder how many younger programmers would know that. Probably most of them. 1984 is required reading in many highschools in america.

vvpan 12y ago

I started taking RMS much more seriously after Snowden.

chroma 12y ago

Stallman isn't quite right on a few points. For example, you can summon an Uber via SMS or a mobile site. No app or smartphone required. But let's address the core of his argument instead of nitpicking. Yes, Uber's behavior has been pretty unethical. They track customers and drivers. They mine their data to figure out who had one-night stands. They shirk regulations so they can expand quickly. But all of those points are moot for one reason: Uber is incredibly convenient. People rarely sacrifice quality of life for their ideals. If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective. The only way to win is to make a more compelling product. If your open source, non-tracking version is worse than Uber, only the tiny population of die-hard idealists will use it. I don't think RMS understands this, since he is one of the die-hard idealists.

smacktoward 12y ago
> If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective. "If you want to sink Big Tobacco, the activism route is not effective." "If you want to sink child labor, the activism route is not effective." "If you want to sink slavery, the activism route is not effective." &etc. Your fatalism is unwarranted. There's plenty of examples in history of people making real, substantial change in society via activism. Moreover, some problems can only be solved via activism. If Uber's tracking yields an economic advantage, and you consider that tracking to be a moral/ethical problem, then it's a problem you can't fix with "a better product" because a company that doesn't follow Uber's lead won't be economically competitive. It will be leaving money on the table that Uber does not. The only way out of the trap is for the problematic behavior to be off limits to everybody.
- chroma 12y ago
  RMS isn't calling for Uber to be outlawed. He's calling for a boycott. I'm glad the problems you listed are much smaller than they used to be, but none of them were solved with grassroots boycotts. Many of them went away due to changes in economic conditions and an expanding moral sphere. And I was being realistic, not fatalistic. There are countless examples of people engaging in immoral behavior for better quality of life. Here are a few: - Eating meat. It's bad for the environment, not-that-great for one's health, and visits immense suffering upon animals. But bacon tastes good, so people rationalize their behavior. - Driving a gas car. It pollutes the environment, aids immoral regimes such as Saudi Arabia, and contributes to climate change. But again, they're so convenient. Except for Tesla, electric cars are slow, small, and short range. The reason Tesla is an exception is because Elon Musk recognizes that, in order to be successful, electric cars must be better than gas cars. - Pirating content. Piracy deprives artists of income and violates the principles of contract law. If you don't like the cost or terms, then don't consume the content. - Not conserving resources (electricity, water, etc). Some individuals do some of these things, but never civilization as a whole. At the macro scale, this sort of activism is a rounding error.

CyberDildonics 12y ago

If you have a robotic job, you need to learn something less robotic to not be replaced by a robot. And people need to stop with the basic income ridiculousness. No one is there yet. Giving people money doesn't mean they will better themselves with it. Uniform high quality education and healthcare are what lifts a community of people up. Why do schools get funding based on the taxes of the local neighborhood? Why is even extreme emergency healthcare so privatized? Why is it that basic financial knowledge is not taught in schools? Why is college so expensive and the preparation for a career so poor by comparison? There are big problems that come before basic income.

eltondegeneres 12y ago

I'm not a fan of Uber either, but there is an unofficial python client out there.[1] If you've already made an Uber account and have issues with running nonfree software, but not sketchy business practices, you can still use Uber through the terminal. [1]: https://github.com/tals/uber.py https://github.com/tals/uber.py

macspoofing 12y ago

>Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay. Yeah. If you deal with money, there is no other way to build a business. Right or wrong, you just can't anonymize financial transactions. >Uber's clever policy of not being directly responsible for anything that goes wrong extends to harassment by drivers, and its practice of identifying passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger is. That's a good point. I don't think it would hold up in court if something were to happen (e.g. driver robs or kills a passenger). >Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. If Uber doesn't do it, somebody else will. Can't stop progress. The privacy issues that he raises in other points are pretty good as well. On a separate matter, though I was never a FSF zealot it pains me to see how irrelevant the FSF and Stallman became this decade.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
I make regular financial transactions all the time with people who have not the slightest clue what my name is.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  Cash? I'm not sure you can make an online business without disclosing some data about yourself.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Financial transactions don't require ID. Cash, alternative currencies (not that BTC is anonymous), or prepaid credit cards all work. The anti-progress-cause-jobs is silly and makes RMS look bad and hypocritical.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Financial transactions don't require ID. Cash, alternative currencies (not that BTC is anonymous), or prepaid credit cards all work. The anti-progress-cause-jobs is silly and makes RMS look bad and hypocritical. Of course, adding in crazy claims is part of the RMS marketing MO.

don_draper 12y ago

Uber is super easy to use and it helps prevent DUI's. nuff said

arihant 12y ago

A hole in RMS' line of thinking is this - he extends only one end of the argument, the end which says Uber will massively grow. He doesn't acknowledge the fact that there will undeniably be other competitors to Uber, a bunch of them might end up being free software. If history has taught us anything, somebody somewhere always tries to copy every closed source project in the name of freedom and open source. Why does RMS think this would be any different? Also, he mentions only bad side of oversight. Even with such oversight, there are rape cases, mugging and other crimes done by Uber drivers. Without tracking, how does he propose he will solve the problem? Maybe he should protest for no oversight when his own daughter takes a GNU/Cab. Why mock what you don't understand? Contrary to RMS standard belief, the invisible hand in the world is not stupid, people put up with what he calls "sins" because there is an offsetting value they are receiving. Uber in current world is equivalent of someone entering the room, trying to find a light switch, not knowing what we will find. RMS' complaint is that he is vegan and the guy finding the light bulb is wearing leather shoes. And Uber does have competitors, and they are solving points he mentioned. In India, Ola is one competitor that allows cash, and allows anonymous bookings via a call centre that does not require me even telling my name. But even Ola knows it wouldn't exist without Uber in this world. Why shoot the guy who is trying to push the envelope?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

nadams 12y ago

> Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going? Walk? Bike? Hitch a ride Back To The Future style with your hoverboard?

ryan-allen 12y ago

I haven't used Uber since their 'glory ride' post or whatever it was. I'm back to using regular taxis.

em3rgent0rdr 12y ago

A free software coder needs to develop a p2p distributed ride-sharing server+client system.

fiatjaf 12y ago

You may not consider it, but > Uber also records where you get the cab and where you go with it. The US government can get those records, and any lawsuit (such as a divorce lawsuit) can subpoena them. Is a serious thing.

dllthomas 12y ago

"It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app)." It looks like with Uber's API, one could potentially issue requests without running any non-free software on your own device. If that's the case, this one is weakened a tiny bit - though certainly I don't think there is currently a FLO client and Uber can rightly (through this lens) be criticized for not providing one.