12 ms·

Can you give an example? For instance, I was aware of Stallman in the 1980s, read his writings back then, didn't think they were correct, and the future he pre

by MCRed 12y ago

Can you give an example? For instance, I was aware of Stallman in the 1980s, read his writings back then, didn't think they were correct, and the future he predicted has not come to be. Yes there are some of us who are that old. Specifically, he said that without the virility of his license, there would be no free/open source software and that all software would be locked down and proprietary. The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period. He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one. Given that this is pretty much the central tenant of his ideology, and it has been markedly disproven over the past 30 years, I too wonder why people listen to him.

yuhong 12y ago
Not always true, especially back in the early days.
fit2rule 12y ago
Stallman predicted the total surveillance state, and warned of the very dire circumstances it put us all in.
- wanda 12y ago
  I think the total surveillance state was a prediction made decades before Stallman. Or are we just ignoring acience fiction authors and philosophers?
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    They certainly warned us, and Stallman has picked up the light to be shone on these dark territories from others before him, but who in the contemporary era has done as much as Stallman to educate the public as to the dangers of the usurpation of technology by nefarious agencies? I don't understand the need to denigrate Stallman for these deeds - what purpose does it serve to extinguish this light?
    - MCRed 12y ago
      Basically, everyone working on it has done more than Stallman. All stallman does is post rants and demand adoration. He hasn't actually done anything. Well, he has opposed a lot of tools that would help protect against the surveillance state because they didn't fit his ideology.
      - fit2rule 12y ago
        I believe your point of view is highly naive, and very seriously deficient in intelligence. Stallman has worked tireless to enlighten younger generations of technologists on the issues of privacy and security in the dawning intelligence age. He is no cult figure - but who can you name who has done as much as he has to bring these issues to the table when, instead, quite viciously, the powers-at-large would rather it all be swept aside? Be careful that you are not becoming the very thing you are resisting, in this argument. Stallman is not the only figure out there working on this - thank the stars - but he has definitely been a leader of opinion on the issue of free speech, free technology, and just use of technology to allow peace - where many, many more would rather be using it all for war and oppression. Perhaps you don't actually know enough about Stallman to be forming an intelligent opinion, yet. Here, educate yourself on his works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman He's done a few GNU things you might not be familiar with. Things which have had a massive impact on the way technology has been made available to the masses. Without Stallman, there would be even more walled gardens by now, and fewer generations of new technologists, aware of their technological freedom to contribute to society in an open and free manner, out there in the world at large. Please, reconsider your naive and ill-formed opinion. It does you no good.
- MCRed 12y ago
  Have you ever heard of George Orwell? It's like you guys go to some sort of indoctrination camp and become members of a cult.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    What an offensive thing to say. Of course I've heard of Orwell. So? What is it about you which predisposes you to reject someone just because "they weren't the first"? It is you exhibiting cult-like behaviour in this case, if all you can do to denigrate and negate Stallman is say "but, but .. he wasn't the first" and assault his character as if he is some sort of ripoff artist. So what? Orwell is dead, and rapidly becoming irrelevant in the younger generations. Whereas the still-alive and relevant Stallman has tirelessly fought to educate people on the misuse of technology by nefarious, anonymous actors, in a grand and increasingly dangerous fiasco. Your desire to negate Stallman as a personality would have only one effect: to remove a significant barrier for the rising super-surveillance state. What are your intentions in doing so, precisely? You wish to see what Stallman fears, and which is enslaving us all, come to pass?
joeyspn 12y ago
Here's a funny one: Stallman came to my uni to give a speech to CompSci alumni 10 years ago, and he told the audience that he didn't own a cellphone, cos phones were being used to track people. He also talked about the backdoors in several OS's. Everybody was laughing at his words. We're talking 10 years ago. Few months ago remembering this speech with old uni mates we talked about how damn right that excentric man was. He saw it coming, and tried to warn everybody... Maybe he's a bit of an "extremist", but he certainly has a point.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  I get annoyed by this because Stallman wasn't exactly predicting a hurricane, here. It's like making a conclusion about Ukraine. Nobody can prove it, but most people infer. Certainly since 641A and other even older signals those who pay attention received, the possibility of total surveillance was plainly apparent. The people who laughed it off were merely banking on the morality of government, but it was not a surprise at all that such things were technically possible. Those who paid attention already knew. Just no proof. He was not some oracle of technical insight that nobody else had or shared. Many people made such claims long before he did. His free software ideals put him in a very good position to be retroactively proven right about surveillance, because the people who are super into free software and the people who practice real opsec end up looking fairly similar. I'm not minimizing that he was right, just countering that we all were. And we failed to deliver the message and/or trusted in our government a bit too much. 641A should have been the catalyst. The EFF continues on it to this day. It took Snowden and the proof to get there, and we are still not there. I don't think we even know where the hell "there" is. Another important thing to remember is had we listened, nothing would have changed. Us heeding Stallman and others wasn't the problem, it was a state actor perpetrating while making it nearly impossible to know about it. It makes us kumbaya a bit, maybe democracy could have fixed it, but all of us were (and are) almost entirely powerless in representative government. Even Joe Biden said as much on VICE the other night, just about a different topic. Surveillance was going to happen. It was a done deal. The terrorists beat us the second those aircraft hit, because terror has driven us every minute since.
  - Finbel 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tome 12y ago
> virility of his license Ah, that was a typo for "virality". I was scratching me head there for a minute. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_phenomenon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_phenomenon
quanticle 12y ago
Stallman predicted the rise of e-readers and the problems that would arise from DRM protected e-books.
- apetrovic 12y ago
  What exactly is a "problem"? I don't live in US. Ordering books online and shipping them to my house used to be slow and expensive process. Now I can buy books from Amazon, for a half the price than printed books (3x the price if I account the shipping). Yeah, I can't read that book on anything except Kindle (device or Kindle app). But I know what I'm buying, and I'm ok with that. I enjoy the option to have my books synchronized over my Kindle, iPhone and iPad. It's fantastic when I'm on vacation, in some other country, and I can buy the e-book immediately, instead of dragging around lots of paper books (as I used to do). And I pay for all of that with DRM. I'm ok with that. If the book is such important to me I'll buy the paper version. That's the problem with Stallman, and all radicals. Everything is black and white for them. Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists. Stallman thinks that it's ok, it's better to not have e-books if there's DRM. I don't think so. I like to have an option. I don't have any "problems" Stallman predicted.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    > Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists That is a strawman. Three are certsinly booksellers who never went near DRM and argue strongly against DRM. Exempel: http://www.baenebooks.com http://www.baenebooks.com
    - apetrovic 12y ago
      No, singling out one sentence from my answer and attacking it is a strawman. But ok, to correct myself: without DRM ebooks would never exists at this scale and people would never buy ebooks readers at this scale and read ebooks at this scale. Ten years ago ebook reader was a niche, used only by geeks. Today, thanks to aggressive Amazon pricing and (DRM-ed) ebooks, it's a common item. And popularity of ebook readers (namely - Kindle) started some new things: I love SF, and last year I bought a lot $1.99 books from self-publishing authors who would probably never find a place to publish their books without widely available ebook readers (read: Kindle). So, to return to original question - what are such a burning "problems" that Stallman predicted?
jeswin 12y ago
> Specifically, he said that without the virility of his license, there would be no free/open source software and that all software would be locked down and proprietary. If I were to guess, without GPL the Open Source movement may have looked very different. It might seem that GPL isn't essential today, but it may have been when the FOSS was learning to walk. Again, I don't see GPL as diminishing in importance, we'll probably see a resurgence in GPL as we start caring more about freedom.
- pionar 12y ago
  > If I were to guess, without GPL the Open Source movement may have looked very different. One could argue the other way, that the GPL seriously hindered the movement until more permissive licenses started becoming favored (like the Apache license).
facepalm 12y ago
Superfish, of recent times. Google it (Superfish Lenovo since you seem to have missed it).
emilsedgh 12y ago
The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period. Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement. He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one. You do know that the Linux Kernel, among the most important software projects in the world (if not the most important one) uses GPL and the Linus himself knows that as a direct result of using GPL, right? Of course, the bazaar model makes Open Source very attractive to companies and many do open source their work. However, the bazaar model happened and the companies where enlightened about it because Free Software Movement happened. Bazaar model was a consequence to that.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  BSD doesn't owe any of its origination to GNU, and it is impossible to say what it would look like if GNU never happened. (The point being, capital letter Open Source as a movement owes something to Free Software, the notion of sharing liberally licensed source code does not)
  - kragen 12y ago
    Actually, Keith Bostic has gone on record saying that the reason he started trying to strip out the AT&T bits from the BSD kernel was because he was inspired by GNU, and wanted to see if the BSD kernel could work as a kernel for GNU. Maybe in Open Sources, I don't remember.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      I wrote the comment thinking that the BSD releases in the early 1980s had been released under the 'BSD License', I even did some amount of checking (I can't remember what evidence in particular made me decide to post). I see from looking more carefully this time around that the ~1980 license from Berkeley was not the same thing as the later one.
      - 12y ago
ta0967 12y ago
i suggest that anyone who is malinformed enough to believe MCRed's perversions of RMS's positions goes and reads the stuff themselves. i'll just say that the world is full of people who are "that old" and full of it.

by MCRed 12y ago

yuhong 12y ago

Not always true, especially back in the early days.

fit2rule 12y ago

Stallman predicted the total surveillance state, and warned of the very dire circumstances it put us all in.

wanda 12y ago
I think the total surveillance state was a prediction made decades before Stallman. Or are we just ignoring acience fiction authors and philosophers?
- fit2rule 12y ago
  They certainly warned us, and Stallman has picked up the light to be shone on these dark territories from others before him, but who in the contemporary era has done as much as Stallman to educate the public as to the dangers of the usurpation of technology by nefarious agencies? I don't understand the need to denigrate Stallman for these deeds - what purpose does it serve to extinguish this light?
  - MCRed 12y ago
    Basically, everyone working on it has done more than Stallman. All stallman does is post rants and demand adoration. He hasn't actually done anything. Well, he has opposed a lot of tools that would help protect against the surveillance state because they didn't fit his ideology.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      I believe your point of view is highly naive, and very seriously deficient in intelligence. Stallman has worked tireless to enlighten younger generations of technologists on the issues of privacy and security in the dawning intelligence age. He is no cult figure - but who can you name who has done as much as he has to bring these issues to the table when, instead, quite viciously, the powers-at-large would rather it all be swept aside? Be careful that you are not becoming the very thing you are resisting, in this argument. Stallman is not the only figure out there working on this - thank the stars - but he has definitely been a leader of opinion on the issue of free speech, free technology, and just use of technology to allow peace - where many, many more would rather be using it all for war and oppression. Perhaps you don't actually know enough about Stallman to be forming an intelligent opinion, yet. Here, educate yourself on his works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman He's done a few GNU things you might not be familiar with. Things which have had a massive impact on the way technology has been made available to the masses. Without Stallman, there would be even more walled gardens by now, and fewer generations of new technologists, aware of their technological freedom to contribute to society in an open and free manner, out there in the world at large. Please, reconsider your naive and ill-formed opinion. It does you no good.
MCRed 12y ago
Have you ever heard of George Orwell? It's like you guys go to some sort of indoctrination camp and become members of a cult.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  What an offensive thing to say. Of course I've heard of Orwell. So? What is it about you which predisposes you to reject someone just because "they weren't the first"? It is you exhibiting cult-like behaviour in this case, if all you can do to denigrate and negate Stallman is say "but, but .. he wasn't the first" and assault his character as if he is some sort of ripoff artist. So what? Orwell is dead, and rapidly becoming irrelevant in the younger generations. Whereas the still-alive and relevant Stallman has tirelessly fought to educate people on the misuse of technology by nefarious, anonymous actors, in a grand and increasingly dangerous fiasco. Your desire to negate Stallman as a personality would have only one effect: to remove a significant barrier for the rising super-surveillance state. What are your intentions in doing so, precisely? You wish to see what Stallman fears, and which is enslaving us all, come to pass?

joeyspn 12y ago

Here's a funny one: Stallman came to my uni to give a speech to CompSci alumni 10 years ago, and he told the audience that he didn't own a cellphone, cos phones were being used to track people. He also talked about the backdoors in several OS's. Everybody was laughing at his words. We're talking 10 years ago. Few months ago remembering this speech with old uni mates we talked about how damn right that excentric man was. He saw it coming, and tried to warn everybody... Maybe he's a bit of an "extremist", but he certainly has a point.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
I get annoyed by this because Stallman wasn't exactly predicting a hurricane, here. It's like making a conclusion about Ukraine. Nobody can prove it, but most people infer. Certainly since 641A and other even older signals those who pay attention received, the possibility of total surveillance was plainly apparent. The people who laughed it off were merely banking on the morality of government, but it was not a surprise at all that such things were technically possible. Those who paid attention already knew. Just no proof. He was not some oracle of technical insight that nobody else had or shared. Many people made such claims long before he did. His free software ideals put him in a very good position to be retroactively proven right about surveillance, because the people who are super into free software and the people who practice real opsec end up looking fairly similar. I'm not minimizing that he was right, just countering that we all were. And we failed to deliver the message and/or trusted in our government a bit too much. 641A should have been the catalyst. The EFF continues on it to this day. It took Snowden and the proof to get there, and we are still not there. I don't think we even know where the hell "there" is. Another important thing to remember is had we listened, nothing would have changed. Us heeding Stallman and others wasn't the problem, it was a state actor perpetrating while making it nearly impossible to know about it. It makes us kumbaya a bit, maybe democracy could have fixed it, but all of us were (and are) almost entirely powerless in representative government. Even Joe Biden said as much on VICE the other night, just about a different topic. Surveillance was going to happen. It was a done deal. The terrorists beat us the second those aircraft hit, because terror has driven us every minute since.
- Finbel 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tome 12y ago

> virility of his license Ah, that was a typo for "virality". I was scratching me head there for a minute. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_phenomenon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_phenomenon

quanticle 12y ago

Stallman predicted the rise of e-readers and the problems that would arise from DRM protected e-books.

apetrovic 12y ago
What exactly is a "problem"? I don't live in US. Ordering books online and shipping them to my house used to be slow and expensive process. Now I can buy books from Amazon, for a half the price than printed books (3x the price if I account the shipping). Yeah, I can't read that book on anything except Kindle (device or Kindle app). But I know what I'm buying, and I'm ok with that. I enjoy the option to have my books synchronized over my Kindle, iPhone and iPad. It's fantastic when I'm on vacation, in some other country, and I can buy the e-book immediately, instead of dragging around lots of paper books (as I used to do). And I pay for all of that with DRM. I'm ok with that. If the book is such important to me I'll buy the paper version. That's the problem with Stallman, and all radicals. Everything is black and white for them. Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists. Stallman thinks that it's ok, it's better to not have e-books if there's DRM. I don't think so. I like to have an option. I don't have any "problems" Stallman predicted.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  > Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists That is a strawman. Three are certsinly booksellers who never went near DRM and argue strongly against DRM. Exempel: http://www.baenebooks.com http://www.baenebooks.com
  - apetrovic 12y ago
    No, singling out one sentence from my answer and attacking it is a strawman. But ok, to correct myself: without DRM ebooks would never exists at this scale and people would never buy ebooks readers at this scale and read ebooks at this scale. Ten years ago ebook reader was a niche, used only by geeks. Today, thanks to aggressive Amazon pricing and (DRM-ed) ebooks, it's a common item. And popularity of ebook readers (namely - Kindle) started some new things: I love SF, and last year I bought a lot $1.99 books from self-publishing authors who would probably never find a place to publish their books without widely available ebook readers (read: Kindle). So, to return to original question - what are such a burning "problems" that Stallman predicted?

jeswin 12y ago

> Specifically, he said that without the virility of his license, there would be no free/open source software and that all software would be locked down and proprietary. If I were to guess, without GPL the Open Source movement may have looked very different. It might seem that GPL isn't essential today, but it may have been when the FOSS was learning to walk. Again, I don't see GPL as diminishing in importance, we'll probably see a resurgence in GPL as we start caring more about freedom.

pionar 12y ago
> If I were to guess, without GPL the Open Source movement may have looked very different. One could argue the other way, that the GPL seriously hindered the movement until more permissive licenses started becoming favored (like the Apache license).

facepalm 12y ago

Superfish, of recent times. Google it (Superfish Lenovo since you seem to have missed it).

emilsedgh 12y ago

The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period. Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement. He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one. You do know that the Linux Kernel, among the most important software projects in the world (if not the most important one) uses GPL and the Linus himself knows that as a direct result of using GPL, right? Of course, the bazaar model makes Open Source very attractive to companies and many do open source their work. However, the bazaar model happened and the companies where enlightened about it because Free Software Movement happened. Bazaar model was a consequence to that.

maxerickson 12y ago
BSD doesn't owe any of its origination to GNU, and it is impossible to say what it would look like if GNU never happened. (The point being, capital letter Open Source as a movement owes something to Free Software, the notion of sharing liberally licensed source code does not)
- kragen 12y ago
  Actually, Keith Bostic has gone on record saying that the reason he started trying to strip out the AT&T bits from the BSD kernel was because he was inspired by GNU, and wanted to see if the BSD kernel could work as a kernel for GNU. Maybe in Open Sources, I don't remember.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    I wrote the comment thinking that the BSD releases in the early 1980s had been released under the 'BSD License', I even did some amount of checking (I can't remember what evidence in particular made me decide to post). I see from looking more carefully this time around that the ~1980 license from Berkeley was not the same thing as the later one.
    - 12y ago

ta0967 12y ago

i suggest that anyone who is malinformed enough to believe MCRed's perversions of RMS's positions goes and reads the stuff themselves. i'll just say that the world is full of people who are "that old" and full of it.