Comment by tgma
20 days ago
The funny thing is Stallman started his fight like half a century ago and on regular days Hacker News shits on him eating something off of his foot and not being polished and diplomatic, and loves practical aspects of Corporate Open Source and gratis goodies and doesn't particularly care about Free Software.
On this day suddenly folks come out of the woodwork advocating for half baked measures to achieve what Stallman portrayed but they still hardly recognize this was EXACTLY his concern when he started the Free Software movement.
Stallman actively hurts the cause with his behaviour. I'm not only talking about his eccentricities, but also the adversarial and combative language. Yes, Amazon is trying to swindle us, but few people will be convinced of that when you start your argument by calling the kindle an "Amazon swindle" every time, directly implying that anyone who has one is an idiot or even malicious.
Yes, it's unfair that someone can be 100% correct but people won't listen to them because of their appearance or mannerisms. But whining about that unfairness is unproductive. People will never listen to someone who can't stop themselves from eating stuff from their foot in public.
I used to 100% feel the same, but at some point I realized the problem was me, not him, in not viscerally understanding his goals. His stated goals are very clear, but the audience usually has somewhat overlapping, but nevertheless distinct goals. This is indeed at the very core of Open Source-Free Software feud. The base is almost entirely the same people, yet the ideologies are not the same, and in a very interesting way: the differences are critical to RMS's ideology, but minute to the other side. Thus, the other side thinks of a crazy guy ruining the whole thing for nothing or very little, and evaluates him as net negative for "the cause." Well, it is absolutely true, for their cause, not his.
I think his take on what compromises are valid and what aren't makes this clear: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.en.html
In fact, this particular incident, re Android, a seemingly "open" system, is a perfect example of the importance of his PoV in particular, as it illustrates that Open Source ideology would not have been enough to ensure the user is in control.
The problem is: you never get to have your goals or arguments listened to when you fail to represent yourself as a basic human. That means not putting weird stuff in your mouth on camera, not looking too unkempt, not being too belligerent before you get to your points – and never, never, never discussing the fine differences between ephebophilia and pedophilia on a mailing list.
His point of view and his goals are completely besides the point that he is unfit as a spokesperson for them.
Sadly. Because I agree with him quite a lot, and he does have good arguments.
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I don't think Stallman is an effective spokesperson or campaigner for his own cause, though. Corporate-friendly open source has got enormously popular, to the point where the biggest open source collaboration platform, Github, is owned by Microsoft. Stallman is not troubling them. It's his own side he's driving to irrelevance.
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No, sorry. By and large, when people criticize RMS for his behavior, they aren't saying "RMS being deeply associated with Open Source makes it harder for me to convince my boss to get the company to switch to X FOSS software or donate to Y project". The Open Source side of things is way bigger than RMS now. He's inconsequential to their world.
No, just about everyone critiquing RMS's behavior is saying that it negatively affects his own movement. That it makes it more difficult to advocate for Free Software, that it diminishes the FSF.
> Well, it is absolutely true, for their cause, not his.
You have it backwards. Open Source is so much bigger than Free Software, that it's not even funny. The Open Source people are not scared of RMS affecting a movement widely accepted in almost every major tech company.
One can be correct but convince no one, a modern day Cassandra.
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It's inconvenient to have to recognise that we are being f**ed in the ass by corporations like Amazon, but that doesn't make it any the less true unfortunately.
It's also a damn shame that the majority of the people who are skilled at communicating messages effectively are working for these corporations; because without them, the unfiltered message of people like Stallman is all we've got.
It is a damn shame, and it is also a choice. If that majority chooses to work for the corporations, perhaps humanity just does not deserve better. There isn't anyone else but us humans who can fix this thing. If we choose not to, it won't be fixed period.
Stallman's mannerisms are one of the only reason FOSS is still standing.
First of all, from a public image point of view, it really doesn't matter at all whether he ate something off his foot or whether he says "Amazon swindle", because Stallman isn't the gateway into free softward anymore.
To an order of magnitude, no one in the last 15 years has heard of Stallman then free software.
The real role of Stallman is to avoid the movement being co-opted by soulless and/or corporate interests. As long as Stallman is here, you can't make free software corporate and well-mannered, which essentially means you can't absorb it into a marketing strategy for your next brand of phones unless you actually plan to deliver.
I was always somewhat put off by his extreme vigilance over the word free. Stallmans usage of free software is exactly the same as the rest of the worlds open source. We also have “source available” for software that is license encumbered but distributes the source.
So much time and effort wasted on a fruitless effort to redefine words that already have well established meanings.
Stallman has mentioned this before that it is a limit of the English language. Thus the use of Libre.
Problem is that many people today do still mistake Free software as no cost and for good reason. Funnily enough, "open sourcesource" turns out to have great SEO. Free software doesn't.
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Android is open source. It is not free software. The issue we're discussing right now should make the difference very clear.
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Stallman is a "prophet": he needs to be extreme and rigid in his ideology so that the world shifts to a more moderate middle ground. For GNU to actually change the world, they need to be a pole of extreme that is opposite to our status quo of capitalist consumption. You are not supposed to emulate him.
You see this phenomenon in every movement for societal change. The more dogmatic they are, the larger their effect on public opinion.
The fact that the modern programming world defaults to releasing their code using corporate-friendly OSS licences like MIT is thanks to Stallman's and GNU's campaigns.
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That is entirely wrong and is a widespread misconception. The difference between free software and open source software is at the core of this 'android verified developer controversy' we are discussing here in a humongous thread. Stallman was warning us about exactly this sort of unethical arm twisting when he was policing the meaning of the word free software. (Somebody taught me this when I held this same misconception. But I was expecting moves like this ever since I understood the distinction.)
As you may be aware, the open source initiative started much after free software movement by people who disagreed with Stallman and the free software philosophy. The core idea of OSI is that by keeping the source code open, more people from a wider background can work on it to improve its quality in terms of features, design, correctness, bug reporting and fixing, security, documentation, etc. The idea is to make software more of a shared resource, thus achieving what is difficult for a single company to achieve. With that in mind, OSI borrows one more requirement from the FSF - there can't be any limitation on the user as to how they use it.
Now coming to the Free Software philosophy as defined by FSF, opening the source is just a secondary concern - a means to an end. That end, the primary concern, being computing freedom. What it means is that any computing device must do only and exactly what its owner wishes it to do. This means that the device owner must be able to verify the functionality of the software and modify it to suit them, if necessary (with 3rd party help, if needed). This is possible only if the device owner also has the source code of the software. But that's where the requirement for open source code ends for free software. If the author of the software and the device owner wishes, they can keep the source all to themselves. There are plenty of cases where this actually makes sense. Anyway, the people who possess the software are also allowed to distribute the software as they see fit.
As you can see, the computing freedom part is the centerpiece of the free software philosophy. But it isn't a concern at all for open source. I will explain why later. In practice, most licenses that satisfy one philosophy automatically meets the requirements of the other. Thus free software license list and open source license list overlap for the most part (with a few exceptions). But the philosophical differences extend well beyond the licenses and deep into the software design itself. If the device owner/software user is supposed to have any freedom, the software must be small, easy to read and understand, easily hackable and modifiable, well documented, highly modular with very good glue layer and highly configurable. This concept pervades the GNU software design. Emacs is the best example of this. Others include GNU Shepherd, Guile, Guix, Poke, GDB and a lot of others.
Now coming to open source, we have this notion that if the source code is open, it is pro-user and pro-freedom. This is true for most FOSS code, because their authors have more or less the same idea. But it's entirely possible to create an open source project that actively denies or even degrades the control of the device owner over their device, and thus their freedom. Take these examples - Android, Chrome browser (and its derivatives), SystemD and VSCode. How many of these projects listen to the public about their design choices? Which among them can you realistically fork and maintain as an individual or even as a company? (Not even MNCs try that with Chrome). How deeply and freely configurable are any of them? Are you able to remove or disable their user-hostile features? Are you able to use their submodules? Have your ever seen their code while troubleshooting or debugging? Have you been able to stop them from corrupting open standards and ecosystems? These are the open source non-free software .
Now, how did open source become popular in place of free software? Its proponents would have you believe that FSF is heavy on 'ideology'. Except, those ideologies were actually very stark warnings about the future. Open source became popular because the corporations used their enormous wealth to downplay, malign and suppress the idea of computing freedom. This is just like how they made permissive licenses popular over copyleft licenses. Both were driven by greed. If the suppression of copyleft licenses was about obtaining unpaid labor, suppression of computing freedom was about usurping the device owners' control over their own devices.
Now that we have problems like Google mandating developer verification on Android, or unilaterally deprecating XSLT from the web standards, know that they are all the result of everyone contemptuously dismissing Stallman as an attention seeking lone rebel when he was trying to draw attention to the oppression that he clearly foresaw. Heck! Even I could see this from a mile away! But this world is driven by hype and ill advised blind faith.
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If they were really the same, you should flip the question around. You do realize the Open Source folks invented that phrase explicitly to avoid using (and dare I say to undermine) the term Free Software?
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> Stallmans usage of free software is exactly the same as the rest of the worlds open source.
Not at all, that's why there are separate terms! GNU has an article that's worth reading: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I'll point out a very practical case. I was once-upon-a-time interested in Nostr, because I liked the relay idea. I looked for a client, and found one called Amethyst. When I installed it, I saw the author had inserted a pop-up on load that had me agreeing to his "Terms and Conditions" for using "the service". But the author had no service...he was worried about his liability if I posted something. Stallman saw this coming! From the article above:
> Third, the criteria for open source are concerned solely with the use of the source code. Indeed, almost all the items in the Open Source Definition are formulated as conditions on the software's source license rather than on what users are free to do. However, people often describe an executable as “open source,” because its source code is available that way. That causes confusion in paradoxical situations where the source code is open source (and free) but the executable itself is nonfree.
> The trivial case of this paradox is when a program's source code carries a weak free license, one without copyleft, but its executables carry additional nonfree conditions. Supposing the executables correspond exactly to the released sources—which may or may not be so—users can compile the source code to make and distribute free executables. That's why this case is trivial; it is no grave problem.
And this is _exactly_ the argument the author of Amethyst makes, check out how he reasons through the additional restrictions: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst/issues/378
His reasoning is squarely in this weird zone the Stallman wrote about:
> I am confused. Why are we mixing the license with the terms of use? These two files are separate legal matters. The Privacy is used by the Play Store to manage the distribution of the executables. The MIT license relates to the source code only.
> In other words, the MIT license removes any author liability from the misuse of the code. But when the author is also providing the system as binaries (which is an additional service in every jurisdiction I know of), there are many other legal issues that the source code license won't cover.
> And I don't know about you, but I am not comfortable allowing people to use the Play Store version or the FDroid version for these activities written in the Privacy statement. Most of them are local crimes that should not happen anyway.
> This has nothing to do with the source code license, which people can still download, compile and use in nefarious ways.
Anyway, my point is, in practice, there's a million ways to water down "open source" to remove user freedoms, and the value of Free Software is that it keeps the focus in the right place to avoid falling victim to those tricks.
Yeah, let's be nice and polished. No blood, no foot eating, just nice people talking in nice settings (castles, maybe?) around a warm cup of tea.
That's how revolutions succeed, historically.
Or you go shouting in the beer house every Tuesday about how the failed state is giving away your riches to others and that these communists are ruining the country. You then have your goons go beat up the communists for fun and when you get enough people behind you, you abuse a loop hole in the constitution which causes re-voting over and over again until you win majority power.
No revolutions turn out good for everyone, and there is no solution that fits all. Sometimes the rich and powerful needs to be dragged into the streets and executed, so they are reminded to be scared of the people under them. If they don't fear the population, then they see that there are no consequences for their actions.
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> Stallman actively hurts the cause with his behaviour.
People arguing this should realize that actors fighting oh the other side of the war might act kind and use politically correct wording, but they're still eroding our freedom little by little.
Arguments like this ("his behaviour") really mean that people care about policing other people's behaviour more than they care about the actual topic being discussed.
Downvote me if you want, I don't care:
- Stallman, singlehandedly, did more than anybody else for freedom in the computing industry.
- People pushing those arguments a huge part of the problem.
- People like Stallman are a huge part of the solution.
Expecting someone who built what he did to be normal is even more ridiculous.
If he were normal he’d probably have ended up working at MS, IBM, Oracle.
Of course if his behavior bothers you then fork it and rewrite his work and maintain it then you have a laundered version of the same thing but you probably don’t care that much about his behavior to do that so it’s pointless to bring up.
To put my thoughts into one sentence: You can't fight the system within the system.
Calling the kindle the "swindle" hurt open software?
Listen to yourself.
I will forever call it the Amazon Swindle now, that's hilarious
Frankly I find it refreshing in a world where everyone is obedient to the corporate overlords to have someone who just doesn't give a shit and calls it out exactly the way he sees it.
We don't need more polished people.
Why would someone use Kindle?
Well if they are too stupid and ignorant to consider the meaningful content of what someone says and get so fixated on how they are disgusting (although it is obvious that he is doing that to attract attention and make what he says memorable), perhaps it is fitting that they lose all their freedoms.
Language matters. I actually really like what Stallman does. You need this kind of thing to counteract repeated exposure to marketing material. It's similar to the Dave Ramsey situation IMO. Dave Ramsey's advice is objectively bad but you need something to be repeated as an alternative to the credit ads people hear multiple times a day.
These simple repeated ideas slowly absorb into people's subconscious.
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I get where you're coming from, but I think you need to understand that the vast majority of people (conservatively maybe >95%) are perfectly fine with using Amazon. If you just start metaphorically punching all of them you won't convince them of anything. I don't think you can really make something socially poisonous that way without a significant group of people, in socially powerful positions, already agreeing with you.
I think you're overestimating how many people think like you on both of these topics (iOS/Android and Amazon).
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You're comparing buying stuff from Amazon... to fascism? Your moral compass is a bit extreme.
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So now people who use Amazon are the enemy?
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It's possible to believe both that Stallman is over the top and that stuff like this Google action is bad, and even to be right on both. It's even easier to believe that Stallman has had some good ideas but is still a deeply flawed human being, and has also incidentally not been the most effective advocate for his own ideals.
It is possible, sure, but I have a feeling it goes unrecognized how prophetic and precise his concerns were, and that this is very similar to his original issue with the closed-source printer software he was not allowed to fix, and he does not get credit for his predictions, as people simply pass by, and not connect it to the Free Software issue, when issues like this happen; meanwhile he takes all the downsides of being brash and anti-corporate, which is taken advantage of by the Corporate Open Source crowd.
But Android is open source. In a way the situation here shows the limits of what is possible just by imposing license requirements that require distribution of source code. The problem is the concentration of power in the provision of services. Even licenses like the AGPL don't really solve the problem here, which is that there is a coalition of businesses including, say, Google and banks, that via their provision of essential services hold worrisome sway over the practical ability of many individuals to live their lives.
Stallman's statements about how the person controlling nonfree software "is your master" are important, but they don't go far enough. The problem is not just the controlling of abstract intellectual property like intellectual property rights to particular software. The problem includes the actual control of how services are provided. When the provision of important services --- be they auth, email, banking, groceries, whatever --- is concentrated in a few hands, those hands become masters of many, regardless of the software licenses involved.
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It's easy to piss on the individual.
Ask yourself how come free software is everywhere, with licenses for various stuff neatly tucked away out of sight unless you're trying to find it, not to mention all the giant clusters of Linux machines in data centers running Samba, PostgreSQL, and all sorts of free software, and at the same time the FSF still has just a small appartment on the 5th floor of a building in Boston?
Here, take a look: https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/tour-2010
They don't work there any more.
https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/
>As of September 1, 2024, we have gone remote and no longer have an office for people to visit.
IIRC they moved somewhere else in the interim.
It has http links to images that don't display when mixing secure content with insecure is disabled.
Having spoken to Stallman over the years many times. One of the most difficult people to talk to, but completely spot on with his ideas.
> completely spot on with his ideas.
Which ideas? I've read ideas from him that were borderline scandalous. I wouldn't say that 100% of what he ever said was "completely spot on".
Now if we are talking about the subset of his ideas that were completely spot on, then yeah, they are completely spot on :-).
I guess my point is that one can agree with a subset of his ideas and still dislike the guy. And I don't see why those ideas couldn't live without him. Especially if they are completely spot on. I don't get the cult of personality, not only for Stallman.
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Who is doing a better job?
Because I see A LOT of “open source” advocates these days, and more and more “source available”.
But the old school Free Software hippies(that started with BSD, NOT GNU, IMNHO) are slowly dying out and being replaced with?
I can understand why some devs would have tried to ignore the writing on the wall for Android over the last few years (hopefully not from now on), but it's especially galling when you see some of them still using the likes of Github and Discord...
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Cory Doctorow.
He's not an open source advocate as such, but his work on consumer rights and enshittification promotes solutions like using open source software, right to repair and strong consumer protection regulations.
There are people who have been pretty steady in their convictions over decades. Not that we have much illusions about the end game. Stallman has issues, but they're minor compared to the issues that the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have. But they get to hide their nasty little habits behind the corporate veil of respectability.
It's a sad state of affairs when a guy born in 1953 and a 70+ years old is our reference for freedom.
What happened to GenX, Millenials and GenZ ? Why aren't there any more vocal activists doing something? The internet fuked us up. We're full of armchair experts "fighting" the cause laying in our coach.
Millennial here. I took up educating masses in my country about all this. I quickly realized that people just do not care.
Millenials here. We did. A lot of a lot. And nobody cared.
Even today on HN most use chrome instead of firefox and mac instead of linux and. If you can't even convince the biggest nerds that supporting alternatives is important, what chances do you have?
This nerd cares about security, and Chrome is significantly more secure than Firefox and Mac is significantly more secure than any Linux distro.
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Plenty of Gen Z caring about freedom, but unfortunately lot of them being deported from the U.S. for defending Palestinians.
I mean - Western world is a bit tougher place for protesting than it used to be, due to capital accumulation. Free SW is admirable but a pretty first world problem, unfortunately, low on the list of priorities.
"lot of them being deported from the U.S. for defending Palestinians."
Can you cite me a source for this? Specifically to show that there are a "lot" of them being deported, and that the cause is definitely "for defending Palestinians" and nothing else?
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Lack of free SW is unfortunately a universal problem for basic human rights now.
It is right to highlight the fight for libre software that Stallman championed.
The world would be a much, much worse place without Free Software. We own the obligation to keep the fight up. So many of us profit from it, and so many people depend on it.
This friend of mine dealt with S. - and found a completely irrational part. We tried to steer history for the best, S. let it flow (in that occasion, of course. He just would not listen).
> not being polished and diplomatic
That is severe understatement. Plenty of people and political activists are not polished and not diplomatic ... while still not reaching Stallmans levels. Majority of them, actually.
> eating something off of his foot
Yeah, that episode is unforgettable.
He can be mostly right but also terrible for his own cause at the same time. Anyone that doesn't see that must not know even the tiniest fraction of the stories, or like him also has a cognitive disability.
fact: it is possible to be a good and clean person at the same time
one can both see far into the future and fit one's foot into one's own mouth. it is possible to do two things.
No, I hate this change from Google, and everyone involved with it should be ashamed of themselves, but Stallman is an extremest and I don't believe his world would be better than this one.
There's genuine need for application developers to gain access to extremely secure end-to-end attestation of the environment their apps are running in. Its a rare need, but it does exist. There's also genuine need for some consumers to opt-in to a strict security regime.
Google's change forces this draconian, dishonorable regime on all application developers and on all users. Its a change that serves no one except their shareholders.
> but Stallman is an extremest
No, he isn't, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025116
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I don't think I can come up with a worse reason to build an opinion on someone than not following the orthodoxy in the extremely stupid context of culture wars.
Especially that big corpos are very willing to use any pronouns you'd like.
I think his proposal to use "per" instead of "they" actually makes a lot of sense, because "they" is very confusing in a lot of contexts, because it's a word already used for another function. I don't see how you perceive that as something negative.
The quote about pedophilia is concerning indeed, but I think that rather stems from ignorance about the issues than promoting pedophelia. It's easy to shit on such things and wokely dismiss someone's entire opinion, which I find a bit weak.
Some context re that matter: https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...
The guy quite obviously is diversely talented. A computer genius, but well below generally agreed upon levels of mental deficiency in areas that most people care about.
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Stallman was smeared for being uncompromisingly rigorous and objective: https://stallmansupport.org/explaining-events-that-led-to-st...
It was all witch hunt from there.
What witch-hunt. What Epstein. Just read RMSs blog.
I can understand Defending bad people. He is railing against freedom of injustice. I understand being abusive. He is feeling hopeless. I haven’t seen Harassment so I don’t know what to make of it.
He seems to walk the path of purity of ideas. And may come off as aggressive. As a by product, he may also be aloof from the career ladder. His trust in being nice to people is broken (autism?).
He has some good civil rights stuff https://www.stallman.org/
I read your comment and assumed he ate some food that fell on his foot. And I thought that was gross. But omg it’s so much worse
is it really worse than losing your freedoms?
We really shouldn’t have the frontman of free software be someone who is a creep towards women and who can’t take care of himself.