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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday August 30 2017, @09:49PM (8 children)
Say you come across a lost person in the woods, will you do them harm by not sharing the way out with them?
Now, a "cool tool" could be just a game. But it could also be a slight improvement on some commonly executed code. And if that means a reduction in power consumption and material wastes, you're essentially depriving the world from a step in the right direction out of the forest of environmental harm. Yes it's a very roundabout, fractional and hard to quantify effect. But when you put together the hundreds of proprietary pieces of code running all over our infrastructure, the damages accumulate.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by melikamp on Wednesday August 30 2017, @11:11PM (5 children)
These are good examples up above, but there are even more clear cut examples of pervasive oppression. Take a close look at here and now: virtually every mass-produced, general-purpose, individual consumer-oriented platform is proprietary, and everyone is goaded into that ecosystem, whether they like it or not. RMS likes to brag how he gets along juuuust fine without Window$ or Mac O$ or a cell phone, so the question I have is this: just how many jobs are out there, so that one can get and keep them while refusing to use proprietary software? We can't all be RMSes, can we? Try being a police without using proprietary software, or a doctor, or, in many places, a teacher, and see how that works out. I personally feel very lucky teaching basic math at a CA community college, where I am able to pretend that proprietary software does not exist, but I feel like my position is rather exceptional.
The point I am making, of course, is that we as consumers are being both scammed and oppressed bigly by this ecosystem, and it sure as hell is someone's fault, so let's figure out whose fault it is. How did we get here? Oh yeah, that's right, the proprietary software spread like cancer thanks to meticulous work done by the likes of Micro$oft, done consistently over the last few decades: they lie through advertising, they leverage the monopolies, they stifle innovation and competition with predatory copyrights and patents, and they bribe all kinds of clients, from state governments to hungry students, both which they do both legally and illegally. I say, it's pretty clear the ecosystem works exactly the way they designed it. They (Micro$oft, Aple, Scroogle, ...) totally own this system and all of the oppression the system effects.
So let's not compare their actions to some guy who built a fun mystery tool and won't share its secret. They are more like a guy who builds a mystery dildos with backward-pointing spikes and shoves them up everyone's ass, coast to coast, for 30 years straight, to the point that people get addicted to the dildos, especially considering the damage which results from forcefully removing them.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:05PM (1 child)
Bit weird that this is your first example. The police force these days could definitely use increased transparency, e.g. the craptastically unreliable breathalyzers.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:19PM
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:28PM (2 children)
If it was worth it to society to create and maintain open and freely shareable alternatives to the software examples you listed then we would do it. It is not, and we have not. I'm sorry if that reality doesn't sit well with your pet, imaginary dream world that never has and will never exist. You should make your peace with the here and now. Do what you can to make it better if you have the energy and resources. Stop complaining and trying to shame or force others to pay the cost for you.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday August 31 2017, @07:23PM
Man, how's life in that perfectly rational parallel universe going?
Because that's not at all how things work over here. Take the example above of closed source police breathalyzers. Or speed radars. The *intelligent* way to do that would be for the federal government to come up with the specs, write the software, design the hardware, and supply in bulk to all the departments. But that's not what happens -- instead, some private company decided they could create this brilliant new invention to replace cops with stopwatches or whatever, so they build it and start trying to sell it one department at a time. Other companies see that success and try to duplicate, and you get competing products. Then later someone takes them to court and you get a whole clusterfuck because the companies don't want to release the proprietary code, but the accused does have a right to know how the evidence was collected, so you blow tons of time and money in litigation which nobody really considered in the beginning. And now it's hard to justify the expense of a new design when there's already several existing and deployed, and people are also going to argue that the government shouldn't be taking jobs away from a private corporation. Thus the sub-optimal solution stays because the inertia of keeping it is less effort than creating the better system, even though the better system would have been far less cost effort if it had been deployed from the beginning.
It's the same lack of long-term planning that we complain about when MBAs loot the future of a company to boost this quarter's profits a couple percent. Sitting back and saying "Well, that's just the way it is" isn't really helpful...
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:30PM
What are you even talking about? Are you from beyond the moon? We do have "alternatives", one of them is called GNU/Linux-libre, and it kicks the SHIT out of every proprietary platform out there. We have created it. It works. You obviously are not familiar with it to any kind of extent, but I am telling you, all we would have to do at THIS point is switch, which is why dildo-ware comes with backward-pointing spikes. It is designed from ground up to be incompatible with everything else, and ESPECIALLY with the free software, so that no one even thinks about jumping ship, even when it is clearly sinking (look at Window$).
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:23PM (1 child)
"Say you come across a lost person in the woods, will you do them harm by not sharing the way out with them?"
He can ask me if I know the way out. I might help, I might not. It depends. Maybe he's trying to get back to his family which he systematically beats and rapes daily. Maybe people who get lost in the woods should learn basic survival and navigation skills before going out into the woods like idiots.
Anyway, doesn't matter. Your assertion that not supplying a lost person in the woods with directions is harm is false. I'm free to do what I want with the information. I can give it, I can keep it to myself. I'm under no moral obligation to share it. The person may or may not be harmed, it's not certain either way. The greater community may be harmed either way depending on what I do.
As individuals we are under no obligation to provide new knowledge we come across or create to the greater community. Maybe if they want it they could come up with some incentive to convince us to hand it over (one not grossly perverted by corporations and lobbyists). But we are not obligated.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:52PM
The problem with following Nietzsche and rejecting the Good Samaritan ideal, is that the point of breaking away from Christian morality was to establish ones own morals and ideals. However, seeing how nobody wants to live with a person that will leave them dead at the side of the road, when others reject ones morals, a social contract fails to form which invalidates ones ideals as nothing but the whims of psychopath, criminal or loner.
That's the problem with morals: In principle, you're not under a moral obligation to do anything other then serve yourself. However, since the best way to serve yourself is to be a part of a society and the best societies are the ones that have a social safety net, you end up with all kind of inconvenient obligations to help others. Unfortunate, ha?
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