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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: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:56AM (7 children)
Most people, even rich people, don't have Gates's level of hubris. He thinks he needs the money because he needs the power to change things because only he has the correct solution. Thus have tyrants always been created.
I've never in my life treated an employee as shit and I've done quite well for myself. My roomie currently works for a company that pays him to sit on his ass three weeks out of four. He was actually told in his job interview to keep a fishing pole on his company truck that he gets personal use of and the gas paid for in.
Not all capitalists feel the need to treat employees poorly. The trick is you need to enable people who aren't rat bastards to compete with the rat bastards. Then it's a simple matter of if you're a shitty employer, you can't keep employees.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:02AM (3 children)
Not all capitalists feel the need to treat employees poorly
You're reminding me of Aaron Feuerstein. [cbsnews.com]
When his factory burned down, all those workers who had been so loyal to him for so many years he kept on salary while he figured out how to rebuild IN THE SAME TOWN.
...though the reason these stand out is that they are so rare.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:18AM (2 children)
They're really not. Most SMBs are run by decent human beings. You have to go to big corporations to be treated like shit for the most part.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:03PM
They're really not. Most SMBs are run by decent human beings.
That's not what I've observed at all. It's really more of a mixed bag. At least with the big corporations, they're more consistent in their treatment; you won't get really great treatment, but you won't usually be totally fucked over for no reason at all. Big companies are risk-averse and have deep pockets that lawyers like to go after, so they develop practices and policies to avoid risk, so you get stuff like harassment training and policies against harassment, specific policies for lay-offs, etc. At small companies you can be harassed and have no real recourse besides quitting because they don't have enough assets to go after, and they can violate employment law more easily because again you won't profit off a lawsuit so it's generally not worth your time to sue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:23PM
Hahahah, maybe overall that statistic holds out, but I believe there is a significant percentage of SMBs that don't treat their employees very well. A large part of it is that SMBs have been squeezed by big corporations and they often can not afford to treat their workers well. Also, a good percentage are shitty bosses who overwork their employees and violate labor laws.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:15PM (2 children)
Most people, even rich people, don't have Gates's level of hubris. He thinks he needs the money because he needs the power to change things because only he has the correct solution. Thus have tyrants always been created.
To be fair, this is not an illogical viewpoint. Look at what happens when the masses have the power to choose their leaders: you get people like Trump elected, or worse. Hitler was elected too, remember. Too much democracy ends up in mob rule; that's why democratic republics have all kinds of mechanisms built-in to avoid this (like having an appointed, unfireable judiciary as a check on the other branches). And people in general are terrible at managing shared resources, which is why we have the phrase "tragedy of the commons" (e.g. if some grazing pasture is available to everyone in an agrarian society, they'll all graze their sheep there but not take care of it and pretty soon there's no grass left). People are generally very bad at working collectively for the greater good. The tyrants are right: the people are too stupid and disorganized. The problem is that the tyrants frequently don't have the correct solution, or are themselves greedy, selfish, and/or corrupt, so they don't do any better.
With Gates, it seems like his deal is to give out free "charity", but then attach strings requiring recipients to buy Microsoft licenses and use MS products.
He was actually told in his job interview to keep a fishing pole on his company truck that he gets personal use of and the gas paid for in.
Wow, that sounds pretty horrible actually. If they let him work on personal projects on work time, that'd be good, but the last thing I want to do is fish. I'd rather work. I was talking to my sister about this recently, and she commented that fishing is one of those things that people either really like, or really really hate.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 01 2017, @12:58AM (1 child)
Nice, that's just more fish for me to catch then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 01 2017, @04:08AM
Knock yourself out. I really don't like eating freshwater fish anyway.