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Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project known by many in the open source worlds as rms, is not the sort of person you'd expect to endorse a product. But Stallman and the FSF have formed a partnership of sorts with Crowd Supply, a crowdfunding company that has been largely focused on open source hardware and software projects.
Crowd Supply is best known for launching the Librem laptop (a privacy-focused computer built by Purism) and the Novena (an open-hardware "laptop" designed by Andrew "bunnie" Huang and Sean "xobs" Cross). Based in Portland, Oregon, the company was founded by Joshua Lifton, a Ph D alumnus of MIT Media Lab and the former head of engineering at Puppet Labs. In addition to providing product designers with a crowdfunding platform, Crowd Supply also provides them with long-term sales, marketing, and fulfillment services.
The partnership with FSF was a natural fit, Lifton said in a statement on the arrangement. "The lines between hardware and software are blurring," Lifton explained. "It only makes sense to consider them jointly rather than separately."
Is this RMS's version of selling-out?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:01AM
Phoenix666, thanks for taking the time to be an editor, but please stop with these comments you are adding to the summaries you post. It is annoying, and worse, it is damaging to the discussion which follows.
As evidence, see everybody responding to your flame bait comment about RMS selling out rather than the actual content of the submission-- a crowd funding site that apparently respects the freedoms of it users.
I would have loved to have seen a discussion on the story-- what it is about Crowd Supply that lead the FSF to this endorsement? But, you completely derailed that discussion before it could even get started.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:21PM
Hear, hear!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:29PM
Oops. Accidentally submitted my last post before finishing...
Let the community decide how to discuss the article. I know you already stated that you put in an opinion to stimulate a discussion: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=8548&cid=212530#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
Though I have another thought: What if an opinion wasn't given? Would the discussion be as "lively? Or would we see less comments?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:59PM
I'm not an editor, I only submit articles. Those I choose to submit are those which I think Soylent might find interesting. The manner in which I do that, ie. an excerpt representative of the article in blockquote tags and a quip from me, is consistent with time-honored practice from the early days of Slashdot through to now. That same heritage can be noted in the form of the editor's quip, "from the the-times-they-are-a-changin' dept." on this article. My quips can be flippant, but they are never intentionally inflammatory. And I'm not going to stop being who I am or suppress my natural insouciance and irreverance because they discomfit you.
There are at least a few remedies available to you. If you want just-the-facts-ma'am information, excise media outlets and community sites like this one from your reading material and limit yourself to whitepapers, scientific journals, and government reports. If you want headlines with no quips as distasteful as you find mine, then RSS is for you. If you generally like Soylent and it's specifically my submissions you dislike, then that's a simple solution: dilute my submissions by submitting your own. I'll be happy to not drop the daily dozen in the hopper I do, and I'd be even happier to learn of new article sources I don't know about through the submissions of other Soylentils.
I submit as much as I do because I see the queue grow so terribly short and then the editors start to submit because no one else is, essentially doing double-duty; I am very mindful of the editor's cry for help this spring (LaminatorX's, wasn't it?) that he was burning out and needed help. I did the editor training on IRC with the guys but the latest cohort of editors completed it and were certified before I was, so I decided to mind the submission queue instead and step in when the nagger (ie., fewer than 20 submissions in the queue) appeared. I value the community and don't want to see it fail because the core developers and editors who make it work burn out and drop out.
There may also be a bit of a difference here in how you see the community versus how I do. Perhaps you see it as a purely factual, technical discussion forum where, say, deep experts on Ruby can dispassionately ponder the pro's and con's of its latest iteration. I see it as a discussion site, where nerds and geeks from many stripes and definitions submit and discuss a broad sweep of topics, mainly technical, scientific, and geeky but with a handful of general interest articles thrown in; it's a motley crew of iconoclasts and social misfits, but they're all smart and in the melange of their social dysfunction and awkwardness brilliant insights, useful information, and sublime moments often appear. To me it's a 21st Century agora, and you get what you get and you don't get upset.
So as you began with a polite request for me to stop commenting, so let me conclude with a polite request for you to stop criticizing and start building. If you took that pile of rocks you've been throwing you could have built an entire new wing on the site with them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:58AM
Hear, hear.
I have been aware of this idea that the submitter's quips/opinions should be kept out of submissions. I think I could only agree with a requirement like that in situations where there could be any confusion between fact and opinion, or maybe where the whole tone & approach of the submission is adversely affected.
It's probably one of the reasons I don't submit as much as I should, because it goes against my natural style.