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, 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.