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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 30 2017, @07:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the must-read dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:10PM (3 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:10PM (#562098)

    Of course it's somebody's business: yours. And no, I absolutely would not sell my last hours of available time at any price, for the simple reason that having time to enjoy what money can buy me is the only thing that gives that money any real value. (Caveat - I might sell the entirety of a year or three of my time for a high enough price, on the assumption that I would survive to enjoy that money later.)

    I consider time the supreme currency... well, maybe alongside attention. They are the fundamental, utterly unreplaceable assets with which *everything* in our life is ultimately paid for. Whether you're watching a movie, going for a walk, or making love - you're making an economic decision to allocate an intensely limited resource to that rather than anything else. You can sell the use of your time for money, and use the money to buy the use of other people's time in the form of products or services, saving you from spending your own time to make/do the thing directly. And thanks to specialization that's very often a very good deal. But only if the good or service will actually enrich your life more than the other ways you could have spent the time you sold to pay for it.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:53PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:53PM (#562118) Journal

    Of course it's somebody's business: yours.

    Except I don't mix business and pleasure, it's detrimental for pleasure. Thus it's not even my business.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:01PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:01PM (#562230) Journal

    BINGO! I was reading this whole thread thinking you guys were missing something, but I think you've just about hit it right here.

    The value of your time varies as it becomes more or less scarce, which has already been mentioned. But the value of the thing you are being compensated with changes in the same way. Infinite money can have a value of zero if you have no time to do anything with it! And having time to yourself or your family can be compensation just as much as cash. And in fact it's commonly used that way -- companies will sometimes offer flex time or work from home as an *alternative* to increasing salaries, just like they'll offer medical care or free meals in the cafeteria or whatever else. It's all compensation, it's all value.

    I've got this dream business I'd love to run...haven't gone out and tried to start it because I'm pretty sure I'd go bankrupt, I'm not much for advertising and business sense. But that's definitely a price at which I would sell my current life -- I wouldn't sell it for any amount of cash, but if you could give me that dream job I'd sell the entirety of my current life time in a heartbeat. And like you, I'd sell a couple years for a few million, because then I could build that business and not worry about bleeding money for years or decades. Ultimately that's what we're all doing -- we've got a dream we're working towards, and a life we're in right now, and we're trying to sell a bit of the latter for a bit of the former and hoping we can get a good deal on it.