The Problem with Stallman

medium.com

2 pointsalive20073 comments

> I used to have this Arch Linux distro.

I think you'll strike a better balance with Ubuntu than Arch.

> I trust American capitalism to do a well-enough job.

Stallman's right about one thing: general purpose computing is under threat. What if buying a CPU that can boot without a signed bootloader from its manufacturer becomes so uncommon that it's outlawed? It doesn't sound terribly far-fetched to me. For now I have the freedom to buy x86 chips and opt-out of Trusted Platform. But I can foresee a day when that's no longer the case.

> I just don’t want to spend 3 hours looking up what broke my Wi-Fi drivers this time.

Yeah, I hear you. I've been using a linux laptop for my regular machine for 4-5 years now and sometimes there are some hiccups.

I've spent some time with Stallman in real life. There is very little variance between Ubuntu and OS X to him. They both have free kernels (Linux, XNU) that come with nonfree binary blobs (device drivers) and nonfree userlands (Ubuntu apt-get main channel is not entirely free, OS X is obviously nonfree). To Stallman, once you give convenience the time of day, you might as well be Bill Gates.

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