Reasons not to use Apple
stallman.org
stallman.org
This is one of the first things I read on this page.
This kind of uncompromising, unsympathetic view makes me think less that Stallman stands for something valuable, and more that he wants to use his principles to be a dick.
I mean, I get it, it's Stallman. He always has a few nuggets of insight, wrapped up in page upon page of pontification. But "they deserve to fail"?
The other thing that gets me is how muddled his political views end up being. Like this bit, "Apple is culpable if its products are made by people working a longer workweek than is allowed in the US." Really? They are culpable? Or you think they should be? China's a sovereign nation, it can set its own rules, but that's worth discussing and not just making some blanket assertion.
And, for someone who tends to play so pedantic, I'm surprised he's claiming that "the mere practice of referring to service staff as "geniuses" is dishonest already" without actually assessing whether Apple has only hired geniuses for its stores.
Last..."iBad"? Where's the eyes-rolling emoticon?
Stallman is at war, and there are casualties in war. He probably feels that the ends justify the means.
Edit: The theater I guess, but I can't really imagine Stallman going to see the movies honestly.
While I understand what you're getting at, would you feel the same way if they were taking advantage of cheap labor from a dictatorship? China may be a sovereign nation, but how much choice do the citizens have regarding their working conditions? I realize they're not strictly a dictatorship, but at the same time the question still stands.
And perhaps more to the point: Ignoring that he just focused on the workweek, if your company is well aware that the working conditions are bad in any sense of the imagination, is that really justifiable just because it is legal? Or do you have a certain amount of responsibility to ensure proper and safe working conditions regardless of what is considered sufficient by the law?
Uncompromising indeed. Maybe a bit unsympathetic to wish that people go unemployed. I doubt however that Greenpeace would described as "less stand for something valuable, more that they wants to use their principles to be a dick".
What a shitty, shitty attitude.
But it ignores all the people making apps that do have open licensing.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
If its not illegal, then perhaps it should be.
The majority of Apple's stack is opensource, too. Take a look through http://opensource.apple.com/ some time. The kernel and huge swathes of their ecosystem are opensource. I'm writing this comment in chrome, which has millions of lines of opensourced webkit code in it, written by paid Apple engineers. And compiled in clang/llvm, which is developed, maintained by Apple. Oh, and its opensource too.
I'm totally confused by the argument that Apple hates opensource. They depend on it. They give back. They're a good citizen.
They just aren't huge fans of the GPL, but so what? Neither am I. Neither is Rust (MIT), or Golang (BSD) or the NodeJS community (90%+ BSD/ISC). Opensource simply doesn't need the GPL to bloom in today's world.
Open source is about collaboratively building tools for developers and businesses, or simply because collaboration produces better software. The software is often released under permissive terms. Apple participates in open source projects.
Free software is focused on the end user having freedom over their software by ensuring that they have the ability to read, modify, and redistribute it. Apple does not give these rights to users of their platforms.
The post that was linked was the FSF, which argues from the free software perspective.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompati...
Note that the BSD license, Apache license, MIT license (which the FSF calls the X11 license), etc. are all considered Free Software licenses by the FSF and are okay in the App Store.
I've been spending much of the last year developing some open source code (a data flow ontology). Was thinking of using GPLv3. But, now leaning towards MIT. The first app to use it will be a visual music synth for iOS.
Ironically, Stallman just reminded me about GPL's philosophical baggage.
You're saying that the aim is to prevent somebody to make money on your work. This is absolutely not the goal of Open Source or Free Software. There is no issue in somebody else getting rich by using your work. A rough summary of both would be:
* Open Source: Stop reinventing the wheel every time. Somebody writes an implementation of a javascript interpreter, and everybody who needs one just uses it instead of writing one from scratch. If they find ways to make it better, they share their knowledge so that others can build on top.
* Free Software: As a user, I want to be able to understand how the software works, so I can fix it myself or ask somebody I know and trust to fix it if it's broken, or improve it if there are ways to do it.
The commercial side is neither seen as positive or negative; it's completely orthogonal to the question. My personal opinion is that I don't see why I should prevent somebody to earn money based on my work. To think that a software is enough to make a business and you could have made as much money as them if you just sold it is misunderstanding the domain. If they're better at it, why would I prevent them ?
Note that regarding Open Source and Free Software, I don't have a problem with any of those views. It's just important to understand the difference in philosophy if we want to understand why both styles exist and why some might choose one "side" over the other. I'll agree that in practice both styles are largely overlapping.
He has valid points, but the general world of software is much more open and diverse and companies are doing things in the public more -- on github, etc. There is still a need to make money to pay people, and, well, there will be closed source and other paths the pay that way.
It could be we are thanking him in 30 years, or moaning that we didn't listen more.
I certainly feel the software user agreements are far more onerous than I would have expected 20 years ago.. and the surveillance more extreme. I wish I had listened more then to what Stallman had to say.
Even if almost all programmers believe that they should have the right to run any software on devices which they own - we don't seem to have any organised political / legal movement that would bring that into law - large companies have almost all the power.
How can we make sure that web apps aren't also censored on mobile devices in future? If Apple or Google decided to do that, the small user base doesn't have much power to fight back, and yet we all would have lost an important freedom.
If he thinks he's a visionary ahead of his time then he doesn't owe it to anyone to be nice about it. I prefer people say what they think.
Most of his reasons fall away when you consider the product an appliance rather than a computer. Heck, I'm a computer programmer and I treat my smartphone as an appliance. It makes me wonder how seriously RMS takes his stance. Does he refuse to drive any modern vehicle with an ECU? Does he refuse to refrigerate his milk in any modern fridge with a microcontroller?
That's a common myth. Toilets have virtually no germs. I've seen so many studies that say "ice dispensers have more germs than a toilet", etc.
In a study done on germs on the areas of the body, the area around the nose came in first, the hands second, and the groin near the last. Germs don't come out of your butt.
> "As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer."
I've looked for a good smart phone to use as a portable computer and my efforts have been mostly frustrated. I think this may be because they're built for pennies, but maybe it's their closed nature.
Android allows the user to do a lot with it but many phone services go to great lengths to prevent you from having that access, which frankly, they should not be allowed to do. They own the towers, not the device. Finding success in these closed-proprietary markets emboldens corporations to make presumptive moves such as that.
Any actual computing I do requires a full sized keyboard and a reasonably large screen. For that I have a full sized desktop computer at home and a small laptop for travel. The only "work" I do on my smartphone is receive notifications.
I don't even like having a phone. They never work as advertised and they're not even that good at being phones, but I'll never give it up because smartphones allow us to record every phone call which is a huge leap forward in protecting the little guy from the hordes of evil people who are every day trying to take advantage of us.
There's a way of thinking that was born or embraced in those free-software circles which the majority of our consumer world is unaware of, and if we could teach it to them it could have dramatic and positive effects globally. But the corporations don't want that, and they often turn the volume on their ads up to 11 to drown us out.
...relies on everyone involved being technically savvy at a very high level in order to survive. Most people aren't like us and that's okay.
Unless you're Richard Stallman, I suppose.
It's not okay by any stretch of the imagination that there is a gigantic intelligence gap in the human race. It's very very bad.
For a Stallman-style world to work, everyone has to be not only able, but willing, to drop the business at hand and spend as much time as necessary, as often as necessary, doing what is basically sysadmin work. The nature of the libre stack, and its interaction with hardware, ensure this is necessary quite a lot. Put simply, most people have more valuable things to do with their time than sysadmin their personal hardware. Even most sysadmins do!
It is incumbent upon the free software movement to recognize and accommodate this fact. The inherent penalty for failure to do so is irrelevance, however ideologically pure.
We are 90% of the way to a "Stallman-style" world being a realistic possibility for the 'average user'. Only a few key applications are missing or under-represented, which should be seen as an opportunity for new developers to cut their teeth on some valuable projects.
There's more to it than an intelligence gap. There's a propoganda issue where people are being convinced that the subject matter is "too advanced" for them, which is a lie that would-be masters tell the people they wish to enslave. (this has been going on for centuries). But the intelligence gap does play a role and can be traced back to our neglected public education system and the greed of free market capitalism.
That's not my experience, nor is it reflected in what I hear from people who do still use Linux on their personal machines. Indeed, Dr. Stallman himself was unable to get VGA output working when he was on the stage at HOPE last month - in the end, the AV staff had to point a camera at his laptop.
It's also unreasonable to conclude, from the experience of programmers who actually are prepared to invest considerable time and effort into reworking the software we use, that free software is at, or indeed, near, a point of readiness to support the needs of "average users". One of Dr. Stallman's examples was a comparison between Photoshop and the GIMP; although he chose not to cast it in precisely those terms, it was obvious to which software packages to which he referred. Unfortunately, this comparison, while well suited to the ideological requirements of the Free Software Foundation and those of Dr. Stallman's talk, is not well founded in fact; the reason Photoshop remains the de facto standard for image editing is not, as Dr. Stallman would have it, mere foolish and contemptible intransigence on the part of "average users", but rather because Photoshop has for many years had capabilities which the GIMP still fails even to approximate. Even in the realm of text handling, a task central to the requirements of any graphic designer and almost any other sort of user, today's GIMP falls far short of the mark set by a version of Photoshop from well over a decade ago.
This sort of failure cannot be explained by a notional "intelligence gap", or by conspiracy theories around class warfare and capitalist propaganda. If a problem like this were of sufficient concern to the Free Software Foundation to be worth solving, solved it would be, and if achieving such a solution required some modification of an ideology which had proven too strict in its purity to address the needs of reality, such modification would have long since occurred. That it has not, and that fundamental issues of usability and functionality remain in the software FSF advertises as being ready in all respects to replace its proprietary alternatives, demonstrates that, for Dr. Stallman and his organization, ideological concerns are paramount, and outweigh to negligibility the concerns which matter to the same "average users" on whose behalf FSF partisans purport to work.
The occasional populism of FSF rhetoric is thus exposed as nothing more than an empty claim, trivially made when convenient and just as trivially discarded when it conflicts with the weird, chilly ideological "hackers uber alles" elitism which, while appealing to few, is at least an honest expression of Stallman's and FSF's true position. Unfortunately, as I said before, the price of purity in such an ideology is irrelevance, and indeed irrelevance is precisely the position in which FSF finds itself today. As long as ideology remains paramount, this will not, indeed cannot, change.
Examples: Regarding hardware support, there is no guarantee that a particular configuration of hardware and software is going to work just because you were forced to pay for it. "Improved Stability" is a lie that commercial software vendors have been spinning for years. I've been building computers for decades and even using brand name parts, compatibility issues, particularly with proprietary drivers, have often been a problem and that has continued to this day.
At least in the case of Debian, there are now free generic drivers for many devices, which are not entirely worthless, which actually improves compatibility.
Regarding The Gimp vs Photoshop, I've recently decided to ditch photoshop in favor of the Gimp and I am still learning so I can't speak as if I were a Gimp Expert, but based on things I've read from people who are, The Gimp is just as capable as Photoshop, but the toolset and workflow is slightly different (and that is intentional). There are some things missing that are represented in photoshop, for example inset shadows in photoshop are trivially easy to create, and in The Gimp require about 2 or 3 additional clicks. That isn't because photoshop costs $600, and it isn't why photoshop costs $600. Most of the $600 from each sale of photoshop is not going to the developers who create it.
Stallman's "rhetoric" is extreme sometimes but so what, that just gives him character. If you set aside your personal whimpering and examine his points objectively, he is 100% right about everything. When there exists an unsolved problem, the _right_ answer is to program a solution. Buying closed-source proprietary solutions is not the right answer, not when you look at the grander scale and consider the long term social effects of these two options. Stallman is right, and I think when people don't like that it's because they're afraid of what it means.
Well. What more could there possibly be worth saying?
People of a certain age have discovered the value in ephemeral services after Facebook and other services with long memories have proven to potentially cache embarrassing posts for future employers but there's no cyber utopia with anonymous communication empowered by a vetted web of trust because nobody cares. Just snapchats you hope the recipient doesn't capture.
Are you sure you're not thinking of CALEA?
Oh, maybe I'm not getting it. You want to run all the linux apps, but know that it's impossible?
RMS is the Richard Dawkins of free software. If you are already an atheist and enjoy making fun of others, Richard Dawkins is a fun read. If you are a religious person with some doubts, Dawkins is unlikely to convince you of much since he appears to revel so much in calling you an idiot. RMS, like Dawkins, has no sympathy for those with a different point of view. He immediately dismisses anyone not on his team, which is not a great way to gain followers.
If RMS cares about the free software movement, my advice to him would be to stop writing and let others with more empathy handle the evangelizing.
Really, Stallman? Is this the best that he can do? It reads like some angsty teenage, knee-jerk Apple hater bullshit that's reminiscent of the late 90's.
Edit: never really got the display and network cards to work, stuck with my Mac for now
Stallman understands the consequences of these things in a way that most humans are blind to. I am so glad that someone as high profile as him has the guts to stand up and persistently deliver the same message, maybe someday everyone will wake up and figure out they've been paving the road to hell before it's too late (if it's not already..)
But if you don't; if you value convenience, maximizing profits, and minimizing development effort, then this will probably annoy you.
I've been quietly hoping that a more personable figurehead for the free software movement might emerge for some time.
The EFF and Mozilla have done more for Stallman's cause than Stallman ever did. ESR got this one right.
Jeez. I never thought I'd say ESR was right about something that wasn't a piece of code. I guess a broken clock really is right twice a day.
As long as these other people are winning over more people than Stallman is losing, I'd say Stallman is still making a positive contribution to the world.
OTOH, gpsd...
For Rainer's sake, 1) Emacs might not have existed in the first place if it weren't for Stallman, and 2) I use GNU emacs more often then not.
I don't care much about principles - Apple made the best OS so I use it. If you want me to use something else then it has to be at least as good.
Due to the "I should be able to do whatever I want with my computer" crowd being a large part of /g/ though, many people agree with what he says. The user should basically be treated as a god - and not be put under limitations to modify the code running on their computer.
It also helps he has a pretty strong track record of being right. Even if his being right isn't recognized until years after the fact.
It's still better than it used to be...
On the other, I don't really like everything he says, despite being a pretty firm OSS supporter. He conflates so much with open source it's nauseating. People choose a license for all kinds of reasons and I understand he's a cheerleader, I am too, but conflating everything hurts open source as much as it hurts proprietary actors.
It's a market. Some people will want to buy your product because they see its open nature as a benefit they are willing to pay more for, others don't care and will not pay more. The same goes for privacy promises, DRM or which devices you support, the color etc. If people buy or sell things that you would rather not, that's cool. Pointing out that everyone at every level of a proprietary agreement is duped by some nefarious puppet-master and the entire machine should fail is childish. Furthermore, throwing in things like economics and employment fairness into the mix really confuses the message to the determent of OSS developers. In like kind, I may be a vegetarian, but PETA certainly doesn't speak for me.
I realize he thinks the current market is trash and slight deviations from the status quo won't bring real change, but most people just don't care enough about what many of us care about. That's the hard truth. Slinging mud and building straw-men isn't how we fix this problem. It just makes OSS proponents look out of touch.
Also, some people commented on his sometimes hypocritical impurity. eg. making phone calls on locked down phones and using closed source websites occasionally. Being OSS pure in 2016 is crazy hard and getting harder, again due to market forces. I think there's a lot to fault Stallman on, but his deviation from OSS purity is not one of them.
Nobody has built any, sadly.
And it's no more similar to FLAC than any other lossless audio codec.
It's widely believed that Apple chose to build their codec rather than simply implement FLAC because their goal was to optimise for maximum battery life efficiency on the iPod. (No such optimisations have been open sourced by Apple, but that doesn't in any way imply their non-existence.)