Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

Although Stallman's opinions and philosophy may be seen as extreme or unrealistic, I think he expresses himself very well here, and makes logical, rational points. It's fine to disagree, but it's not presented in an antagonistic way.

For example, compare a typical flamewar comment to this:

> In practice, open source and free software are nearly equivalent, but the open source people reject our philosophy. They think it’s just fine if someone wants to write proprietary extensions to their software. So we have to differ with them.

Also, it's good to see surface issues (e.g. practicality, compatibility, etc.) reframed in terms of the Free Software philosophy. For example:

> Your question implies that software is good, even if it takes our freedom away. I don’t accept that.

Making distinctions like this can probably save an awful lot of arguing, by rephrasing things from "clearly XYZ" into "even if you don't agree with ABC, can you see that it is a valid position to take, and that XYZ makes sense in that case?" (where, for example, "XYZ" might be "Flash should be disabled").

For example, I'm often asked how I can possibly live without Facebook/Photoshop/whatever. A useful answer is that humans have survived for thousands of years without them, and I'm no different. By controlling the context of the question, something strange can seem normal or sensible.

Thankfully there is a spectrum of software available, so other people's choices and preferences (whether proprietary or not) aren't forced on everyone.

But careful not to push too much your facebook argument:

> Would you like to live without fire? More humans lived without it than with it after all.

I reframed the context too much, it became bad.

There's a fundamental problem with communications we've all experienced, or at least for those of us who tried to teach someone something:

The thing coming out of my brain isn't the same as the one entering the brains of others. Hence why teachers repeat themselves a lot.

> The thing coming out of my brain isn't the same as the one entering the brains of others.

That's true. I suppose the analogy to context is that the wiring of my brain isn't the same as the wiring of others, so something which seems obvious to me might make no sense to others.

Framing things can help, especially if that framing is done in the right place. For example, if I said "it's obvious that Javascript should be disabled by default", many people would find that silly.

If I framed it badly, and said "if we don't want arbitrary code on our machines, it's obvious that Javascript should be disabled by default", then the argument follows, but the premise seems just as silly as the original.

If I framed it better, like "if we want to run only Free Software, it's obvious that Javascript should be disabled by default", then the argument still follows, but now the premise seems like something a reasonable person might want; maybe not the listener, but they can imagine that others might want that. If not, then at least we've found the right level at which there's misunderstanding/disagreement.

Would you like to live without fire? More humans lived without it than with it after all.

That's not actually true, though. There's evidence that domestication of fire predates humanity as we know it.

Maybe use "vaccines" instead of "fire," but it still seems sort of missing the point to co-mingle life and death matters with Photoshop and Facebook.

Or may be use "writing" instead of both.

It's a new technology that enhances oral storytelling and then later replaces it.

Domestication of fire predating humanity as we know it implies to me by the animal kingdom, in which case I'd question how we identified it as such.

Or do you mean "predates modern man"?

Human language is basically a very lossy compression algorithm. It can never convey in full what your brain is experiencing

> unrealistic

This is dismissing a political movement on personal subjectivism. For Stallman or anyone who adheres to his ideology, there is nothing "unrealistic" about it.

Which is exactly why I said "may be seen as". I chose my words carefully.

Actually, your Facebook argument kinda sucks. Number of people who lived without Facebook is likely on the same order as number of its current users (if not lower by now), and most of them had much worse education.

This article[1] comes up with a "guesstimate" of 108 billion humans having ever lived, while worldwide Facebook users number only 1.7 billion[2].

[1]: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...

[2]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-...

> Thankfully there is a spectrum of software available, so other people's choices and preferences (whether proprietary or not) aren't forced on everyone.

The software architectures - mostly the ones close to the users - of the business and education sectors are almost full with proprietary software which tends(and tries hard) to be incompatible with alternatives, especially with FOSS. The mentality of the regular user is to use what he/she has been taught to use - freedom has been presented as too "geeky"(catch phrases like "if you're different it doesn't mean you're useful"). The educational ministries literally sold those people to brands. It might sound quite disutopic but it can get worse.

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