Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Even where he has good points, Stallman so often undercuts himself through overreach. Like, his decades-long attempt to rename things in a "pejorative" way or call them pejorative names when he doesn't like them is...weird. I mean, weird-for-him, not just weird. "Oh, we shouldn't call it Uber, we should call it Goober!" Are we back in fourth grade now? I mean, it's in the same vein as their redefinition of phrases into particular jargon (like, say, "free"), obviously, but then trying to use it in advocacy? Hasn't twenty years of wet-fart responses to the rhetoric taught him--or the FSF in general, who's usually pretty tin-eared too--anything?

View on HN

I've come to accept the fact that Stallman is just going to be Stallman. Both his virtues and his faults are magnified in person.

His brain seems to be wired up differently: He's frustrating, he's terrible at people skills, and he'd walk 10 miles out his way to avoid bending a minor ethical principle. Even when I disagree with one of his ethical principles, I do admire him for being committed to what he believes. I suspect he could have made a very profitable business off of GCC in the 80s—it was a remarkably good compiler for several chips back in the day—but he preferred to focus on writing more free software.

I've spoken with FSF staff in the past, and their attitude towards Stallman often seems to combine admiration and frustration. They work with him regularly, and most of them are fairly typical free software developers. They generally seem to believe that world has room for somebody like Stallman, who's horrible at PR but who takes principled stands.

> They generally seem to believe that world has room for somebody like Stallman, who's horrible at PR but who takes principled stands.

We need more people like that not less unfortunately they often get creamed by the people who are unwilling to take a stand but pretty good at PR.

In the realm of politics you can see that happening now in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn (principled even if you disagree with his politics) and the way the press treats him.

Totally agree, he is a man or principles with genuine concern for others, when he speaks, others listen.

More of his caliber.

Something that has always rankled me with respect to this view of Stallman as a high-caliber role model is the name calling the original commenter mentioned. Of all the people I look up to and aspire to be more like, not a single one employs that particular childish style of "discourse".

I think it'd be a mix of a couple things, it keeps things lighthearted for him, and it allows him to not have to keep typing out the name of something he dislikes very much.

He ain't writing strict legal discourse, he's writing out his own feelings in the way he feels most enjoyable. Personally I respect that.

For myself: I don't like using words like f*, and I prefer to censor them if I do use them, and I'd rather call someone a goob, instead of an idiot or a moron. My intent isn't to be mean!

You don't think you're being a little over-sensitive with respect to the name calling ?

Uber to Guber isn't that bad?

I consider Elon Musk of a similar caliber but it's interesting to see how different both of them are portrayed: Stallman is weird, frustrating, and an Aspie, and Musk is eccentric, ambitious and a legend. (All real quotes from HN). The difference of course is that one is the father of the free software movement and the other is a billionaire.

Oh man I totally disagree with this.

Elon Musk has almost "manifest destiny" ideas about the inherent goodness of America. He talks about the virtues of unfettered capitalism while his lobbyists keep India from playing in American satellite markets. He donated to Marco Rubio as well as to democrat candidates.

I don't think Musk is particularly principled. We're just lucky that he thinks rockets and alternative energy are cool.

Totally agree. His personal/family life is a shambles which is a real litmus test of character and integrity.

He has achieved great financial, business, and technology successes and is a visionary, but let's not confuse that with being a role model or hero to be emulated.

Stallman on the other hand gets nothing but respect from me for his personal integrity and values.

Musk has a great backing by a few enlightened persons that try to bring ideas that were floating 40-60 years ago to reality as due to technological advances some of them are now possible or viable and no longer need to reside in sci-fi world only.

Just because he subscribes to a different ideology doesn't mean he isn't also very principled. I mean, his "manifest destiny" ideas (as you put it) led him to give his competitors open access to Tesla's patents.

The parent poster gave an example of hypocritical behavior:

> He talks about the virtues of unfettered capitalism while his lobbyists keep India from playing in American satellite markets.

Their principles are just different, man.

One gave world a compiler and a text editor.

Another sells self driving electric cars and may even stop global warming.

The press treats him appropriately. He's a fringe left leader and is derided as such in a wider population. I applaud his commitment to ideology though.

I'd say it's better that it isn't a person, but a shared set of values. Harder for the PR lot to spin and counter.

In a rational world I'd agree but my old boss used to say (he was sales) "People buy People", I think the best case is a shared set of values represented by someone who can articulate them well and with integrity.

Which pretty much sounds like Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn, alas it doesn't seem to be enough these days.

Jeremy Corbyn calls Hezbollah and Hamas his friends and his associates are vocally anti-semitic.

Yeah, but you know, everyone needs an editor. Anyone who writes stuff should run it by another set of eyes.

Every single piece Stallman writes would be stronger if someone would say "take out the Goober bit" or "take out the Swindle" bit or whatever other goofy names he comes up with.

This 4th grade stuff just weakens his essays. It isn't good, it doesn't need to be there. All it tells me is that he's not running his stuff by anyone who'll challenge him to make his writing stronger.

> I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

One of my favorite RMS quotes. We need people like him to fill out the spectrum.

> I suspect he could have made a very profitable business off of GCC in the 80s—it was a remarkably good compiler for several chips back in the day—but he preferred to focus on writing more free software.

The irony is that if he had made a business out of it, he could have had much more influence.

No need to speculate: Cygnus did make a business out of it.

Doesn't he simply have Asperger's?

I wouldn't say 'simply'. That's accepting labelling as analysis

Labeling is simply creating a reference to a body of analysis that has already been done. (A particular proposed label may or may not be accurate in a given case, but that's an entirely different issue.)

I appreciate posts like this because it gives insight into popular companies that the public adores but might not be so great for the workers or the economy in the long run. Although like you said it could be over-reaching and making the company look like The Dark Side. Like there are people in it conspiring and thinking of the next way to take advantage of it work-force deliberately.

A company like this was born cause Taxi's sucked in the first place. Taxis were inefficient, cab drivers can have racial prejudices and leave someone in a dangerous area cause they don't like the way they look, No feedback on cab drivers etc. So Uber came into a place that needed re-work and instead of people complaining about Uber's world domination and the cost of it, why won't people work to also change Uber the way it changed the world of Taxis?

I think informational posts like this are great, but the tone of it is off-putting.

>>cab drivers can have racial prejudices

So do riders!

I've always claimed that one of the primary reasons Uber is popular is because its drivers are predominantly white or Asian.

In contrast, many taxi companies employ immigrants from places like India and Africa, who often times have their culture in full display in front of the rider (wearing non-Western clothing, talking loudly on the phone in another language, having various cultural/religious decorations/texts around the car, etc.) all of which your average American views with a certain level of disdain.

I think that's more of a location based thing. I almost always get immigrant drivers from Uber and white drivers in taxis. I am in the south in an area where taxis are not as common as the costal cities. I don't have the cultural issues which I know are common in NYC, but this could be that the state of the car is a metric that Uber tracks via user feedback.

Could be. Personally, I don't care about their clothes, phone calls, decorations, etc. I do care when they intentionally take roundabout routes to jack up fares and sexually harass my female friends. This stuff seems to happen a lot less when there's a way to keep track of who the driver is and review them.

> I've always claimed that one of the primary reasons Uber is popular is because its drivers are predominantly white or Asian.

Not in my experience.

100% agree. Overreach combined with childishness is a massive turn-off, even if you think he's right a lot of the time. And it damages the FSF/GNU by association.

If I see that I might have to sign a contributor agreement (often not in some straightforward manner, but involves reading multiple documents, postal mail, is only tangentially related to the core GNU product etc.) my first choice is usually just not to contribute. I hear myself saying internally "I don't want to have to deal with those people". Seems to me that this damages the Free Software world.

You don't sign a contributor agreement with the FSF. You sign away your copyright, but they also agree to only distribute the work under the same terms as the ones you gave it to them (i.e. the GPL in most cases). It is far more equitable than contributor agreements which basically try to remove the right for you to sue the organisation that gives you the contributor agreement. Instead, in exchange for your copyright, you get a promise that your work will remain free.

Also, the process has recently been transformed to be completely over email:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-now-offering-paperle...

I don't think the nomenclature is the important point here. I also don't consider contributor agreements inherently bad.

Great to hear everything can be done electronically now. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I last checked and found the postal instructions.

> I don't think the nomenclature is the important point here.

Only if you already knew the difference between what Google asks you to sign when you submit patches to Chrome and what the FSF asks you to sign. If you want to call them both "CLAs", fine, but at least I hope you understand now how they're fundamentally very different. Not every bit of legalese is the same just because it's annoying legalese that you'd rather not have to deal with.

Do any (many?) of their projects omit "any later version" in the license statements?

They can't use that to retroactively close off submitted works, but project using other licenses can't do that either.

The GPL says that future versions of the GPL will be "similar in spirit". An "or later" GPL that allows non-free derivative works would probably not be viewed by a judge as "similar in spirit". There really is no great danger in the "or later" clause.

> They can't use that to retroactively close off submitted works, but project using other licenses can't do that either.

I don't understand this sentence, can you elaborate? Who can use what to retroactively lock up what, and what other licences do not allow what?

Well, the renaming of things would actually be useful. He understands that framing is important, and tries to give the discussions a frame that is advantageous to his ends.

Unfortunately, he just isn't overly successful / good at it. If you agree with him on the points, a better approach would be constructive criticism, i.e. thinking about ways of changing the framing of debates that might be more successful.

Reframing the debate can be useful - I actually agree with him wanting to use the term 'piecework subcontractor economy' rather than 'sharing economy' for example. That is replacing one term with certain connotations with another that is, at least in my view, more accurate. It's pushing people to use a descriptive term rather than a marketing term, and can add to a debate.

Wanting to call Uber 'Goober' or 'Guber' on the other hand, is just childish, and makes it hard to take anything else he says seriously.

I agree it sounds childish, but I think it can be a necessary counterbalance to the marketing-speak which will inevitably frame things in the most favorable possible light.

I mean, just look at the name - Uber. What does it mean? Superior, the best, etc. Ubermensch - "This place is uber cool!". I think if you're using the name and trying to criticize it, the name itself is contradicting and undermining your point every time you bring it up.

Maybe something like "Goober" is too far and silly. Maybe just use something neutral like "Ride-Sharing App U".

But "Ride-Sharing App U" isn't a pun on the concept that drivers are paid peanuts.

Goober is slang for peanut. He was making a joke.

Or, because Goober is slang for a bumpkin. The joke is that it's an inversion of Uber.

Why not both!

The name may mean "superior" but being an adult means recognizing that something named "superior" not necessarily is. By trying to rename it you implicitly admit your failure at that - so that the only way for you to not think about something as "superior" is not to use name that means "superior". I don't think it's an effective strategy in persuading somebody it's not actually superior. Most reasonable people would still see the difference between name and actual qualities.

Being an informed adult also means recognizing the inherent limitations of the human brain that allow for the framing, presentation, context, and social group perception of a thing (as seen in branding, marketing, opinion essays, and many other places) to considerably affect how we think and feel about different aspects of the world.

Some might even call this a feature -- such cognitive shortcuts and heuristics allow us to assess threats in our environment, enjoy the warmth and aesthetics of a newly purchased jacket, or complete a shopping trip to the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time.

Through large efforts of will we can begin to become aware of this in ourselves, and then attempt to mitigate the negatives to a small degree. However, we can't do much beyond that.

To a German, "Uber" means "I cannot spell." (SCNR.)

He's warming up the crowd for his new FOSS taxi service (wait for it):

GNUber

Yes, it is part of the first batch of the FSF's new initiative to provide seed funding for free software startups called YNotCombinator.

GNUber's Not Uber?

  GNUber

Rather:

GINU -- Ginu Is Not Uber

Just GNU: GNU's Not Uber

You'll need to use Emacs and PGP to encrypt your coordinates and then post the message on blockchain. It's free, doesn't require a non-free device and everyone can see the transaction history!

It would be nice to have a ride sharing ecosystem that didn't take 30%. I'd use it.

Juno takes only 10% I believe. It's a worker cooperative where longtime drivers are given shares

Haven't heard of Juno before. I found what seems to be their site: https://www.gojuno.com but there's very, very little info.

What's their deal? Are they just getting started?

Public transit?

Hey I do use that;) But actually I was talking about a peer-to-peer ride selling and ride wanting matching system that cuts out the middle man. I use Uber but I cann't help but think the drivers should get a larger share of the fare.

They take 30% and still loose money. How can you do better?

Yes. I also think his isolation creates a situation where he doesn't understand what makes Uber/Lyft et al, special.

> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you can pay cash; you can be anonymous.

The problem is that real Taxis only troll popular areas, and when you call for a pickup they aren't incentivized to actually arrive in a timely manner.

Uber/Lyft fixed this problem in a simple and elegant way. It's the value of the service and UX of asking for a car and getting it, unlike Taxis.

Referring to one's opponent in a pejorative way is a common persuasion strategy. The problem is that Stallman isn't good at it.

See: Trump vis-à-vis "crooked Hillary."

I referred to them as The Company Which Cannot Be Named (Harry Potter reference) or 'duper.

I once pulled up to a bar 2 minutes after getting a call. The passenger got in the cab, and the passenger's (male) friend had assumed the pose that marked him as waiting for a 'ride'. (The observation is typically used by scumbags in Scottsdale to trick women waiting for a 'ride' into getting into random cars, which is why the taxi company I drove for lobbied to force ride-vehicles to have some sort of branding.)

Me: is your friend waiting for a 'duper? Passenger: 'duper? (Confusion, then...) do you mean UBER? Me: FRIENDS don't let friends get DUPED by eww-ber! Passenger: LOL.

Really, though... "Ridesharing" is unsustainable for many reasons, the main one being that cars are expensive, and should the economy rebound, people won't be willing to wear out their cars for peanuts.

> The observation is typically used by scumbags in Scottsdale to trick women waiting for a 'ride' into getting into random cars, which is why the taxi company I drove for lobbied to force ride-vehicles to have some sort of branding.

I'm sure that the cost and bother to the competition had nothing to do with that lobbying effort.

The taxi company's lobbying efforts had two main points:

1. public safety. 2. fairness

Rideshare companies had no infrastructure for basic safety inspections, so they didn't think it was important.

Rideshare drivers had no insurance contract for the time they were on the clock. 'Duper said "we've got you covered", but their drivers didn't have any paperwork supporting this claim. The taxi company lobbied to force the ridesharing companies to provide certificates of insurance to their contractors, so that if their driver was involved in an accident they could provide the ridesharing company's insurance information, instead of their personal policy.

> The taxi company's lobbying efforts had two main points: > 1. public safety. 2. fairness

Denying that taxicab companies lobby their own self-interest is completely unbelievable. All that is missing is to get "for the children" in there somehow and it'd be a perfect political BS speech.

No, I mean I get the point where taxicabs, being regulated up the wazoo, think that if they have to del with all that, why competition hasn't. But trying to sell the idea they are just saints looking for public's good and it has nothing to do with their own interest... right. Not buying that bridge.

The insurance industry was on the taxi industry's side in the lobbying effort, so as to reduce insurance fraud.

Freeloading hurts everyone.

Does uber pay less than Pizza delivery drivers? People have been wearing out their cars for many many years for peanuts to get pizza to your door.

Plus, in 10 years we have robot cars and the economics totally shift.

You can deliver pizza in a worn-out old car. 'Duper has standards for their vehicles.

The taxi company I drove for also lobbied to force 'duper's vehicles to be inspected by mechanics... Semi-annually, iirc.

Edit: the inspections were probably mandated every 3 months (quarterly); the taxi company inspected its version of ride-share vehicles bi-monthly (iirc), which just cost their drivers time (because the mechanics were already employed by the taxi company), whereas an inspection was another cost for 'duper drivers.

> I referred to them as The Company Which Cannot Be Named (Harry Potter reference)

I don't get the reference, but then again https://stallman.org/harry-potter.html ;)

I thought Guber was a pretty clever joke. For those not aware, goober is a slang term for a peanut. So a service that pays it's driver peanuts could jokingly be called Guber.

Oh, come on. It was only for a section of the page.

If you really want to discuss semantic I believe the point he raises on the "sharing economy" term being spun is much more worth talking about.

"Only". Raising your "I think twisting names to sound like a four-year-old" flag is not an "only".

I mean, he's totally correct about the sharing economy stuff and I think "piecework subcontractor economy" is a way better description of the --but I literally can't send this to anybody I know because they'll think I agree with the childishness. This is kind of like an amplified version of the LessWrong silliness--when you have an epistemic closure in which you start redefining basic tents, you have to tone it down when you're talking to normal people or you sound like the kind of crazy person who'd you expect to be raving at you in the streets.

PR matters. If Stallman wants to just wave his hands in the air for the rest of his life, more power to him, but I'd think he'd want to actually achieve some of the goals he says he does.

Then again, he thinks taxis are a positive just because you can pay cash, and he lives near me so he has been exposed to the fine (cough hack wheeze) hackney cabs of the Boston area, so I'm not sure we're even living in the same universe at the basic level.

Hmmm. You are right, I somehow definitely missed the PR angle and overlooked it. Which is weird because I could have written your post if someone had used the `Micro$oft` childish spelling in any other conversation. Thanks.

Right on. And I totally hate the Micro$oft thing, too. =) It's not effective.

Argh, stop saying that Stallman is redefining "free". Fine, "Guber" is all that anyone ever hears and the top comment and the most important thing to discuss about all the other points that Stallman is raising against Uber (sarcasm), but there isn't anything non-free about the GPL. Having laws that forbid others from removing freedom isn't itself non-free.

Freedom is always limited by the rights of others. Always. You are not "free" to punch people in the face or "free" to be a harmful member of society. Copyleft is just a way to ensure that you can never take away others' freedom, to secure the rights of people other than yourself. It is not a redefinition of freedom.

In the English language, saying that a product or service is "free" is commonly understood (and has always been understood) to mean "gratis, free as in beer." Stallman has spent the past several decades trying to get people to redefine "free" to primarily mean "libre" in the case of technology, a far less common usage of the word "free" in English.

This is what people mean when they say Stallman is trying to redefine "free."

> This is what people mean when they say Stallman is trying to redefine "free."

I don't think so. I usually hear this argument from weak free license advocates who specifically object to the GPL, not to calling free software "free". Even anti-GPL advocates like OpenBSD and FreeBSD call their software free, because they're both older than the term "open source" and because they think they're free-er than the GPL, and they really do mean "unfettered" when they say "free".

Everyone knows that "free" has two meanings, and free software isn't even a term that Stallman coined. It was called that before he came along, because there was no other name for open source. He just insisted on it.

The top comment in an article is often a digression when HN does not like the article.

RMS might not be very good at coining phrases, but words matter, brands especially. I wouldn't dismiss the idea entirely.

I thought the "goober" comment was passable considering that it's old-timey American slang for a peanut.

It's the same spirit that led him to use the word "copyleft."

It could be his way of determining his reach and effectiveness. If other people start using his original dumb, childish terms, then that might serve as a metric of some kind for him.

Has this ever worked? How many people call the kindle a swindle?

I don't think the instinct to rename things in a suggestive way is a wrong one -- consider the success of Frank Luntz -- but he hasn't got an ear for it, that's for sure.

"Are we back in fourth grade now?"

This country just elected Trump. Yes, I think we are back in fourth grade now.

Why don't you rewrite this without the Stallman-isms? That might be constructive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com