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Comment by linuxkerneldev | Hacker News Reader

I respect his views. He's been consistently right in the long term. Many of the problems he predicted are currently with us. I recently discovered the StallmanWasRight subreddit as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/

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I haven't seen much in the way of specific predictions from Stallman. Basically his "predictions" amount to that closed source software allows corporations and governments to do bad things to users. We fairly regularly see evidence that this is the case, so hurray, the predictions were right. But it's not really a point I've ever heard someone argue against. Pretty much everyone agrees that yes, closed source software makes these bad things possible/easier and sometimes they do happen. Kind of reminds me of all the armchair economists predicting that the tech bubble will burst without ever providing a timeframe.

Anyways, people trot out the "Stallman has consistently been right" thing for every new Stallman article, as if the fact that a guy has made a series of uncontroversial, vague predictions is some sort of defense against the rest of the comments discussing the article's acerbic tone and/or starkly impractical conclusions.

I dont think it's fair to characterize Stallman as an "Armchair Economist". FSF/GNU are active efforts in response to the Stallman world view. It's the opposite of armchair IMO.

There is a distinction between frameworks, theories and models.

Stallman is probably not offering models that contain the real predictive juice you're after because he has seen the same story unfold over and over. I give Stallman credit for referencing events that support his general theories/framework.

Edit:Grammer

> I haven't seen much in the way of specific predictions from Stallman.

Try The Right to Read[1], which predicted ebooks, DRM, restrictions on reverse-engineering, electronic marketing profiles and hardware which refuses to run free operating systems — in 1997. When I first read it, I thought it was well-intentioned hysteria, but it was completely, 100% correct.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Yeah, and he also predicted that libraries would disappear, and... last I checked, still here.

The long term trend doesn't look good, though.

The building is there, but the number of books is much less.

Citation?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/121026...

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/33880/dcs-libraries...

I hope no one here is surprised by this decline...

Moving goalposts.

Oh hey, it's the Fallacy Man!

Some libraries provide free access to eBooks -- handy.

In SF: http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000005001

Those things existed in 1997. What the article predicts is "the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books" which is every bit as hyperbolic and unrealised as Ray Bradbury's book-burning "fireman", and that hardware wouldn't run free operating systems because free operating systems were illegal. These predictions are not in any sense "100% correct".

> He's been consistently right in the long term.

Examples?

From what I can tell, he's sometimes right and sometimes wrong, which makes him as effective for predictions as a coin toss.

Thanks, I was missing that!

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