A short critique of Stallmanism | Hacker News Reader

A short critique of Stallmanism

jancorazza.com

152 pointsthegeomaster197 comments

Here's a sympathetic perspective on some of these issues (note: I've known and worked with RMS since the late 1970s, e.g before he grew his hair long and decided to start the FSF).

From the article: > ...crucial mistake: confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation. > ...the familiar liberal ideological mistake of lifestylism: the belief that changes in one's own personal preferences are the beginning and end of political action.

I hadn't really known anyone else like RMS, but in the mid 1980s I had a girlfriend from the Bronx. The first time she met her reaction was simply, "oh, one of those." She said she had grown up with a large number of guys just like him. And indeed, when I went back to the jewish neighborhood in the bronx where she had grown up there were in fact a ton of guys around his age, just like him.. Their causes seemed to be a mixture of judaism and socialism, but they expressed the same intensity and belief in the universality (within an interest group) of their cause.

This made him a much more sympathetic figure in my eyes. And once I could see this, I could see all sorts of people like him.

They're not all from the Bronx. Some of them are from Brooklyn ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

Heh, I get it, they're both socialists and all. But Bernie is the opposite of what OP describes. Stallman is a purist, Sanders is a realist. Stallman fights to keep "GNU/" attached to "Linux", while Sanders talks about the fake news coming to people on Facebook's closed platform.

Well, want it or not GNU/ is a big part of Linux distros, at least until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top. And even then most of open source has some GNU somewhere in the foundation.

The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.

There is also no requirement that a Linux distribution includes any GNU software at all, should we refer to them as e.g Busybox/Linux?

> The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.

I don't agree with this actually, that's why I didn't even mention this. I believe GNU was indispensable to the wider Linux phenomenon. It's a matter of being fair and technically precise.

Linux is not called GNU/Linux, but most of the distros need be because the three major components are the GNU userland, the Linux kernel and the distro's utilites and customisations.

Is there an OS that uses Linux as the kernel but then no GNU software on top of that? It would be interesting to see, at least.

Isn't android effectively that?

yep

I think Android does that.

you too

me three

Android

Alpine Linux (of Docker fame)

Lots of embedded stuff

yes

> until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top

Not that it invalidates your point, but it has happened.

Alpine Linux (e.g. Docker) and Android

> a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top

Android shot past all the others to become the most popular operating system in the world, in case you didn't notice.

The sentiment of this comment is correct. Free software should be an integrated part of a wider movement for emancipation, and only harms itself by being so pedantic and hermetic. However, I don't really have a problem with insisting on the name GNU/Linux, and that's why I didn't even mention it in particular: I believe it's simply a matter of being fair and technically precise.

>Free software should be an integrated part of a wider movement for emancipation

This is actually what FSF claims to do as far as I understand. GPL is a law hack.

In my opinion the problem with "GNU/Linux" is that there really is no such operating system at all. Debian contains a lot of GNU software, as well as the Linux kernel, but also contains a whole lot of Debian-specific software (most notably dpkg and apt), as well as other software (for example, X.org). If we compare, Fedora contains a lot of the same software as Debian, but also a whole lot of Red Hat-developed Red Hat-specific software (again, it's RPM, dnf, but also things like flatpak which is not specific to any one operating system).

Why do people insist on saying that all of this is one single "operating system" called "GNU/Linux" and that there are different "distros" called Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, etc., instead of just calling it all a bunch of operating systems? Because these different "distros" are not compatible with each other. They can mostly run each other's binaries, and some configuration knowledge works across them, but other than that they are mostly incompatible. And they are all based on Linux, GNU, and a bunch of non-GNU software.

So if we say that "This is an operating system called Fedora, which is based on Linux and GNU and a bunch of other stuff", instead of "This is a distribution of the operating system GNU/Linux called Fedora" then we would just be better off overall. There is no more reason to fight over the name "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux" since both are pretty inaccurate anyway. There would be no more user confusion about what Linux is, as there seems to be today (e.g. people blame Linux for userland problems, or people expect program X to be packaged and get support for operating system Y because it says "Linux" on the webpage). And things like BSD would seem less foreign if people knew that it's really another operating system instead of being seen as just some weird non-Linux thing.

And if the GNU people ever get around to actually finish their operating system, then they could just call it "GNU" without causing even more confusion

(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.)

This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views. In general, RMS has stood for the effort of trying to find common cause around specific issues and principles among people who might radically disagree about other things (another example was the League for Programming Freedom, a single-issue campaign against software patents that actively aspired to include people who disagree with RMS about free software!).

It's true that the big-tent concept could fail as a tactical matter if it turns out that the success of one cause really is indispensable to the success of another, which is a big part of what this article is claiming. But I wish the article had engaged a bit more with the fact that RMS does not appear to agree with this analysis and has consistently wanted people with non-leftist views to join the free software movement, including enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and private property. In other words, it's not an oversight or an accident. (To be clear about this, the classic formulation of RMS's free software philosophy calls for not regarding software as private property -- for example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" -- but stakes out no position on regarding, say, financial instruments, airplanes, factories, companies, plots of land, or apartment buildings as private property. Hence many more people could agree with it.)

I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.

I've been contributing to open-source software projects for more a decade now. I've never seen any connection with left-wing ideology, and no incompatibility with any ideology I can think of. I've seen all kinds of people participating, from communists to objectivists. I think that's why it worked so well. If something can seriously hurt the idea, it's trying to make an narrow political-ideological cause out of it. You may gain some partisan support and budgets on that, but the losses in goodwill would be enormous.

Indeed, as an independent consultant I'm far more inclined to use LGPL/AGPL/GPL licences for work that I think I could sell commercially precisely because I see those licenses and private property/capitalism as very compatible. Quite simply, I'm happy if you either pay me money or code for the right to use my code; the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka advertising to the minority who will give something back.

Meanwhile I often joke that the highly permissive BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are for commies.

I've seen a lot of companies using GPL/AGPL for exactly the same purpose - to prevent other commercial companies from reusing their code. It is especially common in areas where added-value customizations are valuable - i.e., if you have GPL (or, usually, dual-licensed commercial/GPL) core for, say, document handling system, you can market it as open-source, take contributions, and build add-on business on it, but if a competitor comes out and wants to use your core, they now have to publish source for all their add-ons, so you can have them for free. That puts you at the advantageous position. It's not the unique practice, I've seen many companies doing this. Not sure that's what FSF meant to happen, but that's what is happening.

I would have thought the FSF/Stallman would be perfectly fine with this. Their main objective is to maximise the freedom of users by advocating for software that can be inspected, modified, shared etc. As far as I know, they are not opposed to someone making a private income off this kind of software.

However, it's probably true to say that a number of possible methods of extracting an income would be closed off to you under these conditions. They're closed off not because the copyright(left) is anti private income, but because they're probably user oppressive practices (ones that would be very quickly ripped out of the codebase e.g. sending user private information back to home-base for subsequent sale to advertisers etc.)

That's my layman's understanding of the situation anyhow (happy to be corrected if wrong).

Thing is, a very common model along these lines is to dual-license under copyleft for free, and proprietary commercial license for those who don't like copyleft "virality" (e.g. the way Qt used to do it until switching to LGPL).

This works great; but the proprietary part is completely antithetical to the whole "free software" concept.

I've been thinking about the dual-licensing approach. Strategically, one could argue that it still aligns with FSF goals. My logic is roughly:

(objective) We want people to use software that doesn't oppress them -> People naturally want to use the 'best' software -> Copyleft licences ensure the 'best' software is non-oppressive (via open source, freedom to modify etc.) as derivative improvements can be merged back into the mainline.

The key part is that the 'non-oppressive' software is 'the best' (or at least of decent quality) so that people will naturally use it and society as a whole will remain un-oppressed. Mightn't one extend this logic and say: Although we don't get the benefit of useful modifications being mainlined for closed-source, secondarily licensed derivatives, more money for the project means more resources/devs -> ultimately means improved mainline software?

I mean, I'm unsure if I agree with that argument, but it seems at least plausible.

I think it's a perfectly plausible argument. The problem is that it is a pragmatic argument. It is possible to be pragmatic in pursuit of one's ideals - indeed, I would argue that this approach is the one that usually works best (or at all) - but FSF, and Stallman personally, seem to frown upon short-term pragmatic deviations from ideological purity.

> but if a competitor comes out and wants to use your core, they now have to publish source for all their add-ons, so you can have them for free.

1. Strictly speaking, they don't have to publish anything, they have to provide the source code under the GPL to their customers/users.

2. They probably will make those addons GPL-only, so, if you want to incorprate them into your product, you have to make all your addons GPL as well.

> if you have GPL (or, usually, dual-licensed commercial/GPL) core for, say, document handling system, you can market it as open-source, take contributions, and build add-on business on it, but if a competitor comes out and wants to use your core, they now have to publish source for all their add-ons, so you can have them for free.

This is a bit tricky to pull off unless you get a copyright assignment or a license permitting relicensing from all contributors, or your GPL licensed core has a large exception carved out of it (say, for proprietary plugins).

You can use the code without regard to GPL, since you own the copyright. Of course, contributions usually require copyright assignment in this model, via CLA of some kind.

Um, what part of unless you get a copyright assignment or a license permitting relicensing from all contributors wasn't clear?

> Meanwhile I often joke that the highly permissive BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are for commies.

On the contrary.

Let us use Politicalcompass [1] as spectrum. Gist of it: x = left v. right economics, y = libertarian vs authoritarian.

Now, communism (not Trotsky; the communism as we have seen in countries in the 20th century) is left on x, but high on y because its highly authoritarian.

BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are more permissive than GPL, and its obvious GPL is more authoritarian in this way. But because the GPL enforces the code to (mostly) stay the way it is, it is more left-wing than BSD/MIT/etc.

[1] https://politicalcompass.org

"the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka advertising to the minority who will give something back."

A lot of users also provide free support, bug reports, and beta testing.

I assumed this would be yet another "Stallman is gross and old-fashioned and dresses funny" article, but it's actually well-argued and reasonable. And, interestingly, in many regards it makes the case that Stallman isn't extreme enough to be effective (or rather, that while his extremism is very deep it is only in tightly focused areas, and misses the mark for making widespread change that positively effects the general population).

As I age, I've kinda come to the conclusion that individualism being the driving motivation of so many people in tech (including both proprietary and Free Software advocates) means that we often miss the forest for the trees. Individualist decision-making doesn't solve a problem for the general public, in cases like this. Free Software "won", by some definition of won, the battle when it became the dominant server and mobile OS. But, it continues to lose the war for people's freedom.

I don't actually have a philosophical framework to hang that bit of acquired wisdom on, however, because I, too, have a very individualist mindset that is deeply ingrained. So, coming up with actionable ideas for improving privacy (for example) on a non-individual level is proving difficult; my ideas, thus far, have included helping organize and host cryptoparties, contributing to projects that add encryption to more stuff on the Internet, etc. But, it requires policy, too, probably even moreso, which is far outside of my wheelhouse. Those cryptoparties reached mostly technical users. Those tools for encryption reach mostly technical people who already knew they wanted to encrypt their stuff.

When profit motives are aligned against us (where "us" is the general public that is vaguely uncomfortable with being spied on all the time, by corporations and the state), it's tilting at windmills to stand there, using your Free OS and your Free browser and your Free whatever else, while the whole world uses facebook and Google dozens of times a day. There's only so much an individual can do.

RMS' personal choices are important. I could not live with the same ethical purity myself when it comes to software choices (or for that matter, much of anything else). But I have been personally influenced by reading his essays on ethical topics. If he did not live consistent with his personal ethics, not only would he be much less persuasive, but also he would be at conflict with himself.

the critic is right that software freedom does not exist in a vacuum. However, it does not follow that living in an ethical manner is pointless.

I have too been influenced by Stallman but I don't see why anyone should be above critique. I've developed as a person, politically, and think that my criticism may be useful to well-intentioned peopled, that's why I wrote this.

> However, it does not follow that living in an ethical manner is pointless.

I fully disagree. Personal ethics is only important with interpersonal relationships. Anything political transcends the individual and his actions and requires systemic analysis and action. That is the point of the article.

Criticizing Stallman of the "GNU/"Linux precision is like criticizing a plumber of using pipes.

The guy is just doing it's job and he is doing it quite well!

Stallman is not above critique, but I don't think you have hit on the more interesting parts of his philosophy to question. If I could eat Chinese with RMS, I would want to ask him about when free hardware will become relevant, and what he thinks about user subjugation that doesn't involve privacy invasion or software restrictions -- like, why isn't it mandatory to boycott every monopoly business? Perhaps at some point he would throw up his hands and say, we're only human!

I take comfort from the Biblical parable, Render Unto Caesar.

IMHO, Stallman made two mistakes:

1. He moved into politics (which is in my HO, one of the failure points of a lot of tech people. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but certain people have more talent at politics than others, and certain people have more talents at code than others).

He's a great programmer, and could have pushed the FSF community directly by committing and improving code. And even if he can't code anymore, he could have focused on fund-raising/raising awareness in winnable (as in, not facebook)/worthwhile (as in, not HURD) battles, where others would benefit also.

Like a free Flash or free CAD (which are "FSF High priority projects", though practically dead).

What new coding projects were they involved in since HURD started (OK. Replicant.)?

And how did his political rants help the FSF (and the Free Software movement as a whole) lately?

2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him.

Who's their 2nd in command?

Who'll take over after he passes on?

What will the FSF look like in 30 years?

""" 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him.

Who's their 2nd in command?

Who'll take over after he passes on?

What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """

I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least.

I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying.

I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.

The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS.

(I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p )

What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns.

What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker.

What RMS did was profound and important for that time in history. The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish. What we need is an RMS for the modern era, i.e. a significant thinker who can speak to the next 20 years of people.

Sad to say, like most nonprofits, there's no succession plan.

Eben Moglen sounds like a formidable advocate. Maybe a bit old too, but right now, he is a synthesis monster. While Stallman may have vision, Moglen has crystal clarity of expression.

I don't pay much attention to Stallman for a while now, because I sense I feel I have got enough from his Free Software, Free Society essays —which I recommend to any who aren't familiar with Free Software.

Moglen however still manages to surprise me with new stuff —the last one being, it is now too late to build the [free] network we want. We can only fight the [centralised, spying] network we don't want, and we have less than 10 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T4bZ5R-MH8

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish.

What people don't seem to realize (also in Torvalds discussions) is that people simply wrote like that on the Internet up to around 2005-2008.

These people also produced most of the software that the millenials are now churning around or write middleware for.

What I find disturbing is the trend that millenials spend more time learning how to write glibly, appear mature on the Internet and in general sell themselves instead of writing truly new software.

[None of this is directed at you, I just used your comment for context.]

There's really nothing wrong with making a concerted effort to be more polite or accepting on the internet or anywhere else for that matter. Framing wanting to have good self-presentation and wanting to be a great coder as mutually exclusive is clearly disingenuous.

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish

This is you growing older and wiser, and his old rhetoric being outdated (someone like Eben Moglen, or even Edward Snowden is more up2date). You'll find the same to be true in other idealistic writings or speeches.

> What new coding projects were they involved in since HURD started (OK. Replicant.)?

"New" is difficult to assess.

I'd say: GPLv3, Libreboot (fork of Coreboot). But it depends on what you find important. A starting point is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation#High_...

> 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. > Who's their 2nd in command?

Fallacy, easily disproven at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation#Struc...

I guess you never heard of Eben Moglen (who's a lawyer and does great work with advocacy and public speeches), or Bradley Kuhn from FSF Europe.

> Who'll take over after he passes on?

Did you know who'd gonna take over Microsoft or Apple beforehand? No.

> What will the FSF look like in 30 years?

What will USA, Microsoft, Google, or Apple look like in 30 years? shrug

>I guess you never heard of Eben Moglen (who's a lawyer and does great work with advocacy and public speeches), or Bradley Kuhn from FSF Europe.

You say this as if to refute them, but that's exactly the parent's point. Nobody, or few, have heard of those people. It's all Stallman all the time.

It's not about them existing (nobody doubted that the FSF has somebody that's 2nd in command) -- it's about them getting the same spotlight.

>I'd say: GPLv3, Libreboot (fork of Coreboot).

Yeah, great successes both.

>Did you know who'd gonna take over Microsoft or Apple beforehand? No.

For one, we kind of do. Cook's name was referred to as the possible successor for years. And in Micosoft there are 3-6 senior executives that everybody expected to succeed Gates and then Ballmer, and one of them eventually did. Besides, those are for profit companies. With communities, organizations it should be even more transparent.

> I'd say: .... Libreboot

Didn't libreboot start outside the FSF, then come inside, and is now trying to get out?

> Didn't libreboot start outside the FSF, then come inside, and is now trying to get out?

Yup, drama, long story. The question was though:

> What new coding projects were they involved in since HURD started (OK. Replicant.)?

Looking at the original question: former packages qualify, as long as they're new. When does this 'new' qualify though? Perhaps not here because of Libreboot being based on Coreboot.

As soon as a project joins GNU though, it becomes "GNU Name" and it is officially a new project.

Development of Hurd was started in 1990. So we're looking at least from 1991. A list of current GNU packages is available at [1] and [2]. Of note, I suppose GNOME qualifies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU#Components

>And how did his political rants help the FSF (and the Free Software movement as a whole) lately?

It's ridiculous. His political statements at rms.org are clearly separated from the FSF stuff. The guy is free to think what he like, practice dance or whatever would please him. And actually his political views are quite coherent with the political ideology of the Free Software movement. And in the same time you cannot remove the fact that he actually created the FSF and GPL.

>He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command?

I read the FSF news and information bulletins since something 2016, I don't remind receiving things "signed by RMS". Do you really think that this guy is obsessed by being the number 1 and that there is a number 2? This is a non-profit organisation, with people working for a cause, not a tyrannical political party with people fighting for power.

> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology

Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3.

Therefore I myself do not even recognize this term "free software". I am more than willing to discuss RMS ideas, I agree with many of them, but let's stop messing the language first.

>There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3.

Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to take something and make it closed source with or without changes. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to restrict end user freedom.

The GPL protects the freedom of users. If I license something as GPL then that means I'm saying "I want anyone to be able to use this, and if you want to modify and/or redistribute it you can, but only if you continue to respect users' freedoms as much as I have."

The only person 'messing the language' are the people that turn every discussion of free software into a discussion of whether 'free software' or 'open source' is better terminology, and in my experience that's far more coming from your camp than Stallman's these days.

I don't know, I don't feel I am in some camp. His license grants some permissions and forbids something else. I just don't feel the word "freedom" fits into what he wants to achieve. Just let's call it some other way and I am fine with it. This is just grabbing a positive word, twist it, and use for his own agenda. And I am not willing to play such a game.

Let's imagine a world exactly like our current world, except that I am allowed to punch anybody in the nose at any time, with no negative consequences for myself. Is that world "more free" than this one?

My point is that "freedom" is a messy concept, and the freedom to do one thing (punch somebody in the nose, or to make proprietary software) is often at odds with the freedom to do another (go about your business without being punched, or to control the software that affects your life). That's not RMS twisting words, that's just an awkward philosophical truth.

I guess you could say that the term "free software" is biased because it emphasises society-wide freedoms over personal freedoms, but I think it fits nicely alongside more widely held ideas like "only police should be allowed to fight crime" and "politicians should not write laws that directly benefit themselves". Both those ideas significantly limit personal freedom, yet they're very important parts of a free society.

To add on to your point, this is called the 'paradox of freedom' -- that you cannot have both unlimited freedom and ensure freedom for the future. At the end of WWII, Karl Popper defended state interventionism with an argument citing the paradox of tolerance [1], and claimed ensuring a tolerant society in the name of tolerance, even when paradoxically intolerant. A parallel argument can be made in Stallman's case for copyleft to be claimed in the name of freedom.

It's also worth noting that it is not only Stallman's FSF that uses this definition w.r.t intellectual property nowadays. Lessig's CC adopted the same terminology for their share-alike license (-SA), which has the goal of preserving freedom, while -NC or -ND are considered non-free because they contain restrictions not related to this purpose. The same is true in the greater free-culture community and academic contexts from my experience.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25998

That's a general point, but I think it missed the criticism that the FSF's definition of software freedom fails on its own terms.

In practice the "freedom" is exclusive to a highly educated and exclusive technocracy. The same freedoms are not available to the general public.

This may seem pedantic, but IMO it undermines the argument about software freedom, because Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in making software that the general public can modify, or in designing, promoting, or doing anything at all to encourage the existence of such software.

The idea that if you want to promote software freedom you need to make tools and systems that ordinary people can modify - preferably without learning Emacs - doesn't seem to have occurred to him. It seems that in Stallman's world the public are supposed to become MIT-grade hackers before they can earn their freedom.

You could argue that software is hard, and that's just how it is. But I'm not so sure that's true. It's not obvious that the hardness of software isn't a side effect of the culture around it, and not something unavoidable in the process of development.

The reality is that there has been almost no serious CS research into making accessible user-modifiable systems. FSF would be more convincing if there had been at least some token effort in that direction. But instead FSF has always promoted a rather old-fashioned and nostalgic view of computing, where everything happens on the command line, and development means hand-editing source code and running a build system to create a local binary.

That was more or less the only model around in the 1960s and 70s, but things have moved on since then. Unfortunately the FSF mostly hasn't.

Given that, the question is - what does software freedom mean to users now? If source code doesn't actually equal freedom - what does?

I agree that freedom and practicality are related, but disagree that it undermines the argument. If they were completely unrelated, source code availability would not be an issue; however the legal and practical freedom to do something is often not zero effort or little work.

I'm wondering what you have in mind by user-modifiable systems. For example, KDE and Firefox are free and allow for quite a bit of user-customization without any programming knowledge. At some level you would naturally have to write code.

I recently came across this interview and thought it was well done. Stallman responded to a similar question: https://youtu.be/NB8mCcLRxlg?t=59m55s

> It seems that in Stallman's world the public are supposed to become MIT-grade hackers before they can earn their freedom.

This is not true. In his Emacs paper he specifically mentioned that people who were told that they could not possibly be programmers were in fact programming by modifying Emacs. He also pushed for Emacs to gain word processing features and was ridiculed for that.

"Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in making software that the general public can modify, or in designing, promoting, or doing anything at all to encourage the existence of such software."

That's unfair.

Let's say we're talking about vehicles rather than software.

The liberty to share information, to modify one's own vehicles, and so on is valuable even without a research program to educate every commuter about engineering or make motors modifiable by someone with no special knowledge.

The benefits of software (or vehicle) freedom extend to every user even if they aren't directly involved with software engineering. As a non-programming user, you can find someone who can help you modify programs. You can also begin to learn yourself, as I and many others have done.

Free software is itself an enormous library of learning resources simply because you can study its source code and reuse its components.

To talk about a "highly educated and exclusive technocracy" in this context seems pretty overblown to me. Yes, efforts to make programming more accessible are very cool. But any motivated kid with a computer can get into coding right now. With the availability of free software, they can study working software packages written by experts, for free.

The GNU project was a pragmatic initiative to ensure the existence of a free operating system mostly conforming to the typical Unix-like environment. Call it old-fashioned, but even iOS is built on such a foundation.

I agree that eliminating barriers to entry for newbies is important, but basically I think it's long-term future work and that the FSF is right to focus on the fundamental freedoms for hackers.

>The idea that if you want to promote software freedom you need to make tools and systems that ordinary people can modify - preferably without learning Emacs - doesn't seem to have occurred to him. It seems that in Stallman's world the public are supposed to become MIT-grade hackers before they can earn their freedom.

No, because freedom of modification and the guarantee that such modifications must also be released with a similar licence means everybody, programmers and non-programmers, benefit from that freedom, directly because they modified the source code, or indirectly because they can freely use that modified software, respectively.

>Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in making software that the general public can modify, or in designing, promoting, or doing anything at all to encourage the existence of such software.

Define "general public". As far as I remember, Stallman was a MIT hacker working on stuff like compilers. It is not exactly the kind of thing the "general public" want to know about.

He did some significant parts of Emacs. 30 years after it's creation, this piece of software still exists, has been modified by thousand of people, including non-programmers.

Stallman is not only a software hacker. He is a "hacker", and hacked a piece of law that is a serious little trick that actually created a revolution. Torvalds hacked on the hardware/kernel part under the basic law hack and things started. That's a real success!

The arguments about terminology "GNU/" VS "Linux" are fun but I think we underestimate the law hack.

I mean, obviously because some system gives you more freedoms than others doesn't mean it's the system that best preserves freedom. In the USA we don't have the freedom to enslave people but that doesn't make us less free.

For the record I'm not an RMS-ite and I don't actually mean to compare proprietary software with slavery.

> His license grants some permissions and forbids something else. I just don't feel the word "freedom" fits into what he wants to achieve.

What do you think "freedom" is? We are here because we are not free. And that is called "freedom". :)

Freedom may be considered as a set of values that can be exercised on every human. So that is very limited. Say like "I wish not to be harassed in the public." So that means, "I shouldn't harass someone else in the public." If you say you need the second, and not accept the first, you can't call it a "freedom" in a communal sense.

>There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3.

It's up to you what 'freedom' really is.

For me, I wish my smartband had more features than it does now. I wish my non-smart phone vibrate when the opponent attends the call. Lots of my wish (and many others) won't be fulfilled as long as there isn't an easy way to modify the underlying software/firmware. I call that 'freedom'. Most of these limitations comes from the software/firmware in it.

[AL]GPLv3 assures the freedom to its users. And every person is a user. A developer is a user of IDE, compiler, build tools, OS, etc.

It is the freedom to control what [s]he own and not to be in control.

You're arguing for features that would be genuinely challenging for companies to implement and support.

I'd love to have the freedom to modify the software in every gadget I own. But the $40 digital toaster oven with absolute crap firmware coded by idiots doesn't even have a USB port or any way to attach it to a computer; it's probably got its code permanently burned into ROM and isn't even software upgradable even with the right hardware.

If it were programmable, it probably would have cost 5x as much.

Say it's a device that already supports updates, like your smartband likely does. By locking down, say, a smartband, you've made it much easier for your support personnel to be able to answer questions -- and they won't have to say, "Sorry, you've modified the device, so I can't help you." And they won't have to field questions from hackers who are trying to follow the poor instructions that engineers pieced together on how to rebuild the firmware.

And that's if they even have the right to distribute the firmware to begin with. Just because your smartband manufacturer wants to do the right thing (in this theoretical universe) and make it hackable, doesn't mean that the chip manufacturers are happy with that. So they might need to switch to another, possibly more expensive chip.

And that means the goal of "hackable" needs to be a design goal from the start. Shortcuts they might have been able to make with a closed system are now off the table. You've added another constraint to the design, and every constraint takes time. And money.

Advocate that companies produce modifiable devices, sure. But don't pretend that it won't increase their cost at some level. It's not ethics; it's simply good business to lock down products that 99.9% of users won't try to hack.

And I'm a fan of hacking devices. I just can see the other side of the argument.

There's a difference between the financial aspects versus the legal aspects of software freedom.

You can make the argument that it's too financially expensive for most companies to make their devices more modifiable, but that same argument cannot explain why people are banned, by risk of government punishment, from decrypting their programs, which would be the first step to investigation.

>You can make the argument that it's too financially expensive for most companies to make their devices more modifiable, but that same argument cannot explain why people are banned, by risk of government punishment, from decrypting their programs, which would be the first step to investigation.

Because they're shortsighted and afraid, in short. Legacy companies feel that control is crucial.

But GPL and other Copyleft software requires you to make the code modifiable. That's an expense most companies don't want to take on. Hence, companies avoid GPL.

Freedom was incorporated into liberty a very long time ago. in the 17th century, John Locke famously defined freedom by: *"freedom is not 'A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws.'.

GPL conditions are primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint, such as patents, proprietary licenses and DRM. Negative liberty, which is the freedom from interference by other people, is the other side of the coin from positive liberty, ie the possession of the power and resources to fulfil one's own potential. All FLOSS licenses has positive freedoms, but not all grant negative freedom.

That's like saying that Spiderman abuses the words Spider and Man by solely referring to a crimefighter who wears blue and red longjohns, or that Star Wars is a lie because the war was neither between stars or over stars.

It's a title for a concept, it isn't a redefinition of the word "free." It is always capitalized. Software can't even be free or unfree in any way other than gratis, unless you're talking about software behind a restrictive firewall - software isn't a person or an animal, generally isn't thought of as having agency or desires, and couldn't care less (or more) about the aspects of whatever license it is distributed under - licensing is for people.

It's unbelievable that this could be the main obstacle in accepting a philosophical and political idea that has material effects on the human condition. What do you do when a "stop" light turns green?

You're thinking of the wrong sort of freedom. RMS was motivated by the need to freely control and alter the behavior of computing hardware not software. The restrictiveness of the GPL is designed to guarantee that happens. BSD and MIT code that goes into embedded devices falls into a black hole of proprietary code no matter how free it was to begin with.

What is it that you want to do that the GPL will not allow you? How is the GPL taking your freedom or society's freedom away?

Personally, I find people complaining about the GPL's lack of freedom a bit hypocritical.

What does the GPL prevent you from doing?

As a user, nothing. As far as I (a user) is concerned, Mozilla's MPL/GPL, bash's GPL3 and VSCode MIT licenses are all equally free (I can use them and distribute them).

So what problem do programmers have with GPL?

You can't make a derivative closed source work.

So you want to make a non-free work, fine. I'm not a GPL-or-bust guy.

But are _your_ programs free?

It's not just that they want to make a non-free work, it's that they want my help, offering nothing in return.

That's also true.

Sometimes I suspect the main programmers for Apache2/BSD/MIT licensed works actually hope their works get used by the big guys so they can get employment there.

That's why I've never heard any BSD guys getting upset at MS for ripping off their work, while getting upset at Linux for doing the same.

> You can't make a derivative closed source work.

That's not it. Your license has to be GPL in order to use any GPL code. I try to make the stuff I do on my personal time under the MIT license, which means I can't use GPL code, but GPL code can incorporate my code. Tell me which license is more free now.

Also, it completely disregards the scope of things. If I incorporate a GPL library into my software for say JSON parsing, then it means my entire program must be GPL. Thankfully most libraries aren't GPL but LGPL.

The other thing is that you can't use proprietary libraries in your own code that has been infected with GPL. If you want to develop your own software that incorporates GPL code and even release it to your users, it's impossible to link against proprietary libraries.

> That's not it. Your license has to be GPL in order to use any GPL code. I try to make the stuff I do on my personal time under the MIT license, which means I can't use GPL code, but GPL code can incorporate my code. Tell me which license is more free now.

That's not how the GPL works. The GPL requires that you release the entire work under the GPL, but it does not forbid you from additionally releasing the parts you wrote under other licenses. So you can release the parts of the code you own under the MIT, as long as you also release the whole work under the GPL. [0]

> The other thing is that you can't use proprietary libraries in your own code that has been infected with GPL. If you want to develop your own software that incorporates GPL code and even release it to your users, it's impossible to link against proprietary libraries.

This is exactly the point of the GPL, and what, in my opinion, makes it more free than permissive licenses: GPL code will never restrict the user's freedom. Software that uses proprietary libraries is not free software, and so it is perfectly reasonable for it to be GPL-incompatible.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense

That's an easy question. Make software that combines GPL and non-GPL code. GPL, due to it's political nature, makes it purposedly hard to inter-operate with software that does not carry its philosophy. Maybe it's good for philosophy (which I am yet to see any serious proof of, but maybe I'm just ignorant and it is going great there) but certainly isn't good for me, even when I can reuse the components separately.

That's not true. You can combine GPL and non-GPL code, as long as the non-GPL code is compatible with the GPL. Pretty much all of the popular free licenses are compatible with the GPL.

I think there's a widespread misconception that you have to relicense code in order to combine it with the GPL. You don't. The code can retain its license, because its license allows it to be used with the GPL.

Saying that you have to relicense MIT-licensed code under the GPL is like saying that you have to grant a special proprietary license for Apple if they want to use your code in macOS.

> You can combine GPL and non-GPL code, as long as the non-GPL code is compatible with the GPL.

That's a pretty big exception, which reverses your conclusion. It's like saying "not true not everyone can buy Lamborghini Aventador - everybody can, as long as they have half a million dollars to spend!" That's kind of the point that turns your "not true" into false.

> Pretty much all of the popular free licenses are compatible with the GPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-so...

Just look at the "GPL compatibility columns". Even GPL2 is not compatible with GPL3 without a special "or later" clause, which is all too easy to miss.

> The code can retain its license, because its license allows it to be used with the GPL.

But if you want to distribute the mix, you'd have to abide by GPL conditions.

> That's a pretty big exception

It's not. Most of the anti-GPL free software advocates are using compatible licenses, such as the MIT or BSD licenses, and they are already following all of the conditions of the GPL, since they are distributing source code.

> But if you want to distribute the mix, you'd have to abide by GPL conditions.

Almost everyone is already abiding by the GPL conditions when they are distributing MIT-licensed code. The only real concern about violating these conditions is to not distribute source code. If you have no intention to distribute non-free software, you should have no concern with the GPL.

I just cannot understand, try as I might, why anyone would have a problem with the GPL while at the same time eschewing non-free software. If you are already doing as a matter of course what the GPL is asking you to do, why do you object to being told to do it?

> There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3.

More freedom to who? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee complete freedom to each of them simultaneously.

For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So it makes no sense to talk about which license "offers more freedom".

So, let's stop saying imprecise things like "GPL code doesn't give me freedom because I can't use such code in my proprietary software". The free software movement is about protecting the freedoms of the end users first.

There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT. Copyright is about being able to copy the software. GPL places restrictions on who is able to copy your software. BSD/MIT place less restrictions. It's black and white; there is no argument.

When a project includes code from another project (be it GPL or MIT), it is creating a new work under copyright. What GPL does is hold the developer ransom with a lighter over the GPL code, in order to guarantee the new work is distributed to other people with the same restrictive license. It just means that code under GPL is orders of magnitude less valuable to the world than code under less restrictive licenses.

It's not just about proprietary software that can't put GPL code into their software, but software that's released under less restrictive licenses as well. If code is GPL, I just stay away.

You can't take credit for a lack of restrictions when users face draconian binary-only no-redistribution-ever restrictions that you turned a blind eye to.

While we're voting with our feet, I don't contribute to BSD projects unless I'm paid to, because it's mostly feeding parasites.

> It just means that code under GPL is orders of magnitude less valuable to the world than code under less restrictive licenses.

The most-installed kernel in the world is GPL-licensed. I'm not sure how it could possibly be orders of magnitude more valuable.

> What GPL does is hold the developer ransom with a lighter over the GPL code

It's not a 'ransom' when the ticket price is clearly displayed for all to see. If you don't want to play, that's cool, find another sandpit to play in.

Like it or not, the GPL moved the needle back towards end-user friendliness, and without it and it's knock-on effects elsewhere, being a developer today would be a much more frustrating experience.

> There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT.

If you define free in terms of users and individual developers, GPL is absolutely more free than BSD/MIT, but if you define it in terms of software development houses, MIT is much more "free" than the GPL indeed.

The argument against the GPL having restrictions on what you can do with the code as to not take away freedom, is like the U.S Constitution having restrictions on what the government is allowed to do to restrict your freedom.

Nobody would argue that the right to free speech is restrictive, because it takes away your right to restrict free speech, or would they?

>More freedom to who?

In the same way that a a very inexperienced french candidate for presidency is claiming that he will "liberate France by the work", ear "deregulate the working laws and make possible for companies to get rid of the employees whenever they want without any compensation". Freedom for employers.

Yeah I think you have the opposite mindset than me. Just letting people do what they want is _not_ fighting for freedom, but fighting for the status quo, because inequality exists. In other words the struggle is real

I think "Free Code" encompasses the ideology that ""free software"" wants to be much better and more efficiently than ""free software"".

"Free Code" means the code is free as in free beer. You can get it, consume it and share it with friends. Once tasted, you can start a brewery and imitate the flavor if you want.

> it is not a solution for people to simply stop using e.g. Gmail.

I strongly disagree with this part. For example, if you think the primary problem with GMail is user privacy, then the only solutions are legal or technical. And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service.

The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale. The solution to that problem -- one that's been demonstrated effective time and again -- is to make purity utterly pragmatic.

The problem with this is incentives. Without the profit motive, and without revolutionary support programs like the ones Stallman imagines, people simply have got to pay rent somehow. And FOSS, as Stallman describes it, does not pay rent. So programmers end up working in proprietary applications, often building up on top of FOSS or Open-source to build better user capture and lock-in and winning the market share.

The incentive was supposed to be access to a growing library of copylefted code. But we somehow abandoned POSIX in favor of a half-assed scripting language where a critical mass of desirable code doesn't exist yet.

>And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service.

Could you elaborate on this? The idea of the law protecting peoples' privacy is not really new or untested. I don't think you need to be anywhere near what I would call draconian to be able to protect peoples' privacy legally.

Hm, thanks for making me think more about this.

I still don't think GMail could've come into existence without the carrot of user data. Maybe now that it does exist Google has a vested interest in keeping people inside its platform, which would mean my statement is incorrect.

Maybe I'll just weaken my statement to this: I think a GMail replacement would be far easier to achieve than a strong legal framework protecting users' privacy.

GMail is GMail because of spam filtering and search. There can be no such thing as GMail that respects your privacy, because without the spam filtering and search efficacy that come from huge training datasets, you have just another Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Zimbra installation.

I guess that depends on what you mean by privacy.

I tend to define privacy in terms of an intersection of users' expectations and preferences -- data should be used how users expect it to be used, and those expectations should match their preferences.

For example, a particularly voyeuristic user might truly prefer -- independent of any transactional considerations -- for marketers to know a bunch of intimate information about them. In that admittedly entirely fictional case, the modern web isn't a privacy violation.

My point is that it's possible to use data for a particular purpose without violating users' privacy expectations and preferences. There are both legal and technical mechanisms that enable these sort of use cases.

I think it's fair to say that most people expect and are perfectly OK with google using their email to filter spam and improve search. Therefore, I don't consider those use cases to be privacy violations.

Also, although search and filtering are two huge features GMail, even a GMail without those features would be quite superior to Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Yahoo! accounts with tiny data limits (which really were the alternatives when GMail launched).

The problem is, under the current legal framework, if Google has access to the data for any reason then so does the government.

The only way to protect your users from the government is to not possess (or be able to make sense of) their data at all.

>The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale.

That's why there are some organisations that fight for the right for people to buy a computer without Windows installed-by-default and get the money reimburse if they opt-out of the OS package.

Isn't there an hardware company called puri.sm by the way?

IMO, the fundamental problems with Stallmanism are not to be found in its tactics and execution, but rather in the very core of the philosophy itself.

Although your comment is a fair one, this critique is tactical/strategic rather than political/ideological. That is, the author assumes you mostly agree with Stallman's end goals, and from there argues for a different set of strategies.

Definitely agree. I just wanted to point out that, even though it often seems otherwise, there are indeed people in the technological community who have deep problems with the FSF philosophies.

Are there? I would believe that there are many who don't care, or many who are dismissive at a rather shallow level. But I'm not aware of having seen a good, intellectual critique of "free" software.

There are many criticisms of the various freedoms embodied by Stallmanism's notion of free software (to borrow a term from the article). A thorough rebuttal of the entire viewpoint requires, IMO:

1. An ardent defense of capitalism and private property.

2. A critique of open source as a superior software development methodology.

You'll find shades of (1) in various defenses of competing open source licenses (e.g. BSD). But also, (1) is a pretty common attitude in software development circles (a majority of the libertarians I know are software people).

(2) is a lot less common in developer crowds, I think in part because when evaluated as a purely factual and categorical claim, it's trivial to prove false. Many of the most successful software projects in the world are open source.

The economic argument against (2) is far more common -- and is made in this thread by sprafa for example.

Surprisingly, there are also moral arguments against (2) -- see e.g. https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanD...

TBF the moral case against (2) probably really is as rare as you claim (which is a good thing IMO).

But the intersection of (1) and (2) isn't impossible to imagine, and I think there are a lot of developers who get close to this confluence of opinions. Or at least a lot closer than they are to "Stallmanist" freedom.

I don't think (2) is necessary to rebut Stallmanism - development methodology was never really a part of Free Software - but I don't agree that (1) is enough. One can defend capitalism and (physical) private property without defending copyright and patents †. In fact, it could be argued that they're anti-private-property, by preventing one from using one's stuff as one sees fit.

† https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0

I'm not sure if I'm understanding correctly what you have said, but I think it should be pointed out that GPL absolutely depends on and hangs off of copyright law. It's just as much an expression of the ownership of thought as proprietary software is.

-2¢

That's true, but the GPL is just a neat tool that Stallman invented to work within the current legislation, it's not an actual component of his philosophy. For example, he supported a change to the laws that would shorten the GPL, as long as it also forced proprietary software to open up after a while[1]. He also specifically said that copyright is "no longer beneficial" and proposed major reforms, including eliminating any restrictions on private sharing of works[2].

Stallman's philosophy is that all software should be Free because the users deserve it, not because the author wishes it to be.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.en.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...

Why would (1) be necessary? GPL software is not consigned to the public domain or ownership automatically transferred to the FSF. It is still the property of the original developer, who are simply distributing and licensing its use only to those who comply with a certain set of conditions.

Proprietary licences will sometimes prohibit resale or modification, for instance. Licences like the GPL do the exact opposite: they allow modification and resale under the condition that these subsequent derivative works are licensed under the same terms (if distributed).

I would have thought being able to decide the conditions under which others can use your private property is an idea the most ardent capitalist would support.

Enforcing the GPL requires the state. Which is what I think he was aiming at. But then I don't understand how that's compatible with 1.

I stated that (1) and (2) constitute a thorough critique Stallman's worldview re: software, which IMO is quite a bit more than just the GPL.

I agree 100% with your last paragraph. I think the issue for many libertarians, however, is this: should thought be considered personal property, thus under legal protection by the state?

I personally like free software. (My personal stance lines up the most with the Debian Social Contract.)

However, OpenBSD (my second choice of system) does not, and they've been vocal in the past.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#43

It's pretty simple - freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. That includes in a proprietary environment. That includes whatever you want it to include. The other three freedoms then tell you "except in some ways we personally don't like."

They also don't like the FSF much. They have done some things that are a little controversial, like require devs to cede ownership of code so that the FSF can relicense when they want to (mostly to new versions of the GPL).

What are you talking about? You can use the software however you wish. Even "in a proprietary environment" (like you can run LibreOffice in Windows).

What you mean is probably copyleft licensing which is only a subset of free software licenses. Copyleft means that you cannot redistribute the software and its derivatives unless you give the freedoms down the road to your clients/users as well.

However, there are free software licenses that aren't copyleft too.

> What you mean is probably copyleft licensing which is only a subset of free software licenses.

Yep, that's what I meant! Sorry, wrote that one late last night...

That's a misrepresentation of what the OpenBSD people were getting at. They had a dispute with Richard Stallman over his deciding to not endorse OpenBSD. That does not mean that they don't like free software. Tellingly, the ports tree has an abundance of free softwares. The idea that they don't like free softwares is disproven by the very thing that they and Stallman had the dispute over.

I honestly don't think that I've ever seen any evidence of that. I'm not saying there aren't, though.

Everyone I've ever seen that disagrees with the FSF either:

- doesn't understand what 'freedom' means in the context of software, thinking only in terms of software developers and not in terms of users, when users are the only ones that actually matter, or - doesn't understand that free software isn't opposed to making money from software.

free software isn't opposed to making money from software

It's not opposed to trying to make money, but it does mostly prevent actually making money. If software wasn't copyrightable I suspect most desktop software and video games would never have been created. This argument dates back to the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

I completely disagree. There are some problems with the free software movement but the fundamental idea behind it is essentially inarguable: proprietary software is anti-user.

(Free software supporter here.)

Thomas Schelling mentions the notion of "incomplete antagonism": you could have partly opposed interests to someone else's but still have ways in which you can cooperate with each other. Other people thinking about trade have suggested that this is almost always the case, even, maybe surprisingly, when people have directly opposed values in some respects (but not others).

http://www.amirrorclear.net/files/moral-trade.pdf

When you're buying most things from other people, you might have an "incomplete antagonism" because you may each want to get the best deal you can at the expense of the other person -- driving a hard bargain, so to speak. But you might still appreciate the opportunity to trade and not necessarily resent the other party to the trade (I wish that the vegan sandwich I just bought at LAX had cost me $8 instead of $19, but I'm still grateful that I could buy it at all).

Most attempts to defend proprietary software that aren't based in "romantic authorship" (emphasizing a special moral relationship between creators and their creative works that would make their preferences or interests count in a way that other people's don't) would probably focus on the benefits of trade: proprietary software fails to optimize perfectly for the user's interests and includes some intentional disadvantages for the user, yet many users could willingly accept these limitations because they've been bundled with benefits that the users appreciate, or because they help to incentivize activities the users appreciate (like continued development or support of the software).

This is normally the case for situations where trade can occur: each party may be asked to accept things that aren't that party's most preferred outcome, even deliberately where an alternative that that party prefers is logically conceivable. For example, if you rent a physical object then you might not be able to use it for any purpose, or if you hire someone then they might not be willing to perform any task you ask them to, or if you buy something then you might have to pay for it -- even though if others were making your interests their first priority, none of these limitations would exist. Presumably proprietary software advocates think that "selling software" is mostly akin to selling other things, where private ownership and sales work (fairly well|extremely well|better than any available alternative) for allocating resources, incentivizing productive activities, and increasing people's welfare, and that it's only anti-user in the ways that the costs or restrictions accompanying other kinds of trades are anti-customer.

Sad to see that Schelling died yesterday (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172957

To me, it's not about categories (users, companies, developers, etc.). We're all people -- citizens.

The question is: should ideas belong to the category of legally-protected personal property? I'm very aware of the pragmatic arguments in favor of this. However, I (and others) also believe that there are significant ethical arguments in opposition to it.

You can call that 'fundamental advantages' as well. Its a question of position.

Thanks for posting this. I like this a lot and it clearly argues a lot of what I don't like about Stallman's free software advocacy. Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; software is a tool for accomplishing things in the world, including moral or immoral things. When Stallman says that it's better to have no software to do a task than non-free software, it sounds like the Catholic teaching on intrinsically evil acts, which can never be done even if we think they may result in good—but software does not have a moral value of its own. What we do with software is, absolutely, a moral question; as software continues to eat the world, every moral question may one day involve software. But we should look at software freedom with consequentialist eyes: the ends, the good or evil done to people, justify or condemn the means, whether that good or evil can be done with the software at hand. Generally one can do more good, or at least be assured of fighting evil, with free software. But that does not mean that free software itself is an intrinsic moral good.

Related, I think, is Mako's 2011 essay "Freedom for Users, Not for Software": http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/freedom-users-not-softwa...

But in practice, that ends up being more of a defense of the AGPL than a call for social action - and the AGPL, if widely adopted, would make the goal of using only free software even more of a burden (since it is GPL-incompatible). The FSF seemed to recognize an actual problem well worth solving, but address it through the tool they were comfortable with, writing licenses. (And the minimal adoption of the AGPL indicates that this didn't actually solve problems, so per consequentialism, we must admit that the AGPL did at most minimal social good.)

It's also worth talking about the resources required to make effective use of free software; freedom #4 is only realistic if you can actually make the changes. If Chrome OS (to take Mako's example) can be effectively hacked on by the second-largest company in the world, but much less effectively by an individual, is that really better than the closed-source OS which only the largest company in the world can hack on? And has free software really changed the social order for the better, compared to the pre-software days?

>Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself;

I disagree. Proprietary software is anti-user and anti-developer. In my experience, even the sort of people that don't care either way about whether their operating system is open source get upset at the idea of the View Source button on a webpage going away, for example.

Free software is ethically good in comparison to proprietary software, which is definitely ethically bad in its own right.

I think the argument in your first paragraph mostly misses the mark: yes, software is a tool, but Stallman doesn't actually criticize the software, he criticizes the way it is licensed to people. And his analysis does have a consequentialist component - he discusses at length the actual harmful effects of non-free software.

Regarding freedom 4, I've always assumed (possibly erroneously) that Stallman envisioned "software" as being limited more or less exclusively to Unixlike C programs. It really doesn't make a lot of sense as an axiom if you assume software will eventually become too complex to be comprehensible to a single individual, or that the typical software user won't require a working knowledge of CS and C compiler and be able to edit and compile from source.

I really disagree with this view that one has to have the skill to understand and edit the code to benefit the Four Freedoms. The fact that everyone who gets a copy has that Freedom is the important part. How many use Cyanogenmod without even knowing what a compiler is? How would that be possible without Freedom #4?

Users can't benefit from the fourth freedom, specifically the right to republish their own modifications to their own software, without having the skill to understand and edit that software to begin with.

You are ignoring the fact that users exist in society, around them there will be programmers who may be friends, colleagues or consultants. Some of those will be willing to modify the software gratis, for a favour or for money. Others will be willing to teach the non-programmers enough to be able to make the changes they need.

This. You wouldn't want a car with the hood welded shut. You can take it to a third-party mechanic rather than being at the mercy of the dealer (who would prefer you replace the car), and that's valuable even if you don't have the knowledge or tools to repair the car personally.

I don't agree with everything in this article but I think a part of it really put into words something I had been feeling for some time. I had always found it easy to agree with Stallman's view of free software. I think most reasonable people who didn't have a stake in proprietary software would agree with him. But, something about Stallman that made it hard for me to really take his movement seriously enough to want to take up his banner and follow him, and I think this article hit on why. He is right about the problem but there's a flaw in his approach to solving the problem.

While Stallman is right in asserting that software should be free, he moves into Zealotry in insisting that he only use free software and thereby excluding himself from much of the technology available today. I think ordinary people looking at something like this would be reluctant to follow him or take up his cause because the average person's reaction would be "I could never live like that, yes I agree with him, but I'm simply not willing to give up my facebook, or google chrome, or microsoft word."

I don't think Stallman would look like a hypocrite or have his point weakened if here were to advocate for legislative changes to make software free while still using proprietary software. If someone challenges him or calls him a hypocrite he could just respond that he is living within the unfortunate realities of the current day, which is dominated by proprietary software, while still fighting for a better tomorrow with free software. I don't think any reasonable person would take him less seriously just for using software that, in many cases, he has no other option but to use. I mean really, this guy doesn't even browse the internet because websites have proprietary software and instead uses some kind of software to get info off the web - that's extreme.

I don't think convincing the world to only use free software is a very realistic goal, because most people don't really understand the problem, let along care enough about the problem to make the huge sacrifices that a life without proprietary software would demand. Instead I think he would have a much stronger chance of succeeding if he worked to protest and raise awareness geared towards legislative change to prevent software companies from using the restrictive licensing agreements they use today.

Stallman has compromised in some ways, even when it comes to using proprietary software. For example, before there was grub I believe he made an exception and used non-free bios.

Ultiamtely, even RMS seems to suggest a convenience standard. If the tradeoff is too harsh, at some point it is permissible to use proprietary software. And this is even leaving aside the various non-relative exceptions he has made, such as use of proprietary software in devices that are not primarily for general purpose computing.

So even RMS is OK with proprietary software where there are no free alternatives, or where using proprietary software is somehow not part of a "computer". But now that there is a good free system in Gnu + Linux, the user has no excuse for using proprietary programs in general computing. There is still a sacrifice to live by RMS' standards, but it is relatively small compared with, say, the sacrifices demanded of civil rights campaigners in the 60s.

Of course, one could debate whether reasonable free alternatives exist in certain areas. Perhaps to RMS it is only a minor inconvenience to use only free software to view web pages, and to avoid websites that run proprietary scripts or that spy on users. What kind of moral weakling would betray the cause of freedom for the convenience of one-click ordering of crap on Amazon. The obvious weakness to this argument is that there are surely people for which proprietary software offers convenience that they view as essential to their lives. This is a hard problem, both in philosophy and practice.

The freed bios is libreboot derived from coreboot I believe (not sure about the derivation).

https://libreboot.org/

https://www.coreboot.org/

I'm posting this off an old Thinkpad X61s variant which happened to be manufactured with an atheros wifi card and I'm running gNewSense 4.0. All my major use cases covered.

http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/gNewSense.html

At some point in the future I may purchase a ministry of freedom modified Thinkpad simply because I'm pretty bourgeois and can afford it.

https://minifree.org/

I take the OAs criticism but I despair of the organised left in the UK for other reasons that are outside of the scope of HN.

More precisely, I wonder why it is considered an ethical issue in the first place. I wonder if it is coming from hacker culture.

> I don't think any reasonable person would take him less seriously just for using software that, in many cases, he has no other option but to use.

It's not a public stance for rms. He simply doesn't have the need to use non-free software on his own devices. He will (and has) in a pinch, use someone's windows machine, much like he will use a someone's mobile phone to make a call. He's very pragmatic in that way: he doesn't want non-free software on his devices, controlling his life.

>I mean really, this guy doesn't even browse the internet because websites have proprietary software and instead uses some kind of software to get info off the web - that's extreme.

This is another case of his reputation preceding him. He doesn't casually browse the Internet because he has no time for that. Any interesting website he wants to read he has (automatically) sent to him by e-mail. This way he can process everything in batches when he has the opportunity, regardless of whether he has a connection at that time.

In short: rms is't making any sacrifices in order not to be perceived as a hypocrite. He has simply arranged his life in such a way that he doesn't depend on any proprietary software. And these days, it's really not that hard anymore, when you think about what you really need, software or otherwise.

Oh, this is hilarious.

The art for this blog post was taken from here: http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ This art was taken without crediting the artist, and without permission from either the artist or the publisher.

I agree that this is bad form, though, as the original article is very supportive of the Free Software movement, the author may have assumed a Gratis usage of the image.

I could not find on Hackaday any specific information about using their content, or not, but they do explicitly mention their general copyrights in their footer...

Edit: what I did not say, is that because there is nothing explicit it can not be assumed that you can use it without reference. Accreditation should be given where asked, technically it can not be used unless it was agreed upon. That's what my ... meant.

You can't assume gratis usage of anything.

The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that everything is copyrighted at its creation. Copyleft is a 'hack' of sorts of copyright, in that the author or owner of a piece of work gives everyone else explicit permission to use it. You can't have copyleft without copyright, and everything is copyright unless it's explicitly copyleft. This isn't 'bad form'. This is copyright infringement and possibly the best teaching moment you could ever have.

The idea that the author of the above post would assume gratis usage of something shows how little even technical people understand how copyright and copyleft works. I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress.

As the author of the Hackaday piece, I'm cool with the author of the OP using the graphic, only because it's hilarious. Shout out to our resident artist, joe kim: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ He does awesome work.

Everything that is 'copyleft' is inherently copyright. The protections enshrined by copyright protect 'copyleft' works.

The GPL and copyleft are not magic pixie dust. Just as proprietary software is pirated very frequently, so too do companies and individuals ignore copyleft licenses. Like the BSA spends money to enforce proprietary licenses, so to do the FSF, SFC, gplviolations.org and others have to spend money to enforce copyleft.

There are also lots of violations of permissive licenses, but generally the authors of permissively licensed software do not bother to enforce their licenses.

Yes, this is because OSS authors do not have union, which could have lawyers, which could do the job.

The SFC functions sort of like a union, but they don't have very much funding though:

https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/

> I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress.

What's the significance of Stallman rhyming "Uber" with "Goober"?

I mean, Doug Crockford has rhymed "Gonads" with "Monads". Would you seriously argue that he failed to educate people on functional programming in Javascript because of the tone-deafness of that pun?

I make the comparison because both authors have a clear, unadorned style and show great attention to detail in their arguments. The only relevant difference I see is that one writes and talks primarily on technical matters, while the other writes and talks on social and political matters. If bad puns are out of scope for the one but in scope for the other then I smell bike-shedding.

How do you know it was taken without permission? Are you the artist?

Author of the Hackaday post. I would know if this were taken with permission. The artist (joe kim) can be found here: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/

In case anyone's wondering, we (hackaday) probably would have allowed the author to use this art, provided we get a link back to the post or some credit to Joe. In the absence of that, we're just going to point and laugh at this guy for clearly demonstrating he doesn't understand copyright.

These moments only happen a couple times a year on HN, but they're worth the wait.

Please add a byline to Hackaday header images, or a rider to the article along the lines of "'Vishnu Stallman' by Hackaday artist Joe Kim". The first thing I did when clicking through to the linked article is to do a reverse image search that dead ended at Hackaday and walked away disappointed, not knowing that it was original content.

It's not clear that conclusion follows. Perhaps he understands copyright but chooses not to respect it?

Nah I was just stupid. Corrected now.

Hi, I'm the author of this, and I'm very sorry, I honestly just wanted a nice pic of Stallman and found it through Google without thinking much. I've added the credits at the end of the article now, both to Hackaday and Joe with links, please check if it's correct. If you want I'll remove the image, no problem!

Also, this article isn't about copyright law, it's about politics.

essentially brilliant.

I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code.

That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you'd like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn't be able to copy your code directly.

My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer/owner authorization. The developer also should not be allowed to stop users from sharing modifications amongst themselves, as long as they were paying for the original code, so as to stop him from using it as a weapon agaisnt users who modify it and wish to share their mods.

Any other defence of free software is basically an attack on capitalism itself. Regardless of your opinion on capitalism, this is too radical a change for most people.

Hmmm...That's not the lesson I took away from this article, at all. There are only three mentions of DRM in the article, and I don't see any suggestion that the author endorses DRM be used in this way.

Patents were intended (in part) to have this sort of effect -- free the knowledge while still allowing the creator to profit.

It's the kind of thing that makes sense but is incredibly hard to get right technically or politically.

If patents for software required a copy of the source to be available, then I think we'd be there already.

>My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer/owner authorization.

How can you stop someone from running code they have access to? If I write a new program but use routines from yours, who is the "developer/owner"? I can't picture this scheme.

You can't run someone else's code, unless you have paid them first. And no one you share the code to can do it either, unless they paid the original author of the code.

I think the parent's question is not about the policy matter but more like "how could this kind of DRM work?" (technically).

Stallman isn't concerned with open source code, but with free software. The difference being a moral philosophical framework that makes DRM unacceptable in any form, because it limits the ways in which the user can modify and redistribute software.

No one owns software under the free software philosophy, not even the original creators - code belongs equally to everyone. Since no one owns the code, no one has the right to make demands or to restrict another person's use of the code.

I don't think this is anti-capitalist, so much as capital agnostic. Whether you can or can't make money with free software isn't relevant, all that matters is that the users' freedom is respected. Within that framework you're free to make as much money as you want with the code that you write... and so is everyone else.

We live under a capitalist system that is driven by the profit motive, and the idea that you can have an "agnostic" system for software, separate from the rest of society, seems like a fantasy to me.

Anything that can't be sucessfully integrated by capitalism is fought agaisnt by the system itself, much like an organism defending itself agaisnt a virus. This would deweaponize the whole issue.

If you were to legislate that the user can modify the software, but not redistribute it (at least not unless he shut off his own DRM keys and gave it to someone else, preventing duplication) you would allow for the profit motive AND open-source, which would make it work for everyone.

That agnostic system for software that you think is a fantasy already exists, it was created and is managed by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, both organizations that Stallman started.

Of course, it's not mainstream, but it's definitely not a fantasy. Capitalism isn't the monolithic agency you seem to think it is. There's room for both approaches under the umbrella of capitalism.

Stallman is not opposed to the profit motive. He is perfectly fine with selling software. He just wants you to sell free software.

As it is right now, free software competes with proprietary software in the marketplace. Depending on how you look at it, both approaches can be winning. There is far more free software in use today than there is proprietary software. But of course most of the money is made with proprietary systems.

Stallman is smart and he probably has a better grasp of the realities of the software world than both you or me. He's playing a long game. When he says you should give up your Facebook account, he doesn't really believe you're going to just go and do it. He's giving you a glimpse of a better world, sharing his vision of what could be. This approach has proven extremely successful. He has said that he feels like he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He just never thought he would get this far. He never thought his ideas could gain so much traction.

Ok well I agree with you. That's a very good point. And I'd like him to have even more sucess.

I think closed source software is a terrible, terrible problem for non-programmer workers. Productivity gains from the Computer Revolution to non-programmers have been very small. I think that's partially attributtable to the fact that general-use programs for enterprise are mostly closed-source. And this is a problem because it A. Doesn't allow for customization of applications for specific uses, which I believe would unlock a lot more productivity gains and B. it discourages workers from learning to program (because what the hell would they program anyway!), which again, I believe would unlock productivity gains.

So I do believe making most software open-source and modifiable should be a matter of legislation at this point. It's ridiculous that users have less capacity to modify their work tools today than they ever had during the Industrial/Mechanical Age. And I believe the reason why this is because you can't make any money out of open-source. Because of that, companies discourage it, workers don't see the benefit in programming. The compounding effects of this are getting worse by the day.

Keep in mind that access to the source code not only to your software but the OS itself would mean the ability to modify or remove any locks you imagine are supposed to keep people from running unlicensed code. Given the way a lot of hardware works it probably requires licensing hardware and drivers as well lest someone sell dongles that interfere with the operation of the OS in such a way as to compromise its checks on the users freedom.

Thus the situation you imagine requires that the manufacturer only allow specifically state or corporate sanctioned hardware/software to run after all how do you tell the difference between random free software off the net and non free software that has had its license and identifying information stripped.

Of course now that we have all this great control over what OS/software you are allowed to run we can use our newfound control over the primary tool for communication, commerce, and culture for the entire human race to exercise any sort of control we want.

So all we have to do is implement 1984 and all the tools and systems required to enslave the human race so software makers a truly microscopic portion of the human race can make a few more pennies and thus be inspired to share with us the blueprints for some of our toys.

If this seems sarcastic maybe it is but you truly can't implement an effective way to give the user the source without also providing the freedom to use the software without paying without effectively taking away ownership of the device from the user.

What you are proposing is a terrible idea and you and those like you are truly a threat to the future of the human race. I hope you think through this more fully.

>I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code.

That's a feature, not a bug.

He's not interested in creating a "commons" for companies.

He's interested in having his code help users, and create an incentive for companies to create code which will help users.

If you look at it from that perspective, with DRM you might as well be closed source.

-----------

Oh. And DRM encumbered code is arguably closed source.

Imagine a license - You can copy and distribute source, compile source, but not use your compiled binaries.

That wouldn't fit either the OSS or FSF definition of Open Source/Free Software.

But that's what DRM does. It effectively says that you cannot run this software on your devise.

No it wouldn't fit their definition. Take into account that this is a legislative or a policy position Id like to see. I'm not defending this as a way of helping closed source; I'm thinking of it as a way to put an end to the open-source debate.

That idea is you would by law be forced to to distribute open-source software that's modifiable by the user. To accommodate for profit, DRM would be allowed

Interesting read! I agree with most of this, but the I'm not sure I agree with the argument that it would be more effective to convince government agencies to switch to free software by appealing to a civic sense rather than a fiscal one; maybe I'm just overly cynical, but I find it more likely that government agencies would be swayed to adopt free software by showing them how much money they'd save.

Government is not interested in saving. The power of individual in the government is associated with the budget he is responsible for. No costs on software - no budget, no power.

Ah, true. I had forgotten the phenomenon where agencies make sure to spend their whole budget just to make sure they don't get less money the next year.

I think this is pretty great analysis, really. Sobering, so to say. I know all of this, but tend to ignore quite often. This is because (unlike Stallman) I don't think I'm fighting a war, I'm just living the way I think is "right". But is it really not my war? In the and, I do believe it would be a better world if some goals of Stallman have been achieved.

However, this analysis has the same flaws it points out in the movement of stallmanism: pointing out the problem is not the same as proposing a solution. Take this Gmail example. I absolutely hate it and would love it to disappear, but expressing it the usual way — as pointed out — is useless, if not harmful. Why people use Gmail or Google Docs? Because it's handy, obviously. They need something that does something like these services do, and google products simply happen to be better than alternatives. And they seem free too.

So what should I do instead of demonstratively avoiding them? Propose something better not only for myself, but for other people too. Give them a better option. Obviously. But the truth is I can't do that. I do not have any "smart solution" and Gmail is "free" not because it costs nothing to operate it, but because Google has shitload of money.

And the same is true for nearly every popular service and non-trivial piece of software. We may bring up Linux and Blender all we want, but the sad truth is free software just sucks. There is no open-source alternative for AutoCAD or Native Instruments, because it requires way too much domain-knowledge for your typical Finnish CS student to make one. Making this stuff is expensive as in "money". And "making money" a.k.a "business" is dirty game, so you don't make it easy for your competition to copy stuff you wasted your money to make. Blender is an exception that does not prove the rule.

Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism. People outside of USA tend to agree this is nice idea, but we still haven't seen working implementations of that.

So, if I don't have a better war strategy, how can I complain? Do I think it would be better if Stallman was not fighting this silly war of his own? I guess I don't. Even if "normal people" tend to make fun of him, at least they know about him and this FOSS stuff. Well, at least some of them do.

"Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism."

Communism is an economic system of physical goods and services, digital and intellectual things aren't either so I don't think it's useful to equate the two. Digital media is easily obtained by anyone so is made with a lock to which the key is sold. The keys are usually some form of digital media, so a central authority is needed to validate the keys. The validation process is also digital, so laws get made to threaten anyone that tries to bypass that process and, instead of preventing attacks on ships, those laws get used to mess up peoples lives that usually don't deserve it. Software is just a big, messy math function, and trying to sell it is just as silly as trying to sell addition. Sell goods; sell services (even the service of writing software); but trying to sell the software itself is pretty much insane; the only way to win at it is to treat your customers like no-good, lying thieves.

> Communism is an economic system of physical goods and services, digital and intellectual things aren't either so I don't think it's useful to equate the two.

This is a very confused definition of communism. The proper definition is a classless, stateless, and moneyless society (although I prefer marketless). What that almost certainly implies, is a form of goal-oriented economic coordination in the form of central planning of production.

The problem you're trying to describe is called commodification. It is harder to commodify digital goods than physical ones. But this is merely a pragmatic issue for the capitalists, as they have commodified and will commodify pretty much any facet of life.

I've always considered Stallman as somebody who strategizes in decades instead of tomorrow. He sees a future of locked devices that imprison people and so seems radical to everybody stuck in the state of present day. I don't know if his strategy will work but it seems better than any compromises that could lead to dumb terminals running proprietary webasm binaries watching everything you do.

I think the use of 'Stallmanism ' in the headline (with its obvious reference to 'Stalinism ') is pejorative and click-baitish.

Right up there with 'a card-carrying member of the ACLU'[0] and 'sister who was once a thespian'[1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/24/us/legendary-campaign-pepp...

[edit: fixed typo on 'Stalinism']

And I hoped this article would be a critique of http://stallmanism.com the religion we created a few years ago. :-(

One issue I see with so-called free software is the coming era of AI. The software might be as free as RMS would like, but we still would not be able to decipher what exactly it does.

For this reason I wouldn't be surprised to see the FSF advocate using machine learning only as a last resort when normal algorithms can't be used.

I fail to recognise how confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation is a mistake? I met RMS at Riga Politech when his group campaigned against EU Software Patents, and his logic in the presentation was flawless. I signed petition because of that. When we talked very shortly after the presentation, I concluded for myself that Stallman is indeed very careful with words and the meaning.

Ideologue, idealist, zealot, weird person? All fine with me.

I don't like that he starts with some good ideas, but then slippery slopes his way to see existential threats to our life liberty and happiness. It starts out making sense and takes on an air of paranoia.

Although it's interesting to see the types of threats he has outlined in the past and how at the time when he was saying it people were calling them paranoid, and looking back we can see that he wasn't paranoid, but on point and predictive.

Perhaps the things we think are paranoia now are similar. They may not be apparent, but perhaps they are similarly on point and predictive.

I think we agree more than disagree about how paranoia can become reality. The Snowden fallout rewired my thinking, and I'm still recovering from/reconciling the election.

But some Stallman stuff I see as hyperbole or just wrong.

For example he would label a hobbyist creating a compression utility and choosing to keep code private:

- anti-social

- an instrument of unjust power

- disrespectful of the freedom of others

He makes no distinction between government oppression or megacorp monopolies, and 1 person making personal choices. In reality things fall on a spectrum.

As a formerly ardent software freedom lifestylist I hear this criticism and have embraced it myself. I don't encourage the "designers" I know in my life to use GIMP anymore. Much like social revolution can be tragically violent, in 2016 it sometimes falls to us to surrender our computing integrity for a shorter-term tactical gain. This isn't good, but it's not good to avoid either.

That said, I think this essay paints an overly narrow view of Stallmanism. Stallman would much prefer systematic change, even though he is a self-identifying liberal; you see this less in the blessed FSF essays and more on stallman.org and similar because he doesn't get so speculative to talk about policy in most of the exhaustively-edited technical specifications on the finer points of software freedom theory.

Stallman is I think overly pragmatic. He lives in a society where individualist liberal political action, voting with one's dollar, etc., is the only acceptable method of political change, so he only ever expresses change in these terms. This makes for a weak praxis, because liberalism always makes for a weak praxis. But this isn't Stallmanism; it's just the overpragmatism of rms. Marx thought that electoralism was a good idea, for example, but that doesn't mean communism is inherently electoralist.

I think the best thing to do is to explicitly approach software freedom from a collective liberation stance and be ready and willing to point out the contradictions between the totality and the underlying ideological motivations of software freedom. Stallman doesn't need to do this; I think he's contributed quite enough honestly, and that if you want a better praxis, you should provide it yourself, because it isn't hard.

>problematic >oppressive social relations >conceptualize

I just wanna spray Pomo-B-Gone all over this.

I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't calling this out for what it is, anti capitalist BS. I've seen people talk about tactics, DRM, ethics, but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit. Stallman tries to explain over and over again how free software can be profitable, and the author of this post's whole point is, "nah, it can't be. Want free software? You need socialism."

Stupid article pushing tired socialism, in old arguments.

Don't really see why it needs to be called out as such. It's pretty explicitly radical leftist. Is Hacker News exclusively capitalist now? TBF I tend to avoid this site, so maybe it is.

If you think materialist analysis isn't useful, well, maybe it's not useful to you. But geez, the author didn't even get into, e.g., Marxist analysis or anything so controversial :P

Actually IMO majority of hacker news commenters are left leaning, and I try avoiding political news here because their rethoric is tiring (to me).

I was just thinking on this.

I notice that the comments usually the fit the article. For example, this has tons of comments sympathetic to Stallman (he's generally pro-socialist). While some other pro-libertarian article would have mostly comments sympathetic to capitalism, libertarian, etc. This occurs on Reddit too.

So libertarian/pro-capitalist people see HN as left-leaning, while left-leaning people see HN as pro-capitalist.

I think it's quite the opposite. There's a lot of people living in the high-paid tech bubble here. Actual lefties seem thin on the ground, and less numerous than libertarians.

If HN is seen as left-leaning, then the political diversity spectrum in the US is in truly dire shape.

Far left is just as dangerous as far right, and needs to be called out. Ideologies that resulted in deaths of millions shouldn't be socially acceptable.

Alright bro. Have you considered the millions of deaths caused by American conservativism/liberalism?

Yes I am a socialist and as such I employ materialistic and systemic analysis. Just calling it "anti capitalist BS" is a pretty shitty attempt at critique.

> but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit.

Did you even read the article?

Yeah, I read it, it was a bunch of Marxist buzzwords with one important line...

"How can our politics be effective, if we don't connect them to the actual source of the problem: profit?"

You also draw a really simplistic and ignorant call to action here...

"Free software activists should accept that software freedom is not an isolated issue, with its own, completely independent value set, but is just one aspect of a wider struggle for justice, and that we can never achieve full software justice under capitalism."

I am a free software activist. I write, use, modify, and evangelize free software for my paycheck. I also think socialism is a garbage philosophy. So your goal that we shouldn't take software justice as an isolated issue is betrayed by the fact that you better hope I take it as an isolated issue, because if I don't I'm going to tie it to capitalism and fight you tooth and nail. This is why Stallman is careful to not tie it to much else. He is trying to maximize the number of people involved.

> Yeah, I read it, it was a bunch of Marxist buzzwords

I tried to keep it buzzword free, if it was understandable, what's the problem?

> You also draw a really simplistic and ignorant call to action here...

Well this is a critique of an ideology. The majority of the text deals with what's wrong with it, and only general pointers are given as an alternative. However I believe they are enough to get free software people to question parts of their approach and start researching important topics for themselves. I never set out to write an article titled "How to free the whole society in 10 easy steps".

> I am a free software activist. I write, use, modify, and evangelize free software for my paycheck.

That's great, this article was aimed at you. What concrete problems do you have with the article? I hardly said "Stallman is not a socialist and is therefore wrong about everything", I created arguments from the ground-up, and I believe they deserve to be engaged in such a manner.

> I also think socialism is a garbage philosophy.

All of us have our personal backgrounds and beliefs which are hard to get over. You say socialism is a garbage philosophy, well, what do you think about exploitation of workers, of the huge amounts of labor we waste as a society, of unequal distribution of wealth both inside and between countries? What do you think about imperialistic wars? Do you believe your interests align with the interests of those who own the means of production and exchange, those who control finances? I hardly believe you like any of this.

You don't have to identify as a socialist to begin thinking about problems which the current system has. I certainly didn't, in the start. But as I started reading more and more, I slowly realized how Marxism was the most thorough analysis of capitalism and its problems, and how it formalized the most effective ideology of the working class.

I suggest, if you haven't already, that you give The Communist Manifesto a read--it can't possibly hurt you. If you have, try Engels' Principles of Communism: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com....

We fundamentally disagree. You, as a Marxist, see it as us versus them. That economics, money, and means of production (in this case software) is a zero sum game and that if others have, then someone has not. If the rich have money, they took it from the poor. If there is closed/proprietary software, that has subtracted from free/open software. And that is not true. Money isn't zero sum, Windows can have their proprietary software and GNU can have their free-as-in-freedom software. You don't have to, better yet, you don't get to force (and socialism IS force) other people.

I want people to want FOSS. I want people to be free, that's why I want them to use FOSS. Part of freedom is the choice to make unethical choices. Using government levers to force is the opposite of freedom.

I employ a materialist analysis of society in which means of production are owned by the few, and in which the majority of the people have to sell most of their time simply to have food. This is an undeniable fact of reality, and you merely choose to ignore it. Your ideology obscures simple facts of economic life in capitalistic society, I mean your entire comment completely lacks substance: what do you even mean by "If the rich have money, they took it from the poor"? Which part of my beliefs are you attacking? It's completely vague.

> and socialism IS force

This, again, completely lacks substance. Even by bourgeois ideologue standards.

> Part of freedom is the choice to make unethical choices

Pure ideology. The point is to look beyond individual choices, and analyze how the entire system functions. It is impossible to make ethical choices under capitalism.

"I employ a materialist analysis of society" translation: I regurgitate Marx's works.

"and in which the majority of the people have to sell most of their time simply to have food." as opposed to farmers who work 16 hours a day to grow food. Different occupations sell for different value and require different time.

"This is an undeniable fact of reality, and you merely choose to ignore it" a smug way of saying 'I'm right and you're wrong'.

"I mean your entire comment completely lacks substance: what do you even mean by "If the rich have money, they took it from the poor"? Which part of my beliefs are you attacking? It's completely vague." I'm attacking the fundamental assertions of Marx's conflict theory. Redistributing wealth is predicated on the ideology that someone having lots of money is the cause of someone else not having money. So you redistribute it from one person to the other, ignore any rights of the person to their private property.

"> and socialism IS force This, again, completely lacks substance. Even by bourgeois ideologue standards." - Not only isn't it lacking substance, it's empirically true. Given your next poorly thought out statement...

"The point is to look beyond individual choices" - look beyond individual choices? There is only the individual choice if you have freedom. If I don't have the individual right to choose that means I'm being forced. Hence, socialism IS force.

Well, you're certainly not interested in productive conversation, goodbye

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