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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

I get where Richard Stallman is coming from.

But, practicality aside, and sometimes childish tone aside (e.g. derogatory names for companies) here's what really bothers me: the framing of this as a moral issue.

I can get behind the idea that non-free code might be a problem, sometimes. I can get behind the idea that we should, in some situations, strive to have non-free code. But why is this a moral issue at all? Why can't reasonable people get together and decide that proprietary code makes sense for some situations, and that doesn't make them or the people using the code morally wrong?

I have a hard time with people whose shtick is mostly "appeal to emotions".

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Perhaps those reasonable people are making a moral judgement when they decide to use proprietary code in a certain circumstance: they're deciding it's morally acceptable.

And maybe it isn't morally acceptable in some circumstances. Like when transparency is required in order to facilitate accountability and peace of mind.

It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. But is it immoral to rely on closed-source search algorithms? The answer to that is less obvious. Either way, moral issues affect code all the time.

I don't see how there is anything fundamentally different between voting machines and search engines as far as the morality of closed-source goes.

For a voting machine, I'd say it is immoral to have voting systems that are unreliable or unverifiable. The problem of making a reliable and verifiable voting system is mostly orthogonal to the open/closed nature of the software in voting machines.

For open-source voting machines, how does the voter know that the binary code running on the machine they are using is actually compiled, unmodified, from the right source? Even if they can somehow determine that, there is still the possibility of bugs.

To get reliable and verifiable voting system, what you need to do is design the system so that if the voting machine software does not count votes correctly that will be detected elsewhere in the system and can be corrected.

An example of how to do this is David Chaum's "Punchscan" system, or it's successor, Chaum and Ron Rivest's "Scantegrity II" system.

> It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines.

Bullshit. The problem is voting machines in general. They are too complex and you cannot observe how they work. This opens up elections to get manipulated regardless if open source is used or not. This is also not a moral problem, but a technological problem. The moral problem is in setting the requirements, the technological problem is in solving them.

What I do not understand in regards to voting computers, is why you need the computer part anyway. If you want fast counting, punch cards suffice.

Why even have a punch card? Just a paper and pen/pencil should suffice.

In this particular case it could be argued that Google's unofficial "don't be evil" motto explicitly framed this as a moral issue. Tongue-in-cheek, to be sure, but certainly an appeal to happy squishy emotions.

That said, RMS's stuff is showing up in a few posts today, and framing as a moral issue is certainly a large part of his standard toolkit. Considering any situation from an ethical viewpoint tends to make my eyes roll and skin crawl (ooh, the moral dimensions of public hygiene? yes please!), but appealing to hearts and minds is pretty basic old-school rhetorical technique.

If nothing else, coming from a technical background, it's occasionally useful to come at the problems from a different, squishier, direction.

One sentence sums this up perfectly - Stallman writes: "A nonfree program submits the users to the power of the program's developer."

This is almost always patently false ... A user chooses to submit themselves to the power of the program's developer in exchange for the utility provided by the program. We do similar things all the time in society:

- If I want to drive a car, I submit myself to the "programmer" who decided that the "Enter" key (gas pedal) would be operated by my foot and be on the floor.

- If I want to drive a car, I also submit myself to a myriad of driving conventions and laws that I can't change: I should probably drive on the correct side of the road for the country I'm in and if I don't stop at red-lights I'll quickly be t-boned.

These are in no way moral decisions and since many of his warnings have to do with privacy and security issues, I applaud him for raising the warning. I don't however think that he helps himself by being so black and white on issues. It's far too easy to point out hypocrisies, especially in non-software areas.

Because it is a moral question: Should you be able to control all data about you, and how it moves? Should ownership mean the ability to entirely modify something?

If you agree that these two are automatically derived from basic moral principles – control over yourself, and the right to ownership – then you also have to agree that closed source products, and SaaS, are morally problematic.

>Because it is a moral question: Should you be able to control all data about you, and how it moves?

That's not the argument Stallman actually makes here though. Note that he doesn't list 'propriety software running on Google's servers' as a reason not to use Google, even though that has far more of an an impact on your ability to control information about you (or to modify the software that you are using) then the comparatively small amount of client side javascript that runs when you use Google.

The general FSF/Stallman position is that non-free software is fine as long as you access it over a network. So clearly control over your own data isn't why RMS is morally opposed to non-free software.

> The general FSF/Stallman position is that non-free software is fine as long as you access it over a network

No?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

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