Richard Stallman agrees to do an AMA on reddit
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> As the cloud is moving in (gmail, google docs, etc) and
> slowly replacing more and more of our traditional applications.
> What can we do in order to free the web from closed source
> systems which we can't just use, share and adapt as we like.
> Can free software compete with this or are we forced to live
> in the last century where everything is hosted on out own
> computers?
About the same time the Web was spinning up, network bandwidth and computer performance both started to drop in price, giving software designers the option of retaining a portion of the processing on their end. While it does not replace the standalone desktop app, a "cloud" app affords many advantages which are too great to ignore. (Compare Google Maps to the Road Atlas CD-ROM.)
You make a good point about "what happens when we're offline". We suddenly can't use those awesome cloud apps, but that's the nature of the game -- these apps do things which are just impossible for a standalone app to do. Networking is the price of admission.
I hope we'll see a popularization (commercialization?) of mesh networking in the not-too-distant future. Pervasive mesh networking becomes more and more feasible as we have more and more wireless devices around us, and while it comes with its own set of unique technical constraints, it would go a long way to achieve a self-healing network at its outer edges.
Obviously it is, but there are way too many people that seem to assume that networking is a given.
I have an internet connection at home and at work, but I do not pay for 3G on my cellphone or just for my laptop. Where do I fit into the world where all our computing happens 'in the cloud?' Will I be forced to start shelling out money for 3G in addition to the other costs that I incur to access the internet already? What happens when my carrier has a dispute with me over billing and they cut my 'everywhere' wireless access? Am I now powerless to get any work done on a computer, until I patch things up with them? Should this be considered some sort of blackmail since they are threatening my ability to use my computer when they threaten to take my internet connection away from me?
This line of reasoning sounds like "As the world moves to computerized bookkeeping, am I expected to take on the extra expense and burden of buying a computer so i can keep up?" In the 80s.
Times change. Technology marches on. You can't always do the same thing forever.
Why should I pay $40-$50/month for home Internet and just to pay another $50/month for 3G Internet (which isn't even 'everywhere Internet' because it only covers certain areas; metropolitan areas better than rural obviously)? Keep in mind that these are monthly costs, not fixed costs.
> Times change. Technology marches on. You can't always do the same thing forever.
Things aren't always better just by virtue of being new.
Why shouldn't you? Because you don't want the advantages that doing so brings.
But it's expensive! So make the decision more carefully.
But I want it to be cheaper! And?
It really annoys me when people seem to assume that 24/7 Internet connectivity is a given, and something that every single American has right now ('has' as in 'really has' not as in 'has access to if they want it').
I don't think here's anyone out there who assume that.It's just that some people decide to target only those that do. You're complaining about being left out of the new stuff while at the same time refusing to adopt the new stuff. If you want to continue working with your local software fine, nobody is stopping you. You just sound like a whiner when you go 'oh I want to stay at the forefront of technology, but I don't like where that is, whaa it's so unfair'.
24/7 internet connectivity will be a certainty in the future. We'll have complete global coverage. You'll be diving and able to tweet. You'll be checking facebook on that space shuttle.
The idea that everyone needs a large computer with a lot of horse power is outdated. And the hassle that comes with is not something people want - lost data, viruses, maintainence, etc.
People want small 'appliances' that connect them to their data and applications in the cloud. They have spoken. That's what they want.
For varying definitions of most. People living in Silicon Valley and/or San Francisco and spending all of their time with other techies have a skewed perspective of how many people out there actually have access to 24/7 Internet. I'm not talking about a broadband connection vs dial-up here. I'm talking about an Internet connection no matter where you are (which 3G only brings you if you live in urban areas... as long as you don't hit a deadzone or a tower that's congested... ).
I question that, or, at least, I question that the quality of coverage will be in the same class everywhere. More likely, coverage will be better in wealthy areas, and not so good—and more expensive—in the poorer ones. So will running networked applications be viable in the poorer areas? It depends on the app and how network intensive it is. The optimism about network apps, everywhereallthetime, has optimism about infrastructure catching up implicit in it, and (for reasons beyond the scope of a deeply nested comment) I don't share that optimism.
You're right, new is not always better. But neither is old. Maybe you wouldn't get the same utility out of things. That's fine. But I'm certainly glad that more applications are cloud-based. It means ill actually use them.
I respect people's right to make decisions. My issue is with the idea that 100% of computing will be done 'in the cloud' in the future. In this case, my decision isn't, "Do I want to use cloud-services and always-connect-Internet?" The decision becomes, "Do I want to compute at all?"
Is 3G less reliable than fixed line? I don't know - but networks in general aren't always available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...
Of course, such an utopia won't happen tomorrow, nor in this decade. But it could happen in the next one.
[1] Most people today don't send their e-mails. They ask their web-mail or their ISP to do that for them.
It's like talking about how easy it is for Americans to get a variety of foreign foods nowadays because you happen to live in an area that has a diversity of people and food markets, while ignoring that there are places in America where those foods aren't in enough of a demand to make a speciality store feasible (or profitable enough for a major supermarket chain to carry them). [i.e. Just because you live in an apartment above an Indian food restaurant doesn't mean that it's just as easy for someone on the other side of town to get the same food from the same restaurant. -or- "It's sooo easy to get good organic food these days for all Americans, you just have to go to a Whole Foods! What? Whole Foods aren't in every city in America?"]
As to encountering lack of internet access (ignoring cell access, which I don't have), how about all the time while driving? Or 95+% of the time when stopped, and not near a free, unencrypted wifi location? If you want to use your computer to get directions, you could save them locally... or lose access to them the moment you lose internet access, and nuts to you if you're lost.
First, I have to trust companies not to be nefarious; second, I have to ‘trust’ them not to fold, or simply decide to stop providing their SaaS. I think it's clear that it's naïve to expect companies not to act nefariously, or, even if we impute to them endless goodwill, not to make mistakes that expose our personal information (cough Facebook cough); and, even if we trust both intention and ability, if everything is on someone else's servers, then there's not a lot you can do if you show up one day to find those servers are no longer serving.
This, more than problems with connectivity (which presumably will be resolved after some growth pains), is what really frightens me about the whole-sale rush to online applications. I want to have my resources on my computer—preferably only on my computer; and, while most current services offer some way to do this, it's clear that it's regarded as less and less important, and I fear that it won't be long before it goes away entirely.
That is the "good" cloud. The "buzzword" cloud, however, is much more about centralized computing and client-server networks. In other words, about many helpless customers being dependent on a few, powerful, corporations.
as for "What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?" that seems like a solvable problem to me. (and web application can work offline these days)
* Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic.
* It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline.
* If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless.
* If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline?
I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.
My other point is this:
As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?
Personally, I use my web apps for backup already -- images go on Picasa so I don't have to worry about whether my local drive is going to die or not. (I already have Time Machine configured, but that's mostly for music.)
I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it
seems that most people are too focused on their
strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.
That's not necessarily an excuse. People don't deal with total system failure on a daily basis, but that's not an excuse to poo-poo'ing the idea of having a backup plan that is tried and tested.
Also, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use WebApps, but the idea that the industry is going to completely get rid of locally run applications in favor of doing 100% of your work and data storage 'in the cloud' is short-sighted if we are ignoring the weaknesses of such an approach, no?
And I didn't mentioned the temptations associated with massive centralization yet…
This is a good point, and you can be certain that in any future wars/conflicts disabling "the cloud" will be a primary objective. My advice would be to by all means make use of cloud based services, but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.
One of my points is that operating on this local data becomes impossible if we make it so that all of our computers are thin-clients to the cloud (which is what I think a lot of people are pining for).
For many people (like myself) a computer is pretty useless without internet already. My email is on there. My work is on there. Facebook. News. My games require it. Without internet I don't even bother turning on my PC. And I'm not alone.
Why is this such a big deal when internet is just as reliable as electricity? We don't go out of our ways to have paper systems for everything for in case the power is out, do we? Why not?
An LED Lantern. Superior in almost every way.
At the heart of his message there are some good ideas - but his insistence on people saying GNU with Linux made him seem childish and bitter. He also went over the time and didn't take any questions. By about the 1.5 hour mark large number of people were walking out during the talk. He mocked one of them. There appeared to be no end in sight. Around the hour 45 minute mark it was just getting rambling and incoherent and I also walked out.
There is a place for free software, but I certainly wouldn't want Richard Stallman as a spokesman for my cause.
I have the feeling that he is very bitter about this because he cares so (or too) deeply. Free Software is his pet project and he put so much effort into it. Every time people misuse the terms "Linux" and "GNU" it is a reminder for him what went wrong in the past and that people in his view seem to take GNU for granted.
Yes, some of the reasoning behind "GNU/Linux" is to give credit where credit is due. But I think it's mostly about the power of a name in getting people to accept ideas, which is why the FSF also campaigns to re-label DRM ("digital restrictions management"), the Kindle ("Swindle"), the iPod ("iScrod" -- I heard RMS say this at a talk at Berkeley), and so on. These names may sound silly, but that's just the point: the fact that they sound silly highlights the assumptions and expectations people have about the things they refer to.
The FSF is out to change the forces which maintain the status quo. You can't do that without getting people to reflect on the assumptions they're making about the current situation. And one of the best ways to incite that reflection is to insist that people use names that present different values.
Anyway I always expect him to be the way I saw him because the moment he start to be sloppy about his ideas, the same people who name him as an extremist will say "see, even the president of FSF, the oh-so-holy leader of `free software thing` is sloppy about his own idea".
Makes sense.
* nice guy, but a bit awkward socially
* very smart and good memory too
* has written a lot of free software, and would like others to consider making theirs free as well
Also, I wished that he would've included more technical topics in the talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
"Why do you eat your toenails?"
(both live, on stage)
Reddit was the best thing in the world when it happened but I'm not missing it at all since I left around two years ago.
Also even if the comment style is much more harsher on reddit, and hence reduces the possibility of civil discussion, I find the number of comments that stand out by themselves as being particularly interesting to be approximately the same on both sites.
And finally the hacker news style of discussion, while much more tame, and often bringing more interesting discussions, can be just as consensual, or even more on certain topics, the person standing out as being the more 'reasonnable' being often the most upvoted, with little regard to the soundness of arguments.
Me, for one.
So, for most of the past decade I've been involved in building online communities. I've been participating in them for longer than that. And I've seen the same pattern occur over and over again: as a community grows, the members become more and more concerned with what's appropriate and less and less concerned with whatever actually brought them together in the first place.
You can see this happening here, now, on a regular basis: "is this really appropriate for HN" is almost at meme status, and occasionally we see waves of blunt enforcement through downvoting of comments, or through posts designed to shame people.
There are basically two ways this can end:
1. The community becomes extremely rigid and insular, developing rules and conventions to protect itself at the cost of new members who get run off or never join in the first place. Wikipedia seems to be at this stage right now, if you'd like an example.
2. The "old guard" (who aren't necessarily original or even early members) either migrate away or get over it, and the community adapts and keeps on growing. Places like Fark, where stupidity and outright trolls just get mocked mercilessly, provide useful examples of this.
Reddit, I think, is either at or approaching the second option. Yes, there's dumb stuff posted, yes, there are comments making fun of people, but the community there seem to have realized that's not the end of the world. And because they're much less rigid and much less concerned with "is this appropriate for reddit", there's a lot more room for creativity, for humor, and for lots of other stuff that just couldn't happen on HN. And I'll take that any day, which is why I spend most of my time reading reddit instead of HN.