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Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality.

A lot of people thought the Mr. Robot stunt meant that they had been hacked. Well, you know what? They were hacked. Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.

(Side note: I also discovered last night that Firefox Quantum does not use or support userContent.css - maybe this is a Stylo thing but it really annoyed me.)

(EDIT: per the below, my experience with userContent.css doesn't seem to be shared. I may have messed it up on my end. Will report back when I get a chance.)

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Perhaps Stallman and the FSF are right?

We can fork Firefox, but I agree with many other commenters that a fork isn't sufficient.

It is the underlying concept I am trying to shine a light on: software should serve the user. When Mozilla becomes user-hostile, we can establish new guards for our future security. But if we, the software writers, become user-hostile, then there will be no one left.

The fundamental problem is that the software that serves the user needs to be paid for. If every FF user would chip in a small sum, that might work, but people would rather switch to chrome.

That's a common misconception: software that is Libre can be bought and sold. It just comes with the source code.

(Libre is not the same as Gratis.)

It’s not a misconception. Firefox could be sold, the problem is that nobody would buy it. Opera tried to sell a browser, people stuck with the cost-free alternatives. People would rather use chrome than pay for FF.

Do people actually think Stallman was wrong?

Stallman's issue is that he comes across as a fundamentalist extremist, and most of his suggestions require making huge sacrifices to one's quality of life.

Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile.

If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry.

[1]https://stallman.org/

I think Stallman's website says more about Stallman's design sensibilities than it does about the ability of plain text to be readable or for search to be effective.

Like the progression from http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/ to http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/.

Low contrast text is a downgrade. https://bestmotherfucking.website/ is a true upgrade.

Agreed, I knew there were more but didn't want to find the rest.

Wut? That's his website and he makes it however he likes. I haven't ever heard him telling people to make websites with default HTML layouts or not use interactivity or better search tools etc. WRT websites his opinions regard the tracking they force upon the users and the closed-source-ness of them. Maybe you should read things before you link them, eh?

I think the website is a bad example, but the above characterization of Stallman being a fanatic who is blind to other's needs is not incorrect. There have been multiple cases with him recommending people forgo having working software and hardware if it isn't 100% free. That might be the ideologically pure stance, but it's also massively impractical. As a true believer he just does not understand that the vast majority of the users just want to do work with their equipment, and that choosing to forgo working drivers for some abstract right to modify that 99.9999% of users will never exercise is just utter nonsense.

Also, Stallman is a grade A asshole. I've met him, and he is a deeply unpleasant man to be around.

You need extremists like him. If he was a moderate we'd have stayed in the corporate moderate ecosystem we had: everything proprietary.

When you want something to change you can't have only moderates as they're in fact happy with the status quo.

WRT your first point, well, he's an eat-your-own-dogfood philosopher, and he sets an example to what is possible with his own behaviour. And he just does not make trade-offs in his views. What we should collect from them is what's useful to us. It would be kind of hypocritical if he was telling non-free software is evil, but recommended some such software.

WRT your second point, that is subjective and ad hominem. I live in Emacs and without GNU I was stuck with Windows. Without GNU none of the good things we have today would've existed, Linux wouldn't have existed, we were all programming in ASP.NET or C# or what not. So even if he is an asshole, he's a very, very, very important one.

>It is mostly text [...] doesn't make it readable at all.

that is the weirdest comment ever. On HN no less which is literally just text.

HN has a coherent layout, nice spacing, a sensical grouping of content and functionality per component and view or page. stallman.org is a pile of unstyled textual content which was clearly assembled without actually being designed. Regardless of the validity of his site as an example of what he thinks everybody else on the internet needs to do, the two examples are not not in the same ballpark for readability. Between the two, the ratio of structural elements to textual elements isn't even close.

"makes it not readable" would be a weird contradiction.

"doesn't make it readable" is not weird at all.

Stallman is right about some things, but not everything.

He's right that proprietary software can be used for malicious purposes or evil intent, but he's incorrect that it must be.

I'm saving you a t-shirt for when you finally see the light.

> He's right that proprietary software can be used for malicious purposes or evil intent, but he's incorrect that it must be

Perhaps it must be simply because if it can be misused, it inevitably will be. Therefore, Stallman is correct.

That's an argument that can be just as easily applied to FOSS software, yet I see no one in the FOSS community warning against the slippery slope of evil that is free software.

No it can't. FOSS can't be misused to take away a user's access to the software and data produced by said software. Other types of misuse isn't relevant because FOSS can't do anything about them.

>No it can't. FOSS can't be misused to take away a user's access to the software and data produced by said software. Other types of misuse isn't relevant because FOSS can't do anything about them.

You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.

The argument has never been that proprietary software is immoral merely because the code isn't free, but that the code not being free is what allows those other abuses to occur.

> You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.

No, you just didn't understand the goalposts in the proper context. "Harm" and "misuse" in FOSS have never been about any type of harm in which software may take part, simply the types of harm that can be achieved by software and licensing.

In FOSS, harm means restricting a user's freedom and ability to control their information, privacy and the devices they own.

Stallman puts himself forward as an authority on the best way to use the internet, even though doesn't actually use the internet in any recognizable way.[1] He comes off like an internal combustion engine designer who has never been in a car, declaring himself a traffic flow expert.

[1] "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)." (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

This is nothing new. There has always been "sell offs" in the Open/Free Software sphere. An old-ish example that comes to mind is SourceForge. When it started, it was the place to host and search for Open Source or Free Software. It was amasing. Little by little, the service started to rot, became full of ads and just felt sketchy.

Then GitHub arrived, and a fresh platforfm for hosting open source software was born.

> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.

this is what was wrong about the whole thing. What Jascha Kaykas-Wolff heard from the community, that "the experience [we] created caused confusion" is NOT the point.

That was my initial reaction too, but I think it misses a subtlety.

Mozilla installs software on our computers without our explicit consent all the time, each time you update Firefox; or when you visit mozilla.org and your browser downloads some JS.

It would be impossible for most people to give genuine informed consent, because they'd have to understand what each part of the software does. Most people have not learned to read source code and don't want to. (And the source is available for people sufficiently motivated.) Practically, there isn't time to personally code-review every software update on your system. We defer this to distributors we trust.

And in this case, Mozilla genuinely didn't run any questionable code. They could have done (and arguably have in the past), but didn't. They installed software that actually does nothing. (about:mozilla at least engages the CSS parser; this doesn't even do that.)

I think the problem is just that they're messing with our stuff. Like if someone rearranged the books on your bookshelf to spell out the name of your least favourite whatever, they haven't actually done you any practical damage, but it's really annoying and rude. On principle, it's my stuff and they should leave it alone. Stop being a bad roommate, Mozilla!

I'd never used userContent.css before, but just tried it and it works fine. 57.0.2 (64-bit) on Win7.

I'd suggest raising a bug.

> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.

Auto-updating software has been the norm for a while. This is nothing new, just because it was put into an extension instead.

Except this wasn’t an auto update - it’s a completely different infrastructure pushing stuff into the browser without affirmative consent or even knowledge. And in true malvertising fashion, this system is both opt-out and turns itself back on sometimes.

Also auto-update has a changelog. Users can get an idea of what changed, what the new buttons do, etc. This was unannounced and hidden from users.

Auto-update doesn't carry the implicit moral right to install anything company behind it wants.

Auto-update is a consensual agreement with the user. If you use auto-update to deploy something that a vast majority of your users do not want and did not expect, and intentionally so (refusing to roll back a 'mistake'), then you have broken that agreement or moral code.

You cannot use the excuse of "oh well if they don't like it they can uninstall it and use another product" to condone this bait-and-switch behavior. Just because the behavior is legal does not make it moral.

This behavior is absolutely immoral and must be condemned.

>refusing to roll back a 'mistake'

Did they refuse to roll it back? It's marked as "complete" on my Firefox installation and is no longer present on the Extensions page.

Both userChrome and userContent work just fine on ff57(+). I'm using both right now with the nightly build. What are you having issues with?

(After others here said userContent.css was working for them, I fiddled a bit more. Found an earlier rule in the file that I had somehow mangled and it seems that somehow affected the parsing of the file. Removed the earlier lines, everything works great. So yeah, my fault, not Firefox's.)

"I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality."

PAY. FOR. IT.

What can you expect from a group of people working for you for free, trying to scratch together their salaries from wherever they can.

The answer is not 'fork it' - because the existential question remains: who will develop the fork?

You?

Me?

A magical person who works without income?

More likely - someone who needs an income, and will have to find creative, weird ways like 'Mr Robot' to make it work.

A simple answer is 'pay for it'. A company / non-profit can still be committed to those things you mentioned.

Maybe that worked in the past, but these days, time and time again we see companies offering paid software and services with an extra layer of advertising on top. Old adages like "you're either a paying customer, or the one being sold" no longer apply, you can be a paying customer and sold for extra profit. Companies, by their nature, will try to maximize profits, and that translates to them using any means they can get away with.

I don't agree. This is entirely the choice of the team.

The idea that 'you are being sold' is not fair either.

You choose what to use, for how much, and the resulting product.

So if you want to pay $ a month AND have ads. Well, then do that. If not - don't.

If Mozilla wants to have an 'add free non-profit' they can do that.

But they can't because for whatever reasons - people won't pay.

Some people won't pay because they simply don't want to - and are willing to live with the alternative choice of 'having a sideload now and then'.

Other people use insufferable intellectualizations about all of it.

But mostly it's kind of greedy and irrational.

We get immense value out of web browsers. A $1 a month fee would enable Mozilla to forge ahead being the best browser, free for those who can't afford it - and ad free.

But we can't have that because we are not as intelligently organized as we need to be.

I'm still not really sure what would lead you to believe that they would even consider ceasing their advertising schemes if they had this additional income. You seem to be admonishing people for not taking nonexistent steps that would probably never exist to begin with.

"I'm still not really sure what would lead you to believe that "they would even consider ceasing their advertising schemes if they had this additional income. "

For the same reason Mozilla exists today as 'kind of a non-profit' in the first place without tons of ads.

For the same reason that Wikipedia has no ads.

I'm not 'admonishing' anyone so much as pointing out we can't seem to grasp that nothing is going to happen for free.

The only path to 'ad free' is for someone to pay for it - and that's going to have to be users - or in the very rare case -a 'Big Corp' who sees the strategic value in it.

And yes - I do agree that 'most corps' would try to stick in ads.

Heck - even 'non-profits' like Mozilla - are sticking in ads!

But given what Mozilla is today, if they had the resources necessary, I suggest they would not be pushing ads. It's the last thing they want to do.

Finally - there are tons of services that people pay for that are not full of ads.

I don't get ads when I buy MP3s, and none of my paid apps have ads.

Do you think there are ads for t-shirts in my Salesforce app? Or SAP? Of course not.

Likely because the 'profit maximizing' option for Salesforce is to not put ads there in the first place.

So 'big corp' incentives can definitely align with user needs if things are right.

Xbox Live Gold is $60 a year and still has ads.

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