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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.

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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)

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.

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