Talking to the Mailman – Interview with Richard Stallman
newleftreview.org
newleftreview.org
Aside everything else, self-glorifying stories about heroic saviors who are single so much better then second smartest person in a room should be treated with suspicion - and it is completely puzzling to me that some people are believed them so easily. Because really, for me to believe in that much of an unusual hero, I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources then just said hero and people who worship him. (That is not to say that he is incapable on the other extreme, absolutely not. But you can be extremely good and still not the god this story is about.)
Sure, I'll bite. This is a passage about Stallman's performance in Harvard's Math 55, which has a reputation as the hardest single undergraduate math course in the US:
To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."
Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.
"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."
Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.
"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. Except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's a function. It's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. That's just the way he was."
It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis, which I took with Richard the next year," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."
Chess makes no bones about it: watching Stallman's solution unfold on the chalkboard was a devastating blow. As a kid who'd always taken pride in being the smartest mathematician the room, it was like catching a glimpse of his own mortality. Years later, as Chess slowly came to accept the professional rank of a good-but-not-great mathematician, he had Stallman's sophomore-year proof to look back on as a taunting early indicator.
"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."
This does not even directly implies he is a good programmer (he is actually good programmer in reality, but high level math skills don't prove it).
<BEGIN> Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics program- mers - a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself - still stands as one of the major human accomplishments of the In- formation Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging re- spect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period:
I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute - Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!" 16 <END>
"This person is a hero! This person can do no wrong!" is the common cry of those who'd rather live in fantasy than reality.
Interestingly, he has no wages from FSF. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/428...
We can call those people sheeple or whatever, but at the end of the day they are just users who don't have the time/knowledge to care about free software.
It took me a few times before I could grasp free software Vs open source and I'm knee deep in the code most days.
Another issue this ideology faces is it's main proponent; RMS. He's not charismatic and as another user pointed out, does not present well on videos or talks. If he wants free software to continue, then he should pick new champions and take a step back.
Aside from the hassle involved with using only free software, I think one of the things holding him back is that he's much better at math/comp sci/logic than he is at social skills, and he's not especially suited to being the leader of a popular movement.
I don't think he needs to hand over - if someone else was doing a better job of the advocacy of Free Software then perhaps he could choose to 'retire', but until then he is the best there is.
Anyway some people here that use or create proprietary software try to defend this as a good thing, maybe is necessary for the circumstances but is not good(IMO)
I would say RMS is very charismatic, but his speaking and writing is a bit of a dog whistle which does not strike the right note with many folks. Yet, almost everyone in the developed world still benefits greatly from his technical work, if indirectly.
On the whole, I would say RMS is an incredibly influential and prolific contributor to the software we all use, as well as how we think about computing in general. If he isn't everything to all people, well that is a good sign -- we should not worship free software authors as religious figures. But we should be thankful for contributions, and perhaps be inspired to treat software users well in our own work.
Or... they have the time and knowledge to carefully consider it and just haven’t concluded that it has any benefit for some reason.
Not everyone who disagrees with you is doing so because they just haven’t thought about it hard enough yet.
They think it’s a great idea, and would love if they could do everything they do currently with FOSS, and no extra time-investment. But, with few exceptions, that’s rarely possible, especially as more and more computing happens on phones.
Of course, the people I speak to about FOSS are by no means wholly representative. But IME it’s that software freedom tends to end up being considered a nice idea but a very low priority, rather than an idea with no benefits.
RMS is generally right, and I have the utmost respect for his adherence to such a principled stance for the social good all these years.
Imagine all the opportunities to become filthy rich in the tech world he's ignored, having lived through multiple tech bubbles while being more than qualified to capitalize on them through developing proprietary software or otherwise exploiting users.
> Non-free, proprietary software is also much more likely to be malware—to contain malicious functionalities, of which there are many kinds. Non-free programs can spy on the users, report on them. Many are designed specifically to restrict what users can do—that’s their purpose.
I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to free software as well. The difference is that it is usually much easier to detect when such things are happening, and modify the program so that it no longer does these things.
> Another form of malicious functionality is tying the program to a specific remote server
Again, this doesn’t seem to me to be a “free software” argument. The reason this doesn’t usually happen with free software is that there is no central entity that controls the software, whereas with non-free software one company/server/person can control their products and “backdoor” them.
> If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from source code.
This is not quite true. I can do the same for a program written in Objective-C as well, and I can still write an app in Swift and send you a compiled binary for you to install. Perhaps Stallman was talking about Swift Playgrounds, but even here there are issues: you cannot necessarily change the code on your device itself, and the environment that your code runs in is much more restrictive.
> free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell.
I have seen many companies use free software, but very few actually making money off of free software. When I ask, I’m usually pointed to RedHat, which makes money off of providing support. However, the money they’re getting is usually coming from companies that sell non-free software. So I’m really curious how the economy would work if everyone sold free software, since this doesn’t seem like something that would work.
Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit childish; I wonder if this actually helps him or it just makes other people feel like I do.
That's an interesting rewriting of "the law prohibits the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges," but if you read back he said "more likely," not "it's impossible for free software to have bad stuff in it."
> Again, this doesn’t seem to me to be a “free software” argument. The reason this doesn’t usually happen with free software is that there is no central entity that controls the software, whereas with non-free software one company/server/person can control their products and “backdoor” them.
But that is the whole point! Software freedom is about power. The point isn't that it is impossible to licence malware under GPL, the point is that GPL gives the user the freedom to remove the malware parts. Your argument seems a bit like saying that claiming that free markets help with price discovery is a mischaracterization because people can offer overpriced products in a free market ... when the whole point of a free market is that the buyer has the option to not buy the overpriced product, and it's just completely irrelevant whether overpriced offers exist.
> So I’m really curious how the economy would work if everyone sold free software, since this doesn’t seem like something that would work.
Potentially, the mistake is simply in thinking in terms of "selling software". Instead of software, you can simply sell development work. Not that that necessarily works in every market, but the point is that the model of repeatedly selling the end result of the development work is not the only way to make money by applying your expertise at developing software.
> Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit childish; I wonder if this actually helps him or it just makes other people feel like I do.
Well, the emotional reaction can be a problem for him being taken serious by some. But you have to consider that the status quo in many ways is not neutral, and also often the result of intentional framing by other parties. It's just that they are way better at hiding their manipulation from your view.
Most of their customers don't sell software, basically every company needs software these days. They still have those needs if all software were free, so I'm not really seeing the problem.
>Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit childish;
He named his first major project after a local ice cream shop, and his second after a children's song from the fifties. That's just him. I find it silly but don't see it as credible attack on his message.
I'm not sure if Emacs and Bolio was open when the editor evolved, but the text formatting program (like runoff) called "Bolio" was definitely named after the ice cream store (since by the time it was written Emacs already existed).
3 minutes not wasted, thanks for telling me about it. I'd never thought where the Gnu name came from.
This seems like a logical counter to the Orwellian argument that language shapes though. If you propose you should be free of Microsoft influence, you should reject their rebranding of spyware as Telemetry. It's a political statement more than childish mockery.
Also, some of them catch on and are very generally used.
DRM is actually intended to mean "Digital Rights Management"
You think free (not in the sense of $0; in the sense of Stallman's usage: non-propriatry, libre) software contains malware/spyware?
Brew comes to mind.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/98ctgu/ubuntu_server...
As an example, how does a license like GNU play out for the average person contributing to a successful GNU licensed game versus a closed source game?
And also, at a more macro level, wouldn't a GNU-like license foster innovation and collaboration in the developing world and lead to greater profit for all parties involved in the long run(except ofc mega-corps)?
*I might just open an Ask HN when I've thought this question through some more.
In fact, I remember looking on my SNES and NES classics at a laundry list of open source libraries used for those mini consoles.
"Free and open source" doesn't mean you have to give things away for zero dollars (free as in beer vs free as in speech), just that you have to provide users the means to inspect, modify, and link what you've released. I think you'll find quite a bit of GPL and open source information in the about section of quite a few games. I seem to recall Darksiders 2 (among others) offering to send you their GPL'd source from the main menu about screen.
So, I think it works out just fine for games. Hell, all the games made from the GPL'd id-tech engines should be enough to convince you it has worked just fine for games.
Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay, and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS, maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever).
A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one pays for it.
There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version.
I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.
An example of a pure free software business model is RedHat, they open source everything they make and that is working out for them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772
I think that we would see much more of this is proprietary software didn't exist. But of course, re-selling the same development over and over and over again is much more profitable, so it's hard to compete with that.
They all needed software that fit their needs, and none minded that we shared any generic components we built to accomplish it.
If we want to know more, the companies I worked for were members of the https://odoo-community.org/
The biggest potential replacement for Unity seems to be Godot Engine (https://godotengine.org) which is MIT licensed. From what I hear it's supposed to be easier to learn than Unity.
A comparatively small number of people are paid directly to work on Free software. A slightly larger number of people have understanding employers who allow them to use salaried time to contribute to Free/Open projects. Beyond that is a long tail of people who make no money at all from it.
The benefit lies in the other direction, of course: you can setup a startup using only Free/Open software stack at zero cost. A very different experience from getting, say, Oracle involved to provide your database.
The benefit of contributing to a piece of software is that piece of software getting better. It's not really transactional or financial.
Also various people who had accounts on other machines on the net would connect to the MIT lab machines as tourists simply because it was fun.
Even once the lab caved and put in some login security it was only to access the machine -- once you were connected you could change to another user or whatever.
It was "the ARPANET" by the way -- ARPA's network rather than having a name. ARPANET was also an adjective (e.g. ARPANET TIP). I know RMS would have said that but the interviewer transcribed it without the article.
I dug up the article[1] tonight (thanks, Jason Scott!). The the perspective I have today (at the time I had no idea who RMS was) it seems pretty clear that RMS wrote it. It's a neat little time capsule.
So yeah I might do that part differently if I were Stallman or in charge of BLM. Although I suppose in neither case is there really anybody truly "in charge," which at least in my experience with FOSS I always thought was the beauty of it. (That's another thing too, how can you "co-opt" something nobody owns?)
At some point you have to get shit done. Granted I'm advancing a position right now that leads to all sorts of compromise (in the one sense but also unfortunately in the other sense) and slippery-slope-ism and lesser-of-two-evils-ism. But somewhere I heard the saying, "There's nothing more useless than an unelected liberal." In other words the purity of your ideas does nobody any good if your hands aren't on the levers of power. Hi Hillary! (HRC disclaimers apply; see store for details.) That saying comes from the hierarchical model, obviously, but to translate it into a 'community movement' paradigm, power is simply the number of people participating. If you chop that in half, you chop everybody's power in half.
> That’s what I gathered. I’m in favor of projects like these, because I know they’re useful for other people, but it wouldn’t fit my lifestyle. I just use email. You can call me the Mailman—as in True Names, Vernor Vinge’s science-fiction story.
I really don't get this. Computers are supposed to open the doors to technological and social change, no? Why would anyone drag their feet like this? There are so many things that have come out since email and even more still coming.
I'm something like half RMS' age, and for the most part I use e-mail, IRC, and the odd board like HN (which I probably spend too much time on).
Social networks are simply not useful to me.
By contrast I have a coffee machine and barely anyone else I know does (UK). Because I find it useful and they don't.
What's wrong with that? It's nothing to do with the age of the software and all to do with the purpose it serves. My car is old because it works and I don't need a new one, too.
but you might benefit from a plane
there's no fundamental difference between email and web-based messaging frameworks. a modern web-based messaging framework might even have better privacy guarding features than email, and more useful features by virtue of continued development.
Also, as mentioned, you may want to keep some things private. I do too, but may want to write things to public too, although the stuff mentioned above I do not find useful, and neither does Stallman, presumably.
Lanier used to be a FOSS advocate but has now taken the position that his previous support, and the opinions of RMS, are wrong.
Whether you agree or not, Lanier is a smart guy and an eloquent speaker and certainly worth listening to.
1. Permissive licensing actually helps the cause by spreading free software more widely, saturating demand faster, and displacing all proprietary software. It also avoids the contradiction when free software developers use their power to spread software freedom by force.
2. What RMS is afraid of is front-ending of free software with proprietary facades. This is why free software must extend through the whole stack all the way to the end user and it must be complemented with non-profits that deliver complete services to users. Non-profits can also ensure de facto freedom whilst licenses only barely protect de jure freedom.
3. Internet is not about communication. It's about remote operation of server-side software. Software freedoms must extend to teleoperated software, for example through the above mentioned non-profits.
Non-profits ensuring freedoms is a nice thought, but it's very hard to compete with the abusive business models of large software corps, so unless you somehow convince regular people that they are better off paying for the stuff they use, licensing is the only real tool you have to avoid having your work contribute to those proprietary facades.
Proprietary software vendors are trying to adapt by replacing fees with ads and spyware (like in the case of Chrome), but this business model will not last. It is abusive and people feel it. They will eventually gravitate to free software. Once they get used to free software, they wouldn't accept abuse anymore.
It's interesting that what we call a 'public corporation' today isn't actually public at all - I'm pretty sure that Richard Stallman considers public corporations as being 'private business'.
A big problem with so-called public corporations is that there is not enough fluidity in terms of ownership for them to be called 'public'. The majority of shares move between a very small percentage of wealthy investors which represent an even smaller percentage of the general public.
It would be good to see a capitalist system where there is more fluidity over the ownership of shares of companies. Also, it would be nice to see public companies release all their code in the public domain under the GPL license.
I think that cryptocurrencies could make these things possible because they solve the financial incentive problem which has plagued free software. I think that it's now possible to create free software in the public domain in such a way that people can profit from it significantly but not in quite the same permanent way as we're used to with shares of corporations.
Is reality really so neatly categorized into binary outcomes with no shades of gray, though?
RMS has been proven more correct with each year that passes. More and more of the technologists responsible for our most significant innovations have expressed concerns about the control that large firms have gained over their users. This control is only possible through "non-free" source code, and is a guaranteed consequence when we allow the practice of distributing closed-source systems.
Software we never run on our devices may yet control us.
So while distributed systems under AGPL still protect your freedom, AGPL of a SaaSS (like Google Docs) are non-free because you cannot change the software running on the server (and of course you shouldn't be able to -- because that would violate the freedom of the administrator). SaaSS is fundamentally incompatible with software freedom.
(And this is something that RMS has made clear arguments about. He cares more than just about distribution.)
But, it is correct, reality is not really so neatly categorized into binary outcomes with no shades of gray (and other colours).
> Linux with a video card.
Assuming you are speaking about a recent video card from AMD or Nvidia, then that system has substantial closed parts, which are unreviewable and unmodifiable by the user and/or owner of the device.
If someone thinks it is as black and white as this then it has clearly become ideological rather than rational.
I do think there are some software that in reality, for most people (including large swathes of non-technical people), work better in a for-profit model (which is usually closed source).
But there are some things that work better as open source.
I think it really depends on the fundamental problem (i.e. ends) the software (i.e. means) is trying to accomplish.
I personally do not think you can categorically say one is better than the other, because it really depends on the issue.
Why isn't there an open source Google search, that works better than Google?
If we can open source our encryption algorithms because that ostensibly makes it more secure overall, why can't we just open source all our algorithms for spam filtering, especially to the spammers themselves?
If you look at all the most vibrant communities online, are they closed source or open source? (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, HN itself) ... vs. say, mailing lists, usenet, etc.
Also, he doesn't think all software is good just because it's foss; it can be bad for other reasons. But all non-foss software is bad, because it violates the rights of users.
I don't see the problem with being this consistent. If I say that all non-consensual sex is bad, am I an irrational ideologue too?
I don't fully agree that all non-foss are bad, or that all foss are good. You can find exceptions to the rule either way.
I think the helpful perspective is to take a step back and look at the whole system from a macro perspective. Based on traction, which do you think is "better". I think it really depends on the use-case.
There's a lot of shitty foss software out there, that is just plain unusable because developers like geeking out over code but UX + UI polish are non-technical problems and thus ignored.
I liked this part the most as something new and insightful said by RMS.
I am not sure that democracy is better than innovation. I would choose Freedom and Innovation over Freedom and Democracy. Just look at how much has been done in the last few centuries. Nearly everyone can have things today that even kings didn’t have. Democracy on the other hand is just a way of voting for some policy that’s then enforced on everyone. In fact, China can be said to be a democracy more than the US in some ways. I do think we need to safeguard rights and freedoms but democracy isn’t the only way to do that.
None that I can think of, there is no political opposition allowed in China.
In the US, third parties aren't given equal placement on ballots (you need to get "ballot rights"). Large parties get money from the government for advertising, which small parties don't. The people don't actually vote for who is in power (and votes aren't equal between people).
Doesn't seem like political opposition is a workable right in the US to me. Not to mention everyone has guns, and guns are seen as an "break glass in case of tyranny" tool -- meaning that culturally people are primed to see violence as being a reasonable retort for political disagreements (obviously this is an oversimplification -- but political rallies in the US are far more violent than in many other western countries, despite many western countries having their own problems).
Most political discourse in the US is not violent, regardless of what you see in the news. Dissent happens plenty.
If you think so, no wonder you undervalue democracy. But democracy is much more than that. How you developed this naive concept is beyond me, but I will risk a guess: you have lived in a democratic country all your life.
In many cases, the good part is not having the power to elect people, it's the power to remove them from their positions when it's clear they're useless or corrupt. When someone is in an executive position for years, they often develop client politics nets. So even if the new boss is no better than the former, it's healthy to send them home while they aren't masterful thieves yet.
Even with all the safeguards, corruption happens. What do you think happens when there are no safeguards?
Some people thinks that living in a tiranny is just a question of shutting your mouth and avoid politics. But that's not it. Imagine you live in such a country and your boss, a politician or a policeman likes your wife or daughter or son. Then you are fired, or threatened or found guilty of anything convenient.
Living in a democracy won't save you always, but it gives you a chance.
Justification and examples of these claims here ( https://github.com/amark/gun/pull/434#issuecomment-336536807 ) on an old old old issue around a GPL code dependency we had to reject.
On the other hand, both claims in the linked comment are not reasonable. For the first point in the link, software can be created and shared for money with the GPL while not preventing libraries to collect the software and provide it free of charge. For the second point, the given link does not give any foundation to the claim the Richard Stallman is against cooperations.
Besides the fact he outright calls corporations evil?
If you think RMS is contradicting himself then you are missinterpreting something or your logic is not working right, pleaae post the free software or RMS rules/laws here, then show the logic process you are doing to show a contradiction
Your belief that money should not be exchanged does not mean he is a hypocrite, it means you disagree on something.
In the second I see no point at which Stallman claims that he is "not okay" with corporations.
To paraphrase, he states that they are psychopathic / amoral. The value judgement there is on you, not him.