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Comment by jpdus | Hacker News Reader

Wow - regardless of whether one agrees with RMS, alone the fact that this submission has been heavily flagged already (and will thus drop from the frontpage soon) tells you a lot about the power of Apple and their fans here.

HN urgently needs to address the flagging problems, this has been the case for many important but controversial topics recently and leads to a degraded quality of frontpage submissions in my view.

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I have not flagged this article, partly because I’m curious to see the debate here. But I’m sure those who have flagged it did so because this article is not objective, this is a very extremist position with a lot of cherry picked arguments that are obviously from a personal bias he has against Apple.

Many of the points he is specifically isolating for Apple are quite true of most of the big tech firms.

Yep, definitely true (but his points for other firms like google are directly linked above the article, this I would deny that there is a clear bias).

I have no side in this game (no affiliations to either Google or Apple) but this points about Apple are both true and relevant and thus imo no reason to flag. You can still just ignore the topic.

Flagging just kills the discussion and during recent times this often happened to legit but controversial topics (e.g. OpenAI for-profit announcement was heavily flagged and buried as well).

RMS is an extremist, openly and unashamedly. He doesn't try to hide it, he tries to argue that his extremist position is the morally correct and long-term best for society though.

> from a personal bias he has against Apple. Many of the points he is specifically isolating for Apple are quite true of most of the big tech firms.

He bashes all big techs for most of those points too. See the links at the top where he complains about Airbnb, Amazon, Amtrak, Ancestry, Apple, Discord, Ebooks, Eventbrite, Evernote, Facebook, Google, Intel, LinkedIn, Lyft, Meetup, Microsoft, Netflix, Patreon, Pay Toilets, Skype, Slack, Spotify, Twitter, Uber and Wendy's.

If there are missing companies there it is probably because he didn't have the time, not because he does't want to complain about something regarding that specific company ;)

So by this standard, is there a computer that I should use, or is all computing in 2019 unethical?

I see he's using a >10yr old Intel CPU, presumably to avoid the Management Engine, so presumably he thinks it's OK to pay money to these companies in certain circumstances?

> presumably he thinks it's OK to pay money to these companies in certain circumstances

When they're behaving in what he considers an ethical manner, or at least offering some ethically designed products, I think so. He's hoping to help catalyze a revolution of sorts regardless, and AFAIK is still waiting for the hypothetical ideal entity to arrive (which probably isn't going to happen any time soon).

I look at Stallman's lifestyle as a form of performance art at this point. It's more than this, for sure, but that's the best way to describe its immediate impact much of the time. However, we will likely be chewing on the thoughts he has brought forth for generations to come.

By RMS's standard, it seems that it is ok to reuse old systems (irrespective of which company built them originally) provided you can use them without binary blobs (irreplaceable built-in no-source firmware is fine though). Quoting his "how I do computing page" [1]:

> I use a Thinkpad T400s computer, which has a free initialization program (libreboot) and a free operating system (Trisquel GNU/Linux). It was not sold that way by Lenovo, however; small businesses buy them used, recondition them, and install the free software. This is one of the computers endorsed by the FSF.

Of course I'm pretty sure he would also approve buying and using any open hardware product [2] (provided it can run using only free software). There are some initiatives popping up in this space, such as:

- The siFive HiFive's [3] (Risc-V based), that can get you a fully open, slow system for $3k (1k for the base board + 2k for the PCIe-and-others expansion board).

- The Talos™ (Power9-based) systems [4], that give you 2019-grade performance at ~2-3x the usual price.

All in all, not a pleasant stance to make, but definitely doable for some folks.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_computing_hardware... [3] https://www.sifive.com/boards [4] https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

This is the thing that gets me, is that if a piece of hardware has firmware that you can't replace then it is OK to use. But if they add the functionality to replace the firmware, then it all of a sudden is not OK to use that hardware. Or, is it the case that if the firmware is pre-loaded, but replaceable, instead of needing to download the firmware to the board every time you boot, then that would still be acceptable. Not sure where he stands on that last point.

The thing is, "functionality to replace the firmware" is not an unambiguous positive. A firmware that can be replaced is also a firmware that can be bricked, made less useful by a future update, or even subverted entirely by an intruder. So, RMS would like whoever is placing that firmware in there to tell the user the information they need in order to replace it without bricking the device.

RMS thinks that free hardware is a different matter than free software, on the basis that software is easily copyable but hardware is not.

If a piece of hardware contains unmodifiable software, RMS considers it an "integral part of the hardware". It is no different to him than a cog or any other physical piece in that thing.

In contrast, if said software (firmware) is replaceable, it means that it can be copied at no cost, modified, used on other hardware, etc.. It is a fine line, but I can see some difference.

It's a point that causes a lot of confusion.

As soon as a piece of software is replaceable, the one who provides you with the software can use its distribution to make you promise to ignore the four software freedoms.

If a piece of software is not replaceable, that point is moot, since the one who provided you with the software has no sway over you regardless. They have no control over you or the device.

Better rephrase that to indicate that they have no more control over you or the device than the non-replaceable firmware allows, this is definitely not the same as "no control". Non-replaceable firmware can ping home, it can be used to monitor users, it can download arbitrary code and run it, it can listen for some trigger to start messing with your data or downright destroy said data, it can start randomly rebooting systems or non-randomly restart all affected systems at a specific time - which may cause brown- or blackouts depending on the power draw and -supply, etcetera.

https://fsf.org/ryf

He is a bitter and unhappy person. Most likely because he sees others making money in the way that they do vs. how he feels the world should operate.

The fact is though many of the modern day benefits we have as a society came as a result of the less than pure pursuit of money and power.

> Many of the points he is specifically isolating for Apple are quite true of most of the big tech firms.

I am an apple fan myself, but this is not true. He isn’t “singling out” apple. Apple is the subject of this article.

Perhaps there should be other posts about other tech companies, perhaps there already are, it doesn’t matter.

The discussion is the ethical behaviour of companies, and This post is specifically about Apple.

How can you see this has been heavily flagged?

I didn’t flag this, but I don’t see why this nonsense derserves special protection. If the flagging mechanism quickly moves trolls like this off the front page I think it’s working.

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