Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
gnu.org
gnu.org
I think as a society, we need to calm down a bit. We should not blacklist people merely based on opinions. We are one step away from thoughtcrime, and need to step back.
This was the one that disturbed me the most:
"Going to an RMS talk in the early 90s and meeting with him in person was among the worst of my experienced - I was fifteen, still obviously underage, and skipping gym class to hear him speak at a professional conference (that I'd snuck into). He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, "A GIRL!" causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to "EMACS Virgins." (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.) I was young and terrified of calling out someone that I'd previously idolized."
Did he commit a crime? No. Should we overlook it, and should he remain in a leadership position at a prestigious organization? I can't imagine so; what kind of message does that send?
Anecdote from: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Experiences
Indeed. A lot of people leaping to his defence have only a very surface-level understanding of his past record and think the accusations are something new or recent.
Nobody expects the people who change the world to be perfect, but it really doesn't do to defend people based purely on their reputation. It's unjust to let influential people off the hook just because they're influential.
Please note: I'm not pronouncing any opinion on whether his condemnation and dismissal are justified.
1. The triggering event was someone misquoting him and the media running with that misquote
2. The timing and manner in which MIT handled the situations suggests that they were hypocritically trying to deflect from their own complicity in the Epstein scandal, rather than addressing Stallman's behavior in good faith.
3. While Stallman certainly benefited from some protection for his behavior, the organizations which supported him also greatly benefited from him. The FSF saying that Stallman does not speak for them is particularly rich, considering they exist to promote his ideas.
I'm not saying I care for his behavior, or that all of it should get a pass. There's also a lot that I just don't agree with him about. However:
1. I don't like seeing the media twist people's words
2. I don't like seeing organizations throw people under the bus during moral panics
Also, I fear that it's becoming harder to be a weird nerd in tech[1].
[1]https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
Point 2 is quite strong, though I wonder if they might also have been looking for an excuse to good rid of him for some time? I'm not suggesting that's true at all, that's just musing based on some recent politics at the place I work.
The thing is, tech can embrace "weirdness" without also embracing sexual harassment, hostility and toxicity. Not every behavior that deviates from the "politically correct" norm needs to be worn as a badge of honor and celebrated as cultural quirkiness by tech people.
My point is that it wasn't his past behavior that lead to his forced resignation. If it had been (as is my understanding of what happened with Kalanick at Uber) I would not be so concerned.
Maybe not directly, but I think it certainly added weight to the scales that tipped against his favor.
At the very least, Stallman's present behavior is the product of his past behavior.
Furthermore, his leadership qualities depend only on his ability to lead a group towards a goal, which he was doing swell at.
Reasonable is subjective.
In practice, the "reasonable person" standard is achieved by asking a jury. In a jury, the members apply their life experiences to the case they're deciding and then persuade each other to reach a unanimous conclusion. That's an entirely subjective process, and if you repeat it with another jury you can get the polar opposite answer.
I think that almost all juries could agree on some subset of behaviors being labeled as “horrible.”
I almost feel sorry for him-- like maybe if he had someone who could just tell him: "Dude, Slow your roll!" he would not have gotten into this situation.
On the other hand, he's an adult, old and wise enough to know better, especially as a spokesperson and thought-leader. He did it to himself.
It sounds like his behavior was alienating people who would have been willing to work toward that shared goal, but were instead pushed away. So based on what I'm reading, he was a poor leader in this regard.
The few I've seen mentioned seemed a bit fragile and easily upset to be suitable for doing reasoned public advocacy.
She was older than the 15 year old you quoted, and I think she knew how to take care of herself. But obviously his behavior had caused her quite a bit of discomfort.
Case in point: RMS's incredibly uncomfortable St iGNUcius routine was already legendary.[0]
Does he intend for it to be awkward at best, and offensive at worst? I doubt it. Has people told him that it is not received as he intends? Definitely. Does he change his behavior to better reflect his purported views of inclusiveness? Nope.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you intend your actions to be interpreted, it only matters how they actually are interpreted. That failure to adapt to clear feedback, is problem.
[0] From 2009 https://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html
Long before the current iteration of our dominant ideology, people talked about the slut-versus-stud distinction[1] as one of the ways in which sexism manifests itself in our society. It seems to me that both the circumstance that we would find Stallman joking about female sexual inexperience intrinsically scandalous, and the circumstance that we find $twitterpersonality taking actual malicious shots at male sexual inexperience okay, would serve to reinforce this double standard, not combat it. Consider the possibility that at the very least, the people who are now actually interpreting Stallman's remark as offensive may at least not have been considered good feminists back in 2009, when mjg59's post and my citation were written. Should we fault Stallman for acting ineptly but ultimately in line with what was probably the "best" advice at the time?
This tacky joke wasn’t considered to be in line with the best advice at either time. While you may need to take my word for 1990s, the very fact that there are multiple contemporaneous articles about the inappropriateness of the 2009 skit, is evidence of that. I will concede that the tolerance for the tacky joke may have been a bit higher in 1990, or even 1999, than it was 2009. Also, to reiterate, I do not think that it is RMS’s intention to offend, but offend he none the less does.
I am confused by the line of thought about someone that may not have been considered a good feminist in 2009, but in 2019 may be considered a good one. People are always welcome to change and adapt their behaviors and opinions to be more inclusive. Furthermore, it is especially welcome to acknowledge past behavior that doesn’t rise to one’s current standards. That is the expected outcome of education, growth, and maturity. To steadfastly refuse to change behavior when it is brought to their attention that is inappropriate, and perhaps not in line with their professed ideas, seems suspect to me. Is there something I’m missing, or perhaps you accidentally got the years reversed, and I misinterpreted?
https://stallman.org/articles/texas.html
From the above, from someone at TI he met later who was amused by his joke:
"The plant incident, which I found rather humorous, provided a reason for people in the later camp to become offended. This was convenient as they had been looking for one. They were subsequently able to blow it to suitable proportions to gain the attention of management. "
Stallman will always offend people because he speaks about their unethical behaviour. Those offended will use whatever he does as an excuse.
It is disingenuous to consider all (mis)behavior equal in severity or kind.
Even if the mud sticks, the major problem is that Stallman was forced to resign after what appears to be (from public info) a moral panic. People acting on moral panics is really bad; good process is slow process.
There are real complaints about Stallman. There have been since the 90s. If it looked like he was resigning because of those then that would be a totally different kettle of fish.
Like I said, I had an immense amount of respect for him, I met him quite a few times, but I’m as lost as we all seem to be on how our communities should deal with folks like this. Either way, let’s at least try our best on HN to not accidentally inflame or accidentally mislead people.
It seems to be the case that Stallman did engage in inappropriate behavior - which perhaps should have been dealt with differently by CSAIL, MIT, the FSF board etc. The appropriate response may very well have been to ask for his resignation.
But those behaviors are not why he was asked to resign. Reference to his past behavior was a post-hoc rationalization. It seems the real reason he was fired was because he expressed a difference of opinion over the nature of Marvin Minksy's guilt as a result of his association with Epstein.
Well, it wasn't even about the opinion he expressed, rather he was fired because someone publicly misinterpreted his opinion, and that mistaken opinion was picked up by the media.
Well, it wasn't even about the misinterpreted opinion. He was fired because MIT is (I'm sure) facing some very serious scrutiny over it's entanglements with Epstein, and the very real concern that one of it's famed professors may have been a co-conspirator in a powerful and depraved criminal ring. The whole Stallman affair serves as a nice deflection from that scrutiny.
As it stands, it does not even look like Minsky ever participated in said criminal activity (as far as I can tell, the victim only said that she was compelled to offer herself to Minsky, and another witness claimed that Minksy turned her down). While there likely were many powerful people who were knowing participants in Epstein's activities, it seems that Epstein was also someone who liked to befriend very smart STEM folks, and not all of them may have been aware as to what exactly Epstein was involved in.
> It seems the real reason he was fired was because he expressed a difference of opinion over the nature of Marvin Minksy's guilt as a result of his association with Epstein.
No, thats not it. The inflammatory comment was the following:
>“It is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17".
This statement is as clear as mud, but it certainly seems to suggest that age shouldn't be considered as a factor in determining consent.
Age of consent in my (European) country is 16. Do you think we are all rapists here? And looking up the law 14 is permissible (with a few caveats), even if the other person is over 21.
In the United States it depends on the state. So Minsky would have done a horrible rape crime in the US Virgin Islands (age of consent 18), but in Massachusetts (age of consent 16) ... it would be all perfectly fine and A-okay? This appeal to law seems a bit relativistic for making a moral judgement?
Of course there has to be a cutoff. 16 seems reasonable to me. But I would not have sex with any teenager.
In which case the difference between $AGE and $AGE-1 is not a "minor detail".
Some legal systems attempt to account for this. E.g. England and Wales have two key ages. Having sex with someone under 16 might be (to use US terms) rape or statutory rape depending on whether the person under 16 consented. Both are illegal but rape more so. Having sex with someone under 13 is always rape since children under 13 are not considered able to consent. But in some cases 16 is not the cutoff if e.g. a teacher has sex with a pupil under 18 this is also always illegal. On the other hand if the defendant genuinely did not know the chief witness was under 16 and there was consent this is a defense.
I happen to be English so I’m familiar with the laws in England. I don’t see how any of that is relevant. The English law has cutoffs of exactly the same kind (it’s just that the relevant age threshold is usually 16 rather than 18). Obviously, no-one thinks that any such threshold can be completely non-arbitrary. It is just as "morally absurd" for sex between two 16 year olds to be legal and sex between a 16 year old and a 15 year old to be illegal. But unless - like RMS - you fail to recognize that age is a factor in consent, you have to make a cut somewhere. Apparently, from RMS's point of view, the most troubling feature of such laws is that they may prevent 70 year old Profs screwing 17 year old girls.
I provided an example with a government minister in Norway already... The minister in question remains in the government (the allegations are unproven but would easily be enough to destroy a British politician). Clearly two very similar western countries have very different moral stances on sex between consenting adults!
With regards most of the rest of your post we are largely in agreement.
Except regarding your misunderstanding of RMS's position. I invite you to read what he wrote yourself and revert if you think that is what he actually meant to say! Or to edit your post.
Terje Søviknes seems the closest match to your description. For an adult in a position of power to get a 16 year old drunk and then have sex with them is obviously wrong. It's certainly caused a scandal in Norway: https://exepose.com/2018/02/15/endless-sex-scandals-in-norwe...
You apparently regard the case as one involving "consenting adults", even though you describe the girl as drunk! It does seem that at bottom, the tiny minority of people who think they've found a morally defensible interpretation of RMS's comments are the people who are basically ok with adult men sexually exploiting teenage girls. Or at least, who think it's very important to sharply distinguish these people from "real" rapists.
I assume that the politician you are referring to remains in power because the allegations are (you say) unproven.
I'm not prepared to discus that further with you until you can justify or retract your libelous interpretation.
As for the government minister that is not the one in question. I found the one involving Trine Skei Grande far more comparable https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/a2Wp1M/han-var-17-skei.... Even so you will note that the minister you mention can continue to serve as an MP.
It could (and should) be called differently. If you call a consensual sex with 17 years old "rape" you're doing disservice to real rape victims.
While I do disagree with Stallman's statement here, I think it's important to point out that your insinuation is not justified.
He did not say that he thought pedophilia was good, only that he was skeptical of the claims that it was bad because he'd only ever been presented with examples of involuntary pedophilia. In the intervening years since this comment was made and the present, his mind has been changed on the subject.
> because he'd only ever been presented with examples of involuntary pedophilia
This framing only underlines the point: if you think that children can "voluntarily" have sex with adults, then clearly you don't think age is relevant to consent! It's overwhelmingly obvious what RMS thinks here. He thinks that it's ok for old men to have sex with "willing" teenagers. I.e., he rejects the entire basis of an age of consent.
>In the intervening years since this comment was made and the present, his mind has been changed on the subject.
Can you provide a reference to his supposed retraction of this statement dated before September 2019? As far as I can see, he only retracted this statement - which remained on his website for many years - after this whole shit storm started. And without apology or any hint of shame. You can see Stallman saying similar things about the age of consent as late as 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20180924231708/https://www.stall...
You claim he means "there should be no age of consent"
Others are arguing he means "the difference between those particular ages is minor, and both could be considered reasonable ages of consent".
We could debate endlessly on what Stallman feels in general about the age of consent, but with regards to that particular comment I cannot see how your interpretation is justified given the particular words he chose for that specific comment. If he had wanted to argue that there is no need for an age of consent, then I'm sure he would have chosen words that meant that.
> Can you provide a reference to his supposed retraction of this statement dated before September 2019?
No, but Stallman doesn't seem to be the kind of person who would be dishonest in that manner.
> You can see Stallman saying similar things about the age of consent as late as 2018
That's a stretch. He does not mention age of consent (although he does not seem to be bothered by the fact that the young woman was 16). He does however draw a distinction between adolescence (late adolescence in particular) and childhood, which would seem to be relevant.
That does not make it "morally absurd" to set 18 as the legal age of consent, so I don't think that's a plausible reading of what RMS said. He could only find the idea morally absurd if he found the idea of the age of consent morally absurd - which is consistent with everything he's ever said that touches on the issue. If he was merely quibbling about the age, he'd say "I think the age of consent should be a bit lower."
>No, but Stallman doesn't seem to be the kind of person who would be dishonest in that manner.
It's not clear what you are referring to here. I'm not much impressed by someone later saying that they changed their mind a long time ago (if you have a reference to RMS saying that - I don't). Grossly wrong public statements should be publicly retracted. If they're not retracted, then they're fair game for criticism.
>although he does not seem to be bothered by the fact that the young woman was 16)
He says "she may have had — I expect, did have — entirely willing sex with him, and they would still call it 'assault'". That is, he thinks the fact that the girl was a teenager (and he didn't know she was 16 specifically in the earlier version of the comment) is no barrier to her having "willing" sex with an older man. It's painfully obvious what RMS thinks. He thinks that age should not be a factor in deciding whether or not someone was raped or sexually assaulted, since people of any age (or at least, teens up) can "willingly" have sex with much older adults.
Looking again at what he said, I think his main point was about whether the particular hypothetical should be dubbed "rape". Now, you may say "someone under the legal age of consent cannot give said consent, so ergo the act is rape". Which is true, but even when the law has to draw a bright line regarding the age of consent, the law still does distinguish between "statutory rape" and "forcible rape". Both are wrong, but the latter is generally considered moreso. Furthermore, statutory rape tends to have more exceptions when the victim is closer to the age of consent.
If we are going to use the term "rape" in an unqualified manner, then the usual connotation is "forcible rape". I think it is fair to object to the unqualified use of the term where the victim was appeared to be a willing individual above the age of consent.
It's a bit like calling Martin Luther King Jr. a "criminal". Yes, he was put in jail, and technically he did violate local law, but the activity he was engaged in (non-violent protest of unjust laws) hardly fits the expected model of what is typically implied by the word "criminal".[1]
Now I bring this up not in order to compare the character of either Minsky or Stallman with MLK, but merely draw attention to a fallacy of reasoning known as the non-central fallacy[2].
An edge case in the manner of statutory rape (where the victim seemed to be willing and of age, and was in fact close to the age of consent) is still likely illegal and wrong, but we should still take care to note how such a case differs from a more central example of forcible rape.
> It's not clear what you are referring to here. I'm not much impressed by someone later saying that they changed their mind a long time ago (if you have a reference to RMS saying that - I don't). Grossly wrong public statements should be publicly retracted. If they're not retracted, then they're fair game for criticism.
My understanding is that he did make a public retraction of sorts this month. It's still an open question as to when he thinks the age of consent is, but I do believe he thinks there at least is one. Despite the timing of his retraction, I do think he was sincere.
[1] You've mentioned elsewhere that you are English, so I don't know how salient the example is to you. I hope it makes sense. [2]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...
Statutory rape may in some cases not be a serious crime (e.g. an 18 hear old having sex with a 17 year old), but we are talking here, hypothetically, about a 70 year old man having sex with a 17 year old sex slave. And yeah, when you are a 70 year old man being offered sex for free by an attractive teenage girl who for some reason lives on your weirdo chum's private island, I do think some degree of due dillegence is required.
>My understanding is that he did make a public retraction of sorts this month
I know - I mentioned that. I asked if there was any evidence that he'd changed his views prior to September 2019. There appears not to be. And he has never apologised or shown any hint of shame.
>Lesswrong
No idea why you think this interminable blog post is relevant. But of course it's no surprise that you're linking to Lesswrong, which has a history of burying serious discussion of rape and sexual assault in endless reams of pseudorationalist bafflegab.
Just because it's called statutory rape in US law doesn't mean it's a serious crime in all cases and shouldn't be called in a way to suggest that. That's the point Stallman makes and imo it's the obvious one.
But in any case, the poster that Stallman was responding to was merely pointing out that what Minsky allegedly did probably would constitute rape in the relevant jurisdiction.
If Stallman, for whatever weird reason, has some kind of a semantic program for reforming terminology relating to rape and sexual assault, then he chose the worst possible time, manner and place to put it forward. Especially given that he is previously on record as believing that sex between adults and much younger children can be 'consensual'. He's a best a goof on these topics, and at worst a serial creep and harasser. He has only himself to blame.
Fork. See the glimpse project. If it's more inclusive, it will naturally accumulate all alienated contributors.
Who are you exactly to think you can decide what is - without doubt - "entirely inappropriate behaviour"?
are you in charge of the thought police?
(Edit; to be clear, since this was a point of confusion, I do not believe anyone I am responding to thinks women are meat! This is a rhetorical tactic to use as an example.)
Talking about dicks is inappropriate, but if you are an urologist speaking with other urolgy students, it makes perfect sense.
Stallman was writing to other students about the correct representation of the Minsky situation, because they were using Minsky's name in an inappropriate way to protest against MIT-Epstein case. (Unless you think that accusing a dead person without proof is alright)
His entire life has been devoted to finding the precise combinations of words to express what he wanted to say, in the most exact possible manner.
Can you blame him for doing what he did best, among his peers?
I blame the weapon builder who felt triggered and accused him of something he did not do.
> you can think about how women are just pieces of meat all you like
Pathetic...
Nobody ever said that.
You're embarrassing yourself.
As for the rest of it- well, the post questioning thoughtcrime wasn’t about the individual email defense of a friend at all, but about the decades of complaints! So, again, totally out of context there. Can you re-respond with relevant conjecture?
It was after we found an endangered species in an active mine site. It sucked. We'd built an open database easily accessible online, we used open street maps to display the data and had built a bunch of custom layers, we were also working with another group that wanted to add the data to their open database. In the end though none of that happened and the work that was put into making it was wasted and everything was given to the government and locked away.
Why the hell is my government hiding this data?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scien...
was happening.
Same should be true for publicly funded code: should be open source and accessible by default and anything else should require special reasoning.
In that position, I would be tempted to take a stand and release the data as originally planned, while blowing the lid off the whole corruption. Write in big letters on the website "THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE THIS". If you're worried about your career... why? What is the point of your career as a scientist if you won't take a stand like that?
Not GP, but 'earning a living' can be quite a compelling reason.
To clarify, I'm not saying it makes you a bad person if you choose to eat. Just not a scientist. There's a reason we give professors tenure.
In Italy you can't be fired for your opinions.
Never!
I agree with that. No government should ever give itself legal power to withhold scientific information from the public that funded it. In practice that's making life hard for journalists and other scientists and in principle it's a sign of authoritarian tendencies.
Stallman, at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html , argues that free software developers should "charge as much as they wish or can, ... if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money."
If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money for it, which is not what most chemists and biologists think of in discussion of data openness.
FWIW, the discussion in science started independently of free software. Here's an example from structural biology. Previous to the 1980s, it was common for crystallographers to withhold structure data from a publication, and perhaps only publish an image showing the C-alpha backbone. This was because they wanted to be able to publish additional papers from the same data set, without competition. By 1987[1], there was a push to require coordinate submission into the PDB as requirement for publication. Most journals adopted this new policy in 1989, and funding agencies started to do so as well[2].
While the GNU project started earlier (1983), there is no connection between free software and the open data availability requirements for publication and funding in structural biology.
[1] https://search.proquest.com/openview/0a93cbb72da63b2899793bf...
[2] https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5004/index.h...
Open Source also isn't about making data openly available. Both are only applicable to those who acquire software. It just happens to be that most free and open source developers also make their software available at no cost.
You must be allowed to redistribute the software, and you must be allowed to get, modify, and redistribute the code. Binaries and code are data.
Maybe what you mean is that the biologists' and x-ray crystallographers' journals developed their push for data access independently of the free software movement, but it's a stretch to say that access to the data that a programmer creates and access to the data that a biologist creates have nothing in common.
Open science people generally want people who publish papers to be required to publish the data. This might be in a public repository, or with the journal, and if there is a fee, that fee should effectively only cover cost.
Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want. Hence, these are different concepts.
What I mean is that the statement in the original comment, "Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth" is wrong. Chemists and biologists "started talking about" this decades ago. The evidence I showed is that it was no later than 1987. It's almost certainly older - I just happened to read about this example.
I'm not saying they have nothing in common. I'm reacting to the hyperbole in the idea that the free software movement was instrumental to "the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done".
Sure, there are distinctive features for each domain, but in broad strokes, I don't see the above description as very different from the one following:
When you purchase access to an open-data paper, the author is required to supply you also with the raw data, and you must be allowed to redistribute this (under terms and conditions.)
But there's nothing to force me to provide you with the software until you've given me money. Even if I used someone else's GPL'ed software in my software, I can simply not distribute it until someone gives me $100,000.
"When you purchase access to an open-data paper"
Some provisos first. Some papers are gratis, and don't require being purchased. (Eg, author-pays papers.) Also, I think you are defining "open-data paper" that way, making your argument a bit tautological.
Those aside, I'm pointing out that the "open-data paper" movement started independently and likely co-temporally, if not earlier than, the free software movement.
Of course, you haven't infringed on anyone's freedom yet, there are no users. I guess the thing is if you massively overcharge without providing any corresponding service of value the first person that purchases it has the option to throw the source code up on the internet and it can be forked.
I guess you also have to find a buyer that is willing to pay you the large sum while also knowing they can't charge others for it without also handing over the source code, so it's doubtful anyone would do so.
There are other options though, if a single person or entity owns the copyright for the entire code base, with no outside contributors, they can dual license it. GPL for the public and then commercial proprietary license for businesses. That way the business can build on it if they wish without redistributing the source.
While, to go back to my first comment:
"If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money for it, which is not what most chemists and biologists think of in discussion of data openness."
Yes, he was referring to the service of duplicating and mailing tapes pre-Internet. You seem to have mistaken that for a key philosophical issue of some kind, when it's secondary.
> reacting to the hyperbole
I worked for national labs back in the day. Every dept. wrote their own terminal applications, plotting programs, etc. which consumed serious grant budgets. Free and open source software has been a huge boon to science. The most important? GCC and family. Second is probably Linux, which is GPL. See a pattern yet?
It really sounds like you need a history lesson on the FSF, because you're way off base.
Consider #1: I think of an improvement to gcc. I get a copy of the gcc source, modify it, and prove to my satisfaction that it works.
I stop at that point, intellectually satiated, tell a few friends, and don't release any software (source or binary).
The principles of free software say that I am not forced to release any changes. I am not even obligated to send improvements upstream.
Am I wrong about this?
Consider #2: The same as above, but I know that Yoyodyne could save $1 million per year with my improvements. I don't tell them. The free software principles say that I have no obligation to tell them.
Am I wrong about this?
Consider #3: The same as above, but I go to Yoyodyne and say that I'll sell my gcc modification to them - under the GPL - for $250,000. They of course can then redistribute those changes, including back to mainline.
Is that contrary to any free software principle? I don't think so, according to my years of reading the history of the FSF and the free software movement.
But, suppose you are correct, and Stallman's essay only applies to "the service of duplicating and mailing tapes pre-Internet". If so, there's a simple workaround:
Consider #4: I have the idea, implement it, and distribute it to a single organization - a tape duplicating service - and it's that organization which sells the software to Yoyodyne, for $300,000, of which $250,000 comes back to me. (My brother just happens to run the tape service.)
Is that against the principles of free software, and if so, how?
I don't think Stallman's "selling free software" essay was meant to be so easy to work around.
Just because free software is generally distributed at no price or "reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source" (quoting GPLv3), doesn't make it the same as saying that there's an free software principle which obligates that.
While the open data movement in science does have the principle that the data should be free, or should only cover the "reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of" data.
How am I off base?
That being said, the Free Software movement was obviosly seminal in all of the open data talk, and for that matter open patent talk; it's not the same thing, but a strong and heavily influential idea in one context inspires analogues in other contexts. I think your overall point is wrong, although I think your supporting point is completely correct.
My argument is that that analogy doesn't follow from free software principles.
If it did, then it would follow that if you publish the paper, you're obligated to release your source.
And we don't see that coming out of the free software movement. We do see that coming out of the open data/open science movement.
If you publish your software, you are required to release everything needed to develop it further, yes.
However, if you publish your paper, you are not required, under the free software principles.
If I am wrong, show me where the FSF/GNU say that.
I believe your argument is that there's a clear parallel to publishing a paper and publishing the software.
However, there's also a clear parallel to, say, publishing an internet service based on free software, and publishing the software. This lead to the AGPL.
The GPL does not have that requirement, which means it isn't a free software principle. It could have - I think I've heard Eben Moglen say it was discussed early on. But if so, then having a telnet server, or ftp server, or anything reacting to the network, would require the ability to download the source.
> free software people have been working out these "reproducibility" issues in practice for decades before the biologists even got on the bus.
While biologists were working out other "reproducibility" issues long before there were buses.
Free software requires that if you publish (or sell) binaries you MUST release the source as well, with full rights to modify and redistribute.
You are not required to publish, just as you are not required to release software.
Yes, once. After this your first customer is now free to undercut you and bring the price as close to zero as they like, as is their first customer, etc.
The analogy is: you can charge Nature as much as you want for the rights to publish your paper, but when you do, you have to give them the raw data, in replication-ready form, which they will then publish to anyone they sell the journal to. And Nature's customer is in turn allowed to republish and if they do is required to again make the source data available.
I think you're reading more than is warranted into rms selling some emacs tapes by mail order back in the day.
While Stallman says you can charge as much as you can, his terms say that once someone buys it they can immediately undercut you, and he admits that limits the amount you could charge sustainably.
The data repository I mentioned is the PDB. Quoting http://www.rcsb.org/pages/policies :
> Data files contained in the PDB archive (ftp://ftp.wwpdb.org) are free of all copyright restrictions and made fully and freely available for both non-commercial and commercial use. Users of the data should attribute the original authors of that structural data.
That means it's available for redistribution.
BTW, the general trend is to use "source available" instead of "open source" when the source is available for viewing and perhaps local modification, but not for redistribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
The publication, yes. The structure, no. You can go download the structure of any and every known and published protein from any organism in the world for free with no copyright restrictions from the PDB. And that structure will be heavily scrutinized and reviewed before it's accessible.
That said, working in structural biology, it's incredible how quickly that field attached to open source, and in particular, free software. The big players in the field (coot, Relion, PEET and IMID) are all GPL. Additionally, software like PyMOL, Chimera, Phenix etc are available for free, sometimes with source. Those are basically all the software in the structural biologist toolset, with HKL2000 perhaps being the only paid software on anyone's workstation.
I suspect there's probably multiple reasons for this phenomenon. There's not many structural biologist, and of the few that there are, many are in academia and have no money to spend on software. Additionally, the field moves so rapidly that most software is actually piecemealed toolkits from tons of labs. Also, anything algorithmic requires substantial analysis if you want to publish data acquired with it, meaning it needs to be open. Finally, 99% of structural biology is done on Linux, so there's simply a culture aspect as well.
I think you misunderstand the distinction between open source and free software. Open source software also needs to be available for redistribution. The main practical difference is Free Software also requires that if you make any changes to the software, those changes must _also_ be released under the same licensing, whereas open source may or may not have such provisions.
See for instance this GNU page where permissive licenses like the MIT license are also described as "free software licenses":
"The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licences that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licences they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free."
In particular, he notes the example of DRM software. DRM software can be distributed under an open-source licence, but by design and in practice it serves to restrict the freedoms of its users, not to enhance them.
That's incorrect: open source software is necessarily available for redistribution. What you are referring to (source viewable but not necessarily available for redistribution/modification) is commonly referred as "source available" software [0].
Now, the distinction between open source and free software is more a social/political one rather than a practical one. Free software encompasses an entire philosophy while open source is simply concerned with software licensing.
The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. At the very least we would be having conversations about software in terms of non-free and free versus proprietary and open source.
If he had been a lot more pragmatic, he probably could have put the whole free software thing on hold for 20 years, and been one of the early microcomputer billionaires either alongside Jobs and Gates, or even instead of one (or both!) of them.
Then go back to free software--except now it would be backed by the several tens of billions of dollars of the Stallman Foundation, which would generate enough annual investment income forever to easily afford to award tens of thousands of $100k grants for free software development each year.
A decade of that, and there would be GPL replacements for pretty much everything.
In the intervening years somebody else would have done substantially what RMS did: it's not like he's the only hacker of his era who believes software should be free.
There's no guarantee he would have been successful in business and, even if he was, he would have undermined his moral authority on free software. People don't in general have serious doubts about RMS's motivations even if they don't agree with him - he's a true believer - but they can be much more cynical about Google or Facebook and their open source efforts.
There's no reason to believe this.
I think you're mistaken about the chances of becoming that wealthy. If anything, I'd guess it's more likely now than decades ago. Planning what to do after becoming a billionaire is akin to spending your lottery jackpot before winning it.
EDIT: Let me give a bit more of a nuanced position, because reading my post back, it looks like I'm saying that Stallman never did anything inappropriate before this.
Of course, I recognize that Stallman is fucking weird. I'm not saying that parrot-fucking, foot-fungus-eating St. IGNUcius never did anything inappropriate before; we'd be here for a long time if we were to make a list of all the times Stallman failed to read the mood.
However, I strongly believe that Stallman is not a creep. He holds some odd views and is pretty autistic, and so he occasionally makes inappropriate advances. Add to that that Stallman has been a very prolific person for decades and you won't relaly have trouble coming up with a list of anecdotes that, when framed a certain way, make him look bad.
I've read quite a few of these anecdotes by now. Some of them look fairly innocent to me. Some of them are clear social blunders. None of them look seriously harmful or in bad faith to me. Even taking all of them together, believing that all of them are remembered 100% correctly and played out as portrayed without any additional context, I don't think the appropirate reaction is to remove Stallman from his position(s).
What ticks me off so much about all this is the way the media deals with it. Stallman is portrayed as some kind of sexist, some kind of patriarch keeping women out of tech. It's ridiculous; Stallman is quite possibly the most inclusionary person I can think of. Stallman has had an immense, direct contribution to making tech more open for everyone.
I can understand the criticism of Stallman. I don't even think he necessarily makes for a good figurehead for Free Software; he has poor social skills, unhelpfully rigid and strong positions, and I feel like he often conflates free software issues with other social issues he cares about. He makes for a better philosopher than a political leader.
In this case, he's being thrown under the bus to score social points. People in tech are very itchy to do whatever they can to seem more inclusive, and condemning Epstein and his ilk is a noble goal (that also makes you look good). Stallman's statements that sparked this controversy were naive and he failed to read the mood, but they were not unacceptable things to believe or say. He did not deserve to have his words twisted, get kicked out of his own organisation based on the strawman, and then have people say that he was always bad, anyways.
The right thing to do of course is to speek truth to power openly and before everybody else does it, but this could come with serious consequences for the person speaking up. This is why they’d only do it once they are 100% sure they didn’t misread the situation, the thing that happened was actually big enough and they are willing to carry the consequences this could have for free software.
In other words: people in positions like Stallman can get away with much more than any regular guy, which means they should be extra considerate of their role and their environment if they care about the effects their own power and fame has on it. If it everybody steps up now, it means there was clearly a disconnect between his self image and what his environment thought about him.
Oh, certainly. And I'd say the reason for that is
> because of the importance of his figure people were more willing to keep their mouths shut and look the other way
I don't necessarily blame people for not spekaing out if they were troubled by his behaviour, but this is really unfair towards Stallman. Decades worth of small issues that Stallman was mostly unaware of are being condensed into one big issue. That's why I think the situation is crooked; in my view, Stallman never did anything particularly bad, nor did he harbor any ill will, yet he's facing the consequences of a major scandal.
Also, I don't think that Stallman should be held to the standards of a "medieval monarch". I think you're overstating just how powerful Stallman is (was?); I don't think he was actually in charge of many impactful decisions.
Your points are good but perhaps more applicable to someone like Linus Torvalds, who is fully aware of his controversial behaviour and does actually hold a position of substantial power.
As a reminder, the "small issues" you mention include accusations, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
I don't mean to defend him from any kind it accusation, but all of this is meaningless without full context and hearing the story from both sides.
I've seen enough narrative flipping over the years that this is the one I find least plausible, and requires more information.
More importantly, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, even if the topic is inflammatory and divisive.
I guess things aren't organised yet but I and others I have spoken to IRL have already stopped interacting with certain projects.
I was wondering if some of the community's thought leaders might jump ship - but I guess they will be purged anyway so that should help!
EDIT: Would any downvoters care to comment on why they think this won't happen? Do they think we will continue to participate against our will...
As usual, not trying to be prejudicial here, it happened in the U.S. where different 501(c)(3) formed to attract donation capital, but that actually have been an enemy of large part of the FSF community.
There can't be one strong FSF they want many small feuds, it's like greenwashing, open washing is happening, which, BTW, "misses the point of free software".
Look at what happened to Eben Moglen, a person that nobody can describe as harsh, impolite, unempathetic, creepy or whatever BS they are throwing now at RMS.
And still in 2017 he was declared "no longer a friend of the free software community" by mjg59.
Why?
Because Moglen expressed his lawyer opinion in a way that Garret did not like.
Garret works at Google, Moglen still offers pro bono legal representation at the Software Freedom Law Center, which he founded.
It's not hard to take parts for me.
He has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Do you think that reprieving someone for threatening a colleague to kill yourself if they don't give in to your romantic/sexual advances is "throwing BS"? It's an honest question.
From someone who worked at MIT.
Note in particular that the commentator does not say they saw this or even that someone who saw it told them. You're just hearing a rumour this person heard at MIT.
any article about what happened?
If that's true, then Stallman has completely failed as a leader. There are 7 billion people in the world; if after 40 years there is nobody of similar caliber at the FSF, it is because he has either not attracted them, not trained them, or has driven them away. (Perhaps by asking them on a date or handing them a card that said "tender embraces" the very first time he met them.)
I sincerely hope that there will be people in the FSF that can make it more robust, and set it up for long-term success.
He's been under constant attack for the past 40 years.
Nobody wants to be friend with the smart friend who's also unpopular.
And that's what he failed, he trusted people would be decent.
They are not.
There are: https://www.fsfla.org/%7Elxoliva/
But apart from being next in line, he's also next in line: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1174371580547223553
I'm not young anymore, in my 40s, but I have hope that in the next 40 years some of them will stop being a dick and do actual work.
It's never too late to change.
It ain't gonna happen. This is the struggle of every single generation.
I say this as someone that uses gender neutral pronouns etc.
I'm more than ready to agree with you if you can.
I would also like to know, if you don't mind, what you consider to be good reason to "refuse to comply" with addressing someone in a way they prefer to be addressed, by using a three-letter word instead of another three-letter word.
https://archive.is/https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/11...
I often see this phrase and it looks like a fallacy to me. Does anyone question its validity? Social consequences are a severe thing, in practice they mean losing a job or position, boycotting, etc. In ancient Greece to expel a person was a very strong punishment. Nowadays the associated hardbacks are milder perhaps, but still are pretty severe.
If speech is so potent a weapon that to protect against it we have to use extreme social defenses like expulsion, why not to use the same weapon against the perpetrators? Why not to speak in return? Stallman says something, you say something. Take that, Richard Stallman!
I would say that the only appropriate social consequence of free speech could be other free speech.
Also, a distinct characteristic of a true community is that it's inclusive. It can expel its members, but this has to be a very rare event, only when that person's action are actually destroying the community. "Creepy and inappropriate behavior" that went along for many years is hardly that. It's a mere personality quirk. [Addition] And I'd say that this expulsion endangers the community much more than whatever Stallman was inappropriately doing all these years.
Because the power of the speech in question depends upon the power of the speaker. This isn't rocket science. If I as a random human person say something creepy to you on the street you can just go away. If Stallman does it and you are working under him you have to weigh a whole lot of things (academic standing, his prestige, the possibility that a whole lot of people will defend him just because of who he is and accuse you of accusing him of a "thoughtcrime") in your response. It's an assymetrical situation.
I can't believe people are so short sighted about free speech. The people who are happy with control of speech will regret advocating for it as soon as it spreads outside of the domains where their allies presently have power.
Sure, I guess. In this case, as far as I can see, Stallman's coworkers' speech about his terrible behavior led to him resigning. Nothing wrong with that.
> You're basically saying that Stallman’s speech must have consequences otherwise the little guy might face consequences by criticising him.
I'm nowhere close to saying that. The "little guy" is already facing the consequences I delineated, as this thread shows. Speeches have consequences, both Stallman's and anyone's.
> But the pro free speech crowd are advocating for a world where you and stallman criticise each other harshly, but both get to keep your jobs, it being a strong norm that whoever calls for the other to lose their job over speech automatically loses the argument.
The thing is, this presupposes that each other's speech or criticism is equivalent, which it isn't. A creepy remark is not equivalent to a criticism of that remark - I really didn't think I'd have to spell this out. If someone is being creepy towards coworkers and subordinates and this behavior continues for years, then yes, this should have consequences - up to and including the person in question losing their job, depending on the severity. Calling for someone to be fired shouldn't lose someone their "argument" if the person should be fired.
There's some equivocation here that this is some sort of intellectual academic dispute that led to him resigning. It isn't. It's reports of his creepy behavior, not two people "criticising" each other.
I also think those deciding they didn't want anything to do with him are a tiny minority if you exclude those who have never met him (and even then, probably still a small minority).
I think we're already there. I'm an astronomer, and we (and many others) are already building platforms with software like Jupyter, dask, holoviews, etc.
While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming). For example, nVidia supporting dask, or Bloomberg supporting Jupyter.
It's the idea that was important, and less so the person IMHO. RMS had a lot of ideas, some good, and some bad. But like evolution, people take the good and run with them, and leave the bad. And we rarely remember who started the whole thing, since having the idea is generally such a small part of actually making it a reality.
"We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world."
- V for Vendetta
I had to re-read this to be sure it's not sarcasm. RMS has some of the largest footprints in software among the living people. How can one hold an opinion about his contribution and not be aware of that?
If people believe that Free Software could never have existed without Richard Stallman, and cannot continue without him, that calls into question whether it has any lasting societal or cultural value of its own. Other software licensing paradigms don't have this problem, real or percieved. No one believes that open source will die if ESR gets hit by a bus, after all.
You don't even have to jump back 30 years to see what that world looked like, it still exists today, inside every large corporation that hates free software, except when they can steal it and not give anything back. That nasty, back-stabbing world is what it all would have looked like without the constant efforts of the FSF to continue to advocate sharing and cooperation.
It might have come about anyway, but Stallman accelerated it by at minimum decades. It should also be noted that the timing of the FSF's and GNU's founding was important, if they had tried even five years later when all computers were ensconced behind protective legal walls, they might not have gotten anywhere at all with the effort.
While true, there's a difference between forgetting a person, and making that person forgotten. The latter seem to be happening now.
> While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming).
So a garden finally bloomed (though RMS would probably think some of these companies are weeds). It would however be unfair to say that the people that built and maintained this garden (which is an artificial hydroponic garden in the middle of a volcano) for decades weren't "influencial". The Free Software movement benefited from having someone with clear and unyielding vision. Actually, scratch that. The Free Software movement benefited from RMS the way you benefited from having a biological mother - it wouldn't be born otherwise.
That some companies will sponsor Open Source wasn't that unexpected. That some of the players that now do would (Microsoft?!), that was more surprising.
Him, being how he is, is what made on of the big part of the success of Free Software.
I'd like to take sometime however to reiterate that freedom applies to all views. The ability of a user to use software regardless of their personal beliefs or background, what they want to use it for, or against. The choice of usage is completely and wholly up to the user, they may modify it to their heart's content, and the community can use those modifications freely for their purposes. Restricting viewpoints you don't align with is completely antithetical to the purpose of having free-as-in-speech software, and it is truly a shame, regardless of how you interpret the situation, that the poster-boy for these ideals has fallen from his position due to alternate views.
Do you have an original source, or are you just parroting what you heard in the media?
Since we're talking about the recent email thread, then you'd know RMS didn't start that conversation, so you can't blame him for injecting the discussion anywhere.
> If RMS stuck to his area of expertise we would not be having this conversation.
Show me where he didn't?
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
https://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_2...
There are 3 links. Its pretty clear to me that he fears being a parent and has no concept of child development.
It is well known that changes in a growing adolescent brain can affect decision making. https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam... https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00053
And yet, RMS would like to carve out some kind of exception for sex with kids when the kid chooses sex 'voluntarily'. Its disgusting and goes against what we know from science about kids and decision making.
RMS is a would-be pedo and should be treated as such.
I'm not endorsing or defending his views on any subject, but there appear to be a lot of false claims around the items directly related to his resignation.
I dispute this is rational. Creating echo chambers polarises and intensifies opposing viewpoints. The rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion with people with whom you disagree. This would diffuse extreme opinions and allow people time to consider whether or not their position is justified. Rather than reacting in a knee-jerk defensive manner that serves to protect identity by strengthening belief, they are then given space to examine beliefs in order to strengthen identity.
I don't really see how the rest of your post argues against that, or what your argument for "the rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion(...)" is. Maybe we are using different definitions of "rational" and/or different assumptions about people's goals, in which case it would help if you could state yours.
However, I would also argue that choosing a goal like 'bring about the complete cessation of a particular belief' would be irrational. Although I accept that once I make that claim the conversation is directed towards very shaky territory. The question of how to choose rational goals is probably impossible to answer definitively.
But I will say that when I claimed that the rational thing to do would be to engage with a disliked belief in a meaningful and polite manner, my assumption was that a rational agent would choose to behave in a way that facilitates growth for both the agent and those with which they engage. Of course, once again, this choice of goal is by no means self-evidently rational.
One issue I take with what you said, though, is the notion of a "rational goal". I don't see how this would be defined in my understanding of the terms; goals are axiomatic, (ir)rationality is a property of candidate actions in pursuit of a particular goal. I still get the impression that we probably use different definitions, and yours is much closer to something like "rational"="conducive to intellectual growth". (So in my world a better paperclip maximiser would be more rational, and in yours a better paperclip maximiser would be less rational...?)
And so I would contend that the goal 'cause the cessation of a particular belief' is not axiomatic at all, but an instance of a goal that serves something more fundamentally axiomatic. Like 'make the world more comfortable'. Or 'make the world conform to my expectations'. Or something like that.
From this model we could absolutely talk about choosing goals in a rational manner that aids certain axioms. The question then would be: could the axioms themselves be chosen in a rational manner? Probably not but then it doesn't seem impossible to argue that some sets of axioms are better than others. It would be nice, say, if the axioms guiding the behaviour of a rational agent, didn't contradict each other.
This reminds me of The Racist Tree: https://lardcave.net/text/the_racist_tree.html
> By Alexander Blechman
> Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree.
> "Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl.
> "I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a n-[censored].
> "I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name.
> It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree.
> The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field.
> "Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly.
> "Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child.
> The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children.
> And so, social progress was made.
> the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.
Kind of! That's been the measure of progress as a society; several beliefs that were once fringe have become almost mandatory in polite company.
But we're still not talking about the linked article which is about a distinction between freedom and openness.
Well, to quote our host: No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
I don't think people talking about Bigfoot are usually subject to ostracization, unless they're really overbearing about it (keep changing the subject back to Bigfoot, start insulting or yelling at those who disagree, etc.). And I think not-Bigfoot is basically in the victory condition. I think the victory condition is "universally accepted" and it doesn't necessarily imply "negation cannot be expressed in polite company".
But you might be right that "its negation can not be expressed in polite company" is one of the steps along the way for some beliefs. I hope that's not true (because it might justify what I consider abhorrent behavior), but it might be.
That said, I recall seeing a study that said that extreme protest tactics were counterproductive in advancing an ideology. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314949726_Extreme_P... is probably the one I'm thinking of. I hope the principle extends, or can be extended, to "nasty behavior to suppress ideological opponents is counterproductive". It seems at least possible. Lots of argumentation consists of saying that one's opponents are nasty, which at least is evidence that many people have the potential to react strongly to (perceived) nasty behavior...
Maybe a better rephrasing of the victory condition is something like "nobody who will ever be in a position to make a significant decision that depends on this belief can get away with disagreeing with it". By that definition, non-Bigfoot wins because approximately nobody except maybe for people controlling federal animal conservation budgets will ever make any significant decisions based on non-Bigfoot, and those probably are judged by scientists; on the other hand, the pro and contra on Stallman's cancellation materially influences decisions all of us will make every time we decide which conferences to sign up for, universities to accept jobs at or Twitter accounts to bolster the influencer status of.
Downvoting itself is not perceived as nasty behaviour. Seeing somebody else be nasty in defense of a belief X harms belief X; not seeing anyone ever defend or even bring up belief not-X because anyone who would do so is afraid of becoming a target of nasty behaviour, on the other hand, surely would help belief X.
[1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
What about the belief that any belief should be expressable in polite company, including the negatiom of this belief?
That's the victory condition for a mind virus. I hope that my beliefs (like the belief in free speech) aren't mind viruses and don't have that as a victory condition.
This is a little bit terrifying to me. For me victory would be that the opposing view merely doesn't gain any traction when expressed, not that it can't be expressed - presumably due to social consequences. Any view that "wins" in this way doesn't deserve its victory - how do you know it's actually a good idea? Bad and good ideas alike can win in this way. Only good ideas are stable in the presence of the constant ability to question them.
If you read through more of the article, it becomes clear that the difference in viewpoint has actual real world impact on the type of licensing practices that result.
Promoting a particular principle or ethos matters because it is like the DNA of the idea. Different DNA gets you completely different results.
Yes he had great ideas. They were so great that they exist beyond the man who created them and now benefit from him not being involved.
The chilling effect of such a policy essentially means that all advocacy groups must be led by slick marketing politicians, always on-point and on-brand, even if off camera.
Was this an unrelated private message board? I was under the impression it was on a mailing list at MIT.
That's a big "if"
Stallman was reviled not for things he didn't do, but for thoughts he didn't think.
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Even the initial accusation doesn't try to push the story that far:
"He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. [..] (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)"
Person has sleeping accommodation in place where he lives (odd thought it may be). Sometimes people use it as chair. No mentions of requests or toplessness.
> -Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
Unsubstantiated: saying something like "I can't imagine life without you" can be interpreted just like that depending on a variety of circumstances. That was also decades ago.
> Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Really now? Incidentally also the only one of your accusations of which there is evidence instead of hearsay or urban legends. Furthermore, "a sign" not "signs".
> He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason
Now go ahead and tell me it's a coincidence you kept that part out, and it was probably not a big deal, and they were all exaggerating in some inexplicable coordinated effort to be disturbed.
So your arguments basically consist on half-quotes, "it happened long ago, so it isn't true", "unsubstantiated; since there's no recordings of it, he probably just said something nice and was misinterpreted yet again" and "maybe that happened, but since I, a man, who'd never be targeted by his sexual advances, think it's ok, it's ok", completely disregarding the fact that all these accusations have been corroborated by witnesses, ranging from people interviewed on several media and dozens of reports and online comments from people who claim to have worked with him over the years, let alone the several unrelated victims of his "urban legends", and most of all, the fact that people repeatedly let him know about his attitude and he didn't give a damn.
In short, yet another big, somehow coordinated witch hunt by overly sensitive SJWs.
"He kept the door open to proudly showcase" could have easily been "He kept to door shut to hide his actions", that is: both cases would be equally damning from the writer's perspective, and hinges only on their "implications that went with it" which are their invention alone.
Facts remaining, he had a mattress in his office. He left his door open. Sometimes people were sitting on the bed.
> "it happened long ago, so it isn't true"
No. It happened a long time ago. People, over time, remember the emotional impact of something on them, but no longer the precise wording. She remembers the gist of someone talking about suicide, because that's what she thought he meant. Without the exact wording and cirumstances, it can be very difficult to figure out what transpired. So it's not "it isn't true" or "she must be lying", but the account is unsubstantiated, likely irretrievably so, because "it happened a long time ago."
> completely disregarding the fact
I don't disregard them, I check them one by one, and so far I found them lacking.
Why are you angry at me for reading what other people said before believing them at face value?
> that all these accusations have been corroborated by witnesses, ranging from people interviewed on several media and dozens of reports and online comments from people who claim to have worked with him over the years, let alone the several unrelated victims of his "urban legends", and most of all, the fact that people repeatedly let him know about his attitude and he didn't give a damn.
Please provide links outside of twitter. So far most accusations lead back to the initial article on medium by Salem G.
> In short, yet another big, somehow coordinated witch hunt by overly sensitive SJWs.
I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. I read the allegations, try to find the various sources, and try to put them into a logical context. I guess I'm simply a Knight for Justice (also: old weirdos)
Btw, you seem to be citing something. Could you share it here?
Here's a link to one I've most recently run into from someone who worked at MIT. Yes, it's a Reddit comment, but if you check out his profile you'll see the user's been on the site for 11 years, has close to 140k karma, and has many posts in the past that refer to his professional career.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d59r46/richard...
>A lot of people are acting like this is just about the Epstein comments. The MIT community was up in arms not just over that but at the mountain of shit Stallman has gotten away with over the last few decades, including crap like telling female researchers he'd kill himself unless they dated him, keeping a mattress in his office and inviting people to lay topless on it, defending pedophilia and child rape. He's been making women at MIT uncomfortable for years
>I wish there were more to tell but it's exactly what it sounds like. He had a mattress in the corner of his office and he'd leave the door open and if you were a woman who happened to walk by or heaven forbid need to talk to him for academic reasons he would find an excuse to invite you to use it
You'll also find other similar stories on that thread.
RMS was simply saying that bullshit was being perpetrated in that CSAIL mailing list, about his dead friend and colleague. If Minsky had been alive, no doubt he'd now be suing.
RMS has been traduced by Selam Jie Gano, Vice and TechCrunch, and goodness knows how many others (the bullshit and distortions seem to be everywhere). I regret that FSF have accepted his resignation; I am now resigning my membership of the FSFE.
Be specific about what he said that you find abhorrent
This topic is uncomfortable and a lot of people stay out of it or strongly self censor. he didn’t.
This is my point. As the president of an organization it’s not your job to make people uncomfortable about things that have nothing to do with that organization’s goals. Debating what is and is not statutory rape is not a discussion that should take place in any professional or technical environment.
This instance is actually even worse than just debating something in the inappropriate context. Epstein is a huge scandal. He raped dozens if not hundreds of girls. He loaned them out to other powerful people. It is within this context that RMS’ statements are most damning. He’s wading in some very murky ethical waters and it should be no surprise he caught a backlash.
Did anyone claim it was his job?
> Debating what is and is not statutory rape is not a discussion that should take place in any professional or technical environment.
Why?
> This instance is actually even worse than just debating something in the inappropriate context. Epstein is a huge scandal. He raped dozens if not hundreds of girls. He loaned them out to other powerful people. It is within this context that RMS’ statements are most damning.
Why is that? Does the fact that someone commits a crime make it inappropriate to defend people associated with them against incorrect accusations? How do you square that with the rule of law?
> He’s wading in some very murky ethical waters and it should be no surprise he caught a backlash.
He also should not be surprised that he gets a lot of opposition for promoting free software ... so, supposedly, he should not promote free software either?
I can’t comment on the rest of your point because again you talk about the horror of the crime and it’s not clear what of what he said or did you find abhorrent
That's certainly what companies which made their fortunes out of taking software out of the commons and turning it into products want people to think. Enough programmers don't want to be turned into unpaid employees that copyleft licenses have substantial uptake.
Also:
> OSS predates Stallman, and will outlast him.
... refusing to see a distinction between OSS and Free Software? Neat rhetorical trick.
Open source (inclusive of both) never really had any traction outside a few limited domains until the GNU project.
Invented by Christine Peterson in the 90s, yes (though it was 1998); to distinguish from GPL-style, no. The Open Source Initiative immediately listed the GPL as an Open Source license, and the FSF had already described permissive licensing as free software (as distinct from copyleft licensing).
https://web.archive.org/web/19980119061702/http://www.fsf.or...
> The X Window System illustrates this. The X Consortium releases X11 with distribution terms that make it non-copylefted free software. If you wish, you can get a copy which has those distribution terms and is free. However, there are non-free versions as well, and there are popular workstations and PC graphics boards for which non-free versions are the only ones that work. If you are using this hardware, X11 is not free software for you.
https://web.archive.org/web/19981201223102/http://www.openso...
> GIMP
> Gnome
> Linux
> Open Source is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for `free software' on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have.
If you are talking about the term OSS, then you are completely wrong. It came long after "Free Software" was coined and was named differently to mark a different movement.
That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.
I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.
I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.
If there are people who are choosing to make it incumbent upon themselves to take down these "problematic" individuals, then it must be because they think that all of the systems that have allowed a person to continue to exist despite those opinions must be unreliable in adequately judging them. If that's the case, then wouldn't it be more practical to fix the endemic problem rather than destroy a single person? I'm guessing that the latter is just easier to do and more profitable as well. You gain "credibility" by attacking someone else, so it's difficult to believe that they are doing it for altruistic means.
All in all, I'm pretty sick of this nonsense. A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in, not to mention the already authoritarian governments doing the same.
> I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.
"With great power, comes great responsibility." When operating in contexts where you have a lot of power, one has to be more careful with their words and actions. If he had voiced that opinion to a friend of his, no one would have complained. But voicing his opinion minimizing rape on a university mailing list has direct negative effects for a lot of people.
Also, some people do listen, apologize, and put in the work to learn.
> I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.
The problem is that other people don't just ignore him. By ignoring his harmful behaviour, we let his negative impact spread further as others repeat his misogynistic ideas.
> A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in
I'm sorry and hope you find a way to continue living in this world. And I agree strongly about authoritarian governments.
I don't really think calling out a post on a large mailing list counts as "everyone is constantly being watched by each other" though.
I can find nothing that meets this criteria in the above links. Do you have an unusual definition of "misogynistic", were you being rhetorical or do you have another source?
That very mailing list was about to arbitrarily accuse a dead innocent man of a crime to help provide cover for actual criminals still walking the halls at MIT.
This charade around Stallman is an injustice against Epstein's victims, the decent people at MIT, and Minsky.
I feel like that is pretty sensationalized. The argument being made there is that regular birth is a common thing, and should be left off the list unless it is something out of the ordinary.
For the actual background on the current chain of events at MIT:
https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html
For earlier allegations, take the original sources including quotes and references:
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html
(note: there are many more archives. This also gives you an idea of the effort it must have taken to find those few "damning" posts, and to skew those out of context)
That's not really feminist, isn't it?
> • Co-Principle Investigator for a U.S. Department of Defense SBIR Phase II research contract, prototyping autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) with collection system.
Even projects under the gnu.org umbrella probably don’t interact that much with RMS, let alone have discouraging interaction.
I have no dog in this fight but have a bias for factual discussions
Note also that all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago, and we seem to be supposed to conclude that the pattern never stopped on the basis of that and a pathologically misquoted and misrepresented email he sent on the Epstein/Minsky case. Considering that the real email is at most slightly tone-deaf, the most likely model of reality to me seems to be that he has fixed that behaviour well over a decade ago, but a number of activists had resolved to never let it go until they found some way to completely destroy any status and reputation he has.
Some countries are more explicit about this and actually constitutionally single out matters of life and death as being prohibited from being traded off against each other (e.g. Germany), i.e. the state is not allowed to play in trolley problems. The corollary is that the state, and most everyone, finds it okay to trade off other harms: you can for instance choose to build an airport that will drive down the value of some people's homes and expose them to considerable noise in order to give convenience and good business to a large number of people. I think discouraging some women from participating in FOSS is much closer in quality of harm to "your home is now worth half as much and you have to put up with the noise of planes flying overhead everyday" than "you die a painful and untimely death".
("Wow, I've seen everything on HN to attack RMS. (...)")
this never happened though.
According not to me, but to Thomas Lord (if you don't know who he is, go and check)
> One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.
And it says a lot about the amount of fabrication going around.
Quote one person in this thread who said that it wouldn't be ok if it affected men instead. Or just one person implying that.
You're assuming a lot here. If anything, I think it's likely less people would care if a bunch of men were alienated, since there's already so many of them in the field in the first palce.
I think anyone who was ever in favor of any war would agree that sometimes a death is justified when it saves many more?
That is a yes or no question. That is literally a binary choice. Yes or no - is murder OK if that murder saves more than one person.
That is literally the Trolley Problem.
The question is, is it acceptable to tolerate someones bad deeds because the benefits of doing so is greater than the harm.
It just isn't the same thing.
Armies don't have much issue with that ethical question.
Murder is a crime.
Where is the crime here?
It is ok to let go a "fuck you" if that persons did good before.
He has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Who, exactly?
> -Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office. > -Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
Sooooo, your entire analysis is based on legends circulating since the 90s about a weird man who was even told to be scared by plants?
For reference, Thomas Lord, creator of GNU arch (think about Git before Git), who worked for FSF for a long time said
One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.
p.s.: In the closet-sized "office" Bushnell, McGrath, and I shared for a time we did have some spider plants as part of a running silly joke. They did not actually scare RMS away **OF COURSE** and he usually had helpful criticism and advice of our efforts, from my point of view.
Can you tell an inside joke when you see one?
p.s. all of us have being young and done some innocent stupid shit, the kinds young people do, like having stupid signs on the door. It doesn't make any of us a criminal.
But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-day misogyny in FOSS spaces goes unchecked more often.
As another commenter pointed out, I also don't think net impact is the bar. But besides that, it's very hard to measure, so I prefer to focus on having positive impacts and limiting/fixing negative impacts. I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.
Surely second- and third-degree network effects occur on the encouragement side of the equation, too. Why would we expect any putative discouragement of women by Stallman to travel further in the social graph than his encouragement of both men and women?
> I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.
Which things specifically, and in what way?
> Which things specifically, and in what way?
Saying that we shouldn't call sexual assault "sexual assault", and implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking victim.
The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre perpetuates rape culture. It perpetuates the idea that women are worth less than men, and that it's okay for famous men in CS to rape girls. That emboldens other rapists and makes CS very unwelcoming for rape victims.
Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young women and girls at MIT.
(Background and links from https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... )
...what are the scare quotes for? Is "have sex with" not a definitional superset of "rape"? As far as I can tell, Stallman does not assert that Giuffre was not raped, only that Minsky would probably not have known. (As far as he knew, she could equally have been one year older and legally, voluntarily engaged in prostitution...?) You could argue that (and I think that if Minsky did indeed have sex with her, you would have a very good case) that Minsky was extremely naive and/or irresponsible to not suspect anything amiss in the setting, but sexual (or any other) assault, in the view of many people, requires intent to harm someone against their will.
Here, it seems that the intent, and hence the primary guilt for the assault, most likely was squarely with Epstein and his associates: if a gun salesman takes you to his shooting range and tells you to fire a weapon at a target that he actually secretly tied a person to the back of, and you shoot that person dead, you are not on the hook for murder even if you should really have known that something is off and recall hearing muffled screams from somewhere at one point in hindsight.
> The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre
Where did Stallman claim that?
How would Minsky have known? It was 2001 or early 2002, before Epstein's trafficking came to light. From Minsky's point of view, a girl who worked at Epstein's retreat as a masseuse and was above the age of consent [1] offered to have sex with him. (Which, according to Gregory Benford, who was there, Minsky declined).
[1] 16. It wasn't until later that the US Virgin Islands raised it to the current 18.
> In 2012, the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation issued a press release touting another conference organized by Minsky on the island in December 2011.
The press release is at https://www.pr.com/press-release/383199
Almost certainly not, but at this stage it is not unlikely that he'll put off more than he'll encourage going forward. So by the same "net effect" argument you make for accepting his behaviour up to a point in the recent past, he should go. Live by the sword, get asked to resign because of the sword.
> Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors
That low number of female contributors is at least in part due to the impression people have of working in these areas. Allowing him to continue to alienate people works against efforts to rectify that impression (and where it is true rather than just an impression, work to fix the behaviours that are causing the problem).
> all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago
Perhaps most, but not all. I've definitely seen some more recent claims, and they were mentioned before this particular episode. They weren't as egregious as the earlier behaviour so he was at least controlling/curbing/changing the creepy behaviour for which I suppose there should be some credit, and there is definitely some curious timing wrt MIT and the Epstein contributions so there is presumably a bit of "throw him under the bus as a distraction" going on, meaning this is a case with significant grey areas, but I think painting him as an entirely innocent victim is a step too far.
Let's be fair handed: if we wouldn't accept it from a politician or other celebrity, we shouldn't accept it from someone whose other ideas we agree with either.
If I save a hundred lives as a doctor and then murder one person, does the calculus go in my favor?
It can be. A sharpshooter killing a terrorist and saving 100 lives would be lauded as a hero.
I'm just asking. I got that feeling reading your comment. I get that feeling reading a lot of comments here. I could be wrong.
As a reminder, he has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Again, if you save a bunch of lives, but then murder someone in cold blood, does the fact that you saved way more than you murdered mean that society ought to look past the murder? After all, your net contribution is very positive!
I agree in principle, but I think there's lots of good arguments against it as well.
More importantly than the question of whether it's legal, I'm amazed that people can still see themselves as "the good ones" after all the things they do to their fellow humans.
* In German, we use the word "Meinungsfreiheit", which literally translates to "Freedom of Opinion", not "Free Speech", so yes, technically speaking, we don't have free speech; only the right to express our opinions.
A nice side effect of criminalizing defamation would be that the enforcment would be up to the state. When it is a civil affair only rich people can defend themselves.
[citation needed]
And if you get alienated from a career path because of one bad professor, go and find something else that you want so badly that you are willing to tough it out. Otherwise you will always blame your professional success limits on people not supporting you enough, or cracking an off-color joke or two or microaggressions. Do you honestly expect to never have to deal with a problem boss/coworkers/customer in a super-competitive private sector job? Don't tell me nurses and schoolteachers never have to deal with someone like RMS or worse. And sure, some degree of bad behavior should have proportional consequences, but do we hear about how women get alienated from these professions en masse?
If you can't know these things with sufficient certainty, definitely pick your license. Then only change it deliberately for your own purposes with your own goals and ideals driving it.
Devils advocate: maybe gpl will never have a later version you could possibly disagree with as it's too important to too many people just like you.
That may be a good thing. FSF isn't about Richard Stallman.
And some of the "kids" that ran him out of town know to keep plants at their desks because it turns out he's kind of a creep around young women, and also afraid of plants. None of that information has anything to do with mailing lists. There is always some reason that gets people to deal with a problem and that reason is often objectively kinda shitty. People overlook it because the problem is finally being addressed.
One of the things that's going on in the current political climate is that it's no longer enough to be a great developer but a horrible human being. Development in the 90's was punctuated by some truly titanic man-children that everyone had to 'put up with' because they were just so good at the rest of their job.
Gates seems to have grown up (I'm curious what Ballmer has been up to). Jobs, god bless him, died of his own stubbornness. They keep Ellison out of the spotlight, as they seem to have done with Stallman. Until he retires that leaves Torvalds (who I hope outlasts Ellison).
I am sure there were points in my life where I could be painted with that brush, and I can say with a bit of authority that we don't need that kind of behavior. And if behavior is tolerated at the top then it's effectively tolerated everywhere.
The problem is that that reason is the one people think is the reason the problem got dealt with.
It has a nasty chilling effect.
from someone who actually worked with him:
"p.s.: In the closet-sized "office" Bushnell, McGrath, and I shared for a time we did have some spider plants as part of a running silly joke. They did not actually scare RMS away OF COURSE"
I like free software not because no one is making money. I like people making money. I like it because I can change it.
That's important and everyone who gets upset simply because people profit is not necessarily on the same side as me. I don't want communist shared ownership of all things. I want the power to modify and run my software. That's all. It is actually like free speech. I want it for those who aren't like me and those are who like me.
One way is if the software is a marketing tool for selling something else. Then people sharing or using it is good for marketing the other service.
Another way is if the product is useless to the customer base in source form so they need to buy the compiled version, and aren’t technical enough to do it themselves.
But in general making software to sell needs a propitery license if you want to make money.
This software uses a license that seems to solve both the problem of ensuring the user has control over the software and also allowing the author to sell and distribute binaries without worrying (too much) about others undermining his control over the market.
It appears to work quite well in this case. Although I do not know how much he actually makes from software sales, it appears to be non-negligible based on its popularity within a niche community and the fact most users would rather pay $15 than learn the skills necessary to compile from source.
Of course these days this business model is being overtaken by SaaS and the bus takes out the developer and their data.
GPL licensed, basically identical to the "non-pro" version, $5. I don't know how well that works out for them, but I think it is a model worth supporting.
See also:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/11/25/2217247/valves-gab...
For example, a software license could support freedom to unionize. The GPL does not.
I've decided to strictly use "software freedom", in order to avoid confusion with the much broader topic of "freedom".
(BTW, many 'source available' licenses support your right to modify and run your software, if that's really all you want. Free software also includes the right to redistribute the software, including with modifications and in commercial sales, and without needing additional permissions from the original copyright owners.)
Even though i support FOSS over OSS, I've always found this particular argument a bit uselessly pedantic. Both of these term are almost always used casually not legally, when we want to do that (i.e when releasing software) we must use the highly specific language of a particular license anyway... which leaves only the following argument:
> establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom.
For non-enterprise uses, how much OSS is not also FOSS? most people assume they are equal because the free part is implied, so do we really need to teach it? most software vendors understand this because they know the majority of people will just use it for free if the source is available regardless of whether it is explicitly given as free. It's too hard to enforce payment in any area except for enterprise... When this market force already exists, does it really help to create a social force to differentiate FOSS from OSS? I'm not sure, I think you just end up pissing off new FOSS enthusiasts.
A much longer discussion obviously but an example where user freedoms more or less are counter to developers being able to restrict what their software gets used for once it’s been released as open source.
Do vendors have financial preference to work with microsoft to write and maintain those drivers? I'm talking about things like touchpads, wifi... I can understand that if there's no demand, it makes no point for them, but even after all this time?
Not to mention nvidia. What makes nvidia be so complacent towards linux? It has been almost 15 years now. Are there agreements between microsoft and nvidia?
The arguments of Stallman make sense, but to me they don't explain the state of linux drivers, which made the linux desktop so difficult.
With open source but not "free" (sensu Stallman) software, one is free to run it and study it and change it, right? Since one has read permissions on the code. So the only difference is in distribution rights? So his sentence is misleading regarding the extent of the differences?
Yes, it's misleading. There's no practical difference between the two in terms of licensing.
What this boils down to is that not all open source developers subscribe to the free software philosophy (e.g. believe that proprietary software is evil). Therefore, rms doesn't like the term.
Isn't it the case that (a) there could be / are open source projects with extremely restrictive licensing which totally prevents all distribution. I.e. a "copyright": you can still read and run the software and modify it for yourself, as long as you don't distribute it, and (b) such a project could never be "free" sensu Stallman?
Why not just call it open source and pick the license you prefer? With all respect for Richard Stallman, the label 'free software' is a really poor word choice IMAO.
Software freedoms and Free Software came first. "Open Source" came later, as a "free just as in beer" spin-off.
If English is not your native language "free speech" is also a confusing phrase.
https://www.cmpod.net/all-transcripts/history-open-source-fr...
That said, I think it would be better to focus on where these various initiatives are aligned, and focus on how to work together to maximize the strengths of these various communities, as opposed to focusing on where they differ, and engaging in petty bickering.
Of course there will be hard-liners who will reject this, and I can understand and appreciate a measure of that. I'm a bit of the same way when it comes to my radical anarcho-capitalist / libertarian political beliefs. I'm open to a certain measure of collaboration with others in the name of "any progress is better than no progress" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good enough", but there are principles that I'm unwilling to compromise on.
First, and I think foremost, is that we’ve done ourselves a huge disservice in training users into believing that software should be gratis. Through the surveillance-driven ad economy for services, to FOSS adherents who insist they won’t pay for software, to smartphone app stores making it impossible to differentiate between products (and also, making it impossible to make a good product). Few people are willing to pay for software anymore (especially developers for development tools). This leaves software development to the privileged few who can afford to work for free, either because they work at a company that sees software as a loss-leader for some ad-economy service, or because they are financially independent. I cannot imagine how one might be able to replicate the 80s and 90s market where you could do hard work, make a great, common product like a word processor or an email client, and consumers would rejoice instead of snarl, “what do you mean you want money for this?” This consolidates power in the hands of Google, Microsoft, or worse, Oracle.
Second, we have grown complacent and too accepting of crap. A lot of gratis software has very little polish (unless it’s being pushed by FAANG). People don’t want to pay for software because they rightly expect to have to try a dozen different packages before they find one that marginally works. Not getting paid means developers don’t have time to put into polish, nor any non-vanity signal to work on anything but neat features. With that, I think comes the ability for any actor of means to easily displace any smaller actor in the market. When a buyout happens, they don’t do it to acquire the technology anymore, they do it to acquire the users. We’ve raced ourselves to the bottom, so the only products we can afford to make are easily replicable by a 10x larger team. Or they don’t even have to replicate it, they just have to dump into marketing the kind of money that would setup any individual one of us for a nice, healthy, “fuck you” lifestyle.
Third, because we haven’t fought “free software does not mean gratis”, companies demand software be permissively licensed or they won’t touch it. So they get to take your work and never pay you and it’s legal. You could GPL license instead and just get ignored, still not getting paid. You get to prove out the market for them, and then they copy your features, release under MIT, and don’t give a shit that they aren’t making money on it, because the only software they make money on is the ad seller console.
I think we need to do several things:
1) grow a spine and a conscience, finally admit that there is no such thing as technology divorced from politics (it8s made for people, by people. Without people, it’s masturbation at best), and refuse to work for Google and Facebook, selling out our fellow citizens for a few bags of silver.
2) stop publicly publishing source code. The GPL doesn’t say you have to leave your source lying around in the open. It says you have to give it to your users. That’s fine. Users need lovin’ too, they just gotta pay first.
3) start taking a little more pride in our craft than, “I made a thing”. Software isn’t done until it is documented. It isn’t done until it’s usable without having to install Node and Python, just to run the setup. It isn’t done until it’s compliant with ADA and 508. With pride comes an expectation of remuneration.
4) stop “bucket of crabs”ing our fellow developers. If you don’t like something about a project, that is fine. But don’t call into question their fundamental right to exist. Too often I’ve seen projects cut down because they were “reinventing the wheel” or “just a solo dev”. Reinvention is important, or we wouldn’t have electric cars or faster computers or really anything. And solo devs wouldn’t be solo if you took them seriously and at least tried to put as much effort into supporting them as you put into cutting down their work.
Realistically, I know this isn’t enough. But it can at least be a start. We can’t keep going on like this.
only when we have an answer to this question can we properly progress as a society. else, we will keep expending resources to keep these debates alive.
I'm very sympathetic with people (over)reacting to what Stallman said and did.
I'm from a family where my parents and most of my uncles worked in healthcare.
Specifically my dad worked in oncology and my mom in infectiuos diseases.
I've seen patient's relatives panic because of some blood (after a very dangerous surgery) or complaining to the management because some other patient had sever pain and they could not stand them crying.
People are tribal, they usually act as a tribe, if not educated differently or introduced to things they do not know.
Of course I don't have to explain than when some of my friends needed to go to an hospital I was always regarded as the unemphatetic for saying things like "some blood is normal at this stage" or "the pain is gonna go away soon, don't worry" or "well, they amputated that man's leg, I bet I would be crying too. You can't complain about that" (this one really happened to me, when I had surgery to remove the saphenous vein, one of my parents friend came over to visit and asked me "why your parents keep you here with that man crying all the time?", I must specify that in Italy healthcare is mainly public, it was even more 25 years ago, you don't find the private hotel like rooms, and it worked much better than today, but that's another story).
SJWs are the same: they only think about their group, their needs, their right words, without stopping to think for a moment that Stallman started 40 years ago and that for 40 years he resisted, you don't just throw him under the bus because he said something you don't like because you were never exposed to that kind of thinking.
But Stallman would have defended their right to speak their minds if the role were reversed.
And that's why I'm sympathetic with them because they don't even understand the damage they made to themselves.
TL;DR;
We should work together engaging in what makes us similar more than what makes us different.
That's what Stallman did.
Exactly 80 years ago Sigmund Freud died.
> The narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation. The term was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, based on the earlier work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley. In language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation, a narcissism of minor differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
Technically true, but "you don't get to take away other's freedom" to me seems an entirely sensible restriction and not at all "bizarre".
You need innovation even in licensing. One man is just one human. Humanity is much larger then one man abd one sex.
Walk on.
MIT license all the way. It doesn't make me pay through the nose to be 'free' by following some arbitrary rules from elsewhere to fit into something I can only realistically see as a 'club'.
For a reader who is not a journalist, what is the value of free speech? Is there one?
Devil's advocate: The journalist loses his job and livelihood. I had nothing to say anyways. Clearly to him it had much more value.
I obviously agree that free speech is valuable for everyone (and so is free software), but how do you best explain why?
a company can take something that is MIT licensed and make part of their closed source application. or they could start out as open source project and then later decide to close source it.
with GPL they could do pretty much the same thing, but the only caveat is they would have to share back any improvements they make to the parts that were gpl licenced.
the first example would cut off a user from being able to access the source and modify it themselves or even worse they might have to start paying a fee to use it.
although I think a company can still charge a fee even if they are using something that is under gpl, but with this scenario people are free to take the source and use it in another project if they wish. if an MIT licence was used then that company is under no obligation to share any improvements they make