Why Software Should Be Free (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Why Software Should Be Free (2002)

gnu.org

218 pointsfinolex1143 comments

While I resonate fully with the ideals encompassed by free software, I find that the "logistics" of supporting them "in real life" are a completely different story, that has little to do with the ethos behind them.

This comes as a singular, personal data point, or course. There's wider context behind my trials and tribulations, but, succinctly put, starting a for profit company around my 5 year-ish old OSS project was the only way I managed to find to safeguard its continued existence and development. This road involves a lot of uneasy compromises that don't fit in the original discourse around free software.

Perhaps, what I'm lacking, is a "how to get there" guide - the ideals are clear, the way to achieve them is not so much so.

I'd say it's the other way around. If you work for free software, then money is secondary, will happen only if your software has so much value that you can set your own conditions.

Else, you accept to work for money and then, well, you know that road...

Agreed. That's definitely not the scale we operate at (digitally latent, partially marginal by hn standards industry). Nevertheless, this restricts free software to only "critical" need infrastructure that has high value from the start (rather than being allowed to develop it), doesn't it?

I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and usability. For my wife and I, our Apple Watches, AirPods, iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks are a net (I use this word purposely) that holds our digital life together and make working (she is my editor, and even in retirement I write every day for a few hours) and our digital lives easy and pleasant.

On the other hand, I love Linux, have a zillion GitHub repos with open source projects I do, etc.

I dream of a world in which I could use open hardware and free software, but how would something like an Apple Watch ever be open hardware and software?

> I dream of a world in which I could use open hardware and free software, but how would something like an Apple Watch ever be open hardware and software?

The PineTime is going to be released soon. Sure, it's nothing like an Apple or Android watch, but it's a significant start.

There's also the recently-released LilyGo TTGO T-Watch, which might not quite meet the most rigorous standards due to its ESP32 core but is designed from the get-go to be hackable. It doesn't seem like a stretch anymore to imagine a world of perfectly nice hardware that isn't locked down.

Many writers are doing their job just fine without owning the whole range of Apple's current offering, nor is there a surge in global writing talent imputable to the advent of the Apple Watch. It's cool if it works for you, but those things are not necessary.

No claim of “necessary” was made which needs refuting.

If people stopped buying the proprietary version, manufacturers would make open products. They don't really care either way, they just make a bit more money with proprietary licenses.

So, the answer is: it's on you.

I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and usability

You could reverse this and say that if open-source advocates would make usable products with features on par with commercial products, people would adopt them. There's a chicken-egg problem here.

People interested in these issues should read Working in Public by Eghbal, which is about open source culture and sociology. I just finished it.

The trouble is that the commercial products have marketing departments that aim to convince people that their feature set is the most important. So although open products have unique features of their own - including openness - people are likely to overlook them.

DRM also has an amplifing effect here.

This fails because we only have one formal kind of payment - money - and in a monetised economy, nothing compares with it.

Money solves one problem - how to get people to do things that may be useful to others which they wouldn't otherwise do - but causes much worse problems in return.

The most obvious is money is such a riotously inefficient way to decide what is and isn't genuinely useful, especially collectively.

OSS doesn't really solve the usefulness problem. It's good at producing software that's appealing to people who like using and tinkering with OSS software - but no one else really cares unless it's handed to them inside a product which has been assembled to be useful. And even then it's about the product, not about a largely imaginary "freedom" which is inaccessible to most users because it specialised skills, advanced knowledge, and plenty of free time.

This doesn't make it useless, it just gives it a different domain to operate in. There's some overlap, but there are many potentially useful projects that don't happen because they don't appear inside either the commercial or the OSS circles.

I need a goat and have chickens for trade. What's your exchange rate?

freewheelin' franklin says ....

"Dope will get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no dope."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Broth...

generally - things and stuff get you through times of no money better than money gets you through times of no things and no stuff. money is really a roundabout way of convincing someone to give you things and stuff, and offering shiny things and stuff is a way to get money. in the end money is for making landlords and bankers happy, its the things and stuff that help to mantle over the hard problems of real life.

You seem to be dismissing FOSS, despite that it has taken over the world when it comes to servers and smartphones.

> OSS doesn't really solve the usefulness problem.

Most Linux kernel devs are paid professionals, making improvements that have value to their employer, and making the improvements available to all (a triumph of copyleft). It's not just hobbyists tinkering in ways they find interesting. Hasn't been that way for decades.

> It's good at producing software that's appealing to people who like using and tinkering with OSS software - but no one else really cares unless it's handed to them inside a product which has been assembled to be useful.

I have the choice of several different FOSS browsers, text-editors, C++ compilers. FOSS is quite capable of producing a 'finished product' that just works.

> even then it's about the product, not about a largely imaginary "freedom" which is inaccessible to most users because it specialised skills, advanced knowledge, and plenty of free time

It's not just developers who are affected by issues like tracking, intrusive telemetry, and even just unskippable ads in DVDs. It's true that developers are more aware of these issues.

You seem to be dismissing FOSS, despite that it has taken over the world when it comes to servers and smartphones.

I think that dismissal is correct. While both may be open-source, neither is "free" in the sense of the term that Stallman is using. Cloud services may run on Linux, but it's a very TiVo-ized form, where the free core is wrapped in many layers of proprietary code that serve to negate the freedoms that Stallman is pushing for. Similarly, Android, while it is open-source, is nowadays so dependent on Google Play Services (which is proprietary) that it seems hardly fair to call it free software in the same way that one would call a Linux desktop free software.

You have a point about smartphones, but I'm not convinced about cloud virtual servers. You can use proprietary managed services from AWS, or whoever, but if you just want a GNU/Linux server, you still have that option. Indeed, there's never been a better time for it.

That's fair, but I would respond by saying, if you just want a generic GNU/Linux VM, there's really no reason to choose AWS. You can get one from someone like Linode or Digital Ocean for less. The advantage of AWS is that your GNU/Linux server has access to all the proprietary AWS goodies, like S3, DynamoDB, Route53 DNS, etc. etc.

I tend to do my Linux dabbling on the cloud. I rarely make use of the fancy services available on AWS, but that's not the only advantage of AWS, as they also do a fine job with the basic abstractions relating to EC2 instances.

One example is firewalls. I'd expected Linode and Digital Ocean to offer cloud firewalls the way EC2 does, but no. When I create a new Linode instance, all ports are open to the world. On EC2, I can easily restrict new instances so that incoming connections are only permitted from my IP. That gives me protection against flaws in the SSH server. I think it makes good sense to handle this at the cloud level, rather than configuring a firewall inside the instance.

Another example is that Linode and Digital Ocean will charge me the full hourly rate for an instance even when it's switched off. To avoid this, you have to manually create an image of your instance, then later restore it. Not so on EC2, where they've really thought through all the abstractions.

Free software in this essay means software that respects your freedom. Not "Gratis".

So every company has the right to charge you for their software but once you acquire it you can use it however you wish.

Don't most FOSS licenses explicitly allow for redistribution though? So once one person gets itm they can then redistribute it for free or a cost with the original developer not benefiting (directly).

Sure but the end user of this product doesn't know or care about the parts. This matters to those of us in the plumbing business and those businesses that would hire us to do their plumbing.

I suppose that money does bring a lot of problems along with it. However, in human history there has never been a better means to trade or provide almost universally desired fiat. Since there has never been a nation state collective government that has survived over the long haul or a massive project on a national scale completed without either money or an authoritarian government forcing it, I think we'll just have to live with it for now until someone figures out a way to make the world collectively completely altruistic.

We do have a secondary form of capital: what we charitably call ethics/guidelines, or uncharitably - peer pressure. This is the currency that dominates FSF language like the “harm done” by proprietary software, the free software “manifesto” and so on. It is in this currency that developers are given a “perk” of occasionally working on open code at their otherwise closed day job, or are compensated in in exchange of a more lucrative proprietary model for their side project.

I don’t have anything against those who take their free software views seriously. But I am very annoyed that the currency of “ethical behavior” is one that burdens the individual and benefits the corporation. Only individuals can feel guilty that their software is not free, can agonize over copyleft vs permissive, can feel obligated to pass up compensation in exchange for ethical currency, can feel drained by an internet argument, etc. Corporations meanwhile can mostly ignore this secondary currency and operate entirely within the system of money.

Pressuring developers to use your license (when it is their work and their choice) is disgusting and people shouldn't be doing it at all.

> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

The crowd funding culture is evolving. In recent years I follow and donate to a couple of public initiatives in my country from free media, environment, and other public services. People are excited to donate and be members in projects that solve real problem, conduct transparency and communicate with the members.

Its all about trust.

That works at a small scale. When things get big, people start behaving badly... or alternately you could say that when things get big their surface area becomes sufficient so as to encompass a lot of bad behavior.

The problem is that not all software tasks are small. There are many valuable problems and applications that are too difficult for a single individual or a very small group to address. As soon as you get more than one person involved you start to need the infrastructure of a business, and that's expensive. You quickly outgrow what voluntarist community scale systems can handle.

On the other hand there is Mastodon, there is KDE, there is the Linux Kernel. All varying in their level of infrastructure but all are communitys of volunteers. Most programming languages work this way too

All these things are used by nerds and have little chance of breaking into the mainstream. They're too labor intensive to use and deploy and impose too much cognitive load.

10% of the work is making it work. The user experience necessary for mass adoption is the other 90%, and it's mostly work that is not fun and that people must therefore be paid to do.

If the goal is just to have a for-nerds-by-nerds ecosystem that's fine, though ultimately I think without mass market penetration it's likely that the hardware ecosystem will eventually close. We are seeing the encroachment of locked boot loaders everywhere. Eventually it may be hard to get a fast modern chip that can run the open stuff if the open stuff does not have sufficient mass in the economy to demand it.

That and I for one think privacy and freedom for everyone is a worthy goal. For-nerds-by-nerds is elitist.

Linux isn't mainstream? Sure, by consumers running as a desktop operating system but consumers are using Linux all the time; they just don't know it. (Android, Amazon, Chromebooks, many cars, etc.) Linux isn't like the two other things on that list.

Android and Chromebooks are usually pretty closed in spite if having a Linux kernel.

>there is the Linux Kernel

The Linux kernel is most certainly not a community of volunteers. It's overwhelmingly developers doing this as their day jobs. From the 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report: : "It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the “unknown” contributors are working on their own time, well over 85 percent of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work."

> The Linux kernel is most certainly not a community of volunteers.

This depends on the definition of community. While most of the developers are paid for their time. Someone voluntarily contributes this developer time to the kernel.

Now you could argue that the companies don't do this voluntarily but are driven by market forces etc.

On the other hand, these companies could just ignore the the Linux Environment; and some companies do this.

> When things get big, people start behaving badly

Good point. As the sense of belonging is also important. I commented about it in another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23414793

> "Humans are tribal and their survival depends on teamwork of about ~100 people or so. This is natural on intimate scale."

Readers suggested a couple of ideas on this. Maybe the scale is solved by having a network of small groups connected, where each group has a "representative" that is also a member in group of "representatives". And maybe members can also intentionally exchange groups periodically to build natural connections across groups.

From the perspective of user, it's not as simple, at least for some.

a) At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss? Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well?

Personally I admit that I rarely donate to free projects as an individual, unless they explicitly ask for a fixed amount that I find reasonable, because I dread the process of such decisions.

2) At a business level, usually there is a complete detachment between the value drawn out of a piece of a free software and the process of donations. The company is there to maximize its profits and minimize its costs, donations exist at a separate sphere that has more to do with financial/tax or PR incentives than the intrinsic value of the free software project, so all donations tend to get send to recognized charity organizations.

Very often the people who understand the value that a piece of free software brings to the business, have the right mindset and want to donate, but there is no process to make it easy for them to do so (it would be awkward to put a purchase order to the finance department for a donation).

For that reason, I would encourage every free software project that cares about funding to sell something at a fixed price, that can pass for a standard purchase in the eyes of a non-technical person -i.e. call it support/maintenance plan, or premium forum access. Even if in reality it adds nothing to the value of the software, it makes it easy for IT departments to support projects they are using that they would otherwise not be able to. Speaking from experience, it's very frustrating to see how much a company spends for bullshit and not be able to donate even a small amount to projects that bring much higher value to the company.

>At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss?

I can't speak for what society should do, but I adopt a "value for value" mindset.

If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me. This is sometimes hard to quantify, but as a rough estimate, if it's in a professional capacity, I start my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me, and if it's in a personal capacity (think used with hobby work), I start with half my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me. You should never feel like you should give more than you can comfortably give.

> Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue?

It depends on the project - often I'll ask the author. Some software is backed with recurring donators, so a one-time donation to help pay for some hardware or software the project needs is the most helpful, but some software is not backed by recurring donations, so a smaller, recurring donation will help sustain the project for longer (especially with hosting bills or other recurring expenses). My number one suggestion to free software authors that accept donations would be to specify whether one-time or recurring donations would be more helpful, and if one-time, if there are specific expenses/amounts that are needed that could have a high impact on the project.

> Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well?

Disabuse yourself of the notion that life is fair. For me, there is certain free software that I use almost constantly (Debian and Emacs, say), and some free software that I use one-off that saves me a large amount of time. Both are examples of projects that I would consider donate to. Something that I use once or twice a month for a short amount of time and has many alternatives I may not donate to.

> If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me.

Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix?

The bulk of OSS is invisible "plumbing" that provides the critical infrastructure for the software we actually use on a day to day basis (proprietary and OSS). I'm happy to hear that you contribute to some projects and that's great, but you haven't exactly solved the tragedy of the commons.

>Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix?

Sure!

For regular one-time donations:

  - Debian => $500 once a year (typically in the summer)

  - Free Software Foundation => $500 once a year (typically around the new year)

  - MetaARPA membership on the SDF => $36 once a year (in August)

For regular ongoing donations:

  - $60/half year to the OpenBSD Foundation for OpenBSD (once for each release - I used to buy each CD set but they don't sell them anymore)

  - $20/month to the OpenBSD Foundation to support OpenSSH, LibreSSL, and OpenNTPd

  - $5/month to a niche forum that I post to on occasion

  - $5/month to a podcast that I listen to

  - $6/month to a BandCamp artist that I listen to

For other projects, I'll keep an eye on their calls for donation for specific things and support them one-off as I can. GnuCash says I've donated about $5000 over the last ten years or so doing that.

I think your business analysis is completely on-point. On the other hand:

> At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting.

I don't think I disagree with you, but couldn't you argue the same exact thing about paid software?

"At a personal level, paid software forces the user to make choices upfront about whether or not the software is valuable enough to justify the cost; often before they have enough experience with the software to know how valuable it will be. If the software will be useful for 5 months but doesn't come with free upgrades, does that change the value proposition? Should they wait and watch some tutorial videos before paying for the software? Should they comparison shop with other brands? Should they wait to see if a sale is incoming, or if a new version is about to be released? If there's a free trial or demo version, should they just use that instead of purchasing?"

"Personally, I rarely purchase software as an individual, because I dread the process of such decisions."

----

Again, I don't think I disagree with the main thrust of having a purchasing option somewhere for something. But where choice is concerned it's worth noting that consumers have to make choices regardless of which path you go down. It's just that they're used to some choices more than others.

It might not be unreasonable to imagine that in a generation or two, people might get more used to the choices they have to make surrounding donations.

Perhaps that troubles some people more than others, it's just that for me a purchase is a simple, binary choice -I either agree with what they're asking for, based on the best information that I have about it, or not and I don't. Depending on the asking price, I will spend some time to research, in order to minimise my chances of being disappointed, but that's straightforward enough.

Whereas when I'm faced with a donation button that leads to an empty box waiting to be filled, or even to a number of presets, my mind goes in too many directions:

"Is this particular project more worthy of donations than dozens of other free software projects I am using every day? What am I using every day, let me think, Linux, FreeBSD, Xorg, GNU, vim -jesus that'll be a long list, I can't donate to all of them. Well maybe I could just give a few quid to all, but donating a few quid to some of these projects would be a joke -the big ones receive a lot of funding regardless. And it would be too much effort just to find the details on how to donate anyway." So now I have to factor in not just how much value I would attribute to each project which is hard enough as it is, but also how much difference it could make -how much the project is in need of funding.

It just feels too arbitrary and exhausting to deal with all this, so in the end I don't bother. Obviously some people don't overanalyse things and just act spontaneously -sometimes I do too, but rarely. I don't think I'm the only one that has this mental block.

On the other hand if a project says "you like this project? If so, please click here to donate $x" -then that's awesome, I like the software, it's asking for $x, $x is a reasonable amount, so I just do it and move on. Or I don't, if I don't think $x is reasonable (I don't think that's happened, normally free software authors are very modest in what they're asking when they do that). Giving me a single choice taps to the spontaneous part of me, asking me to pick an amount myself triggers my analysing part.

The ideal for me would be if there was a platform that asks you to put a total amount you're willing to spend every month, then asks you to select the projects you're using and a rating of how much you appreciate each, then it factors that along with some objective development activity measures to distribute the amount between the projects, perhaps with an increased weight to smaller projects. I think someone actually posted a similar idea here recently.

Charity events have always had a suggested donation amount for this reason. If a project doesn’t suggest a donation amount then they intentionally or unintentionally ignoring conventional wisdom.

Disturbing a donation pool is interesting but not far off patreon.

Becoming a member of the FSF https://my.fsf.org/join is a great way to help free software.

> The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes.

It is because they are getting paid they willingly hand over the rights. Also a lot of full time employees do take personal ownership of their code maybe not in a legal sense but they feel it is their responsibility.

This is why I cannot stand Stallman. There are plenty of good arguments for open source software. However completely ignoring the fact that when you are a full time employee you are promised pay and some benefits by the employer is as far as I am concerned completely disingenuous. His whole premise is faulty.

Well, compare/contrast the emotional attachment a programmer has for code with the emotional attachment a parent has for their child.

No amount of money would make the emotional attachment of a parent to their child go away; I think this is his point.

Yes let’s compare looking after your a new life in the world with source code like they are they in anyway equivalent.

This is exactly my problem with characters like Stallman and why people should actually read the more robust arguments against GNU/Free software movements sad the more robust arguments gives you a reality check against a lot of Stallman’s nonsense.

It's not equivalent, that was the point. Any responsibility one might feel towards their employer's code goes away immediately when they find a new job somewhere else for better pay. If you follow that, this whole line of reasoning really doesn't have anything to do with FOSS versus proprietary. You can observe the same effects happening at tons of Linux companies too, i.e. employees who don't care one way or another about the OS or the license and are just there to put in their time and collect a paycheck.

You are using the his language.

The language is that many developers take ownership of a project while they are working for an employer. The fact that people make these comparisons between children and source is the problem and what you are doing is framing it the way Stallman wants to frame it. This leads you to his conclusions. If you actually take some time to look as some of his assertions you can see they are far more nuanced that he would like you to think. It is disingenuous of him to frame it like that in the first place, he isn't stupid and therefore I cannot accept it is an oversight.

I would rather Software development was more seen akin to be a plumber or a carpenter and that is exactly how I try to work. People have to get over the fact that programming is a profession, it has a market and things need to be paid for.

The whole activism for free software is completely missing the point as it focuses on source code and not specifications. If there is an open spec then anyone can make a opensource or proprietary implementation of that spec. The "freedom" of that software is irrelevant because it adheres to the specification.

The current model for monetising free and open software software has lead to making money via support contracts, which leads to things like SaaS where you are perpetually renting something rather than actually owning a license. When you are perpetually renting from a large company you are then tied into what they want to do and you are probably in a worse situation than using a proprietary product especially if your data is held up in that service (that why Microsoft and Amazon want you to use their proprietary NoSQL infrastructure and price it so cheaply compared to something like Postgres of SQL Server).

This is such a difficult thing to get across I end up rambling on tangents because there any many many things wrong as the presuppositions are just incorrect or aren't as concrete as many assert.

>The language is that many developers take ownership of a project while they are working for an employer.

For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off, redesigned from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the picture. It's just business.

I have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than it did when the article was written.

> For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off, redesigned from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the picture. It's just business.

I know many developers that are quite happy working and improving particular systems for years on end and consider it their project. Richard Stallman over simplified the relationship between employer and employee and the project they work on. I believe that is disingenous.

> have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than it did when the article was written.

When did I state anything about what your motivations maybe? I didn't.

Well that is a shame you don't have any comment on the rest of my post because it is quite important when it comes to discussion about this. You cannot ignore that Richard Stallman in some ways has shown companies that engineers will create stuff for free and they don't have to pay. OpenSSL debacle proved this, they were quite happy to let the engineer who was maintaining the project basically live poorly until HeartBleed vulnerabilities. This is never discussed but this is direct consequence of Richard Stallman and his activism.

As for it being an emotional argument, it really isn't. All I am simply saying is that Richard Stallman ignores nuance when it suits him and invents it when it doesn't exist and by using his language that he invented (he redefined the word free).

IIRC he said on a mailing list that he specifically tied the plugin system to GCC to the main part of the program itself so plugins would be forced to use the GPL license. Forcing other people to be tied to your license is anti-freedom. But it is okay when he is a hypocrite about it, people will make all sorts of excuses for the hypocrisy because of the "GPL Freedoms" but the GPL is less free than many other licenses.

Why did rms choose to remain poor when he could have earned a lot of money. That must’ve been a difficult choice. Programmers who are a lot less talented than he is earn a lot more money. I also noticed that other open source programmers also were poor. There was an article on hn about the programmer who maintains ssl.

My impression was two things: (1) he had a mission; (2) he had strict and unusual ethical rules for himself, which precluded most other work.

RMS wasn't the only one with ethics that was a barrier to getting rich, however. One odd thing was that, at the start of the dotcom boom, I had the impression (perhaps mistaken) that the programmers with the most experience with Internet and such were also disproportionately more inclined to see themselves as bringing some altruistic vision to everyone, and nurturing it. Things like privacy violation would not fly, I don't think. The privacy violations were snuck in, initially, and the original visionaries either weren't in a position to stop it, somehow didn't realize it was happening, or simply took the money.

The problem is that the programmers in the dotcom boom did have an altruistic motive that is why they can justify the privacy violations. They simply see themselves as the good guys and thus it is okay when they do the wrong things as long as it is for the greater good.

I'm sure there were some people like that. But the impression was really that it was an orgy of anyone who could program at all acting the role of some rock star genius visionary, while most people were hopping companies to whatever seemed to have the best IPO prospects at any moment.

Why does everything have to be about money? This view is really prevalent on HN and it's actually really tiring to read week after week.

It boils down to this: some people prioritise other endeavours. And if your response to that is 'but they could be doing the same thing AND getting paid £££' then I guess they just don't care as much as you might do.

It doesn't, but a lot of doors open with sufficient amount of money at your disposal. And it is very easy to get lost in the pursuit, because there is never really enough and someone always has more. I am not excusing it, but I understand the strong pull.

For the record, I agree with you. There are things that I effectively add money with no hope of money return. From a purely monetary perspective, those should have been ended a while ago.

> Why does everything have to be about money?

Because of those pesky habits of clothing, feeding, and sheltering yourself.

I'd love to know the special mix that make a person more detached from material possessions than another. See I love open-source, I really do, and the idea of a world with a bunch of Oracle-like businesses competing for software makes me shivers. Yet in my day-to-day, I take the job that pays the most and I probably wouldn't take a 50% pay cut to maintain the kernel.

To be clear, I wish I was able to put my ideals above my personal wealth, but I have a hard time doing it. For those that might wonder, yes I do feel morally bankrupt at times.

Because the amount of money determines the amount freedom you have both in terms of time and location. How this is lost on people like yourself is maddening.

On a similar note, I run a popular (and probably the best) personal finance website on the internet.

I use data and math to find the most optimal ways to eat, buy health insurance, etc... And everything is free.

I make trivial amounts of money by donations.

I've seen my competitors are significantly worse quality, downright Dave Ramsey Snowball effect tier bad advice. But they sell advertising space for snake oil, they sell yet another budgeting spreadsheet, books, courses, and more.

Their marketing is pretty interesting "I'm a bad girl that likes fashion, so I invest and save." Or something to give them personality. They claim to make 30k+/yr. But they don't get the traffic and I'm sure they haven't been on BBC.

I'm happy with the thank you emails I get, my day job pays well.

It's just another example of lower quality, but charging money making bigger profits.

Could you provide a link? I’d like to check this out.

Efficiency Is Everything

I'm also curious for a link to your personal finance website. I understand if you can't post.

Efficiency Is Everything

What makes you think he's poor? What do you think his net worth is?

Well from his Rider for talking engagements

    Flights:

> The FSF does not pay for my travel, and I can't afford to.

Not able to afford several worldwide flights a week doesn't make him poor, but he seems like he probably donated most his money to the FSF.

His net worth is estimated to be in the $1-5 million range. Choosing to live a lifestyle we associate with being poor doesn't necessarily mean he's poor.

"I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place." --rms

The systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design.

For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there.

And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again, there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it

> I am not saying that a toll road is worse than no road at all. That would be true if the toll were so great that hardly anyone used the road—but this is an unlikely policy for a toll collector.

With "toll road" as a metaphor for "proprietary software," it seems like the current situation requires an even more radical stance than Stallman could have envisioned back then, because software companies today aren't content with merely operating in a socially suboptimal way. Instead, many now have a net negative impact on society: through spying, engineered addiction, echo chambers, etc. For instance, I think society would be better off if Facebook simply ceased to exist, even if it wasn't replaced by some type of privacy-protecting alternative and everyone just had to go back to email and personal home pages.

You are confusing social media with software companies.

I think most software should be at least semi-free. You can read the source code and distribute changes but you can't redistribute the software (code and binaries) without approval from the author (i.e. paying them).

Basically I want people to be free and able to fix and improve what they paid for.

Of course. Long gone are the days you could tinker with your machines and appliances, fix your problems, replace oartd, hack together improvements, or simply take it apart to show your kid how it works. Okay maybe not long gone but certainly on the way out. Appliances and computers and even cars are getting ever more encumbered in terms of being able to fiddle with them, both physically but above all in terms of software.

Maybe forward to PG who seems to be veering into Peter Thiel territory lately. Might remind him why startups are even a thing he can brag about to AOC.

Edit: I rewrote this to add a lot of substance.

This was written in 1991. The world was very very different then. The Internet was small. Hardware was commodity. Most of the power in the industry belonged to proprietary software vendors like Microsoft and there was a danger they would totally monopolize the future.

Things have changed quite radically. Today hardware has been effectively de-commoditized, on one hand by the escalating difficulty of building a high quality machine and on the other hand by vertically integrated cloud vendors whose hardware becomes "special" by virtue of its location at a highly connected secure data center. The Internet is also huge, and it has made network effects powerful and has created a new form of closed called "SaaS."

Today software is commoditized, hardware is proprietary, and SaaS is where the power is centered. Everything depends on the cloud. Much of the software that powers the cloud is open source, but that doesn't matter. Having source or being able to run your own copy is irrelevant if the value is in the centralized network location of the runtime and the fact that the cloud has all the data.

RMS's strategy for freedom is obsolete. If software is totally free and un-owned, all the power belongs to the owners of physical capital and SaaS systems that leverage that capital to create network effects around centralized instances of software.

SaaS is more closed than commercial software ever was. I can still run a 1980s proprietary application in a VM on my own system, but I cannot run 2008's Facebook or Google. SaaS operators have total visibility into everything we do and the power to rescind capabilities at any time. It's a pure panopticon. Today we need open and liberated runtimes more than we need open and liberate source.

Those of us who care about privacy and freedom need to change strategies to cope with a changing world, but the problem is that RMS's views and the views of others in the 1990s FOSS movement have been dogmatized and transformed into a religion.

It's not a religion. It's a strategy, and one that was largely successful at checking the power of Microsoft and other commercial software vendors. The trouble is that it's a strategy that also undermines the economic sustainability of software, thus handing all the economic power and muscle to those who control other aspects of the stack. Those other aspects of the stack now rule us by virtue of the golden rule: "he who has the gold rules."

The FOSS movement is fighting the last war.

What we need is a new model that hopefully can retain the openness of free software but that recapitalizes the software layer and allows the center of gravity to shift more toward the physical and economic edge of the network. I was hoping for a while that cryptocurrency would furnish this, but it was taken over and destroyed by scammers. Some are exploring "source available" licenses like the BSL, but that feels like a stopgap to me. There has to be something that preserves the freedom of open source at the individual level while restoring revenue streams to software and limiting the ability of the for-profit cloud to exploit FOSS to create its silos.

This has been the elephant in the room for more than over a decade, but hardly anyone mentions it apart from occasional posts on HN.

Stallman has largely ignored the web developments. Pushing for the GPL works (almost) as well for companies these days as pushing for the BSD license.

I think most new OSS developers are distracted by the thousands of social issues that are made up by corporations to give them the illusion that they are doing meaningful, socially relevant work.

So they no longer care about software freedom and overlook that elephant in the room.

Yeah, the "woke" vs "based" culture war has destroyed the minds of a generation. These are two sides of the same coin. The underlying anti-intellectualism and biological identitarianism/racism is the same. The only difference is where you go with it.

Sorry but "we are creating the infrastructure for a future panopticon that will transform the Earth into a global labor camp for the 0.0001%, but we have gender equal HR policies" is not woke for any definition of the term I'd care about. A gender-equal prison is still a prison, and does anyone think that gender equality is going to persist once real totalitarians take power and inherit all that wonderful mass surveillance infrastructure? Fake woke Silicon Valley is building the infrastructure for something that will probably look like a cross between The Handmaid's Tale and alt-America in Man in the High Castle. It's another case of capitalists selling the rope that will be used to hang them.

Meanwhile those who see through that have run into a completely different hall of mirrors chasing stupid green frog memes and embracing literal ideologies of enslavement. "We see through your fake woke! So we're going to advocate literal fascism to be edgy!" Playing the record backwards is still playing the record folks.

Why has this been obvious to me for years and yet I feel like nobody else sees it?

Identity politics is just a way to co-opt and divide left-wing politics by ignoring how oppression of women, immigrants, LGBT, etc., is always inextricably tied to economics.

It's a way that corporations, the Democratic Party, and others, have been able to keep the 99% distracted from the real source of their oppression.

> Stallman has largely ignored the web developments.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... for Stallman's take on Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). He seems to broadly agree with parent's points wrt. this industry; he's certainly not "ignoring" them.

It is irrelevant though whether he is paying attention. The most successful work under the GPL (the Linux Kernel) development is steered by the companies that he attempted to wrestle control back from.

> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

It's funny because users freely buy software from developers without coercion and they're coerced by the government to pay for public radio and television under threat of imprisonment.

It works when everybody is singing love songs in rainbow coloured clothing, but at the end of the day there are bills to pay and only a few lucky ones get to live from donations and they surely aren't arriving at the bank with donation extracts for a credit renewal.

Well...

(1) If you believe prices trend towards marginal cost, and,

(2) the cost of acquiring a new user trends lower for more useful products, then it follows that...

(3) capping the price of software would generally improve its overall quality.

(Don't worry, I'm mostly joking. Still...)

It's a GNU/FSF article about software freedom, it's not about pricing.

The libre/gratis distinction is important, sure. But when rms argued against "programs as property" here, there were certain implications about pricing models that came along for the ride, whether that was his primary intention or not.

My argument is really a (somewhat tongue in cheek) rebuttal to people who think libre software, which incidentally tends to be gratis, can never be high quality or sustainable.

Richard Stallman is a genius, he didn't deserve to be cancelled from his position at the FSF.

Could you expand on cancellation part a bit. Why was it done?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_f...

When was this written?

RMS is a brilliant mind and someone I have had the luxury of meeting. Every now and then I like to look at his rider list and have a little chuckle: https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt

I came across a site that just rotated pictures of him, using his laptop in some strange places: https://rms.sexy

As much as I respect his ideas, god he is cringeworthy.

He can be; his 'free software song' certainly makes me cringe.. Edit (added link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

Man, times have a'changed...

I remember back in the late 90s at one of (GNU/)Linux shows (was it in Paris?) RMS arrived and started singing this song, many people joined in marching, it was a very happy and positive event. Of course everybode knew it's a kind of joke, just like the whole St. iGNUcius thing, but at the same time the general idea of sharing the code with others as opposed to hiding it seemed quite serious and meaningful. And so it continues to this day.

I actually like this song, and the several covers people has performed of it.

Not being afraid of coming across as cringeworthy might contribute to producing the original ideas that you respect.

There's a difference between not being afraid of coming across as cringeworthy, and coming across as cringeworthy. The former doesn't ennoble the latter, and for someone who chose the role of not only originating ideas but seeking also to make them popular, the latter is a real problem.

A good point re him having two roles. Speaking your mind and expressing yourself freely are both paramount for a good thinker, while both are anathemas for anything that has to do with people’s opinion and politics. Maybe the two roles just don’t combine very well.

It might be similar to the concept of code-shifting in linguistics. That depends on the ability to "read a room", and whatever Stallman's virtues, that has never seemed to me to be among his skills.

To draw a comparison which will certainly infuriate everyone, Stallman might usefully be considered as a Wozniak desperately in need of a Jobs.

He's like Cassandra, except a tad insufferable instead of cursed.

Social skills are boring to work on, but he's a political activist; those should be a priority for him. He's usually right, but that doesn't mean he has to say things all the time! (Or, rather, he could probably pick more opportune moments, while retaining most of the frequency, and be listened to more.)

Plus, the kinds of jokes you make with your friends are not necessarily the kinds of jokes you should be making on stage, during a talk about free software, in front of a wide audience of strangers. Though I hear he's got a lot better at this in the last half-decade, so perhaps this criticism is no longer warranted.

He could not have gotten much worse at it. Where have you heard he got better?

I haven't heard any “Richard Stallman ad-libbed one of his comedy skits badly and made members of the audience feel uncomfortable” stories since 2010 at the latest. I haven't heard he got better; I've just stopped hearing complaints. From this, I infer that he got better.

One of the more hidden benefits of people being more willing to raise concerns like this is that people bad at noticing that they're doing stuff wrong get told it – and then, if they care, they get better. (And if they don't get better, keep shaming them; even if they care, just caring isn't enough.)

I would rather people focused more on legitimate complaints like these, even though they aren't snazzy enough to make newspapers; making up stuff like “Richard Stallman supports child sexual abuse” helps nobody (except sensationalist newspapers, but they're not worth helping), whereas calling out the many small components of systematic injustices (e.g. many women feeling excluded from tech and hackerdom because they're women) helps many.

Well, I can attest from personal experience that he was still stuffing his foot in his mouth that way as late as 2016; I didn't leave the talk, but I saw enough people do so that it was clearly not by happenstance.

I've discussed the incidents of that talk before on Hacker News, at considerable length and in the face of the same anger borne of discomfited hero worship that seems to attend every criticism of Stallman's behavior. If you're interested in the details of that discussion, I'll ask you to find it in my comment history here, as I have occasions today both more urgent and more appealing than to attract yet another tiresome crowd of would-be shouters-down.

His social skills are fine, and he has been immensely successful and changed the entire face of computing. I find it strange that people condescend about his appearance and manner because he has as of yet failed to transform the entire technological world to his vision.

The reason FOSS exists is because of how charming and convincing RMS was and is.

I condescend about his manner because when he slipped up, he slipped up big-time. Not just a single-word blunder, but entire paragraphs. (He does this less nowadays, from what I can tell.)

He was charming and convincing within the environments in which he needed to charm and convince people. I reckon those were largely informal settings, in what I've heard referred to as "tech-bro" cultures. Those skills don't generalise.

The easiest way for eccentric people to gain social acceptance is to fit in. That was never an option for Richard Stallman, so he must've been charming and convincing. I couldn't have done what he's done. That doesn't automatically mean he's good at every kind of social interaction – and he most certainly wasn't, in the early 2000s. He made enough public slip-ups that I might need two hands to count them!

He's a political activist. One slip-up is enough for your enemies to discredit you. He can't afford as many as he's made, and certainly not any more. That's why I say he needs to focus on social skills; there's still work to do, and he's still one of the few people doing it, and he needs social credibility to be able to do so.

(I suppose his biggest mistake was spreading himself across so many causes, and hence making himself a lot of enemies… But I'm not going to criticise him for that; it's better than I've ever done.)

> I condescend about his manner because when he slipped up, he slipped up big-time

In his failure he seems to have achieved success greater than pretty much anyone else in the tech industry. The GPL and the laughably successful strategy behind it is one of the main planks underpinning the modern tech industry, and Stallman was one of the key characters to set in motion that agglomerative process that is the modern OSS stack.

Stallman has arguably had a more transformative impact on the software industry than any CEO in recent history. It is a weak argument, because any one man can only do so much, but it is there. More than can be said about most people.

If that is his contribution with slip-ups you must have high expectations for him.

I do. He's Richard Stallman.

The slip-ups I'm referring to were largely spur-of-the-moment social blunders; there's only one general principle I know he has that I think is wrong. If he hadn't made those, there'd be less fodder against him, so he could do more. I'm glad he's not making them as much, but he's still doing it enough that he had to resign from the FSF to prevent it from being dragged down by association with him.

That is brilliant

That rider makes quite a read.

> If you would like to put my speech on the Internet, or distribute it in digital form, I insist on using the formats of the free software community: Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Speex format for audio, and Matroska VP8 (Webm) or Ogg Theora for video. Please do not distribute my speech in any other format.

Presumably ruling out YouTube and Vimeo at a stroke.

> If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too.

Good to know.

Youtube supports WebM. In fact WebM development is sponsored by Google.

His problem with youtube would be a different one: Non-free javascript.

But it says Please do not distribute my speech in any other format.

Even with FOSS JavaScript, I don't think YouTube offers the option to disable other codecs. From further down the rider:

> If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you can't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and I won't let you use it for my speech.

edit I'd skipped over the point about non-Free JavaScript

That doesn't mean "please do not use other formats in distribution"; it means "please do not use other formats as distribution". You should be able to access the speech using free, patent-unencumbered software;

I don't follow what distinction you're making here. Stallman said Please do not distribute my speech in any other format. That means he's not ok with you distributing his speech using, say, H264.

No, he's not. But it sounds like he would tolerate H.264 plus Theora, if the Theora version was always provided to people that the H.264 version was provided to.

> it sounds like he would tolerate H.264 plus Theora, if the Theora version was always provided to people that the H.264 version was provided to.

I don't agree that this is a reasonable interpretation of the text. I really don't think he could have been much more clear: he is not ok with this.

For audio codecs, Stallman could not be more explicit. He's not OK with using non-Free codecs, and makes no exception for where multiple codecs are offered:

> I insist on using the formats of the free software community: Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Speex format for audio, and Matroska VP8 (Webm) or Ogg Theora for video. Please do not distribute my speech in any other format.

Clear and categorical. He is similarly explicit on the topic of video codecs:

> Please do not ever broadcast or publish my speeches in formats that are not good for free software.

There's no wiggle-room here, he uses the word 'ever'. From a little later in the document:

> you must use only Ogg format or Matroska VP8 (Webm).

Again, no wiggle-room. There is no implication of an exception permitting the use of non-Free codecs when multiple encodings are offered.

With all of that said, the FSF say here [0] that they're ok with H264 as a fallback. That page was published just 4 days ago, so perhaps they've reconsidered their position. See also the (currently empty) HN thread on that page. [1]

edit For what it's worth, in Feb 2016 Stallman was still going with the hard-line, see his 2016 talk in Switzerland at [2]

[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-fsfs-approach-to-usi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24087382

[2] https://audio-video.gnu.org/video/

Speech or beer?

Free as in 4 freedoms.

Freedom zero should be only for people.

> Footnotes

> The word “free” in “free software” refers to freedom, not to price; the price paid for a copy of a free program may be zero, or small, or (rarely) quite large.

What's disturbing to me is that this idea is under attack by people who believe we are morally responsible for the users of our software. Meaning, software should not be free for everyone, only free for people that won't use it immorally.

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