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Comment by iso1210 | Hacker News Reader

RMS has been saying this stuff for decades, but people ignore him.

This sentiment gets repeated all the time and it drives me crazy.

I've read a lot of stuff by RMS and am certainly aware of his concerns.

I have an iPhone and Mac so I guess you would consider that I "ignored" him. This is a ridiculous conclusion. I considered the risks and trade-offs of non-FOSS software, and regrettably accepted them, because the FOSS alternatives had trade-offs that cumulatively (for me) were much worse. Unlike RMS, I am not a one-dimensional person that only evaluates tech on the single dimension of freedom. Tech is not a religion for me; it's just a tool.

RMS pontificating about FOSS does not magically bring iPhone comparable FOSS software and hardware into existence. If the FOSS community wants consumer adoption, ratio of pontificating about to building consumer products needs to be much lower.

TL;DR: You understood the trade-off, and chose to become a product for the convenience. The majority of us here have done the same, because becoming a product is part of the modern life. Nowadays choosing digital purity is like becoming a digital Amish.

Bingo. RMS is not being ignored. People are just making informed decisions that FOSS purists don't like.

Informed decision is a high bar.

I'm pretty sure that most go with habit and convenience. I mean.... Apple could lock MacOSX down tomorrow and charge you $100 for terminal access and "informed decision" people would still argue how good MacBooks are (they aren't that good)

MacOS personally looks nice and functions in a logical way - so I consider MacBooks good. It’s a personal choice while weighing negatives like how MacOS is not ‘free software’ that anyone can fork, change, and sell on their own.

I disagree that it functions in a logical way.

I literally have to have an app to make my bluetooth mouse scroll in the opposite direction than the trackpad, because there is "Scroll Direction" checkbox in both mouse and trackpad... but it's actually one config option. And with every update I hope that they don't screw up that app... OSX has less and less of "less is more".

No one takes you seriously when you describe an interdependent mutually beneficial bur imperfect relationship as "become a product"

I think people don't like to think themselves as a product, but that's what we are. We're a potential source of income, and companies will want to know how's your health, where do you go, what do you buy, how you use your time, etc., in order to realize as much of that income as possible.

It's a mutually-beneficial trade-off, it's just that one party gains individually, and the other gains by quantity. Advertisers wouldn't care a lot what restaurants you like, but they care a lot about what restaurants people in your city like.

> Tech is not a religion for me; it's just a tool.

Ok, it is a "tool", but it's like an axe controlled by another person, not you. Maybe you trust that person with such a tool; I don't.

That much was known upon purchasing the axe - maybe it cuts trees 50% quicker and thus was worth the tradeoff, but now you can re-evaluate your options and purchase a different axe.

You are doing the exact thing I am complaining about. I DON'T trust Apple and never said I did; I quite explicitly elaborated on this above.

Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.

> Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.

I'm afraid that'll never happen, at least, until most people don't care about their privacy and are willing to accept one-sided tradeoffs with phone vendors. BUT, there are alternatives like LineageOS that do a pretty good job. They only need more acceptance by public to be able to compete at the level of a trillion-dollar company like AAPL.

Right. And I think projects like LineageOS are super interesting.

My beef is just with statements like "people ignore RMS," as I have yet to see any evidence of this. Everything I have observed is that anyone who has heard of RMS is fully aware of his concerns, but most of those people just have different priorities.

> Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.

But spending your money on Apple products certainly won't either.

> magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence

Well, purchase a Pixel 5, install CalyxOS or Graphene, lock bootloader again. Job done. Probably you'll lose some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.

> Probably you'll lose some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.

The amount of money needed to bring CalyxOS to the iPhone level of polish and to get the same sets of popular apps on there is probably in the millions.

Freedom and privacy are not free.

Trust in this discussion isn't a binary 1/0. You do trust Apple in some regards, else it'd be impossible to use their devices for anything. There's a tradeoff being made, that Apple does not do 'certain evil things'. This one's crossing the boundary for some, opening the floodgate for others. That's the issue at hand.

For example, say US government. I trust the US government not to kill me (Dutch citizen, not a terrorist, not a criminal, etc etc). Does that mean I trust the US government with my personal data? No, that's a different discussion. And if I were to trust them with my personal data, does that mean I believe the US government has integrity? No. I've been very disappointed with the US government with regards to a recent war (I'll refrain from details as its irrelevant), so they need to earn back credibility. In my language there's a saying 'vertrouwen komt te voet, maar vertrekt per paard' which translates to something akin to 'trust comes on foot and goes on horseback'.

Well your sentiment drives me crazy, especially for techies. It is up to us whether a non-feudal digital society will exist or not. It's true that FOSS will never be as good as the monopolists' who are able to pour billions of dollars into polish while tightening their grip over our lives. But if we are unwilling to make sacrifices in this fight then the battle is already lost.

> I've read a lot of stuff by RMS and am certainly aware of his concerns.

> RMS pontificating [...]

Uh, no. RMS was right all along and you're still not getting it.

You bought devices you can't upgrade, you can't run software on, that oppress indie devs, that tax 30% of the market, that sell out freedom fighters in oppressive regimes, and that now spy on you. And now you realize the problem.

The only way out of this madness is to get the sensible representatives in Congress to move forward with an antitrust case. Breaking up the power monopoly will perhaps get us back to a place where we have rights. The way it is now, Apple is a central point of failure.

Again, everything RMS spoke was truth, and it's here again rearing its ugly head.

The real-world alternative to Apple is Microsoft, Google, and Blackberry, not GNU. Because almost no one and no money cares about GNU.

The real world alternative is healthy competition.

Which is definitely absent in mobile phone space.

You're right. Free Software isn't there yet. So I just took some of my money and donated to a few projects.. Drop in the ocean, but a drop nonetheless.

If anyone is going the purist route, it means no Dropbox, Facebook, OneDrive, etc. since they’ve been scanning for CSAM content way before Apple.

But not on your own device.

so what?

It's weird that people seem to trust Congress with this. This is the same Congress that is considering banning end-to-end encryption, remember?

Congress isn't wholly incompetent, despite the fun we have poking at it. The US has a functioning democracy and leads the world in so many good and important metrics.

Our government isn't one person or one party, and that's a strength.

One of my local reps is leading the big tech breakup movement, and I'm incredibly proud to have her representing me.

>leads the world in so many good and important metrics.

Can you help me with a few? Maybe 5? I'm pretty low on the US government at the moment. I can name quite a few things we lead in that are horrible.

>One of my local reps is leading the big tech breakup movement, and I'm incredibly proud to have her representing me.

I think that's great but I doubt that will ever be allowed to happen. Too much money will be thrown at congress and they will either do nothing, or do nothing in a way that makes them look like they did.

Innovation, science, technology, art (music, film, game, etc.), athletics (Olympics, etc.), space exploration, economy (by multiple metrics), energy production, military power, property value, ...

I might agree with parts of your list, but I think that people are way too down on the US and its accomplishments. I wouldn't want to live elsewhere.

That's the crux of it. There are a few edge cases, but quality of life across the whole spectrum of wealth is worlds ahead almost everywhere else. Things aren't perfect, but they are pretty damn good compared to almost anywhere else. People get too hung up on first world problems to appreciate what they've got.

>The US has a functioning democracy and leads the world in so many good and important metrics.

25th most democratic country ("flawed democracy") [1]

Which metrics? Defense spending? Healthcare cost?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country

Congress is trash, but they're the institution that runs your life, and you at least get a nominal say about who is in it. If you're arguing for revolution, I won't disagree, but what it really sounds like is the traditional "we can't do this one thing until we do everything else first."

The funny thing is that you are failing to recognize the value of devices that can render web pages, give navigation instructions that won't get me lost, run games, have long battery life, great screen quality, and a bunch of other things.

I have yet to see a phone with the build quality and value add that I need a mobile phone to have from Free Software endeavors. These are the table stakes for the majority of people. Not the list you just rattled off. You aren't even in the running to compete on the other value adds if you can't do the above.

> The only way out of this madness is to get the sensible representatives in Congress to move forward with an antitrust case

What are you looking for out of this anti-trust case? Apple is not a monopoly. There are numerous privacy-focused phones and Android distros available. I think there just isn't a huge market for a privacy-focused phone (no, 1000 people on a HN and twitter is not a huge market.)

> If the FOSS community wants consumer adoption, ratio of pontificating about to building consumer products needs to be much lower.

Actually it's not like FOSS community is fighting for your adoption, you know? It's you who should do something in order to make good things happen.

He did. He bought Apple products. That's the whole point.

They didn't buy Apple products for any ethical reason, and didn't claim to have done. They bought Apple products because RMS didn't personally make the UI of Free Software polished enough for them.

This is a very solipsistic way to look at the world. FOSS has no duty to try to appeal to you personally, and if you accept the end of your privacy over UI niggles, that's your choice to make. The reason Apple can spend so much on UI is because of your willingness to eat whatever they serve you.

After emancipation, there were plenty of slaves who wouldn't leave the plantation, and became slaves-by-another-name in the sharecropping system. I don't think any of them were so up their own asses that they blamed the slaves who left for not making it easier to leave.

Also, RMS didn't talk about "FOSS." He talked about the inevitable future if we continued our trajectory, and suggested Free Software as the solution.

I'm also not going to make lowering your carbon emissions just as easy and convenient as using all of the carbon you want. Take responsibility for yourself, or at least don't actively denigrate people for being right.

You have hit on one of the problem permeating modern society. No one wants to take personal responsibility for anything.

it always some one else that is to blame, the rich, the evil corporation, the right wing, the left wing, china,.... etc etc etc

This is easy to say, but it’s clear from decades of cognitive science that people find it extremely hard to avoid the affordances and incentives in their environment. Blaming the victims of a concerted corporate and political effort to constrain individual liberties seems churlish. This is a tragedy of the commons and the only solution is cooperation and dialogue to set common standards and norms.

But I never asked FOSS to make me anything.

All I said is if the FOSS community wants consumer adoption, the path forward is making things consumers like, NOT blaming us for "ignoring" RMS, because no one ever did that.

Basically everything your post implies (that I think I am entitled to something, that I think everything should be easy, etc...) is not true.

As I keep pointing out again and again, all I'm saying is that people don't use FOSS, but it's not because they don't value privacy, not because they don't value freedom, and for the love of biscuits not because of anything to do with RMS or ignoring him.

The options are use an iPhone (not freedom), use an Android phone (not freedom), or use something like LineageOS. Using something like LineageOS is major commitment that most people don't have room in their lives for, because they have different priorities, which might also be very good.

EDIT: Here's a metaphor, it'd be like if you asked your friend who owns a car with an ICE why he keeps ignoring Al Gore's warnings about the climate. It's like, Al Gore can be right, your friend can believe in Climate change, and he can still decide he needs an ICE car because he's barely making ends meet and is trying to support a family. You can claim that your friend has made bad choices, but there is no argument that he "ignored" Al Gore.

I guess consumerism is at the heart of the problem. And juicy complexity successfully keeps consumers remaining such.

I think humans - having been nomads for the most part of their existence – just aren't equipped to care for their habitat (say: ecosystems). It's rather recent that became important, <8k years compared to 250k before.

> The reason Apple can spend so much on UI is because of your willingness to eat whatever they serve you.

No, it's because FOSS has no economic model.

Agreed and a great example of why his message on free software is so important. I would never have been as cognizant of the topic if not for his laser-focused and committed work.

Quite literally: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57

Every year RMS sounds less crazy.

They don't ignore him, they just don't have the same priorities. Having privacy with a phone means giving up a lot of other things which people value.

>Having privacy with a phone means giving up ...

Well it would mean giving up the phone entirely.

who is RMS?

Richard M Stallman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

https://xkcd.com/743/

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