I 100% support what they do and preach knowing FULL well I will likely never 100% do as they recommend. That's not actually a big problem.
Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.
This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.
Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.
Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.
Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.
Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.
I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authorities have enormous power to expand the definition of "offending" when it pleases them to do so.
Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.
I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.
Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.
"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.
Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.
The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.
And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.
In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.
(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)
For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?
Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.
Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.
It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.
> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.
Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.
The solution is to make such labor practices NOT legal and force everyone into a good field of play and rules for the game(s).
But in neither case do I believe that "the government is colluding to eliminate first amendment rights" which I believe is a reasonably specific definition of censorship. This is just culture culturing.
In what world does Linux on the desktop provide "useful pressure" to anyone? The only Linux "desktop" that has provided any pressure on the desktop to Microsoft and Apple is ChromeOS. ChromeOS is decidedly not a "Linux desktop". If Google flipped ChromeOS to Fuchsia tomorrow it would provide the same pressure with zero Linux.
Third parties don't care about the Linux desktop either. If Linux is even considered it's a distant third place. If Electron dropped Linux support tomorrow a good number of applications would drop Linux support the next day.
Even the likes of Valve supporting Linux is more of a hedge against Microsoft than anything compelling about desktop environments on Linux.
For end users, WSL and Crossover do allow for more freedom than if these things didn't exist.
You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
Here Stallman again rails against Ubuntu. Okay, maybe Ubuntu isn't perfect, but s/Microsoft windows/Ubuntu/ would be quite an improvement, and especially since the 100% free/libre stuff he recommends are caveated to hell it's the only pragmatic/realistic option there is right now – not necessarily Ubuntu itself, but some distro which includes the same firmware, nVidia drivers, and such. And if a lot of people are actually running Ubuntu/Linux you end up having a lot more leverage.
By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Love your username btw.
Sure, but that was back in the 80s and this is now.
That someone had a lot of good ideas and did good work 35 years ago doesn't mean they're not hampering it today. I once worked for a business where the owner worked very hard to build things up (or so I heard), but when I worked there all he really used his business for was to show his boyfriends around to impress them or something; I rarely saw him. That's all fine, except that the business was directionless and basic stuff wasn't getting done (like, say, my employment contract). Eventually there was a bit of an intervention and he was ousted (his dad also owned part of the company), which was badly needed because he was really running things in to the ground, in spite of having built it up in the first place.
> Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.
No, but the FSF could be promoting Ubuntu instead of railing against it. If I'm interested in Free Software and find the FSF website then all I get are unpractical solutions.
But what the FSF really should be doing is lobby this kind of thing with governments, schools, corporations and such.
I'm trying to understand your meaning. You went on to say:
> You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
But every example of such political parties/organizations I can think of (in my experience) has 'puritanical' wings that serve to establish the key direction.
> It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.
I was unable to follow your logic. Perhaps actual example of this happening would be useful.
> By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Forgive me, but it appears like you're focusing on practically achievable goals rather than having a long term plan. If Ubuntu continued along its current path of just partnering with vendors, only "they" being able to build the signed boot images that machines boot, then it is not unreasonable to suspect that at some point users will lose all ability to build their own kernel for their machine.
I'm not sure that Stallman is intentionally positioning himself this way (he seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance), but I could see it actually working. The big problem with Stallman is that he has to be at least moderately credible in order to extend the Overton window, but he seems to perpetually be right on the edge of being completely dismissed. If that happens then the window snaps back shut.
Richard Stallman has largely been not averse to pragmatism, he is the sort that is willing to clearly articulate his stance as to what he thinks is right, but has also been willing to endorse all sorts of incrementalism. For example:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast-dev/2001-February/00...
"In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use.""
(I am desperately trying to avoid inserting a Bernie Sanders analogy here..)
So, let's keep pragmatism, reality and wisdom above idealism.
Or, ya know, they could just stake out reasonable, nuanced positions that organizations could adopt or at least be a starting point for further developments
Stallman is infamous for his inability to recognize viewpoints other than his own as having worth or validity. He is literally incapable of such a big-brain plan because there's no way he could see a moderate position as valid.
In other words, the fact that you don't see these positions I think is a result of a mild "embrace, extend extinguish" and not "no one thought of this before."
Also I agree 100%.
Toxic people shouldn't have a voice because then all sorts of people will decide to not get involved in a community where such people can be leaders.
Trust me in this, I should know :(
"Cancelled" and "toxic" are vague terms that we really need to stop using, please use the more precise words you mean. Has he broken the law or been unforgivably abusive, etc? If so, say that. If not, stop throwing accusations.
And again, helpful to whom? Yes. Stallman's no diplomat or ambassador, but that's not the job he's trying to do.
With Microsoft and Apple the software is commercial and not free, but they do a good job of handholding the customer and working through bugs and technical issues over the phone.
With that said, I appreciate what Stallman has done, if nothing else, to shine light on what freedoms we're giving up, and on the contrasts between the different free and non-free models that are in use today.
It's more likely that we'd have the situation we had with UNIX; incompatible forks tied to incrutable hardware drivers that no one can fix with a zillion different combinations so that when you sat down at a terminal you had no idea what to do -thanks to people being able to take the BSD/MIT software and create their own contrarian forks.
GNU wasn't innovative because it was free, or even because it's source was free. It was innovative because it forced people to play nice.
The UNIX Wars demonstrated how well people play with others when left to their own desires (not at all).