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Comment by waplot | Hacker News Reader

> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously... But the crucial thing is, free ones might make it easier for some people to say, 'Let's move off this non-free thing, and play a game that is free. So we can have the same pleasure, but without paying freedom as the price.'“

i'm sorry but i just can't read this without laughing. what does stallman think gamers are like?

i can only imagine the average teenage gamer trying to get their friends to stop playing virtually every game on the market and instead play some obscure game and trying to teach them how to install gcc and git to get it running

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Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise.

It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust. It's already so bad that you practically need a separate machine for many games if you want to run anything remotely resembling a VM on your main one, and it's going to get much worse. (ex. TPM requirement in some games on Win11)

And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.

I feel like free software, and RMS's biggest blind spot is the network, between people, and between computers. Everything is framed and discussed in this old timey way of using computers, where you had a general purpose machine that was personal that you programmed to do things you needed, or installed software on, to also do something valueable.

Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface.

Which means, that in order to do anything useful, you need to communicate with some other service that is running software that has access to your data. The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious.

Take something as old and as open as IRC. I have absolutely no way of knowing if the server Im connecting to is actually running the software I think it is, unmodified. The only people who have that level of access, have root on the server.

Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.

> The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious.

How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they are a far worse option, precisely due to the loss of freedom and autonomy for not much additional gain.

Sure, if you accept that all your software are belong to them, then clearly the freedom to run libre stuff is useless, tautologically. But maybe you shouldn't be ready to give away that freedom just yet?

That you cannot be sure what someone else is running "over there", on a machine you don't control, is a fact of nature. Trading away your freedom for a foolish attempt to control that is misguided and shortsighted.

It's not freedom in general that's useless, but specifically freedom when that software relies on an upstream service to do things.

Your argument sounds like it is against the use of software that requires such an upstream service in the first place, which is a fair stance to take. The Problem is when that upstream service is Necessary for whatever you are trying to do. Like in circumstances where interaction and collaboration with other users is the goal.

> It's not freedom in general that's useless, but specifically freedom when that software relies on an upstream service to do things.

Until that service (such as a bank) decides that your rooted, user-controlled phone is no good, and forces you to use one controlled by the manufacturer, if you want access to your bank account.

If you want access from an app on your phone yes, not just to have access.

The fact is it’s not just us that are stakeholders in the devices we carry. Our mobile network provider is a stakeholder, the manufacturer is a stakeholder, our bank is a stakeholder. This is why e.g. we don’t have unlimited rights over the bank cards or those access code generator devices some banks used to issue.

If you want to use your phone for some of the functions of a bank card, then some of your banks interests in the functioning and management of that card roll over into your phone. If you want to play a social online game on your device, then now the games company and the wider community of gamers playing that game with you has an interest in the management of your device. If you don't like that, that's fine you should be able to have as much control over your device as you want ideally, but you wont be playing those games or using those services.

Cory Doctorow is one of the few people in the techie public space that seems to have a really good grip on these issues and some practical ideas on how to solve these problems, through chains of trust based on users owning the keys to the chain of trust on their devices. It’s a really hard complex problem though.

> If you want access from an app on your phone yes, not just to have access.

Ah, you mean in the case where you have a different computer available to you, that has not (yet) been locked against its user like your phone has. But we are so certain that this locking of compute won't spread, that we treat all other computers (that are locked), as an exotic exception, and the only remaining class of devices not yet locked (PCs) as the norm.

> Our mobile network provider is a stakeholder, the manufacturer is a stakeholder, our bank is a stakeholder. [..] some of your banks interests in the functioning and management of that card roll over into your phone.

Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate. Especially when freedom-respecting options are nearly absent from the market, and one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones.

But most importantly, there's one item missing in your list of interests: the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations. What use is free software if none but a handful of hobbyists can run it?

There are a few online only banks, but beyond those you don’t have to have access to any computer at all to get access to your bank account at most banks.

> Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate.

Whether that interest is legitimate and acceptable is a decision for the user. If I decide to accept the terms for my banking app, what’s that got to do with you?

> one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones

I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.

> the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations

How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?

> Whether that interest is legitimate and acceptable is a decision for the user. If I decide to accept the terms for my banking app, what’s that got to do with you?

Whether you accept those terms has nothing to do with me. What has something to do with me is that there is no bank that allows me to access my account with my phone, without requiring me to relinquish control of that phone to its manufacturer.

But you're right, I can always use my PC for access, and, when that option too is removed, go to the bank in person, to one of their increasingly scarce physical offices, and slowly get locked out of more and more modern society. Alternatively, I can try to proselytize free software, to be met with "Sorry I can't install that, if I unlock my PC I won't be able to use my bank".

> I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly - what I meant was that one cannot argue almost all consumers are making that choice. As you point out, many people chose the moderately free Android. That freedom is growing more moderated by the day.

> How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?

Extremely:

Apple Removes App That Helps Hong Kong Protesters Track the Police - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...

Of 3,200 apps missing from the China App Store, almost a third relate to hot button human rights topics targeted by China’s censors, such as privacy tools, Tibetan Buddhism, Hong Kong protests and LGBTQ issues. Porn and gambling apps made up less than 5 percent. - https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/apple-censo...

Apple orders Telegram to block some Belarus protest channels [..] Among all the things that the Telegram CEO revealed, here is what’s most concerning: Apple apparently restricts app developers from informing their users that some content from their app has been hidden on request by Apple. - https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-orders-telegram-to-block-som...

Cattle that waits until the day of slaughter to attempt escape does not fare well.

(I don't mean to single out Apple - they get the most coverage, but I'm not sure if/how much better the situation is with Google's Play store. Which locked phones cannot escape.)

The bank and the game are far less important than me retaining full control of a general-purpose computing device and sensor that I keep by my side for a majority of the time and trust in the most intimate parts of my home. This is also a fact.

If the bank and the game cannot function in this reality, then the only solution is for them to provide separate devices for me to interface with them.

That is partially my argument, but not entirely. I'm rather arguing that even if you're using upstream services, you still want to have full and total control and ownership of the device you're using the upstream service from.

In fact, I find it a total jump in logic and a fallacy to conclude that I don't want or need freedom on my own device just because I'm a heavy user of upstream services. How does that even remotely follow?

I think the idea isn't about whether you would Want or Need freedom/control/ownership of your device; it's about the value of that freedom when an application depends on a closed upstream service versus if all the functionality is captured by the app running locally.

I personally think that its important to have that control and freedom for its own sake, but I understand the sentiment that "if my data is getting shipped off Anyways to some unfree system then why bother? I can't make the same guarantees around privacy and security as I can with a fully libre application"

> this old timey way of using computers, where you had a general purpose machine that was personal that you programmed to do things you needed,

Personal machines are actually new-time'y, not old-time'y. In the old times there weren't that many computers, and you accessed one via a terminal.

The difference is more in how remote services are now things you can't program and modify and tinker with, but rather closed-source "products" or "services" in shiny wrappers.

It is worth pointing out that einpoklum's point is not merely academic: Stallman is old enough that he really did get introduced to computers and programming and software through corporate and university mainframes, and not through personal machines like (I assume) most of us.

The decline of the early open hacker culture in favour of corporate proprietary software during the 70s deeply informed the idea behind Free Software.

I do tons of useful stuff on my computers running software locally on those computers.

You are right about network services working hard to own more and more of the interactions and make it increasingly difficult to manage one's relationships and interactions without those services.

Frankly, I've responded by making damn sure I have interactions with the people I care about that are not owned by these services. Should one change, or I somehow am cutoff, I can maintain my relationships and interactions with people I care about.

Regarding IRC, the resolution to your dilemma is open data in tandem with open code. Sure, they could be running an IRC like thing. But, your data, interactions with others over IRC, are all open. Same goes for email and such. You can take it with you. You can change servers. You can read all of it without enabling technology.

Regarding cheating...

That's a social problem being attacked with technology and it's going to bring grave consequences. Personally, I would rather not play than deal with what's being done in an attempt to prevent cheating. The people interested in doing that are playing their very favorite game, and the cost of escalating that cat and mouse impacts all of us. Impacts you.

> That's a social problem being attacked with technology

Any problem in the last couple of centuries is being attacked with technology. That's what the industrial revolution is about.

Steam engine? That's a transportation problem being attacked with technology. Covid vaccines? That's a healthcare problem being attacked with technology. Anti-missile missiles? That's an international relations problem being attacked with technology.

> Steam engine? That's a transportation problem being attacked with technology

steam engine has been adapted to transportation, after transportation was invented, they haven't solved any social problem.

there wasn't a transportation problem, there was a problem applying the technology to transportation, for lack of better alternatives.

steam engine in cars were banned until 1920s, so cars used electric engines.

it worked (kinda) on trains

main application of steam engine still remains steam turbines for power (electricity) generation, which is a modern technological challenge by itself.

> Covid vaccines? That's a healthcare problem being attacked with technology

COVID vaccines helped an economic problem, people would have survived by avoiding contacts

they have been in fact deployed firstly and foremost in developed (AKA rich) countries (2.8 billion people around the world are still waiting to get their first shot).

modern drug manufacturing is not about society anymore and hasn't been for at least a century now.

> Anti-missile missiles? That's an international relations problem being attacked with technology.

That's a warfare problem that has always been about technology, since forever.

What needs to be explained is why throwing technology at power generation problems, economic problems, healthcare problems, or warfare problems is seemingly ok, but social problems are a no-go zone.

Because using technology to solve social problems leads to restraining people's personal freedom, choices, and expression in a much more direct manner than other domains of problem solving.

Furthermore, this restraint tends to impact people unevenly. As ineffective as the government may or may not be, at least the goal is for all people to be considered equal in the eyes of the law. With technology the power lives with those who own and create the technology, who have even less oversight and accountability than those who make the laws.

The inequality issue exists as well with Covid vaccines and with weapons — other applications of technology, so societal problems are not standing alone there. The unequal access to nuclear weapons is... a good thing I guess? What still needs to be explained is why throwing technology at power generation problems, economic problems, healthcare problems, or warfare problems is seemingly ok regardless of inequality, but social problems are a no-go zone.

It is about technology alignment, and the nature of people.

Right now, our tech is not capable of understanding meaning a mere child does easily. This makes it very poorly aligned with the problem domain in that applying it will create at least as many and probably more problems than it will solve.

Other problem domains have seen better tech alignment and have also seen greater success, though one could argue we also poorly understand the new problems created in some cases. (Global warming makes burning fuels a much worse deal than initially believed)

The side effects inherent with such blunt instruments as appear to be required to apply tech to social, human problems warrant consideration well beyond, "just because we can."

In the future, when our tech is much better, perhaps it can address human, social problems with far fewer costs to those subjected to the solutions.

Just how much control over your life and expression do you feel is necessary?

Right now it is well beyond anything I feel good about and it has just gotten started!

This thread has started with a problem of cheating in online games (like head-aiming bots in first-person shooters) and (non-free) anti-cheating software as a solution to that (not ideal, but closing that gap somewhat). GGP pointed out it's "a social problem" and suggested we shouldn't attack it with technology (anti-cheating software). I still stand unconvinced with regards to that.

Otherwise, I had been denied boarding in the Covid era because the software had had a bug, so I tend to generally agree with your sentiment that the technology has too much control over my life already.

Well let's break it down I am the ggp.

I think this is a good conversation personally.

Now, are you unconvinced that the act of cheating itself is a social problem?

I did use course terminology, it could be a moral failing as well. I lump a lot of those under social. And that's to my detriment obviously. But let's sort that out.

And then there's the part I'm convinced that I understand you on, and that is I believe our current state of technology is not a good fit for social problems, and you believe that it is. Or maybe more accurately, the solutions work and you're happy with that I'm concerned about costs and risks associated with said solutions.

I think once we understand one another there let's have a short chat.

I don't disagree with your classification of cheating. I don't believe that technology is necessarily always a good fit for social problems. What I take issue with is a blunt dismissal of technology as a practical solution for social problems. Sometimes it's a good fit, sometimes it's a bad fit, sometimes it's the only solution we've got and the other solutions are either imaginary or worse ones.

Fair.

I was coarse. Reading through, I was able to see it

Life, people, come with a bazillion, edge, corner, intersection cases, right? I am moved by the likes of Lessig, RMS, others in that we are super complex! And computer tech right now is missing a couple big things!

Meaning and reasoning basically.

Context is hard.

In the "we just want to play on a fair field" context, of course! I get it. Tech can help with cheaters for sure, though I do think it is a temporary help at best. The really brilliant people with resolve get through and may well be as great of a gamer as they are cheater. The challenge, "real game" is what really gets them going.

One could say the same of a cartel leader, thief, and others who play this game of life in that way.

And we struggle with tech and law constantly!

There are parallels.

Poor law causes a lot of grief, wasted time, people enduring punishment that should not, and we have a process for that.

And it is a shitty process!

I would feel a lot better with a similar dynamic applied where we do reach for tech tools.

Another parallel: mandatory sentencing. We put people, many of whom are elected, others selected, who we believe worthy of judgement (And I know how debatable that all is, just roll with it for sake of discussion please!), into a position of real power, and we accept that because our lives are generally better for having done it.

Mandatory Sentencing is a mess. Now we basically take this complex human capable of judgement and boil it down to a more rule based thing not so unlike what computers would do. I am not sure that ever made sense. Whether it does is an interesting discussion, but what I really want to say here is more about where tech falls short and put some meat behind "social", as I should have done.

We are perhaps not so far apart on this. Seems my lazy comment got me a robust discussion I find far more worthy than the comment was!

Nice when that happens.

Circling back then, if I am to say anything, it is process which bothers me the most.

When we are really impacting people, ruining lives or changing them seriously, or improving them frankly, there are no do overs. Our time here is our time and taking that very, very seriously seems like it should matter a whole lot more than it often does with tech and social / society.

We are trending toward more bad fits than good in my view.

RMS, character that he is, absolutely does take it hard to an extreme. He should not have ruling power, but we need that voice, just as we need ours.

In that context, your push back was solid and for me useful and productive! I am better for having worked at this a bit. And these matters are important. Increasingly so.

I hope my attempt to clarify and back away from the worst of my thoughts here is similar for you.

We both are likely to come away from this tuned up a bit and better at the topic at the very least. (True for me)

Cheers and game on!

Oh, and while we wait. I thought of a much better way to express this. So I'm going to drop it here, and then wait for your response and then proceed.

One area where technology is not a good idea is civics. Our votes the law things like that. At the present time, humans are best at managing human Affairs. That includes things like cheating crime who will be the leader oh, what's socially acceptable downtown, all that kind of stuff.

With voting in particular, we are in a position of forced trust with technology. It is going to be cheated, exploited, and has multiple times, and we really don't have options. We need people to physically vote and deal with the votes, or we're going to be under the thumb of the people that own the machines. That's pretty clear.

I am open to the idea of cheating not being in that collection of stuff that humans are best at dealing with. I also think we should have more options like we used to, setting up her own servers and what not like what used to be possible. And frankly still is possible. From time to time I like to play a little Q3A, and I just set up a server and run with friends. I don't think that game will ever die for us.

I want a lot of us, myself included, oppose is the very blunt instrument currently being used to manage cheating. It affects us in ways that really hurt the open Libre software causes. We can't know what's running on our machines, we can't run what we want on our machines, and so forth.

I did this on voice fall in the car, so please forgive typos, but perhaps this puts the chat in a better place. We shall see.

Not all social problems, just those where the people involved have opposing goals. And even then, it's not so much a no-go as unlikely to work. We can tackle problems like advertising and recruiting for local hobby groups. But people will actively subvert, exploit, or ignore software meant to enforce social norms. Anti-cheating software restricts what honest users can do, and cheaters will find a way around it if they like the game enough. DRM is a ham-fisted attempt to force digital media, an industry with virtually no distribution costs, into existing financial models. Solving the problem of encouraging artists to produce work with the promise of money is hard, but DRM isn't solving it.

Social problems are just very hard to solve, and they're rarely made simpler by automation or algorithms. They often require trust in another person's intent.

> just those where the people involved have opposing goals.

This describes every competition ever; person A wants the winner to be A, but person B wants the winner to be B. Should we stop doing doping tests at Olympic games, as it's an application of (non-free) technology to a social problem?

Medical tests are only part of the solution there. They would be worthless without the more important component: a trusted third-party tester. As we've seen with DMCA takedowns on YouTube, an automatic third-party arbiter ends up favoring one side. Usually the one who learns to game it.

The imaginary solution works reliably in 100% cases, but the available solution works only in 99%. Should we accept that practical solution in the interim, or should we dismiss it and fall to a "perfect solution fallacy"?

False choice.

What we can do put process in the mix.

The available solution coupled with time tested, production proven ways and means is about as good as we can get. And that is not very good, but it is livable and people value that a whole lot more than is given credit for.

Bad things are gonna happen no matter what, right?

Humans doing the messy human works are important. It ain't cheap. Never was, and for sure isn't now. But when we do that work, people do get options and overall harm is reduced, but more importantly, consent, acceptance, compliance all go up.

And or the ones funding it.

That dynamic is exactly why so many people oppose electronic voting, electronic court "guidence" and other similar things.

People are super messy, complicated and the strength of automation coupled with the allure of doing less work is the root cause for an awful lot of unnecessary grief, despite let's say for discussion, the best of intent.

Speaking mildly - it is the Free Software Foundation, not the Free Network Foundation. They aren't trying to tackle all the world's problems at once.

But also the network is profoundly different than the PC to the point where "free software" doesn't mean as much. Picking HN as an example because it is really easy:

1) We don't control the content we create for HN.

2) At some point all that content will disappear.

3) If viewed as an API, there is nothing complicated to it (disregarding dang's daunting fight with comment threading & similar issues). We get a "post" button and a text page.

So there seems to be a freedom problem here but it is about data control rather than software control - far harder to solve and also not so clear cut an issue. Does it, fundamentally, limit my freedom if all my HN posts disappear? Since they are public anyway, does it mean anything for it to be exploited by someone? Things like the piratebay.whichever and youtube-dl have been in the news today as part of ongoing examples that the network is still a very free place for who we can connect to and what API they can offer.

>Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface.

And its almost always done to remove agency from the user and give it back to the corporation. Again, RMS is right. You can only truly have digital freedom if you are running your own software on your own hardware. It only seems old timey because we have been drinking the everything as a service kool aide for so long.

It doesn't have to be this way and it's not necessarily technologically superior. Its due to business forces more than anything else.

>Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.

Not everything he advocates for is always practical, the game example is one. You have to have some kind of central control in multiplayer games to make sure people aren't cheating. But there is still wisdom in what he says. We have single player only games that are demanding the same kind of access and control that multiplayer ones are. Obviously that isn't to prevent cheating.

And sometimes he is still right about a problem even if he sees every all of them as technological nails to be solved with a FOSS hammer. That's not going to work but he is identifying the problem correctly. Banks and governments are weaponizing the financial system against people they don't like and can't be trusted. How do you prevent them from doing it? I think ultimately its not a technological problem, its a political/societal one. Banks need to be reigned in and politicians need to be more afraid of the people.

Calling it useless is a really big exaggeration. The license is applicable to both software running on the server and on your client (browser) so I have no idea how you can say it is "useless". Maybe less powerful is what you're looking at? I mean security is orthogonal to "free as in speech" software. I would interpret RMS for the person writing/using the software on the server moreso than the person logging with a browser.

Not really shortsighted, when it comes to games, it was laughable then and its laughable now.

> Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise.

I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?

> For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust.

The driving force was (and still largely is) protecting copyrighted video content. That is bullshit, of course, but cheaters and video games were far down the priority pile when hardware DRM was designed. Now, it’s all about secure computing and sandboxes, and video games are still pretty much an afterthought.

> And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.

The average teenage gamer does not care. There are things we can do to improve the situation with DRM, but “how do you do fellow kids” from an old neck beard is way off the mark, and indeed laughable.

Just Google "Stallman was right", sounds like you might be in a bit if a bubble.

Well yeah. I know he has been right on a couple of occasions. Still, how does this make me unwise for laughing at him? What went worse because I did so?

To be fair, his position was interesting in the 1980s. But he’s been hopelessly out of touch with the vast majority of computer users since the 1990s. He can keep harping on about the GPL and keep watching the world pass by.

Seems weird to laugh at someone who pretty consistently predicts the future. Does it make sense to laugh at physicists too? Was their predictive theory only relevant in the early 1900s?

> I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?

[anecdotal]

luck has nothing to do with being wise.

anyway, I think unwise in this context means that RMS has been right more times than he's been wrong.

And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.

https://banksyexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LAUGH...

> The average teenage gamer does not care

that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.

Stallman rightly predicted that corporations want to amass power and control over you, and that counter-culture technologies like the computer and the Internet would slowly revert to mainstream, corporate-friendly and capitalism-friendly ideals as they become wider spread. This is hardly a fringe position.

But whereas a lot of others think the problems are structural to how society operates, and that fixing it would require rebuilding under a new economic framework, Stallman's only insight is that software you can't modify is the devil. DRM is bad not because it upholds a capitalist supply-and-demand system by restricting theoretically infinite supply, but because you can't modify the .c files yourself or send them to a friend.

It's an extremely limited way of thinking that ignores any external structural or economic motivations, and focuses on an unreasonably small niche subset with a black-and-white moral answer. It sometimes makes good points, mostly accidentally, but it still has a lot of misses, e.g. the religious persistence on "software" leads to programs like the FSF's Respect Your Freedoms with incoherent policies around hardware, firmware, and ROMs, mostly from a place of ignorance.

The free software movement was quickly co-opted by corporations as the "open-source movement" by executives looking to offload their labor costs onto unpaid workers, leading to a lot of under-funded core software infrastructure as corporations rank in the cash. Stallman's "Open Source Misses the Point" essay doesn't talk at all about this, it doesn't talk about the ways that open-source is about externalizing costs, nor about the way that it's leading to maintainer burn-out, it just points out that it's kinda bad that they're releasing stuff under the MIT license instead of the GPL, and would really much prefer if people didn't do that, while not realizing that was the goal all along.

The FSF has very little force in accomplishing their goals; it's a wet paper towel tossed vaguely in the direction of actual change.

Do you recommend any other thinkers on these topics?

Don't limit yourself to technology and computers. These systems are political in nature; that is, they concern the basic fabric of how society is structured. One of the biggest tricks any new field has is thinking we're way different, won't repeat the mistakes of others. Both of these make it hard for me to recommend anything good here without getting myself into an internet argument I don't want at this point in time, but at least start reading some history of labor, of capitalism, and of corporations. A People's History of the United States is widely recommended as an intro to these things, and I might as well give it a namedrop here.

I think you've just described all of leftist theory. I was wondering specifically about thinkers on Free and Open Source software taking a broader scope than what we tend to see from the FSF.

> luck has nothing to do with being wise.

Ok, let me reframe it. Do you have any example of anything being adversely affected by the fact that anybody ever laughed at RMS? Sure, he sound profound and far seeing, but his rhetoric is anything but subtle. He’s been way off for about 30 years now.

> And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.

I know what we owe him, but his contribution is long passed now. It does not turn him into a kind of universal genius. He’s outlived his usefulness as far as software freedoms are concerned. These day he’s more of a boogeyman than someone to take seriously, and he’s got only himself to blame.

> that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.

Do you remember what you did when you were in this situation? Personally, I mostly told my parents to fuck off and did whatever I wanted on my side, which was mostly what they did not want me to do. A condescending tone when you tell them what they ought to care about is not going to cut it. And I am saying that as a neck beard father.

"what does stallman think gamers are like?"

He doesn't care, and likely has never given a single iota of thought to it, as he assumes what is best is to think like him.

And dear RMS acolytes who will almost certainly bristle at this statement; I spent enough time around him and his satellites in the 90s/oughts, to feel quite comfortable saying this. He has near zero interest (and I would argue the capacity) to try to understand what drives other people, just the self-righteous purity of his own views.

There are plenty of examples where somebody who has influenced the world was an idealist, out of touch with societal norms. RMS has serious faults, but his virtues have an immense value in my opinion.

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’.

Tho, those unreasonable men also fairly often cause quite a lot of damage to their own causes and to world in general.

Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.

> Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.

This is because the definition of 'unreasonable' is relative. For Edison, wasting thousands of hours of lightbulb experiment was quite reasonable.

For most people before him, it was squarely in the unreasonable territory, and hence it took Edison for lightbulb to happen.

Except that Edison didn’t invent the electric light bulb (first invented in 1806).

https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-ligh...

> Tho, those unreasonable men also fairly often cause quite a lot of damage to their own causes and to world in general

did they?

I think that in history those that caused quite a lot of damage to the World are those that laughed at unreasonable men, thinking they could not achieve anything substantial.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead or wearing toothbrush moustache, is purely coincidental

Hard to argue that Stallman has done that. The perpetual character assassination attempts (e.g. the failed cancelation attempt from a year or two ago) merely serve to underscore this.

"RMS has serious faults, but his virtues have an immense value in my opinion."

And I wouldn't disagree with that as an abstraction, but being in direct contact/proximity with him is an utterly dreadful form of masochism.

At a minimum, those gamers need to look at the past, and their own future.

See, when hardware was more open, I was able to preserve and continue to play the games I enjoy. In fact, I can disassemble them, learn from them, make my own.

The gamers of today won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms, if they are playing them at all.

This is just one of the many things Stallman is right about. Laughing at him is generally unwise. Ask a bunch of us how we know. Seriously.

>won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms

Do they care? Lots of these games are like fashion, where the core gameplay loop is pretty similar to exactly the same as previous games, just with a different art direction on top. The fact that its popular is what makes it popular until its not.

They will. They will want to share their roots, tell their stories, etc...

> "Do they care?"

I guarantee you that they will.

They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the impossibility of porting it without breaking some law), then they will care.

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche. The modern hardcore gamer market has tens of millions of customers - maybe hundreds if you include trivial but addictive phone games.

The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most.

And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as binaries.

If I really want to play Marble Madness on an Amiga emu, I can, even though the original code was never open sourced.

The emulators themselves frequently employ some "grey area" techniques in order to reverse engineer or otherwise replicate the systems these games ran on.

The emulator community your beloved games run on is rife with dodgy things. You know, how to get certain firmware, how they cracked this or that protection, and of course the ROMs themselves.

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche? I totally disagree. It feels like a niche until you feel it yourself. Most gamers haven't aged enough yet.

PS "the modern hardcore gamer market": I care little about that short-sighted institution. I want to preserve the cultural digital heritage of mankind, and videogames are a vital part of it. And because they are games, they are meant to be played, so a blog post with some screenshots won't do. If you disagree -- we are not on the same page, and it's not worth continuing this conversation.

You don't need to be a hardcore fan of anything to want to revisit experiences from your youth and there's a lot more people playing games now than when Jetpack Willy released in the 80s, certainly not a niche market.

Think of the situation with today's games 40 years in the future rather than 40 year old games today.

Jet Set Willy, you philistines!

I really question the size of the niche. We've got Recreations of all the classic machines going on right now, people buying arcade cabinets, and even casual gamers into Retro. Their organizations now into digital archaeology going back through trying to tell the stories communicate the impact on culture and a lot of other things.

A lot of people thought gaming is shallow, but it's really not. It has packed a major league punch on culture, tech itself given its age.

My take is we're going to have the early Roots stories oh, because things are open enough and simple enough but we can get them, and we're going to get them wall a lot of the people are still alive. But after that it's going to be a mess.

And then I try one and wonder this looks really ugly. This mechanic is rather annoying, yeah maybe it isn't worth the nostalgia.

Thankfully, I am PC gamer so most things work, outside certain set of DRM...

yet there seems to be quite an active scene around restoring aspects of 8-bit games, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune https://www.retrogamer.net/top_10/top-ten-atari-8-bit-games/

and I'm sure someone actually into the scene could pump out a long list of much better links than these.

That scene is currently vibrant. A lot of people are revisiting that early era, 1977(8?) through to the 90's.

8 bit systems, and I mean consoles, computers, industrial automation, enjoyed relevance through what is seen today as a long, diverse era of computing and gaming. The Apple 2, 1Mhz 6502 systems, was sold in various forms from 1977 through to 1994, I believe. That is crazy!

Sidebar: I snagged a 1990's machine and if you want to explore this early era of computing, an Apple Platinum is the most recent system and is very reliable. Recommended.

End Sidebar

Today, there is an active hardware scene with people making new old computers and sometimes extending their capabilities a bit. Jim Bagley and Spectrum Next wishbone example.

The MISTer FPGA system is basically a hardware emulation of a ton of retro hardware. These are hard to distinguish from the real deal, and connect to newer and old displays for a great visual experience.

Hardware cards are being made for the Apples. I have several in mine. Great experiences.

Games are being developed, and Nox Archaist is an Ultima style RPG worth a look. The C64 is seeing a lot of releases, AtariAge is where you can go for news on that.

RetroRGB has news on a lot of consoles, MISTer and others.

Sorry, no links I am on mobile and just killing a few minutes here. But, a quick google on the names will get you somewhere fun in no time.

Retro is pretty big right now. There is a lot going on.

This.

Since joining some C64-related facebook groups after buying my TheC64 retroclone, I was surprised to find the large number of new and original games for the C64 being released all the time. And they are commercial, not free!

Really happy to find the community lives on.

Yes! Me too. Similar experiences.

And what I appreciate is a modern take on these older systems. It is a sort of, "what if..." it had all continued. The Nox Archaist RPG I mentioned plays GREAT. All the hard edges Ultima style games had are gone for the most part.

The result is a very playable 8 bit game in that style, good elements maximized. Too fun.

Looks really ugly? Not in my experience. This mechanic is rather annoying? Very often true! But I'd rather be able to replay that classic oldie and find out, than never be able to do so again.

FWIW, many Unity games are not protected/obfuscated at all. I can look at the full source code of my current favorite game, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

He's right, though, even if his proposal isn't practical. Games/movies/music/etc "justify" the development of DRM technologies that inevitably metastasize in time to further lock down general-purpose computing itself.

Just because it isn't realistic in today's AAA world doesn't mean the man is wrong.

As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.

Stallman is not right as a matter of principle.

His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale.

It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him.

But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

Modern FOSS is the exact opposite of open computing. Computing affordances are trapped inside an inaccessible technical monolith instead of an inaccessible corporate monolith.

To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.

> Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

..you're blaming FOSS for not solving the "programming is hard" problem?

> To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.

Yes, if you ignore all the secondary and ecosystem effects, such as getting to use the resulting free software. I have not once looked at the source of the linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, or Firefox, yet I benefit enormously from the development method and spirit that gave birth to them. That is not zero difference.

As a programmer, the number of times a project's closed-source nature has prevented me from fixing a problem I had as a user is... one. The number of times I've availed myself of the open-source code of a project to fix a problem I had as a user is... zero--and that includes the projects I was a maintainer of! Both of these numbers are dwarfed by the number of times being closed-source hasn't prevented me from fixing a problem (as it turns out that reverse-engineering a file format is often an effective solution that rarely needs source code).

So the direct utility of open-source in being able to fix your own itches is in fact extremely rare, even for people for whom programming isn't hard.

There is a better point about FLOSS creating an ecosystem of usable utilities for getting stuff done, one I have availed myself of on innumerable occasions. However, I will also point out that the Stallman stance on software has impeded this goal on several occasions, since GPL or even LGPL [1] licensing can prevent reuse of code. This leaves me wondering how necessary the FSF/GNU stuff was in bootstrapping the open-source ecosystem.

[1] LGPL requires you to link software in a particular way to avoid the license spreading to your code.

To expand on car_analogy's point: you're ignoring second-order effects. Look at the avalanche of user-hostile nonsense that has become the norm in non-Free software. Much of it is incompatible with the FOSS model.

* Microsoft is apparently pushing to make it impossible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft online account. [0] I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that.

* Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state

* Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed

* Mobile apps that sell your location data, and anything other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security

* Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics

* Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox)

* edit Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption

* For more see [1]

If you only run Free Software, you get many benefits even if you're unable to modify the software yourself.

> Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

This cannot be done. You can't make a car that anyone can repair, either. Software development is a skilled craft. That doesn't mean there's nothing to gain in Free Software.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387866

[1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html

I can imagine a world where people reimplement game engines as free software, rendering the corporation's proprietary code outdated and irrelevant.

Example:

https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw

I used to laugh at RMS but reading more about him is shocking to say the least. Just check the story he wrote in 1997 to make a point https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html .

Basically he foresaw people will not be able to own books. He is a genius who *really* does not care about money. That makes all the difference. Very rare to find people with this trait. To top it off he is relentless in his cause. Think if there is any one who can meet these standards. Very few.

I’m a gamer. Given a choice between two games of similar quality, I’d choose the free / hackable one every time. There are tens of us, I tell you.

Gamers includes people who play Doom. It's reasonable to think a few of those players will ask "Why does this have from the 90s have such an excellent, creative and enjoyable scene when tons of games since have been forgotten?"

The answer, at least partially, lies in free tools, engines, and community content.

The only reason the engine can be free nowadays is that it has near zero commercial value to the IP owners. If the lesson is that for a libre game to survive and prosper at the mass market level being worthless is an important enabling factor, that’s not a great conclusion to come to.

Anyway Doom has this great community around it not just because the tools are free, thought that’s a an important enabling factor, but due to its cultural significance to gamers and games developers.

id Software has a history of releasing the source code to their engines ~4 years after their initial commercial release:

Doom released in 1993, its engine was open-sourced in 1997 (4 years).

Quake released in 1996, its engine was OSS'd in 1999 (3 years).

Quake II released in 1997, OSS'd in 2001 (4 years).

Quake III released in 1999, OSS'd in 2005 (6 years).

Sure, in most those cases they were at least 2 generations of their own tech ahead when releasing source code, but considering how they were at the cutting edge of game development at the time, arguably those engines still held considerable value at the time and far from worthless.

Or that it is pretty good game and has the brand. The variants by my understanding aren't so different from it in those aspects, but they don't have similar scene think of Hexen and Heretic. And then the third party titles, how many remember or play those?

you laugh until you get old and the games of your youth do not work anymore because of missing libraries on linux, if there was a linux port.

i am missing my unreal tournament days and would even pay money, if one would build an opensource clone where i could load the original maps of Unreal tournament and UT2004 into the game like with Command & Conquer: Red alert.

(UT2004 crashes randomly on linux and it's always a hassle with the 32bit libs)

FWIW UT2004 works fine under Wine (GOG version) here.

UT2004 has native Linux version. I would expect that to still work well. The Windows version does, so there should be no need for Wine at all.

I wouldn't because the Linux UT2004 binary is very old and aside from glibc, X11 and perhaps a couple of other libraries, the Linux userland doesn't really have much of a culture for ABI stability preservation.

There are certainly ways to run Linux UT2004 binary in modern Linux but it'd be way more effort than running the Windows binary under Wine.

I get my Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena kicks from Xonotic. The online community is small, but every day there's at least one DM server with some extremely good players in it.

Edit: the maps are different, but yesterday I joined a server that had one of the Quake Arena maps on it.

Xonotic is the shit!

There are some really addictive games that are open source though. And some of them are quite rightly famous. For example, Nethack. I've played Nethack for countless hours over the course of decades. It's definitely given me more entertainment than 99% of all commercial games that I've bought, and I have it installed on all my computers (and there are even phone versions).

https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/

got a 404 error for the linux link: http://nethack.org/v360/ports/download-linux.html

  sudo apt install nethack

Doom 3 might technically qualify, the source code was released under the GPL years back. The caveat was that you needed the creative assets to play it (although I'm pretty sure it would happily run with custom maps).

I especially like this model. You get the source but the people who worked on the game still get paid.

I do too.

Romero spoke about this a while back. Several members of the team at ID, Romero included, got started on the Apple ][ computers. Those machines were completely open, software driven everything! I keep one as a reminder of my own roots, and the machine is still fun! (Romero keeps his too, as do many from that time period, but I digress...)

The author behind Beagle Brothers software and educational materials was a huge impact on many of us, and ID. They released their code so that others may create and so that their games live on for the people who enjoy playing them. Open matters, and that's why one can play doom on almost everything these days, as one example.

It's a great model.

What I've enjoyed is seeing the ID team watch what others do, and share in all the fun from a secure position having been well paid, no worries beyond that.

And frankly, they can STILL sell those creative assets. People would still buy them.

The most fun I had, with people who give 0 thoughts about free software, were Teeworlds, Hedgewars, Xonotic, OpenTTD and OpenRCT and OpenRA, and Apple Flinger. These were genuinely fun, with relatively straightforward onboarding, and we sunk a good number of hours into them. This is not to say that they're better or worse than closed-source games, just my recommendation of what games proved to be actually fun under real life circumstances.

under the free software philosophy (free SOFTWARE), art assets are allowed to be non-free, but stallman believes the game code itself should be free. considering games rely heavily on art, this model still lets you sell games.

Stallman isn't a free culture person

To add to this: here's a source confirming the FSF are ok with non-Free game assets (and other non-functional data). [0] They single out documentation specifically, saying that documentation should be Free despite that it's non-functional. [1] See also [2].

[0] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli... (under Non-functional Data)

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#exte...

Try it this way: You create a game which is actually good. People want to play it a lot. It costs $0 and becomes popular. It's easy to mod so it gets a big community.

And everything gets released on GNU/Linux two months before it gets ported to anything else.

"Free" in Free Software doesn't mean 0$ cost.

I think he just reinvented F2P. Or looking at something similar to its spirit.

Many modern competition games like VALORANT or PUBG are free-beer with paid food, built on free-beer semi open engines like UE4, and are also streamed free-beer on Twitch or YouTube.

And kids are moving towards F2P from paid games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty franchise, because the former category is free(-beer). The former is also startin in to surpass the latter in quality.

It’s “just” a matter of turning free-beer into free speech, and I think it could well happen as an inevitability, just not in a quarter or two.

I don't think it will happen. The engines might be free speech, part of game play too. But the tens or hundreds of thousands of hours spend unified assets is much harder thing to reach. And where the value really is.

Shouldn't it be possible to sell a game while making it open source at the same time?

I mean that's a bit what quake 3 did, the content kept its copyright.

I honestly don't think it's posing a threat to the company who makes the game, because there won't really be anybody forking the game and making it better than the original creator, in a short period of time, while also selling it. It will only bring bad publicity.

The idTech model is to open source the code (after a couple of years) but keep the content non-free so you still need to buy the game from the original creator even once someone else creates a better version of the code.

This does not give you as much (legal) freedom as opening up the whole thing does but gets pretty close and most importantly removes most of the technical challenges for improving and maintaining the game. It's also probably way easier to accomplish since writing, art and music has even less of an open source culture than software.

I mean many games do have a privacy problem and I can't imagine it will just go on like this.

Sure. But let’s postulate that people would rather be monitored 24/7 than play the AAA game from even a a few years ago, and in order to stop playing AAA games and start playing free software, what is the realistic path there? Giving a yearly speech?

Being dogmatic doesn’t help here I think. Start from the fact (people must play billion dollar budget games) and work backwards. How can privacy be improved, etc.

Saying “solitaire has fewer privacy issues than this AAA game” is like saying “walking is better than driving”. That doesn’t improve cars.

We shouldn't expect one person to solve these issues though, I think. In my opinion it's perfectly valid from him to just point out the problem, or give a recap of the state of things and point out trends. It's up to everyone else to make of it what they will. I personally tested many of the foss games myself, and then pitched the ones to my group when we wanted to play games. Due to me trying them first and work out some kinks beforehand, onboarding was easy and we ended up having a good amount of fun.

I also like your train of thought however. Which is why I'm happy to support Steam in their effort with Proton. They surely can't make everyone release a Linux version, so what if Wine could run all of the games instead? I like this idea in general and it also enabled me to not reboot into Windows to play some of my favorites.

This was literally me as a late teenager. Anyone remember IVAN (Iter Vehemens Ad Necem)? Battle for Wesnoth? (I'm guessing the latter may still be around...)

I never had to use gcc or git to poay hedgewars or any other free game.

You do know most of the current best games were free mods at some point?

Stallman probably thinks the state of the art is "GNU-Penguin-On-A-Sled".

What a coincidence

Today I downloaded a free game and having fun [1]

$ colossal-cave-adventure WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

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