The Right to Read (1997) | Hacker News Reader

The Right to Read (1997)

gnu.org

70 pointscik22 comments

Nice to read this excellent essay again. It has stood the test of time. Far from being a straw-man it presciently describes what has come to be since 1997: The idea of "illicit debugging tools" (DMCA against reverse engineering). The leverage of debt against free learning and research. Draconian monitoring and threatening of academic staff and students by "university IT police". The ostensible use of copyright protection as a cloak for "selling personal interest profiles to retailers". No matter how you cut it, how much you detest his style, puns, defence of inconvenient friends and personal hygiene.... as always Stallman was right.

Most of all, and his greatest sin in this age, Stallman's writing has a compassionate streak. Even Orwell was too cynical to let something as schmaltzy as "love" triumph in Nineteen Eighty Four. But here, as in other passages by Stallman, we see the human urge to share and help one another is leveraged by the exploiters to herd, separate and corral us toward digital domestication.

> it presciently describes what has come to be since 1997

The only question now is when will the system he describes become fully operational? When will it be impossible to go online using a device that can't produce a "Secure Boot" attestation that it is running an "approved" operating system (namely one which runs a process like Gatekeeper[0] to monitor for unapproved applications)?

My guess is that some G7/EU/FVEY nation will pass a law to that effect before the 20th anniversary of Stallman's essay. That will give time for desktop users to "upgrade" to Windows 11, with its required Pluton chip. If the law does allow "hobbyist" OSes like GNU/Linux to access the internet, it will probably require them to install a CA certificate for TLS interception.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-explains-why-it-grabs-data-...

> My guess is that some G7/EU/FVEY nation will pass a law to that effect before the 20th anniversary of Stallman's essay.

Before 2017?

Oops, I guess I meant 30 years. Thanks for catching that.

Anyway, 2027 is only 5 years away, but it's after 2025 which is when Microsoft ends security support for Windows 10 (and thus when countries will be able to claim with a straight face that if your computer doesn't support Secure Boot then it's too dangerous for you to be allowed online).

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/14/22533018/microsoft-window...

Wish more people took Stallman more seriously and rejected closed source software.

https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight

In spite of being right very often, he's managed to make himself remarkably difficult to take seriously - including quite a few acts I couldn't even have dreamed up.

His behavior makes it easier for me to understand how "Surgeons should wash hands" remained such an unpopular idea for so long.

Precisely this is the reason one should take RMS seriously. Can you imagine how ridiculous this might been in 1997 when mobiles and kindles did not exist, yet he was so damn right. RMS does not compromise and its very rare to find some one like him who is both technically sound and also being an activist.

Nitpick:

Software can be free while being closed-source, as "open-source" refers to a development model, not the liberty of its users. A more precise term to use would be "proprietary software".

I think I remember reading this excellent article when he first wrote it. While I have supported the FSF off and on for decades, and I like the idea of free software, public data commons, etc., I feel stuck: my work/writing/personal lives are so intertwined with the Apple ecosystem, I don’t feel like I can walk away. Everything works, programming tools, communications, handoff between devices, etc. What really makes me feel trapped in Apple’s ecosystem is the Apple Watch. Being able to move through the world with just one very small device is addictive. I absolutely love not having to carry a phone or other larger devices when I leave my house. If I am walking around my neighborhood and my 101 year old Dad calls me, I can take the call.

I do still have 3 old Linux laptops, but any desire for the pleasure I get from using Linux can be met by working on GCP, AWS, etc.

I'm no fan of DRM, but this story was slightly annoying to me. I think I realised why - it's basically a straw man argument against DRM. Arguments like this can be constructed to make many things I believe in seem awful.

Unfortunately the essay is translated to Slovene for me and the translation is terrible.

I couldn't find a button to force the original version of the essay, is this intentional or did I just miss the button?

The language select button is at the top-right of the screen, beside the magnifying glass/search icon. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but it’s a Latin letter “G” next to what looks like a hiragana character.

It’s not a great icon, but I don’t know if there even is a good “language select” icon or symbol that is easily recognisable across all languages and scripts

Ohhh, thanks! It's actually quite a nice symbol (reminds me of the google translate icon [0]), maybe browsers need some meta tags to indicate that "this page is available in another language" instead of offering a google translation (:

[0] https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/ZrNeuKthBirZN7rrXPN1Jm...

That’s a “nu” hiragana, so the button reads Gnu, which I guess is cute but doesn’t help usability.

Ohhh that's actually quite a neat idea, if it could be incorporated in a way that more immediately suggests "select language" that would be cool. As a non-graphic-designer I don't know how possible that is :)

You have 2 free articles left for this month in mordium dot com.

While reading, I found the tone to be familiar. Came across “Amazon Swindle”, knew it was Stallman, scrolled to top, confirmed. No judgement on his personality here. I just find those “cute” names and straw men to be real annoying. There are of course valid points in there but this is not the way to make them.

> There are of course valid points in there but this is not the way to make them.

Why not?

I consider such slight renaming to be quite a good idea since these are quite memorable and thus hopefully hackers will tend to use them in everyday speech (like the re-branding of "DRM" from "Digital Rights Management" to "Digital Restrictions Management" that is common in Hacker circles).

It is just lying and dishonest communication. It can work, lying and being dishonest often has advantages. The complaint about it is not about whether it can work.

"this is not the way to make them" is often euphemism for other complains someone does not want to make directly - whether civility based (it is rude) or ethics based.

It’s also a lazy, pun-laden, misreading-the-room way to communicate. People who think of themselves as clever do that. It’s a preaching-to-the-choir style of framing. It undermines the intellectual concepts presented by not making the argument very well.

[1997]

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