Stallman Was Right
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https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...
Stallman basically preached a Communist manifesto where the tech workers should own the means of production/compute. Communism became popular in the early 20th century because people were scared of a feudal-capitalist future that didn't come to pass --yes, partly because of Communism. However, Big Tech has managed to build exactly that kind of feudal/rentier capitalism without regulation, without oversight and with full market control.
In the end, I don't think Stallman was right wrt the tools needed to stop that future; the GPL was embraced (and then undermined) by Big Tech and became irrelevant. By actually commoditizing the base platform layers, OSS probably enabled the massive cloud/application behemoths on top. More importantly, OSS was useful as a pseudo-competitor to the monopolists --remember when in them midst of the Microsoft-DOJ fracas, MS kept bringing up Linux as its nemesis? how did that turn out? what percentage of Azure are Linux machines? what Big Tech behemoth does NOT run on OSS these days?
But, to his credit, the future that Stallman warned us about did come to pass; his diagnosis was correct, but not the cure he prescribed. The internet is now run by feudal lords that extract rents from anyone trying to work or live on it.
DVDs of new movies are £10-15 in the UK still, shows are much more than that if they even get a DVD or a non-digital release to begin with.
Unless your content consumption is low it’s going to cost many multiples than what even paying for 2-3 streaming services does per year.
You're right, the newer stuff is difficult if not impossible to get a physical copy of. I just don't bother. I go see a movie in theaters every now and again but I'm 500% done with modern streaming platforms.
When you are looking to get content for children it becomes even harder and more expensive.
On the prior point of is it affordable, local storage is not just affordable, but is now cheaper than a subscription.
And for TV we had reruns either on primary channels or for older content on the various basic cable “syndication” channels.
When it gets really expensive is when you have kids at which point Disney+ which is £7.99 pays for itself in about a day.
Not something said about many people who are "a bit" if a creep. He can still be right and a massive creep/harasser
Hay-fever? Arachnophobia? Chlorophilitis? What are the plants for??
That is to say, adobe is most likely doing this to train models that will put their current customers out of business. They probably think they're cutting-out the middleman for a better margin, but this seems like a greedy bet that could easily go sideways.
Right now nobody cares, where "cares" is defined as "alters buying behavior." If you don't alter your buying behavior in response to this stuff you don't "care."
If the world's largest window manufacturer added a clause that they could send employees to your home to look through your windows at any time, day or night, the government would likely step in and put a stop to it. I don't see how this is any different. We have privacy laws and consumer protection agencies. They are failing us.
We basically threw that away in computing in exchange for ease of use.
You're assuming equivalents exist which don't have the downsides but to have the same upsides. They don't. When there's no viable alternative people are just forced to do things they don't like.
If people are not willing to make trade-offs or sacrifices, this also means they don't care enough for companies to listen.
When blacks protested bus segregation in the South, they boycotted the busses. That meant they had to walk. It worked.
It would be a better more just world if people did not have to make these kinds of sacrifices to be heard, but we don't live in a utopia. We live in a messy real world full of people being assholes and broken systems.
In this case the sacrifice is not having to walk in searing heat in the summer while being jeered at by racist assholes. The sacrifice is having to learn a new image editor.
We can do this.
How much is "some"? Lots of people bought Affinity products, despite them lacking some critical features that folks need. And now Affinity had been bought by another company that will likely take it the way of Adobe. None of this ever stood a chance of dethroning Adobe before, and it certainly won't now. What percentage of the users do you realistically expect should be willing to risk their income over this, and for how long?
"If you won't make sacrifices, you don't care enough". Nope. Some people care deeply and still need software that monopolized their workflow. It doesn't matter how much they care, if the VFX company they work in uses the Adobe Suite, it will not re-train all staff and rewrite all the work that's been done (plugins, assets) for the Adobe Suite.
I myself work in an adjacent industry - video games. Some 3D tools are as ancient as the civilizations they are named after and Blender has surpassed them in many ways. So much so that recently in AAA games, people have started using Blender a significant amount and many companies now allow a choice. But this is still impossible in many workflows. Game companies have written many plugins and integrations with their pipelines for the ancient software, they have hired staff qualified in this software. There is a very significant cost to switching that is beyond what is possible even for large studios, which I won't name, but I'm sure they made some of your favorite games.
"To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn’t. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in? "
etc:
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-22...
I still remember when the first iPhone/Android device came out looking for a setting to share my phone storage via SMB/NFS which is almost the first thing you do on a laptop/desktop and not finding any but that you have to pay to buy some app which will allow you to do it. It was then that i realized something very fundamental has changed in the computing services paradigm and for the worse. Services which were taken for granted from the OS were no longer available and every OS feature has been made into an "app for sale", something which was unthinkable when i started off in this industry in the early nineties. And then the "Cloud" happened and finally the users lost all control over data and software services.
Apple imagined a future where 1984 wouldn't be like 1984.
Behold the iphone and app-store paradigm: "A garden of pure ideology, where every worker may bloom, secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths" indeed.
As far as I know, the only person who has diagnosed Richard Stallman with anything is Richard Stallman, and I doubt he has even an honorary doctorate that would qualify him to make such a diagnosis. Maybe he is neurodivergent, maybe he isn't. If he were, that wouldn't excuse his behavior, as plenty of neurodivergent people don't act the way he does. It's not a "get out of social consequences free" card.
And honestly, if Richard Stallman is so neurodivergent that he isn't capable of interacting with people in a reasonable way, despite being middle aged and no doubt having been told about his behavior many, many times, he shouldn't be in the position he's in.