Richard Stallman, su, and the 'wheel' group (2004)
meisterplanet.com
meisterplanet.com
Stallman is not anti-security and is indeed pro-privacy[1], i.e. you should be able to deploy security systems to keep your data secure from adversaries. However, a security system should be deployed to protect the user from adversaries, not protect admins from the users and give admins power over the user. It's the power asymmetry that is used to oppress the users that bugs him. (In fact, time and time again, the actual security of the system is a joke, as was in his particular story, but nevertheless the boogeyman is there and is set up by the admins to restrict the users.)
Note that we are talking about a different era and deployment of computer systems. I have seen firsthand university systems that are effectively run by students as peers for the most part, but some power-hungry clueless hired admin inevitably comes up and wants to deploy spyware and overprotective policies on the students.
[1]: another example of this is Secure Boot. He has no problem with Secure Boot in principle as long as the keys are under the control of the user, not the manufacturer.
They all (Google, Microsoft and Apple) say that . The problem is that they do the exact opposite. All your user data belongs to Google, Microsoft and Apple because they protect the root user.
But all data is in your user account.
The "user account" isn't an abstraction used to help you, it's an abstraction that serves the companies.
It's the open source operating systems (and MS) that only protect the root account, because they're designed for servers or academic/corporate campuses and not personal computers.
If I install a program from a package manager on Linux, it has access to my whole home directory. If I install an app from the Apple App Store, it only has access to the files I specifically tell the OS to open with it.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/selinux-gett...
"Why doesn't SELinux confine desktop applications" https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1578673
If your text editor can own your account, it doesn't count.
I sometimes worry most have no idea he wrote an Emacs and he was the one who conceived of much of the operating system they call "Linux."
The quickest and most common way to do this is by labelling someone crazy or a sex offender, both of which are constantly tried against RMS, to the point where there's a whole website to counter the most common misinformation: https://stallmansupport.org/
However, the website you cite points out that the beginning of the whole sex offender thing was a single MIT alumna who wrote a blog post. It seems unlikely that this was part of a greater conspiracy (by big business) to cancel Stallman.
And that really put me off, because reading a bit about her with an open mind showed quickly, she was genuinly enraged and a real simple student. She was maybe not right, but her anger was for real.
And dismissing this as hired defamination prevents seeing why the outside world has no idea about what RMS want to tell the world.
I said what I said, though, you should understand there doesn't need to be some 'entity' making dictates. Just powerful people whose interests align; who all went to the same schools, are in the same clubs, and have the same fucked up views [0].
'Muting' isn't the word I'd use; I'd go with 'marginalize'. Close enough though.
RMS' vision of free software is an existential threat to big tech, and to the ecosystem of mass surveillance they enable.
Much as Assange's autism was weaponized to paint him as 'arrogant' in corporate media, RMS' quirks have been magnified to mark him as 'crazy' despite the fact that it's possible no one alive, ever, has had such a clear view on software freedom.
> However, the website you cite points out that the beginning of the whole sex offender thing was a single MIT alumna who wrote a blog post.
Whereever the initial spark came from, it was carefully nurtured into a blaze, most obviously by Vice. Vice deliberately twisted RMS' words, craftily removing clear and vital context to make RMS look as creepy as possible.
Then, corporate media took that steaming turd of a Vice article and repeated it ad nauseum, without talking to Stallman, without ever adding context, and without any apology or retraction after the truth slowly filtered through.
Here's [1] a great and short article that shows how people like Stallman (Assange, Snowden, Donziger, non-establishment Pres candidates, etc) go through 'ritual defamation' in the US. Once you start seeing it, it's everywhere - look at how people protesting war and genocide are being labelled as terror supporters, for example.
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAFd4FdbJxs
1 - https://stallmansupport.org/the-practice-of-ritual-defamatio...
FAANG would literally not exist without "open source" software. Being able to use volunteer developer effort for free has saved the industry trillions and made today's corporate Internet possible.
Open source has also spread more than a few backdoors, some apparently written by state actors.
(Of course we've found all of them now. Of course we have.)
As a politician, Stallman is an idiot. His pitch - "You can write your own printer driver and customise your OS and this will save the world" is a naive appeal to the tiny minority of the population which enjoys tinkering.
It excludes most users - which you'd think would be an obvious issue. So in practice it's an adolescent, oppositional and tribal view of how computing operates, socially and politically.
Global infosec, corporate exploitation, user accessibility and customisation, three letter agency surveillance, personal privacy, disinformation factories, user empowerment, developer trust, attention farming, ad tech, and the politics and economics of data ownership are all hugely complex issues.
"Give everyone the source code to everything and poof! - you'll solve all of them" is just such a stupid take.
So no - he is neither a threat, nor a martyr. He's a distraction, and politically that's all he'll ever be.
Do you want to be taken seriously? Starting your comment with such a claim is no means to do it.
> FAANG would literally not exist without "open source" software.
Open-source software has contributed to the technological ecosystem. Attributing the entire existence of major corporations solely to open source is silly, and I find it hard to believe anyone could do so in good faith.
> Open source has also spread more than a few backdoors, some apparently written by state actors.
And closed source hasn't? I honestly can't tell if this is advanced satire.
> As a politician, Stallman is an idiot
Most of us are - that's a good thing. Being a canny political actor without being a shitbird of a human being is about a one in a million skill.
> His pitch - "You can write your own printer driver and customise your OS and this will save the world" is a naive appeal to the tiny minority of the population which enjoys tinkering.
Your strawman sucks - that's not his pitch. Stallman's advocacy focuses on empowering users with the ability to control and modify their software, not expecting everyone to write their own software.
> in practice it's an adolescent, oppositional and tribal view of how computing operates
What's "adolescent, oppositional and tribal" is making weak strawmen like this.
> "Give everyone the source code to everything and poof! - you'll solve all of them" is just such a stupid take.
Another strawman. Stallman's advocacy for free software is not a panacea for all societal and technological challenges, nor did he ever claim it to be. It addresses fundamental issues of user rights and autonomy, complex though they may be.
> So no - he is neither a threat, nor a martyr. He's a distraction, and politically that's all he'll ever be.
Fortunately, Stallman’s significant contributions to the philosophy and practice of free software, with their enduring impacts on technology, privacy rights, and digital freedoms, do not depend on your opinion. For your own sake though, I hope you clear up your thinking; because once you blame open source software for surveillance you've probably lost the run of yourself completely.
It shouldn't take years of conversations to understand that pedophilia is bad.
Ironically BSD doesn't have "a ruler", a cult-like leader like RMS. It is more democratized than GNU.
[Without taking the bait of addressing "pedophilia," but the specific comment RMS made that got generalized...]
Your objection is he committed thoughtcrime by not taking certain gospel on a taboo subject at face value, has actually thought about it and discussed it with folks, and even changed his opinion on the subject in the end. Note that there is zero evidence he has shown any personal interest in having sex with children and this is some abstract analysis by a heterodox, and analytical mind, dare I say neurodivergent and on the spectrum, looking at it.
If it helps, what you consider such an obvious settled matter, even on its simplest dimension, the age-of-consent, varies among the united States, let alone the entire world where lots of cultures have different opinions about it.
> Ironically BSD doesn't have "a ruler", a cult-like leader like RMS. It is more democratized than GNU.
The BSD community has had their fair share of drama and accusations of misogyny too. RMS is hardly the driving force behind modern decisions that drive Linux distros. That crown, if any, probably belongs to Red Hat.
Thank you for stating this.
As a matter of fact, coming to think of it, the IT world is so fast paced that I'm worried there aren't currently any appropriate measures in place to record historical developments, because in IT, "history" is something that happens over a few years, rather than a few decades or centuries.
Stallman is a hacker, but his interest and cause is not so much on a technical than a societal level. The free software movement, it seems to me, has experienced a considerable reduction in public interest, and likely this has to do with the controversies that arose around rms. But there's also something to be learned about why the term "Open Source" is ubiquitous while "Free Software" is not. It is not only because of the unfortunate ambiguity of the latter, but also because of the implications of the underlying philosophies for corporate IT.
As a matter of fact, when I started a new job a couple of years ago, I asked the sysadmins whether they could install Emacs on my machine, and they had literally never heard of it.
I had contact with emacs in university, decided I do not like it and moved on to more modern tools.
And today so many moved on that they do not even mention it in some schools and academies.
Or is knowing Emacs a condition to qualify as a hacker? Well, that wouldn't be my definition.
I share this feeling. But frankly I think that nowadays the word "hacker" is largely meaningless.
It's not wonder, however, that Stallman is regarded as the last "true hacker".
The point is that most people, even most new hackers, misunderstand who Stallman is and what his principles are. At best they see him and some random crazy pedant that’s probably never wrote a line of code like most politicians or lawyers in his space. They don’t understand the dude wrote the world’s most popular compiler for three decades or more (I won’t be surprised to hear they think BillG is more technical than him if you survey). Nor do they have a grasp of his movement to the degree they attribute Open Source, a deliberate and successful attempt to derail his PoV, to himself!
None of that implies sainthood or value judgement on him. It stops at hearing what the guy really says carefully.
If you allegedly "give" me something for "free", but still assert the right to tell me what I can do with it afterward, it's not "free" in either sense of the word. It's not "free as in beer", nor is "free as in freedom".
Stallman's monomania on this subject became tedious and counterproductive decades ago.
Yes, he wrote some great software. So did dozens of others.
I do share the feeling towards the free terminology. Over the years he has been fond of libre more and more.
That said I think the reason behind the confusion over the term free is less sincere and somewhat of a Freudian slip in retrospect. I think his original view was indeed against commercialization and he pivoted to the current iteration of Free Software advocacy. By the way, Linus is on the record making the same mistake and initially licensing Linux under a non-commercial license.
I know the sentence was longer, but even in context that still sounds to me: "Those who do not agree, have apparently not understood it". Maybe you meant it different, but this is the vibe I am getting often from GNU folks. This is what people criticize as cult like behavior. And statements around here like RMS the "last true hacker", fit into that.
Well, I have not seen much code from him lately.
And assuming he rather became an "societal hacker", well, then apparently not a very succesful one, if this is the result:
"Rarely people understand what he stands for, that his not the poster child of "Open Source", and all they know is that he ate something off his foot in a video."
When you work for a company, the computer issued for your use is not your computer. It belongs to the company.
Modern threats often target the user, and often through the web or email. The user is the target.
Of course no one who reads hacker news would ever have the same browser logged in with root/admin rights to a company system, and in the same session also be downloading and installing stuff, and browsing to sketchy web sites, and clicking on legit-looking phishing mails. Not to mention that they wouldn’t be doing local development but have a shared component with the production system because it’s not practical to make a staging version of the production service that acts like production. And certainly no one here would ever disable monitoring software, or write a cron job that resets a managed setting to a more palatable one every time the corporate security team enforces a value.
But believe it or not we see that sort of stuff Every. Single. Day. in infosec.
If you can’t stand not having full control over every aspect of your computing environment; if your ego doesn’t allow it- then corporate IT work is probably not for you.
But the company has to protect its interests as well, and often that includes setting stuff that makes your life less convenient or violates your ideas that you should be master of your computer. And sometimes there are reasons that you cannot know (like regulatory requirements or consent decrees) and you place the company at significant financial risk if you try to evade those policies.
That said, there do exist business that act like big brother - installing essentially managed spyware on your computer. The best thing to do there is resign.
But most businesses are just trying to do due diligence in protecting their systems and data (and users), and most users don’t need root access, and many users who think they need root access really don’t, even though it’s convenient.
You write as if those are things one should feel guilty for. I proudly admit that I have done such things.
In my experience, whenever this happens, whenever the user goes above and beyond to do such things, the security team should revisit their values rather than the other way around.
Never ever it happens. Feedback is given. Stupid policies remain. At best you get some acknowledgement that they also realize it is stupid but it is what it is. As the tone of your post shows, the security guy thinks they are bestowed a divine power to restrict without fully understanding the trade-offs. That puts the user in an adversarial position with the security team. Stallman's philosophy ultimately sides with the user.
It may not be the value of the security team, but the values that are part of a cyber-insurance policy, or regulatory regime, and thus outside of what the security team are able to change.
Perhaps the user, at times, does not understand the larger context, and the risks that he is exposing the organization to.
This story shows that Corporate's way to restrict user power can cause real inefficiencies.
And I am happy that I don't need to work for Corporate today.
Yeah, this is really important to understand. The machines of this era required some degree of physical access, they were shared by entire departments, and in some cases even the CPU instruction set might get changed overnight by students with soldering irons.
The student ethos around these machines at the MIT AI Lab was that they were essentially run as anarchist collectives. University management didn't always agree. But frequently the OS, the applications and even some of the hardware had been built by the "anarchist collective."
This worked because of the small community size, because of the limited physical access, and because of the high knowledge barrier new users needed to climb to do anything. By the time you'd figured things out (or your peers had taught you), you'd become part of the culture. Communities like this can be fantastic, while they last. But they don't scale.
When Stallman talks about security, don't imagine a modern world full of millions of computers connected by networks. Imagine instead someone arguing about the right way to run a local non-profit "hacker space". Should it be run by the membership under tacit social rules, or should they elect someone to enforce lots of strict rules? Or imagine Wikipedia, and how it has evolved. Once, you could just fix articles. Now it's often harder.
The original offense that set Stallman on his journey involved a new printer. The AI Lab had a printer with a clever feature: When the paper ran out, it sent a message to everyone in the print queue, and someone would come add paper. The AI Lab bought a printer which couldn't do this. So Stallman tried to get the source code and fix the printer, but he was told he couldn't have the code. This fundamentally annoyed him, so he decided to rebuild literally the entire computer industry so that everyone would always have the code.
Stallman has a lot of faults. Some of them deserve serious criticism. And his brain does not work like that of most people. But he's essentially a left-libertarian anarchist who prefers self-organizing communities over centralized authority.
His opinions on stuff like security are essentially arguments about a very specific world that was disappearing even in the 80s, one where people would think, "Hey, the OS on the shared machine could be better, so let's fix it tonight." His goal was always to keep some version of that alive.
Stallman is open sources resident lunatic. And for better or worse he's ours and we should embrace him. Not because we think what he says is right, rather for his purity of vision and conviction. You don't have to agree with him, but you have to respect how far he's willing to go to make a point.
> He does emphasise source code
This is not relevant to the free software movement vs the open source movement.
> it possible to have freedom without open source
No, because the open source definition is more or less equivalent to the free software definition, and something not open source is therefore not free either.
> it's called public domain software.
Public domain software is necessarily¹ open source provided you have the source code. If you don't, you don't have freedom either.
1 ("well, actually"): many countries don't allow you to willingly put something into the public domain yourself, so in those country, it is not clear you have any right to use software someone put in the public domain because it's not in public domain in those country. You'd need an explicit license like CC0 to do this.
Wrong.
Public domain software is necessarily open source provided you have the source code. If you don't, you don't have freedom either.
Wrong.
This is precisely the idiotic focus on source code I'm talking about.
Decompilers are even better now than they were in the 80s when people, even Stallman himself admits, would just disassemble and then modify software that way.
As long as you have the power to change the bytes that make up the software, and doing that is legal, that should be enough to qualify as free software. How it was made doesn't matter one bit (pun intended).
You have a point with having the right to modify a program in the public domain through a decompilation of its machine code.
But for a program to be free software, the ability to study and modify the program must be practical, legal is not enough. Sharing the source code is the minimum, we can't stoop so low as to consider a blob free software or open source just because you have the right to modify it. It's not that idiotic to put an emphasis on the source code. What are you trying to defend?
But for a program to be free software, the ability to study and modify the program must be practical, legal is not enough.
It already is practical. As I mentioned, decompilers are only getting better and what we have now is far better than in the early days when people did "study and modify" just fine. I could also argue that a lot of current free software is not practical to "study and modify" even with the source code.
Instead, the emphasis on source code has created a sort of learned helplessness (see above) that is definitely an impediment to true freedom. Companies have instead used "open source" as a form of virtue-signaling while adapting other user-hostile "security" features that make it so users can see the source and try to contribute to it (with their contributions only accepted if they toe the line) but can't actually make use of those changes themselves. Android, Firefox, and some other Google projects come to mind.
As a practical matter, it's hard to come by software that comes as a freely licensed binary but lacks source code. I'm blanking out on coming up with even a single example.
Re the ability of "study and modify" it does not have to be universal obviously. If a subset of community can do so the rest can benefit by their improvements passively, asking their help or contracting them.
Permissive license are also free software licenses.
(but indeed, the FSF and GNU projects, who defined free software, also push for copyleft for the reasons you mention).
Smearing people like this should not be acceptable on HN.
> A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar, any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea without milk or sugar.
You want tea? But don't say what kind?
> If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too.
> DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. ....
Friendly and Parrot is pretty much a dam unicorn if you know what's up. Why is your preference for Parrots in here? Is this legit something you think any of us should give a shit about?
Brown M&M's was in there for a reason. I am not finding a parrot for you RMS. And, for the love of god, who bought him a parrot.
Which I interpret as "don't go out of your way to get special tea for me."
> Why is your preference for Parrots in here?
Because some people fawn over famous people, and once they hear through the grapevine that Stallman likes parrots, they'll do daft things like buy him a parrot for the visit, without realizing how horrible that is to the parrot.
Parrots are flock animals. An unfriendly parrot means it's not been socialized or engaged with enough, probably isolated and unhappy.
> I usually decline to participate in "open source" or "Linux" events. ..
> "Open source" is the slogan of a position that was formulated as a reaction against the free software movement. Those who support its views have a right to promote them, but I disagree with them and I want to promote the ideals of free software.
That's rms affirming what I said.
Truth is a complete defense to a claim of slander, and ESR's own words provide that proof and defense for everyone who rightly calls him racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Words so vile and lurid that people have actually begged Thomas Ptacek to stop posting them to twitter, and donated over $30,000 to charity just to not hear ESR's own words quoted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli...
>Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."[30][31] A progressive campaign, "The Great Slate", was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I've been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that, as of March 2018, over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[32]
So far, everything he has said and written about surveillance capitalism and Big Tech's monopoly has turned out to be true. The subreddit /r/StallmanWasRight has aged phenomenally and also turned out to be true and prophetic.
Speculation: I believe that there were many in the league of Socrates who were never known.
Yes. History is choosing random names for preservation. If every century had just one worthy name or event, in 1 million years there will be 10000 of them, way too many to remember. Eventually the humankind will forget almost everything that we think is important about our culture. The information may not be lost, but it will be buried in some scientific databases. I bet that Stallman won’t last even a century. He is a pioneer, naive and controversial, but the main works on ethics of software, copyright etc are yet to be written, and the names of those authors will shine brighter.
http://laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
I have also been right about a lot of things :-P from a left-libertarian perspective:
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
and also lack the capital and clout to make a bigger impact and prevent huge mistakes:
2023: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424
2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=174
unfortunately, politicians and crowds don’t always listen to sensible rational arguments, including all their own top diplomats and cooler heads warning them for decades:
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=397
I have been warning about swarms of autonomous AI bots since 2015 for example. And saying that IPOs are toxic and should be replaced by regulated ICOs (of utility tokens). Both are hugely unpopular on HN. Some people may have knee-jerk reactions until they actually read the substance.
But my other viewpoints might be a bit more palatable.
Veterans of the MIT-AI Lab, Patrick G. Sobalvarro and Leigh L. Klotz, beat you to that by 33 years, in this article they published on October 1, 1982 in ACM SIGART Bulletin Issue 82, pp 23–25:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608
https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf
>TURTLES AND DEFENSE
>Introduction
>At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...]
>Guidance
>The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability.
>Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...]
>Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...]
>Munitions
>The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death.
>Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]
> Not because we think what he says is right
Few have ever been as right in their fields, or had such foresight.
And even when proven correct, over and over again, this snideness draped in a nicety gets regurgitated on every RMS related post. It's a sign of deep sickness in the tech community that we tolerate it.
The macOS and BSD's don't ship with root group, Linuxen either doesn't ship with wheel group or it's GID mismatch what's on BSD side.
The difference will cause issues and system tools misbehaving. Bit different if NAS is BSD based and using NFSv4 or newer, since user and group mapping is based names and not any more ID values they were earlier. But NFS GID mapping does not work properly whichever NFS is used, it's just different kind of misbehaving.
This can be fixed linux (debian etc, missing), add "wheel:x:0:" line /etc/group, right after root group. And with Red Hat based changing that GID 10 to 0.
Of course then /etc/idmap.conf the usual " [Mapping]
Nobody-User = nobody Nobody-Group = nogroup
[Translation] Method = nsswitch "
Is worth checking also.
The rationale adding secondary GID 0 "wheel" after first original root GID 0 is that, if you check how std nix tools work, when those look up by name they will use GID what's set there, and when they look up by GID they quit looking after they find matching first value that was found.
Therefore above solution works both ways, and your NFS shares from BSD's always shows correct value and correct group name that matches the value. I think I've learned this workaround about 30 years back now.
Leave the GID for the wheel group at 10.
That is Stallman's point. Some users do not want to place someone else, maybe a so-called "tech" company, in charge of the security of the user's system.
..but you'd be ok Microsoft being in charge of signing kernel images for secure boot, right?
For example, imagine "/" is the path separator for some users and "\" is the path separator for some other users, depending on some setting. Would you like that?