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Comment by MisterWebz | Hacker News Reader

People denouncing Stallman's views just because he's not charismatic and conventional has always bothered me. I hope people will start realizing that using free and open software/hardware/web services exclusively isn't something that only free software extremists should be doing.

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I denounce Stallman's views because they are plain stupid and not based on reality and don't match with human psychology and sociology. Attempts to portray recent privacy debacles as the proof of Stallman being right are even more stupid, because it has nothing to do with software being open-source, free or not. If my service runs Apache, MySQL, the source is on github, but NSA has access to all the data, how does being open-source help?

People won't start using "free and open software/hardware/web services exclusively", because none of that matters for the end users. I do like and use open source for infrastructure, this is where it shines. But as Joe User I prefer highly polished (and paid) apps to "free" software which is powered by advertising. I am sick of this "advertising will pay for everything" world with ever increasing noise and subpar quality. How about paying some real money for some real work?

> If my service runs Apache, MySQL, the source is on github, but NSA has access to all the data, how does being open-source help?

I can host it on my own server and not share the data, or make a fork which respects user privacy and compete with you. Failing that, I can verify any claims you make about the integrity of the data - what is kept and how it is stored - and petition for appropriate change.

For a man of such strong opinions, you seem to have a poor grasp of Stallman's philosophy. He's against SaaS, and would refuse to use a hosted service. He doesn't object to charging a fee for software. The user must merely be free to use it after the purchase. Yes, people are ready to sacrifice some freedom in return for convenience. That in itself does not prove him wrong. Cellphones are tracking devices. The "cloud" does allow for wholesale surveillance. In light of recent revelations, his warnings seem to be more prescient than ever.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out things like cell phones being tracking devices and the cloud facilitating surveillance.

First we all knew it would happen, then we found out it was happening, and now we're saying thank god for Stallman or we'd have never known and lets be sure to listen to him from now on? Stallman's idea of freedom doesn't work unless everyone gets involved. We live in the real world here and we know that isn't happening. He needs to live and let live a little.

So are you saying that we should just accept everything as it is now? That way things will never change and probably only get worse.

There are however people that don't accept everything that's going on in the world and will fight for change. And they DO make change, ever heard about GNU/Linux?

You've got that part very confused. Nobody is saying "thank god for Stallman or we'd have never known" - what people are saying is "Stallman was right - these tracking devices and cloud services are harmful to freedom and we should find better solutions". There may not be better solutions though, but the message is still very clear over which is harmful and what a solution might look like.

i object to the characterisation of such opinions as strong. they are not strong, they are weak. weak for their justification, weak for their referencing and weak for the world view which informs them.

(but i totally agree with you)

The wast wast majority of people who write code get paid real money for real work, and the buyer get functionality, source code and most of the time, copyright assignment.

Its called a salary.

"Should be doing" and "is practical or feasible to do" are too different things. Not all of us are satisfied with browsing the web by emailing a wget daemon and reading it on a computer designed for a Chinese government contract with a 500 MHz MIPS processor. It works for Stallman because he puts a lot of value in having free software down to the BIOS level. The rest of us value other things (convenience, comfort, performance) and thus make different choices about the tech we use.

That's not to say that people not using more free (as in speech) isn't a bad thing. It's just that for quite a few things, there are either no free software alternatives or the free software alternatives are not user-friendly enough, not fully-featured enough, are not compatible enough with popular proprietary programs or proprietary hardware, or just generally aren't as good. We should work on improving the free alternatives and advocate their use, but we should also be mindful that users will often need to use a piece of proprietary software because there aren't any good alternatives available. Just saying, "If you use any proprietary software at all, you hate your own freedom" is not an effective strategy for driving mass adoption of free software.

I think it would be better described as "principles" than "views".

People do not share his principles, or worse, they give lip service to the principles but compromise. This creates internal dissonance that is difficult to reconcile without admitting that your principles do not in fact include "freedom" of this sort.

We tend to get unhappy when we believe we value something only to be shown that we do not. We can be angry at ourselves (depressed, sad, etc.) or we can look outwards.

RMS is not a sympathetic figure, so if one were to look at a target of ridicule, he is just about perfect. Stinky pinko whining hippy couch-surfer with a thing for parrots.

Hey! Don't knock parrots. I own a parrot, a very cool and interesting creature.

If only we could eliminate this harsh parrot bashing from HN :-)

Yeah, they're nice until you have a flock of feral parrots. They cruise this city like a gang of harpies!

Since they live forever, you know your 'pretty bird' is deciding which bits of you to eat first. Talking is their way of testing if you're dead yet.

I agree with you. I will defend Stallman against any strawman attacks. However, we should be honest and recognize Stallman's views as promoting a very radical and perhaps fundamentally untenable path forward. It may be that even if Stallman's view was the morally correct one, it would bring about a world/situation none of us really want to live in.

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