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Comment by gargoiler80 | Hacker News Reader

I'd say Stallman has a very extreme set of priorities.

For most people, they just want a computer/games console/cellphone that works, and operates in the way they want it to. Whether the source code is free or not is completely irrelevant, if it fulfils the purpose.

If I buy a plastic toy for my kids, I don't feel the need to have the schematics, plastic moulds, and full assembly details for it. It's enough that it fulfils the purpose for which it was made.

Personally, I think you have to trust other people at some point. You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government, just like you have to trust closed source software.

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Stallman is under no delusions, he makes concessions all the time. He uses computers in a very extreme manner, finding fault with even all major Linux distros, but does not demand or expect that other do the same. He knows that other people will make practical concessions.

Fucking hell, even of Steam, the popular game distribution and DRM software (which distributes primarily DRM'd closed source games) running on Linux, he says:

“This development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux,” he wrote. “My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?”

Would he use Steam? I can assure you not. Even so, he thinks that Steam being on Linux will likely do more good than harm. This is not extremism, this is pragmatism.

Sure, but it took him a while to get to the stage of accepting what he considers "the lesser evil" (talking about Steam from his point of view).

Perhaps, but he was also pragmatic enough to kick off the GNU Project from a proprietary base and work on replacing the OS with Free software incrementally. So he has demonstrated pragmatism often when it aided his overall goals, which is something you can't say about many principled idealists.

So he understands the reasons why people use proprietary software. Is that what you say?

> finding fault with even all major Linux distros

I guess you did say 'major,' but http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

You're making a strawman out of Stallman's position though. It is not lost on Stallman that some hotel clerk doesn't care about the source code running on his phone. This is sort of not relevant in a very real and fundamental way. Think of it this way, do you think the same hotel clerk cares about the congress following parliamentary procedures, or tort law, or anything like that? No. But, does our society depend on such things (at least in some capacity)? Yes.

Stallman doesn't care that you don't care about getting the source code; that's just not the point at all. Also, Stallman's issue about free software is not just about not being spied upon -- and also his ideology mostly deals with software. :)

I think you largely made pron's point.

Torturing your analogy further, you don't care about the provenance of the plastic toy until it turns out that the factory in China used lead-based paint to decorate it. As an average statistical westerner, you are very angry when you learn this and want to know why your children were not protected.

Stallman is merely stating that you may want to check that your Hot Wheels car isn't going to take fifty IQ points every time your kid sticks it in his mouth.

(You don't even want to know about Barbie.)

I don't think Stallman's agenda stems (only) from paranoia. To me, Stallman represents a reminder to always think about the power structure of everything - even software. For an interesting comparison of Stallman's and Tim O'Reilly's ideologies look here: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

I get it - not everyone has the bandwidth to worry about these things. But that is what makes RMS all the more valuable. Because the alternative is toys you can't fix yourself, and software which you can't fix yourself. Eventually every third party goes out of business and then you're stuck with useless bits.

Or worse, the trusted software company goes out of business and it turns out they were gathering up all sorts of data, and you didn't know that because it was closed source, and the way you find it out is that someone buys it all at the bankruptcy auction and you start getting a dozen calls a day and your identity gets stolen.

Also - seriously? You never fix your kids' toys?

Yes, I fix my kids toys. But I don't require the manufacturing details to do that.

Just as I don't need source code to modify/analyse software.

You use a hex editor?

Not that it defeats your broader point, but there are certainly better tools than a bare hex-editor for reverse engineering and hacking binaries.

>>You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Kinect/PrivacyandOnlineSafety

Weren't these the guys signing onto prism in what? 2007?

Stallman is extreme in his views. This has always tempered my respect for him. Gotta say though, he seems less extreme and more insightful given recent revelations.

Stallman supports knowledge as much as freedom.

Probably the reason that you can afford raising kids and buying them toys, is that at some point of your life you got educated, you learned to read, write, you learned math and everything else needed to land your job.

If one can hide how he made a plastic toy through legislation, then tomorrow the legislation may be used to control what one is allowed to learn.

True equality requires access to and sharing of knowledge.

> If I buy a plastic toy for my kids, .... It's enough that it fulfils the purpose for which it was made.

I sincerely doubt that. If the toy was made by child labor, would you still buy it? What if the toy was created from oil in war zones with child militias? Or what if the toy was made by companies that dumped oil in the oceans?

If you do indeed say yes that all you can about is the functionality of the toy, then I would claim that it is some strange priorities. Otherwise, you do have priorities other than the functionality of the toy.

People in fact purchase products that hit all of those points as a matter of routine. When you're in the store and your child sees an affordable, well-deserved toy that he wants, do you say, "OK, let me just run some thorough background investigation into the manufacturer's history and hiring practices before we decide if they're worthy of our money, and if they pass we'll come back and get it next week"?

For most people, they see a product for sale, they recognize that they want said product, and they purchase it. Buyers implicitly assume that the product was developed and produced basically ethically or its purveyors would be imprisoned, and that's pretty much as much thought as you can expect from the market. That's why regulatory bodies like the EPA and FDA exist.

I think more people would say the priorities of a curmudgeon who will not purchase an occasional gift for his son due to corporate politics are uncalibrated, rather than the priorities of one who simply buys the desired gift.

Systems being open have a trickle down effect of enabling many creators - that means if your kids dont like the mainstream toys they can very likely find some toys created by some small creator. Innovation is correlated to systems being open. Without open and free operating systems / compilers / debuggers we would not be seeing the proliferation of technology that we see today. Advocating for openness does not imply the expectation that every single user will use the schematics and source code to build things from scratch, it just implies that the subset of users who are unhappy with the status quo have some means of changing it.

> You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government

Dude, but did you hear about the recent surveillance leaks? ;-) What was revealed is almost exactly analogous to toy having the secret hidden camera. I am puzzled a bit - you say that you have to trust other people at some point, just after revelations that we can't trust them. ;)

But if you believe that the data collected about you will never by misused by anyone, then fine - but we shouldn't dismiss Stallman's concerns, especially when they turned out to be almost exactly true.

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