Richard Stallman Explains His Position on Google [video] | Hacker News Reader

Richard Stallman Explains His Position on Google [video]

techrights.org

11 pointsdredmorbius11 comments

This website is the epithome of what's wrong with the free software movement. I'm reading it from my devilishly closed iPad and I can't watch the video because it's in a format incompatible with the devices many people use to surf the internet everyday.

To hear what Stallman has to say, I should switch to a PC, which would probably have a closed system installed on it anyway.

Given that I gain access to the content I'd be still baffled by a website that looks like it's got some CSS issues, unless it was designed in 1993.

All of that considering that I know who Stallman is, what's Going on with the website, why I can't play the video and what's exactly a .ogg video file.

In other words, these guys are still pushing hard to spin themselves into oblivion and irrelevance. That is really sad.

In fact you are giving argument in favor for the free software.

Well, no? They're shutting themselves in in their Ivory tower. If you're already a free software enthusiast, than maybe you can hear what THE MASTER has to say. Otherwise, well, be fine with your life of consumerism and oppression that we won't contribute to overcome because our self-entitlement and shut-in attitude.

Going on the defensive and posting snarky replies purely because your device of choice opted not to support the format - despite being free to do so - is neither big, nor clever. The person you're replying to is completely correct, you make a great case as to why free and open software is a good thing, because your ability to experience this content is hindered by a walled garden of an OS.

Unfortunately I made a mistake. I shouldn't have mentioned the iPad. It weakens the central point - I.e. The fact that many free software advocates are themselves the feeders of their marginality

> I'm reading it from my devilishly closed iPad and I can't watch the video because it's in a format incompatible with the devices many people use to surf the internet everyday

Are you sure you're not mixing roles here ? Ogg Vorbis has been supported by Firefox, Chrome and Opera for at least 5 years. Who doesn't play it ? Microsoft browsers and Apple browsers, the latter explicitely discouraging [0] its inclusion as a lowest-common codec in the HTML5 spec.

Heck, the most widespread video format on the web is Flash and Apple is notoriously known for not supporting Flash natively on their mobile.

Don't you think Apple is to blame for this more than the websites ?

> irrelevance

The fact alone that you can't play the video because of your browser shows that the free software fight still is relevant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Ogg_formats_in_HTML5#Su...

I agree that the website looks awful, but it always baffles me when people blame open standards for the fact that their devices don't support them.

It's like blaming USB for the fact that a micro-usb plug doesn't fit into a lightning socket.

You can't watch the video because your device is incompatible with a well-known format that many people use to record video. As rakoo states, Apple famously and deliberately refused to support flv, which was the most common web video format when iPads were first released.

There is no technical reason why you can't watch the video on your iPad. There is no legal reason why you haven't got an Ogg player on your iPad. There are no legal or technical reasons why iPads don't ship with an Apple-authored Ogg player.

In fact, both libvorbis and libtheora are permissive, rather than copyleft, so there wouldn't even be a problem building an iPad app upon them.

While I agree with him on some points most of his arguments are just absurd. Javascript is now a bad thing too, because websites don't license it under the GPL? I wonder what his opinion on Postscript is, given it's a turing complete language. Am I only allowed to read Postscript documents if they are licensed under the GPL?

It's not JS but the Javascript applications (which are almost always non-free) that he objects to.

Particularly where websites disable functionality unless you're accessing them with JS enabled.

As an example of the latter, I was setting up some custom search engines for Chrome (you can enter the search URL of any site and replace the keyword with "%s"), which is handy for quickly dialing in on content on a specific site, etc.

And I've got a large (1000+ articles) Readability list. Which I would like to be able to at least run title searches on (that's all that Readability supports). The problem: Readability's search access is implemented fully in Javascript. I can't search by URL, which means rather than search from the address bar (as I can for many sites) I've got to navigate to my reading list (oh, they set up the landing page so you hit a "recommended reading list" first, so now it's two steps to get to where I want to be), then run your search.

It's a small bit of friction, but it's an annoyance, and gratuitous. And if the site wasn't relying on JS, my ability to interact with content I've curated myself would be much greater (search from commandline tools, etc.).

2 minutes on one very very small aspect of Google? That hardly warrants this title.

The title was the one on the post itself, HN rules.

And there were two aspects covered.

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