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Comment by vajorie | Hacker News Reader

Who was that guy with that bigass beard was? You know, the one everyone in tech takes lightly and treats as the butt of the joke? He keeps owning your asses as you keep ignoring him.

The one who advocates open hardware. You know.

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Richard Stallman?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

He's about free software as well. People that haven't started subscribing to his ideas post-leaks are part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is the assumption that using free software necessarily protects you from government intrusion. I think at this point you pretty much have to live out in the woods with nothing more complicated than a gun in your possession to avoid that.

Well, RMS exclusively uses a Lemote Yeelong that has been formally verified to not contain backdoors, and he runs purely free software on it. If that's not enough, he never connects it directly to the internet by having another computer wget certain websites on a regular basis and also download/ upload emails, which get transferred to the Lemote via physical media.

There may still be vulnerabilities, but he's a whole lot more secure than your average person.

But how well does RMS' model scale to our modern, global and interconnected society? Free software assumes the right to validate, and modify, source code - which is great if you can. Most users of free software, however, don't have the time or even the ability to do anything but blindly trust that someone else has it covered (and obviously, users of non-free software don't have a choice in the matter.)

Well, in terms of package and code validation, there are definitely strong arguments to be made for source-based distribution models and FOSS-backed fuzzing operations. Although freely available source isn't perfect for combating government intrusions, it still is the gold standard since it's impossible to implement fully-featured, unobfuscated backdoors. Despite the fact that things like heartbleed are damaging, keep in mind that they're only a bugs rather than deliberate backdoors.

The answer to imperfect software freedom isn't no software freedom.

> But how well does RMS' model scale to our modern, global and interconnected society?

It doesn't. But it isn't supposed to. Stallman is consciously upholding a moral ideal that most in tech are not.

The goal is not for everyone to be like RMS. The goal is to sway the companies who build tech for everyone to be like RMS.

Consider for a moment how much open source software Google, Microsoft, and Apple use in their proprietary products. Is it ethical to use that much free software for the corporation's own personal gain?

>Is it ethical to use that much free software for the corporation's own personal gain?

I don't believe it's necessarily unethical for a corporation to take advantage of open source software if the open source code is distributed with a license which allows for commercial use. I think if the author wants not to care about that, then that should be their right.

That said, closed-source code does make theft a lot easier to hide, so the case is stronger for the use of free software validating the (ethical) integrity of a company.

It's all a matter of trust in the end. Even with Open Hardware, the production line, or the transport of the hardware to your doorstep could be compromised. The same way that even Open Source software can be compromised if no one is paying attention or you are being specifically targeted.

How much trust is required also depends on how far one takes "Open". The homecmos project [1] is taking it down to the level of atoms.

https://code.google.com/p/homecmos/

That's all true. But if intelligence agencies are constrained to physically breaking in to your premises to bug you, that gets hard to scale up to pervasive mass surveillance.

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