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Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

Completely off-topic, but does the signature bug anyone else?

  > Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  >   Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

"Skype is a closed-source, proprietary infrastructure, and that's bad. Therefore you should avoid it. Please consider using AT&T's closed-source, proprietary infrastructure instead."

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It's not the infrastructure that he cares about. He believe that any provider you use should be free to run their infrastructure as they see fit, releasing or not releasing any code as they see fit. It's the fact that the software that you run, on your end, is non-free.

With Skype, you cannot connect your own client to their network; you must run their proprietary, highly secretive client.

With the phone system, you can attach any device that you want. You can use a dumb, analog phone, or a digital phone running free software, or a digital phone running proprietary software, or modem, or a fax machine, or whatever, to the phone system.

Note that this was not always the case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_v._United_States).

So a reverse engineered Skype client would be OK then?

yes, I think so

Yes, for the same reason Samba, a reverse-engineered SMB/CIFS implementation, is OK. It's a Free Software (GPLv3) way to use a proprietary technology.

Absolutely.

Now, he also does have other concerns about the infrastructure; he would generally prefer to support infrastructure running on open tools and technologies, and may have various other concerns with particular providers.

But he sees that as a separate question of the ethical question about running non-free software on his own computers.

Ekiga is open source, using the GPL. Skype is a proprietary protocol. Plain old telephone service is at least an open standard.

It doesn't bug me, because without people pushing as hard for freedom as RMS has, we'd wouldn't have what we have today.

I've wondered about this before, and had to explained to me. Basically, RMS only considers software "eligible" to be free if it could, in theory, be moved to other hardware of the customer's choice. It is the ability to put the software somewhere else that is the "freedom" being abridged by closing the source. On the other hand, software that is fundamentally tied to hardware (such as firmware or infrastructure control) couldn't reasonably be moved somewhere else, so close-sourcing that software is not impinging on any freedom that would otherwise exist.

It's a fine distinction to make, but I get it. I don't necessarily agree with it, and I think it's a strange place to draw the line, but I can understand the logic behind it.

If I'm understanding this right, then the only part of Skype that RMS objects to is the desktop client. The network and infrastructure being closed-source does not remove freedom. (NSA is a separate consideration)

What would his position be on using the Skype software to make a PSTN phone call?

What if your phone uses proprietary software?

> What if your phone uses proprietary software?

As has been said, if the software is utterly hardware-specific firmware, such as the software that runs inside a hard drive that handles bad blocks and head movement and so on, he's OK with it being proprietary. A phone which somehow had software of that sort (to run an integrated answering machine?) would presumably be OK with him as well.

RMS is eccentric, principled to a degree that most of us have a hard time understanding, and probably more than a little nuts. However, everything I've seen about him indicates that he's highly intelligent, even if he uses it in unconventional ways. If you think you've spotted such an elementary error, it might be worth to stop and think about what you might be misunderstanding, rather than going straight for the conclusion that RMS can't spot the obvious contradiction.

Why does it bug you?

RMS is the first politician that codes. Once you understand that most of what he rants about actually makes some sort of sense. He's appealing to his base by making political statements that make little sense to anyone who isn't an acolyte.

However, you'd think given his issues with UNIX he'd still be a staunch advocate of avoiding AT&T.

Mostly, the hilarity of RMS recommending AT&T for some reason makes me think of that scene in the Matrix where Agent Smith asks Neo what good a call is if you can't speak.

My apologies to the downvoters for questioning the dogma of St IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs.

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