Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video](audio-video.gnu.org) |
Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video](audio-video.gnu.org) |
The more the tech world develops and the more I learn, the more I start to like free & open source tech.
I do think there will always be a a large and growing amount of space for paid software work, but the variety and quality of free software seems to go up and to the right over time.
But I think the world is better with him than without him and that he's worked hard to further his mission. Not everyone should be like him, but it's great that he is.
I sincerely wish RMS all the best.
Do you guys know of any ways to reduce your risks of getting cancer? I know not smoking tobacco works.
What foods, bad habits should one avoid. What other habits can reduce cancer risks?
Are there any prophylactic techniques?
But I think some big part of it is genetics and/or luck. I see what happened to Jobs, and people like him - reasonably healthy people. Then I see men in my family who've routinely drank a ton and chewed tobacco, overweight, spent all day in the sun to the point of looking like leather, and live well into their 80s. Yes everyone has some anecdote that doesn't mean much, but it's hard to reconcile.
I think about this kind of thing lot, like how I think about TotalBiscuit's cancer and his regret regarding not getting seen to earlier. The profound level of regret these people must have felt during their final days must have been frustrating and saddening, but I appreciate their efforts to warn others as they have been responsible for me personally making sure I get serious signs and symptoms seen to rather than ignoring a bloody stool as though it's normal, or thinking I can treat something myself without professional advice.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/21/steve-job...
Not to say you shouldn't minimize your risk, but it can still hit you regardless.
Also not drinking alcohol [1].
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
Remember, though. You can still get it, even if you do all that. Having cancer is not a moral failure. Even kids may get it.
Realizing, not in a philosophical way, one way way or another, that we will die, is something that changes you. Fewer reasons to accumulate fame and money. More reasons to make yourself happy in this life.
(1) https://veganhealth.org/chronic-disease-and-vegetarian-diets...
We know most cancers are preventable and caused by our lifestyle/environment
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/
Don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, avoid smoked food, avoid processed red meat, avoid plastic food containers/beverage containers, buy bio food or food which has grown with minimal amount of pesticide
Exercise, that'll help not being overweight/obese/diabetic
Get vaccinated against hpv (you're probably too old for that one)
Don't live in a polluted area/city center, avoid owning furniture's that release toxic gases (a lot of things treated to be fireproof or fire resistant are awful)
Wear sunscreen or long clothes, get your weird moles checked
At the end of the day we all know it deep down, you can easily prevent a lot os health issues by not being overweight/obese and avoiding alcohol/cigarettes
Your recommendations are good, the easiest one being the HPV vaccine when under 30s.
https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cance...
Don’t: - Don’t smoke (even second hand so don’t stay near someone smoking), don’t drink alcohool, don’t drink sugar loaded drinks.
Beware: - Try to limit red meat, industrial food and processed sugar stuffs
Do: - Sport. Every day. Walk as much as you can.
Those are quite simple rules.
because of the poisonous vitriol that responses will undoubtedly have, i wont be reading responses. dont even bother.
The biggest tension at the GNU 40 years event was when an old Mr. was speaking about social economics and his attempts to make a local money in Basel (ch). Two american protagonists interrupted the speach telling it is too political. Later i talked to the one of them, a Chinese girl studiying in Harvard USA, she started telling me things about her big rich buisiness family and personal crypto projects she had in liberal finance field in Switzerland, she proposed me a job as a Solidity develloper. And I UNDERSTOOD why the previous speech was "TOO POLITICAL" for her.
For me, FSF and GNU are not enought political; I was always disappointed of the FSF and GNU political positioning, while their fight is about freeing the world of proprietary licences (property right) they don't consider to support anticapitalists movements who are fighting for that to. Stallman was the only to publicly support the French left social-reformist party "La France Insoumise" with the candidat Jean Luc Mélenchon, and for me it means a lot.
Now, let's say it; OF course I understand why this is strategic for them, but i don't stand for it because it is irresponsible and dangerous.
So sad to hear this :(
Also several studies mention they have higher level of nutrients, vitamin &co
Eating bio veggies won't make you cancer proof, but the again smoking a cigarette a day won't guarantee you a cancer either. It's a game of luck but some things help while other things are detrimental, I personally see no reason to buy pesticides riddled veggies when I have access to cleaner ones
Or is it because people with higher vitamin D levels probably spend more time outdoors, and are getting more exercise?
I wish it was easier to figure this stuff out.
> Results Global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by 79.1% and the number of early-onset cancer deaths increased by 27.7% between 1990 and 2019
It's the GNU project we're talking about!
There’s nothing to think more; the FSF should use YouTube or similar services as mirrors so people can watch the videos even when their website is hammered down by the HN crowd. You can hardly argue that the current situation where nobody can watch the video is a good idea.
For me that’s a great example. I personally know many old (even obsolete iPads) lying here and there collecting dust, as their software (and hardware) vendor decided they are all in for nature and ecology (sarcasm), so let millions of perfectly capable devices would be thrown away as a trash.
Eyeing some Android tablet for that, the one I can flash with Lineage OS and be happy with. Maybe Google’s Pixel C or even Nexus 7.
Meanwhile we continue using the iPad unlogginned till it stop working.
This sadly limits the options to less than let's say 10 devices. For now I am still using my 10 years old T440p because it's the last generation laptop that can both run coreboot and is still repairable (and it survived all the Ultrabooks I mentioned before. WTF?). But it's too old for Vulkan because there is no Haswell support. It was the perfect laptop until around 2020 when Vulkan was rolled out. Can forget games that ran before that now, because of mesa dropping support for it.
The framework will very likely be my next laptop if the current one dies, but only time will tell if the promise is worth the price.
Fairphone 2/3 are kinda useless as an ideology if there are no replacement parts available 12 months after the phone came out...so yeah, I got also two broken Fairphones I cannot repair for the moment because the bottom module isn't available anywhere.
I kinda refuse to buy a full phone just for spare parts because I can do that with literally every other cheap Chinese Android phone.
With the T440p there's no working new mint condition batteries available and only used ones that have less than 60% capacity when you buy them, so I am currently trying to design a battery case that can use 18650 cells directly without soldering. Takes a lot of time to iterate, and very hard to print with a cheap 3d printer.
I think I am way too stubborn for this world, given the amount of time I spend on fixing my old hardware.
This really infuriates me because we (iOS developers) were all forced to see how it was happening. If you want to stay in the game, you have to develop for the newest devices, In order to do so, you need to upgrade your Xcode. In order to do so, you have to periodically upgrade your mac. And this is more or less fine. But at the same time newer xcode drops support for older yet perfectly functioning devices.
What can you do? Keep older macs with older xcode versions and at least be able to develop solutions for your own devices. But this is not a solution, it doesn't solve anything really, and it wouldn't help much in your kitchen example.
Even better, I would very much like installing some Linux mobile distro on it.
It's limited but perfectly fine hardware with a good screen and impressive battery time. If only the software were any good.
Also:
- Yes, I know there's no sim card in it.
- no, I won't log in to iBooks, this is a freaking PDF viewer for me.
Every restart.
Linux mobile software is flawed by accident. iOS is flawed by decision and I can't rebuild and fix it.
The YouTube iOS app stopped working a while ago, I suppose the backend API changed.
But YouTube still works via Safari on the iPad 4.
I generally keep JavaScript turned off in Safari on that old tablet; I think it's a RAM limitation but it could simply be that the JavaScript version is too old. Many sites just don't work. But with JavaScript enabled, YouTube still does fine.
We had two, and both batteries are dead. No longer charging at all.
Additionally, even before the batteries went, video playback was far from great at the end.
I used NewPipe for youtube videos and VLC for downloads. And while once playing, it worked fine enough, the UI interactions were frustrating because of lacking responsiveness, and the 7 inch thick bezelled form factor made it hard to watch anything without holding the device in front of you.
We've since switched to a couple of cheap 10" tablets and they provide a much nicer experience.
It's really annoying though. The watch ticks, but it was built with features that the developer decides it can't support anymore after a few years. I found the Android version outside the google play store and I decompiled it to find the problem she described, which is a seemingly frivolous login feature (to WeChat login service! why?!? I think all Fossil watches in the past few years do this) to control the watch. I might make it a project to fix it one day.
I almost went down the path of buying a panel heater with an app - but, as a rule, no source (free to view, free to modify), no buy.
Talking about iPads, we have one, an iPad mini, that is just an alarm clock now. It's useless otherwise.
One of the things I like about Samsung tablets is that they have a "Battery saver" feature where you can restrict it from charging the battery past 85%, which is a generally good move if your tablet is going to be permanently plugged into power and used as some sort of fixed display.
I've had MANY brand name devices with lithium batteries bulge when left constantly plugged in at 100% battery for months and don't want to risk an explosion.
GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL.
The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. I barely hear anything about the FSF on Linux sites. Their reach elsewhere has to be essentially nonexistent.
And with the FSF it appears that RMS has no viable successor. That doesn't bode well either.
The sad outcome is that we keep rehashing things like Right to Read -- a fine thing from 1997, but what has happened since?
The FSF has been talking to users and to devs for decades, but unfortunately devs went from being users that had no problem sharing their progress to business people who thought that restricting access for personal, individual gain at the expense of the entire society of today and tomorrow is somehow "better", "more free", because who knows, maybe I'll be the next Bill Gates ?
I see the catastrophic state we are in today as the result of non-copyleft, of "Open Source" as opposed to "Libre Software", of the depolitization of what it means to take from the commons and give back to the commons, of what society means whether we see it as a sum of perfectly rational individuals with no money problems or as a group of interdependent agents. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and other big platforms could start up and be where they are today is because they could take a bunch of existing tools in the commons and not share back, to build their own fortune and control prison.
The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ? The issue runs deeper than software licenses, or even software.
> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter?
You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?
Sadly they seemed to have tied themselves in all kinds of self imposed knots when it comes to spreading their reach via social networking sites.
See * https://www.fsf.org/twitter * https://www.fsf.org/facebook
You can't change today's world if you're not a bit pragmatic. FSF may make some correct objections but if you're not properly present on some of these platforms your reach will remain limited.
To effect change you need to be part of the world of today -- warts and all. Only then you can you change it. Rejecting the world by putting your head into the ground is a strategy that will often fail. Only when you become extremely big and influential can you help determine the rules of the game.
I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is.
As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done! But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project.
A lot of these tools have pretty good documentation but when you visit one of the GNU websites you feel like it's 1995 again. It's more like man pages in HTML. Actually same for Apache Software Foundation.
And this is not getting better...
A start would be a modern representation of the tools and the ideas behind free software, maybe with a bit less philosophy. GNU needs to get a bit "cooler".
It's always been my opinion that the FSF screwed the pooch when it came to spreading their message. This starts right from their very name - the "Free" Software Foundation. Anyone of didn't know their message would understand them to be a group arguing that all software should be free of charge. This is completely orthogonal to their actual message of software having the ability to be easily understood and customized as needed by a tech-savvy user who has fairly compensated the original authors. They aimed for and missed badly the sweet spot message that all software should make simple things simple and complex things possible.
This expectation that users should not have to pay for the apps/software they use has partly lead to the dystopian landscape that is our ad-supported modern software experience. Users today think they're entitled to the same standard for all software they use. They expect LibreOffice Calc to be having the same feature set as MS Excel while at the same time paying nothing for it.
Well, they are Free Software Foundation, they have Mastodon (and PeerTube, although the latter is pretty empty).
Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. Those platforms are the opposite of free: Closed source, secret manipulation of content, censorship (and never mind the motivation), spying on users for the government, etc. The FSF would be hypocritical to endorse them. But of course, it does have "social network" videos - on PeerTube and MediaGoblin:
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf35-videos-online-find...
so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?
If I switch my project to GPL I immediately will lose most potential contributors and a lot of users, who will start complaining about my license choice or will be forbidden by their employer from contributing to it or using it.
Corporate entities are (maybe rightly) scared of the GPL. And the rise of open source work by/in FAANG companies, etc. has meant the undermining of that license.
It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.
The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.
AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".
I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.
At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).
So yeah, we're screwed.
At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.
We need these "content" people who maintain reliable tools with stable interfaces/behaviours. These people and tools are at the core of what modern infrastructure run on. Fly by night tools, languages and frameworks do not allow us to progress like we have. It's very easy for us "users" of these tools to forget that there is something maintaining something we take for granted.
You seem to be forgetting you're standing on the shoulders of giants.
A car that already has the hardware but requires payment to enable that by software is exactly the same thing as paying for a video game: The video game is already created and uploaded on the servers but software requires payment to let you download and play it. There are numerous other examples like game consoles sold at loss, printers sold less than the cost, search engines or mail services provided for free, free hosting etc. - all investing huge sums on creating the product in hope to recoup that and make profit by collecting small fees later and they need their products locked down to be able to do this.
The whole thing revolves around collecting small payments for a the very large capital investment that is required to create the product in first place. Since the small payments are collected post-development, someone has to risk their large capital for this to happen, they also expect compensation and guarantees that the small payments will arrive if the product is developed successfully.
The software is locked down only because they want to enforce that business model. You can refuse to participate in that but ultimately, those who can invest large amount of money end up making the much better products.
Most software worth a damn was made by a few people who cared. The business around it usually just gets in the way. This year you'll see hundreds of startups trying to "collect money" for some asinine idea. Most of those startups wont create anything of value. Even the successful ones will be gone or irrelevant in 5 years.
And that's what RMS understood better than many others: His software (and by proxy it's license) is just a tool to enforce an ethical business model.
Open source is a great thing. But it’s not better (morally) than closed source. Open is just a feature. Like Lego vs a solid plastic toy.
If the thing is a general purpose computer that can run arbitrary software (and I’d be tempted to include anything that can be remotely updated as "software", so this would include Tesla’s firmware), then I should be able to run my software instead. That’s the true test of whether I truly own my computing device.
Before we even get to Free Software, we need documented hardware architectures.
That's a highly subjective opinion, and yours is not more valid than others'
If your side of the argument is all compromise-makers trying to meet people halfway you often end up giving up more than you’re comfortable with. Both types of people play a useful part.
I really liked the idea of Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
It's gotten to the point where most cloud services are no longer managed instances of open source or even compatible software.
You could take a managed cloud PostgreSQL instance and migrate to something self-hosted if the prices were to hike up or something else happened that would necessitate it.
But how many of the cloud services in your stack does that apply to? Geocoding or routing? Push notifications and messaging? Payment gateways? Authentication and authorization solutions? File storage solutions? Web Application Firewalls?
Whether the software runs on my computer or not, if I am the user, I must be in control.
Whether the meal is prepared in my kitchen or not, if I am going to eat it, I must be in control.
Say what you will about his personality, you don't have to like him but saying that his accomplishments are way overblown is a terrible take. His work flows through every part of the GNU land and it's used by almost every tech person on the planet to some extent.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link with this claim to share.
If RMS made a choice to use proprietary software, with the only alternative being his dead, there is absolutely no moral conflict, or even anything against his principle. The only issue could only ever arises if he claimed "Free Software is more important than human lives", which I am pretty sure not a claim he, or anyone, has ever made.
It's basically the same principle as if you point a gun to my head and tell me to kill a puppy or get shot (and I'm certain you would shoot me). It's obvious which choice I would make, and I hardly see that as an evidence of my hatred for puppy.
That said - RMS has iirc said in the past that for medical emergencies he's willing to make a personal exception on this stance.
[0]: Medical devices can't be GPL compliant due to the anti-Tivo clause combined with regulations of the FDA that demand that a medical device will always behave the exact same way in the exact same situation. This is also extended to the software, meaning that not being allowed to reflash the software if you're not the manufacturer is a requirement.
Valuing freedom (even in limited spheres) more than human lives is a pretty familiar American idea. For example, recall Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" and consider that he was talking about the prospect of being taxed without his consent, not enslavement. Also, recall Private Eightball from Full Metal Jacket:
"Personally, I think, uh... they don't really want to be involved in this war. You know, I mean... they sort of took away our freedom and gave it to the, to the gookers, you know. But they don't want it. They'd rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards."
The answer is obvious based on your own personal principles, or based on RMS's stated principles?
>The only issue could only ever arises if he claimed "Free Software is more important than human lives"
He claimed that it is categorically not good to use non-Free software, with one exception for using non-Free software to develop a replacement for that software; and that "we must resist stretching [that exception] any further": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/is-ever-good-use-nonfree-prog...
+ the opposition against proprietary software does not mean that using proprietary software is immoral on its own. (Although you'll find plenty of people who will make this some sort of purity contest, rms is not one of them.) The moral evil that the free software movement address is to be forced or coerced to use proprietary software. The mere use of proprietary software only becomes a moral issue when it results in drowning out free software. Much like the widespread acceptance of proprietary mobile phone apps leads to cultural shifts that essentially force everyone to use said apps to participate in life. (See wechat in China.)
+ The second is addressed here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy//po/who-does-that-server-real...
As others have pointed out, there is no moral dilemma here. The demand for computational autonomy is not a dogmatic, religious belief that conflicts with medical treatment of a disease.
FSF gave Karen Sandler an reward for her work on this: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/mar/26/sandler-fsf-free-...
"Richard Stallman, President of the FSF, presented Sandler with the award during a ceremony. Stallman highlighted Sandler's dedication to software freedom. Stallman told the crowd that Sandler's “vivid warning about backdoored nonfree software in implanted medical devices has brought the issue home to people who never wrote a line of code. Her efforts, usually not in the public eye, to provide pro bono legal advice to free software organizations and [with Software Freedom Conservancy] to organize infrastructure for free software projects and copyleft defense, have been equally helpful.”."
Linux is not a GNU project. But it's free software, so I suppose RMS could use it without major pain. Although he'd probably prefer Linux to use GPLv3.
He's not unreasonable, he's just very adamant about software freedom.
Results in a lot of stuff getting rejected for FSF certification despite being just as open practically as the certified stuff.
A car probably just isn't seen as software to him if it's just the internal control systems. Maybe the entertainment system these days would be.
You can search his site for the word "ticket" to get an idea of how he feels about software systems in public transport.
Even if you don't care, you have to upgrade to the latest Xcode to build against the latest iOS version with the cascade of consequences you described so well.
My wife is Ukrainian and we do live in Ukraine. And hadn’t left, as our city is relatively safe from missile and drones attacks. But the winter was harsh and we had extreme blackouts last winter. We could have from days (at worst) to hours (at best) without any electricity and internet connection. I bought top of the line MacBook Pro 16 with M2, just to do my work, which involves heavy renders quite often. Also we have a generator and a huge battery pack that can power some critical devices up to a day.
Still, given all that, the iPad saved our winter, as we could download offline most of the various content and almost never its battery was depleted during those blackouts. This tablet ($30 on a used market) and a $4K laptop were two devices that held its battery basically without need to be recharged either from generator or the battery pack.
Now Apple and Google tell me I have to retire the tablet just because. Also, I have an obsolete 10” Intel Atom netbook somewhat 5 years older than this iPad (ca. 2007–2008), and it runs fresh Arch Linux with the latest Firefox. Its battery is dead, but I know I can replace the cells, when needed. It can run many of my tasks, has an HDMI port and 4 GB of RAM. And is perfectly usable in many cases. But the iPad that could run rounds across the netbook, if allowed to remove all the bloat and update what’s needed— well, you know. You better buy a new one to watch YouTube and your precious local content.
And it plays local H264 720p very well, usually. However, for us 480p is plenty most of the time.
So funny and so sad. Nonfree JS? They're in their own cloud of whatever. Yes, there is nonfree stuff. But nonfree stuff also can get things done.
Linux just has a different business model. If you can do all your things like that, cool.
Many other business models are possible too, use that to create better products than the "invest huge sums now and develop the thing, collect small payments down the road".
It's strange to expect that other business models shouldn't exist so yours can work.
If you don't like locked down cars, just make cars the way you see fit.
It definitely should, but it doesn’t want to. That’s two different things. The goal of the FSF is to promote free software; that they don’t want to do it through proprietary mediums is obviously a legitimate choice, but that doesn’t make it intelligent.
With Google you can even make an argument that they can violate more user's rights because of Free software.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Free software per see, the topic is just more complex than what is presented.
To my knowledge the FSF doesn't consider firmware blobs with no way to flash "part of certification" because it would be inoractical to do so. By definition "software you can't change" isn't "free"(as in speech, not beer), so I don't think it's an ideological line.
So they either have to consider any device with unmodifiable software to be non-free(basically removing entire device classes), or be realistic and draw the line somewhere. "Can you modify the software on the device from the rest of the gnu software" is a line that matches up with their ideals fairly well IMO.
Basically, Richard Stallman is well aware that cars are bundles of non-free software(see: https://jalopnik.com/richard-stallman-weighs-in-on-the-check...). He has voiced opinions that software controlling the brakes in your car should be FSF and not binary blobs that come pre-installed with no visibility.
Can you develop a bit on that ?
The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently.
Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store).
Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.
However, my impression is it has been a force for good overall, giving us cross-country mobility, getting rid of cellphone roaming charges, and avoiding waste by trying to standardize plugs. They notably introduced GDPR to protect citizen's data and they provide a court of human rights, and there is a push for "data sovereignty".
The FSF/GNU seems a bit too fringe and not too great at explaining the problem to everyday people instead just offering entirely uncompromising solutions that don't work for most people. More isolationist than activist. What would the less radical organization benefiting from the existence of FSF/GNU even be? The EFF?
Give them an inch and they'll take (or more precisely, they took) a mile.
On this kind of topic negotiations are at the political level and whether you like it or not they will take the unsavory position of large corporations into account. A total refusal to compromise can end up leaving your side out of the discussion and end up with worse regulation. Uncompromising idealists just don’t have the leverage to make impactful threats of leaving the negotiation table.
That doesn’t mean you should not draw lines and do your best to hold them. But if the line is already crossed you can still do good negotiating, as unpleasant as it is.
If there are no “soft mature adults” there to be heard, no one is heard. But your point that giving an inch ends up losing you a mile absolutely stands: this is what I was saying about absolutists being anchors, they allow the soft negotiators to start from a stricter position before the negotiation starts. A group made up entirely of “reasonable compromising people”, however, is terrible because they start from a weakened position that they view as a reasonable compromise.
However, there will be negotiations and you will end up giving away some inches unless you have a lot of power. I absolutely value your un-negotiable position, but don’t underestimate what moderates can do representing it in a politically-acceptable, watered-down way.
That does not answer your question though. It goes both ways: if the doctor recognises that a firmware tweak may save your life, then she should be able to do so.
There are many cases where running a self hosted version is not feasible, which are also mentioned in the text. Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware. But outsourcing simple calculations that can be done locally is a bad thing I agree.
I mean, fediverse sites like Mastodon or Lemmy, or even something like PeerTube show that it's possible to at least run instances of a larger federated service, albeit the user experience could be better (the average person asking "What do you mean, I have to pick a server to join?").
Admittedly, video hosting is the hardest due to space and bandwidth requirements, though perhaps the real reason why none of these platforms see real widespread success is the network effect - most people already are pretty comfortably in popular walled gardens and don't feel like they want to switch to anything else.
The restrictions on business models (imposed by software licenses as a tool) is necessary to preserve the Four Freedoms, which, at least in his view are required to use software ethically. RMS predicted, and accurately as we see, that forgoing these essential Freedoms will create a world where software is used (on us) in an unethical way.
You can’t advocate an ideology without a solution to the problems at hand. Someone needs to write that software, and that someone needs to be fed and sheltered. It’s also not shameful to want more than staying alive.
You do? No graphics card? No (good) games? No firmware? And if so, how much of a premium did you pay for the lack of scale from your hardware vendor alone?
I prefer to look at the positives in life. Literally the biggest companies in the world don't want people to have free software, yet we still do. It's been a hard battle at times. I was there in early 00s when running GNU/Linux sucked in many ways. Now it's an absolute joy.
Quake 3 is still free, you know.
But things are changing and linux is getting some traction.
The healthcare industry is very slow moving (as it should be).
I know it's not foss, and I'm aware of mach, but QNX still holds a place in my heart.
If you want that sort of protection, BSL, SSPL, Elastic license, etc are what you want.
If you want to make Free Software, make it. Know that people you don’t like may use your software, even criminals may. That is what Free Software is. OSS is slightly different but similar.
If you want to make shareware, make shareware — no judgements on people who want to make money with their software and believe thats the best path.
I wish they would give back all the profit as well but that's another topic and the AGPL doesn't touch that.
You're never 100% in control, but that doesn't mean you should try and maximize it.
Software is malleable, and Tesla (or hackers) can change it under your feet. You should be able to inspect it and have a say in what it does or whether to accept the next update.
See the recent Philips Hue debacle for an example of when software that's been running well for years suddenly turns on the user.
See recent car recalls where there is a structural problem with the car.
This is not unique to software.
Same with the software, there is a pc and an FSD chip in there. You could definitely muck with it. You just don’t have any details. Is it because you’re a software engineer and not a metallurgist that you think like this?
That article was written before the finished GPLv3 was published, they had only published a stricter draft.
Therefore; I'm not wrong.
What is the anti-tivo clause?
--
Anyway, TiVo wanted to get onto the GPLv2 train like a lot of companies, but they also wanted people owning their devices to be unable to partially modify their firmware even as they distributed their copies of the firmware onto TiVo boxes. They enforced this by having a digital signature check that only allowed TiVos own software to run if the software stack was entirely TiVo. It would also work if the stack was entirely FOSS because only TiVo checked it.
For the sake of clarity; Bradley Kuhn of the SFC iirc investigated the TiVo boxes at the time, the signature checks only were an issue if you partially replaced TiVos software, not if you went the whole hog on replacing it; excercising GPLv2 rights was completely possible and you could turn a TiVo box into a XBMC (these days that's Kodi) box. You just couldn't run TiVos software ever again if you did that thanks to a hardware check.
The FSF took personal offense to this practice and dubbed it "Tivoization", which is a shorthand for "attempting to restrict the ability to install or link with Free Software via hardware DRM". (Which yes, is a modification of what TiVo actually did but really that part is just par for the course with the FSF.)
As a result, the GPLv3 includes an explicit clause that if your software is distributed in a non-code form, that you also must distribute all the information required to be able to modify that distributed software, if there's parts on the device that prevent you from doing so. (Or in plain terms: on restricted hardware, you must give up the signing keys if you preload the hardware with FOSS software.)
--
This clause is usually just called the anti-Tivo(ization) clause and it's... pretty damn controversial. It's the main reason why the Kernel is still GPLv2 and not GPLv3; Linus Torvalds personally considers this clause to be a significant enough alteration of the "deal" that FOSS provides for the kernel, so he didn't upgrade (which to be clear would've also been very difficult since the kernel is 2.0-only, not or-later, so he'd require approval from all significant contributors at that point). It's also often cited as the main reason why the GPLv2 has/had strong corporate backing but software licensed under the GPLv3 has always kinda had issues with that; the v2 was seen as more "fair" in that companies were willing to work with its terms, while the v3 was seen as basically forcing them to give up important parts of their trade secrets and made them antsy of working with the FSF in general.
And as mentioned before, in some fields (medical is the one I know of, but I'm pretty sure there's a few others), regulatory compliance is impossible with v3 while very much possible with v2 because of this clause.
Yeah, the greed and individualism of earning a living wage. Not everyone can have a sheltered position at MIT or as head of a foundation.
There is a distinction between "I need money to live" and "I want money because I want more", and the distinction should be clear enough. Yes, many projects are in the first case, but that's not the subject.
If you want to commit to a new project, make a living off of it, what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft ?
This is not a statement of my values; simply providing plausible answers to that question.
Usually non-copyleft free software is written in a variant of these scenarios:
1. Paid for by a company whose business model is distinct from selling software (e.g. ads) and prefers to not have to worry about copyleft licensing issues in small contributions they get back from the community and be free to integrate it in proprietary products.
2a. An individual author who will indirectly benefit (in both ego and monetary ways) by writing a popular piece of software. Copyleft in fact limits the spread of the software. Think Tanenbaum being excited and proud when the news that MINIX is used in Intel Management Engine came out.
2b. Result of a academic research that benefits from maximum spread. Lots of consuming companies prefer Apache to GPL and are more likely to use the non-copyleft software.
Had the US done its job properly and antitrusted the offending companies a decade ago, as it should have, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
Plus, the GPL has long been used for commercial purposes as well.
I don't think the issue is in the form but in the content: developers don't want to hear they are favoring greedy private interests (sometimes including themselves, sometimes at their expense) instead of the common goods, because the freedom to restrict a good from everyone for personal profit is more important than the freedom to access said good and build upon it.
the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding.
Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.
[0] for example: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
But younger people looking at Times New Roman websites is like telling them 'use man pages'.
I think GNU is not doing themselves a favor in being so old school. I'm not saying they should use (nonfree scnr) JavaScript bloated websites but a more modern look is not that complicate and achievable with free HTML and CSS standards.
So I see ads (even videos!) instead of my simple html page, or on top of it. It's terrible!
I just factory reset, then if I do the system updates from the control panel they come back. It's reproducible.
I don't install any app since I really only need the browser to display an html page from a server on my LAN.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MS6I0HQ/
This short USB power cable
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B092KF36T6/
This wall switch to tap USB power out of a wall switch box so there would be no visible dangling wires. This will only work if your apartment has neutral wires in the switch boxes. Older apartments often don't have them
Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want?
> Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles.
And how else are people on those platforms going to hear anything? The only way I can imagine is either by people who don't agree with the FSF repeating their message (do you trust them to be accurate?), or people who do agree, but more willing to compromise.
> so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?
And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?
Nobody is preventing you to post to multiple platform .., and you might have way more engagement in smaller platform.
The recent Mastodon growth allowed me to leave Twitter, I'm missing some content would be nice if more people cross-posted but well I'll do without.
Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.
The technology is there to make their own website and platforms; I'd argue that the problem isn't that they're not active on the big social media platforms, but that they don't produce media in the first place.
They can chuck videos onto their own website, license it under a free license and allow others to repost them onto social media for exposure, for example.
GNU tools such as gcc were originally developed using proprietary software until the GNU fabric was dense enough to allow bootstrapping. How else can you achieve anything at all, really?
The gist is, for different situations different business models can work. If the one you propose works for your software, good for you.
The problem starts when you demand that other business models should not exist, so yours can work.
Aside from the fact that in democracies we regularly oust business models which we believe have dimetral effects on society, this is not what happens here. Free software exists as a choice. And is often chosen freely, because of it's transparency, quality, and continuity, not because of it's price. In fact, when you base your work on a foundation so large that it's infeasible to recreate it, the Four Freedoms actually work in _your_ favor as a business.
We as users should demand insight into the software running on hardware we own. Otherwise we only partially own it, and if the device is connected to the internet, we can lose ownership any time.
When you buy a house do you enquire into the grade of concrete used in the foundations? Should “we home owners demand insight into the concrete ratios used”.
I wonder if on electrician forums there are folks saying: “wiring should be open source”? Like because you understand something you want more insight, but you’re happy to be in ignorant bliss on every other aspect of a product.
Yes?
This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.
You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.
An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".
Like it or not, YouTube and twitter are enormous with huge audiences.
Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.
But yes, GCC is very nice.
> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?
If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.
Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.
You can even boot Linux from EFI directly, I think, you just need to hardcode the kernel parameters, which is not ideal. So a very minimal loader is still useful, but way simpler than GRUB.
Twitter has been in the news for banning accounts for doing that.
And when the ban time comes, milk that for all it's worth.
They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.
Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.
"Knights for hot ladies", "eating skin parts of own feet on video", "..."
And this is about the front face, so what do you expect?
The purity inherent in insisting on using only free software is laudable, but evangelizing is only effective when there's reach. (It's also much more compelling when it demonstrably makes folks' lives materially better, but reasonable people will disagree on the particulars there.)
I don't know how Microsoft managed to design a boot scheme that is conceptually better than boot sector booting while including a similar painful amount of legacy in it.
And then there are the people who celebrate that 'advance' of modern software while their kernel now has a 16-bit real mode "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" stub.
It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.
His ideals is just fine. His social manners not so much, and that highly limits the effectiveness.
And with that sort of maneuver, GNU lost exactly what made their stuff popular in the first place: that they provided better tools than what commercial Unix used to come with.
We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is.
While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”, while DRM goes deeper into our lives, and while everything is becoming a “hosted service”, one can only hope for (and put efforts into) going back to the ideals he proposed and pushing back on the elements that control us and seek to do even more so.
We all don’t have to be absolutists (it comes at the cost of convenience, which most people prefer), but there are enough of such people around the world as far as FOSS is concerned. Whenever I see FOSS meetups and people connecting over it, that’s something I’m grateful for and wholeheartedly support (though I’m not one of them).
Programs were way simpler, and shipping the source code in paper was the de facto way of distribution.
It's not like he was a wacko around his peers. He just created what seemed a logical step from that.
I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
Check out doomworld some time to see what’s been going on. Unbelievably good level design and mods all over the place, custom source ports everywhere, thousands of maps, etc
Time and time again showed me why free and open source software is important, but they keep lagging behind their competitors in term of funding.
He once got irritated with me in an email because I wouldn’t do something (release one of my old Lisp books under a FSF document license), but I happily accepted that irritation because I understand where he was coming from.
Richard, get well.
Global warming is one ecological problem out of dozens and we'll economically outscale it even if we don´t do anything special about it. Damage to human health and infrastructure plus spending in adaptation will be a steady drag that will be much slower than our increasing ability to withstand its effects.
In the meantime, we have tons of global and local issues caused by human activity that have next to nothing to do with global warming: destruction of natural habitats; invasive species; overfishing; plastics; toxic and/or long life chemicals/medicines... We have a couple of resource issues coming up: cobalt, helium, rare earths; hydrocarbs; hell even copper might become a problem soon-ish... We are faced with the effects of being able to reliably control our own reproduction, a revolution that we're absolutely not ready for as a species and that requires us to rethink a 100.000 years old societal structure pretty much from scratch. We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail. Again that's a first for any social species.
The whole point of the GPL was to empower users, and it's pretty clearly failing at that. SaaS providers provide access to GPL software, but users can't decide which version to run, or move their data, or even use an old version of the software if the new one comes with unreasonable restrictions, surveillance clauses, or unreasonable price tags. At this point, FOSS isn't even free-as-in-beer for most people.
On top of that, Red Hat has basically said they're not going to abide by the GPL any more. They're taking third party code, modifying it, distributing binaries, and if you exercise your rights under the GPL, then they'll stop giving you access to the code or the binaries.
Ironically, BSD and Apache licenses seem to be better at preserving user freedom at this point. They allow commercial distribution on hardware and as a SaaS. GPL 3 forces *aaS business models in practice.
I hope RMS makes a quick recovery, but I'm pretty bummed about how the GPL has played out at this point.
But what is he known for, outside tech circles, if he is known at all?
When you want to deliver a message, it matters a lot, how you deliver it.
Unfortunately the world doesn't know how to really appreciate people as much when they're alive for some personality types.
What is plato known for among people who don't give a shit about philosophy?
Most people don't know what the kernel is, but they do see user space, and that was largely GPLed for a while. I think IBM ran some super bowl ads about how amazing Linux and open source were, about ten years ago.
Also, stuff like raspberry pi and ssh exploits (yes, BSD, I know) also show up in pop culture. The Matrix and Mr Robot come to mind. During the end of the dot com boom, I think people were largely aware that Apache + Linux were what things ran on.
> While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”,
Free software and open source are the same category of software and licenses (except for sporadic instances that are at the very edge of that one category, as categories tend to be blurred).
Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available.
There are companies trying to push source available proprietary software as "open source", perhaps hoping for such replacement, and this has had some success in some specific areas, but the open source community is pushing against it. Or, at least, the wise ones in it are.
GP here. I agree. I should’ve worded it better to say that a lot of “*source” terms are used to make it seem as if the publishers are meeting a great ideal (like FLOSS), but are muddling things more and more. I shouldn’t have listed “source available in the very same sentence” without being clear. I don’t have stats, but “open source” and similar terms have been used as buzzwords for marketing while the publishers really want their SaaS to be the one people ultimately pay for and use.
> While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”
The OSD is very much compatible with the FSFs list of freedoms.
“Source available” is a new name for “shared source” and is fake open source proprietary trash.
But in practical terms, it is too complicated (ethics!), so all is down to copyleft or not, which I believe is what the parent comment was referring to.
Perhaps that's what we should be using: copyleft vs open source, instead of free software vs open source.
I agree we need passionate people working tirelessly for software freedom.
The broader free software community agrees we don't need people like him though.
From Wikipedia:
> The FSF board on April 12 [2021] made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.
> Multiple organizations criticized, defunded and/or cut ties with the FSF, including: Red Hat, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Software Freedom Conservancy, SUSE, the OSI, the Document Foundation, the EFF, and the Tor Project.
For those out of the loop, the Richard Stallman had repeatedly defended adults having sex with children over many years and he most recently said sex slaves aren't raped.
But has any other license had the same impact as GPL?
Has any other set of OSS tools enabled so much as the GNU command line tools which were (and are) the foundation of Linux?
I put him up for the night once. I'm a BSD guy, ran the local FreeBSD society. He was pleasant enough about BSD we could hang out a bit. I know what my preferences are, but I'm not so arrogant as to believe I'm anywhere near in a majority, and his influence through his work (including GNU), is completely obvious. Without him, we'd all be paying Microsoft, Sun, IBM or HP through the nose for licenses to much worse technology than we have today.
My email:
Greetings Dr. Stallman,
First of all, Happy 40th GNUversary!
I was not able to attend the GNU40 meeting in Switzerland, but I have heard rumours that you have announced that you have some form of cancer.
Can you give me some more information about this? And is the cancer manageable?
I hope you are around for many more years.
--- tusharhero
Stallman's reply:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
I'm glad you are concerned about my well being. At the same time, I am disappointed that people are spreading incomplete rumors, instead of passing along all of what I said about this. That is going to waste a lot of people's time and concern, just as it has done with you.
My prognosis is good. I can expect to live many more years.
-- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
And wasn't a total stranger anyway, he let Stallman know that he's a part of the same tribe, that's probably enough.
For example, the right not to have to use some random company's app to interact with a government agency or a public school (and agree to said company's EULA, etc). It only takes a few dozen people to create a church with legal standing in many countries.
The FSF and the EFF are nice, but churches have additional legal protection for their adherents.
It does sort of vaguely border on religious zeal at this point. I've told companies they can either talk to me on Signal (or email), wait til I arrive on site, or find another contractor, but I will not use WhatsApp no matter how much they pay. This also applies to, for example, Microsoft/Google/Amazon products where learning their APIs and products mean my human capital, my skills, can be revoked by someone I never met, made valueless, my income made moot, in a sense.
Imagine having invested substantial time and effort into a proprietary ecosystem that was killed (by the company or its competition) and not being able to quickly leap into a competing esoteric, obtuse product.
Only recently, I happen to realise, we could have listened to this man little more. Too late then, we are sold already.
Recover well Mr Stallman! I wish you the best!
I think he is one of the most influential persons in the last decades, not only regarding GNU or FreeSoftware but also about technology overall. While sadly at the same time lots of people underestimate his works and foreseeing.
He has really been and still is an inspiration for me. Really all the best to him!!
May he recover well, or at least have long enjoyable years ahead.
He has/had arguable/unacceptable behavior, but I believe we strongly owe him. He has built incredible software, defined important stuff and kicked our asses in the right direction.
As I am prone to do when I'm brought back to that moment where I was just chatting with the RMS, I smile and wonder how many other dumb college compsci kids were exposed to a different kind of way of doing things that basically changed their lives.
Get well soon Mr. Stallman!
Richard Stallman has certainly been successful inspiring Ton and others to do great work and carry the flame! I hope he has access to excellent healthcare, and is as lucky as Ton.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate Ton Roosendaal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/jlaxaf/can_we_just...
"Money doesn't interest me" - Ton Roosendaal interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg
BlenderCon 2020 closing address transcript:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951703
DonHopkins on Oct 31, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Can we just take a moment to appreciate Ton Roosen...
It's well worth watching and discussing the entire video, including Ton's introduction and close, bracketing all the amazing contributions by blender artists and developers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951550
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEjmbsiflMU
I think he saved the important personal news to discuss at the end, so it didn't distract from the virtual conference's focus on Blender itself, its community, and developers.
Ton is an unstoppable lucky force of nature: First he survived a vicious ceiling attack, now he survived leukemia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk&ab_channel=Blend...
In the introduction, Ton says that it has been a year of introspection and renewal, and describes how the Blender organization has been restructured.
That's followed by a series of mind blowing videos by a diverse worldwide bunch of talented Blender artists and developers.
In his closing statement, Ton tells what has happened to him in the past months, explains his change of perspective, and the implication and changes at the Blender Foundation.
Ton Roosendaal's BCON2020 Blender Conference closing address transcript:
https://youtu.be/uEjmbsiflMU?t=5427
I think it is a quite common effect in films.
Imagine, you are standing in the middle of a waterfall.
It is noisy, it is messy, it is colorful, it is wet.
You see everything is falling down.
Suddenly stops, the jets are coming down.
You see a bit of splashes.
You are standing there in the darkness.
On a black mirror.
That's how it feels when the doctor tells you that you have leukemia.
On February 24th, this year I was urgently hospitalized because I was developing bruises all over my body.
I started to bleed on my mouth.
The doctor said go to the hospital. Ton, we have to examine you.
At midnight I got the infamous bad news delivery by the doctor that I have acute leukemia of the quite rare kind.
It is called APL, which is not very common, but it is very lethal.
So usually you don't survive two weeks with this, unless, of course, the treatment works.
So that's what happened.
They immediately gave me blood transfusions and chemotherapy, and luckily after a few days I was recovering.
So I quickly moved from the critical phase to the phase of that you may get cured.
Four weeks later I was released from the hospital.
I was strong enough to join the rest of the world in the ... lockdown, staying at home.
After five weeks I had my first bone marrow test, which was extremely good.
And cancer was in remission, the doctor said. We are going to take you to the next phase, to cure you fully.
And that's called the maintenance phase.
Maintenance, right?
Then he said, well ... actually it is 7 months of treatments in which you have to be four months in hospital.
Not full time. But imagine in the afternoon you go to the hospital, they hook you up with the bag of poison, you wait three hours, you get sick, you go home, go to bed, in the morning you feel a little bit better.
And in the afternoon you go back to the hospital.
They hook you up, and you get sick again.
That's for 4 weeks, and then you get 4 weeks to recover, another 4 weeks getting sick, and 4 weeks to recover, another 4 weeks to get sick, another 4 weeks to recover, another 4 weeks to get sick!
It was last Friday, the last of the chemotherapy.
And this morning I went to the doctor again to discuss the tests I had.
And luckily my blood is fantastic, the bone marrow is looking really good, I could be declared cured.
But there was one little test they are still waiting, is the DNA test, which will take another 2 weeks to get.
But the doctor said I shouldn't worry about that.
I'm recovering extremely well.
So basically I've got my life back
So ...
And oh, how much I would have loved to sit together, today, at the conference with everyone because there would have been a conference and we would have thrown an enormous party not this year.
So I'm telling you this because this whole experience has had a profound impact on me, on my personality, on my life of course, plus I had time to think.
And I learned a couple of lessons.
First, getting cancer and surviving it it is not a fight. It is not something you win, something you lose.
You only need one thing. A little bit of discipline of course, to take care of yourself, eat well, do some exercises.
But what you need is luck.
And I was lucky.
I was lucky that science found the right treatment for me.
This is only 15 years old. This treatment for people with this kind of leukemia.
I was lucky to have family, friends around me to stand by.
I was lucky to have a team here in the company to stand by and to have.
Francesco Siddi to replace me for 8 months, doing fantastic job on it.
So I was lucky to live in the Netherlands, where there is a universal health care for everyone.
So there was not a moment that I had to worry about what would the treatment cost, and the doctors didn't have a moment to think other than what can we do for Ton, to help him, to cure him, and to make it as good and easy as possible for him.
So next time if you see people having cancer, don't wish them strength, or in Dutch "sterkte", just say good luck, and I wish you well, or a good day, a good evening.
Other things that I learned was that I want to start taking better care of myself, and I want to, I have a feeling that I was sacrificing myself too much.
So I want to put myself more forward, and also take care better of myself in a way that I can pay myself a little bit better. So I can afford a little house outside of Amsterdam with a garden.
I also mentioned last year that at some moment I have to step aside from Blender, for the future, to allow other people to come in.
And the process is been sped up, but not so much that I want to step down, but to get very strong people around me to help making Blender strong, and keep it strong, and move on, and step forward.
Because the main thing I learned was that I was really really not ready to let that go.
I couldn't let go of Blender, because that' s my life' s work.
Blender is life, right.
Blender is a community.
It is a team of people here.
It is everybody who is contributing.
It's the developers.
The bug fixers.
It is the people that make add-ons.
It is even the people who complain, or the people use Maya and don't like Blender.
It is the forum trolls.
And even the people who want to have the game engine back.
So all of them are the people I love.
And all of them I feel like is my family.
And I would never let go of that family.
So, enough drama, right?
I want to end with a little more happy note.
As you all know 2020 is not very nice.
It is a year that we are going to forget.
But the happy message is that 2020 didn't get me down, and I want to spread that positive vibe with everyone.
So please take care of yourself, take care of each other, and a little bit of Blender.
And I see you next year in Amsterdam, or somewhere else.
Bye Bye!
Father God in Heaven,
Please heal Richard Stallman of the cancer afflicting his
body, and give him a strong will to endure all of this to the end.
Let him keep his health through this period of his life here on Earth, LORD.
And let both him and his legacy continue shine the light of freedom and
transparency and human decency in this world, which is getting so dark.
And keep him healthy through his chemo, please God. And give him the joy of Your
salvation through Jesus Christ, and the hope of life eternal.
Save his soul, please God. And if it is Your will, even make him a saint in the
church of Jesus Christ, Your Son. Heaven wont be the same without him.
In Jesus Christ's name I ask,
Amen.
I will continue to pray this for you RMS.I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode (no X11 or Wayland) by sending a URL to a service he wrote that will email him the Web page back - a clean process without any using any tainted proprietary software.
He only ever exchanged one sentence with me when we had dinner together with other computer scientists two decades ago in Edinburgh: "I don't do smalltalk." - and he didn't mean the programming language. :)
Anyone who is not as strong-headed as he is will have no hope of defending software freedom. The only thing I wish is that he would learn how to be more persuasive, i.e. improve his rhetoric skills. His reasoning and logical skills are exceptional, but winning over the public is not always about being right.
Right person at the right time - live long and prosper RMS.
Nobody is perfect. World is moved forward by imperfect people that are able to do something productive for the society.
I hate that word. It's not being "cancelled". It's being called out for being a jerk, and it's past overdue we did that.
For the Stallman case the impact of "cancellation" was probably 0, anyway.
Perhaps, but we all know not to make other people uncomfortable by staring at their secondary sex characterists. RMS is an adult, he should know better than to treat women like objects like I saw him do at my university.
Do you have some examples of someone being “cancelled” in this way?
fuck cancer.
Fuck proprietary software!
referring to his story of "right to read" or something like that about books being able to get deleted of your bookshelf... and then Amazon making this a reality some decades later
Surely we can set our standards a touch higher than this sort of behaviour.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37705885 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37706055
We need his vision to inspire us to keep inspiring. And to help us understand what is right and what is wrong.
I hope he will heal soon.
Two days later I found myself selling books alongside a self-described nomad and was approached by the leader of the communist party of Great Britain who shook my hand and said “I’m a big fan of your work.”
Was one of those surreal moments.
Please elaborate on why this is an inaccurate view instead of just saying "you're wrong", which adds nothing.
https://stallman.org/saint.html
"Sainthood in the Church of Emacs requires living a life of purity—but in the Church of Emacs, this does not require celibacy (a sigh of relief is heard). Being holy in our church means exorcizing whatever evil, proprietary operating systems have possessed computers that are under your control, or set up for your regular use; installing a holy (i.e., wholly) free operating system (GNU/Linux is a good choice); and using and installing only free software with and on the system. Note that tablets and mobile phones are computers and this vow includes them.
Join the Church of Emacs, and you too can be a saint!
People sometimes ask if St IGNUcius is wearing an old computer disk platter. That is no computer disk, that is my halo — but it was a disk platter in a former life. No information is available about what kind of computer it came from or what data was stored on it. However, you can rest assured that no non-free software is readable from it today.
In addition to saints, the Church of Emacs also has a hymn—the Free Software Song. (No gods yet, though.) Hear the song sung by Saint IGNUcius himself."
I am installing it now.
computer science is not real. computers are not found in nature. they're not a natural object, hence the methodology of study (from a philosophy of science standpoint) cannot be the same.
similarly to how math is not subjected to experimentation; but to intelligibility (a modern math proof is accepted if mathematical "peers" understand it and agree with it). so can't computer be subjected to experimentation as a matter of studying them. they're not found they're made. so the "experimentation" is really end-to-end testings; a philosophically distinct practice from a physics experiment (which is often just measuring something extremely precisely)
maybe I should ponder on the "philosophy of chemistry" which also blurs this line between "making" and "experimenting"???
you jest about making a religion (which funnily RMS also does); but recall that Academia (and RMS is an academic) was started by religions, which means if there's a faculty of computers, then it already IS a church... an academic church 2.0
Almost every human being reaps the benefits of our technological and scientific progress in some way, but only a small portion of us contribute to it.
Of course, there are plenty of other important areas of work, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to have a higher percentage of people be interested in this stuff.
It's just so crazy, that using "cutting edge integrated circuit R&D" as an example, there are maybe what, a dozen people in the world who are intensely familiar with that ecosystem? And yet it forms one of the pillars of our entire modern world.
I think people in the medical field are probably the most important, though. Can't do science or write code if you're sick, so I have an intense appreciation for them; they help all of us.
Zigbee/Matter/... are widely adopted open standards without vendor lock in.
Things like Home Assistant are getting serious attention and funding.
Could be much worse.
Sadly, the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome)
Dark themes were not common while skeuomorphism was mainstream, they are only in demand right now because viewing an extremely low-contrast white flat theme is an eyesore.
Luckily, KDE and the similar still exists and you can theme it:)
Other then in most stuff migrating to the browser how so? Browser + terminal has been a good combo for a long time, the desktop enviornment only have suffered enshittification due to a push to touch screen oriented UI conventions.
:-)
But when someone is willing to pay us a lot of money, many of us will willingly become deaf to the free software ideals and submit to the corporations in exchange for stable employment.
Genuine question: what proportion of developers actually understand the free software ideals? Have you ever tried to go to your colleagues and ask what [choose your open source license] implies?
My experience is that most people think that GPL means that you need to publicly distribute all the code and that BSD means that you can just use it without any attribution.
The real problem are mobile operating system. Android phones are nowadays even more and more locked down, and using ROMs without Google Services is nearly impossible.
There's SailfishOS. It still uses Android kernel+drivers, but above that it's a "real" GNU/Linux system (glibc, systemd, bash, Qt, connman+ofono, zypp/packagekit, Gecko). It's not completely FOSS, but it is usable as a daily driver, and has been for at least 10 years (based on personal experience).
Ever hear of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/ OS, LineageOS, divestOS? I have been using one of those for 2 years now, just like a "normal" Android. I bought my phone with it pre-installed, I didn't have to do anything.
Of course I can't use the apps that require the Google Services, but in my experience that's mostly just stuff like Google Maps (there are great alternatives) and YouTube (there are apps like NewPipe that work really well).
So yeah, I wouldn't say "nearly impossible".
I think it's deeper than that; I think the problem is mobile devices. The OS has to somehow paper-over the fact that there's no mouse, and that everything has to be done with finger-stabs on a 3"x5" screen. That doesn't work with the traditional desktop widgets, so a variety of OS-level widgets and Javascripty plugins is layered on top. But (a) they're not consistent with one-another, and (b) they're not consistent with the desktop metaphor (which isn't going to go away).
Basically, I don't think a phone is suitable for user-input of any complexity. It's a device for selecting content that you then consume passively. It can't be used as a replacement for a desktop. "Mobile first" sounds all very well, but nearly all mobile-first projects have the desktop portion permanently stubbed.
Without GNU, that's just a fever dream.
Many cancers are survivable these days. I hope he has one of those.
You get an ESP8266 micro with wifi plus a power supply, relay, momentary button, current and voltage sense, and a couple LEDs all for about $8. Serial debug and flash headers are broken out for easy access on the PCB.
They ship with chinese firmware but the headers and standard hardware make them dead simple to flash with your own firmware, or ESPhome or Tasmota if you prefer.
Shelly devices offer a firmware that can be controlled trough a REST API locally. Unfortunately it's still proprietary and not open, but it doesn't require a cloud connection.
Otherwise you can buy a device and replace the firmware, there are number of open alternatives, such as ESP Home, Tasmota, etc.
Or... you can build it yourself. Building a smart plug is an easy task, if you have some practice on electrics. You will likely build a better product in terms of safety and capabilities that one you can buy.
The primary reason off the shelve products are cloud etc. is because these companies spent the time and money to do the above and since no on wants to pay 100+ for an iot switch they add cloud garbage etc. These products are now sold to the masses and if you have to support them you need control over them or your costs go through the roof.
I am working on a hardware iot product (no cloud) and I have to tape off the USB service port not because there is anything that could go wrong but because people don't read instructions and think the thing will power over USB when there is a power supply included with a barrel plug...
This is not to belittle his experience or cast him in a negative light; I wish him well and I know that overall it leaves you feeling less than normal, and I can completely relate. But “under chemo” is not always as debilitating as you might think.
Isn't chemo tolerated differently in different patients? It's still anecdotes, but I've heard many stories of people, some usually very dynamic, being strongly weakened by it. To the point some even decide it's not worth it and stop the treatment altogether. I personally know someone currently under chemo too.
Anyway, it's good you tolerate it well and I wish you a good recovery!
Doxorubicin might be a good example. It has nicknames like "red death" and "red devil", and many unpleasant secondary side effects. Side effects that are different from other chemo drugs, including an unusually high rate of congestive heart failure.
Arguably that describes most people ever considered heroes. Just look at the controversy of anyone who ever had a statue made of them
I think to change the world you have to be somewhat not of it - you have to rebel against social norms. The people who rebel against social norms don't just rebel against the right ones but also are wrong sometimes too.
However, you don't need to make women uneasy (among other things) to promote free software.
His heroic work on free software shall not shield him from criticism about other aspects of him.
Reacting because accepting bullshit from heroes is widespread but dangerous (not saying you are doing it).
Since he's 70, he's eligible for Medicare[0]. And likely has access to other insurance through his professional affiliation(s) as well.
Can you explain what you mean?
I guess that's why fake, phony, status-oriented people can't stop themselves criticizing him for all his superficial shortcomings. It's as if his genuineness is a trigger for them and they need to attack him to feel better about how phony they are in comparison.
Hank Green, the YouTuber, said that the thing he didn't appreciate until he had cancer was, how much you want the 40-year-old treatment and not the cutting edge treatment, because the 40-year-old treatment means that you have a cancer which is well understood and very treatable.
golden snippet taken out of context
Before that, he talks about covid and long covid. But I couldn't tell if he says that he has long covid now. I know that he was being pretty careful to avoid covid, to the extent that's possible while travelling on planes as much as he does. I had some discussions with him about N95 mask fitting and testing.
Can anyone tell from the video if he still has the big beard? That interferes badly with mask seals. I never had such a bushy beard myself, but before the pandemic I was lax about shaving and often had some beard growth. I keep it clean now so that masks will work better,
Anyway, I hope he beats the cancer and stays healthy and active.
Does he travel on planes a lot? His speaking rider used to explicitly say that you should NOT book a plane for him, because he wasn't comfortable with the level of personal information required. In fact, he said you should book trains under a false name.
You can a video of Stallman's now without his beard in his closing remarks at GNU 40th anniversary.
https://audio-video.gnu.org/video/gnu40/closing-remarks-gnu4...
In minute 3 of the video he takes off the mask, he no longer has the beard
almost like a rite of passage for a/v content from the foss sphere
`Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.`
The problem is that it is chronic. It can reoccur. And it can mutate into malign lymphoma. But some people go twenty or more years without it reoccurring.
BTW. I got Covid-19 while having lymphoma. I recovered from that normally. But if I had also been under chemo, it would have been a different matter.
I had asked him to sign my t-shirt, that depicted him with a beret with a Gnu on it, in the style of Che Guevara
(Yes, I know about RMS' history too (yes, that history) and I'm not defending that at all - but so far, of what I've seen, he seems to be wanting to avoid being misinterpreted by others, which is something I deeply empathise with, such is life-on-the-spectrum)
He is way too careful for this.
Stallman had to fight people comparing free software to communism, and left wing people didn’t help at all in that sense.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-interview-edinburgh.html
This was close to midnight in London when I was helping him get his stuff back to his accommodations (his bag is frikkin HEAVY). He needed to rest for a minute, and he whipped out his laptop to laugh at comics he'd written.
They were /not/ in favor of the proprietary Motif desktop environment, nor the (at the time, non-FLOSS Qt library dependent) KDE (C++) environment, hence the FSF creating the GNOME (C) environment. "...GNOME and KDE will remain two rival desktops, unless some day they can be merged in some way. Until then, the GNU Project is going to support its own team vigorously. Go get ’em, gnomes!"
https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-...
Related - the BSD License:
> ...a quote directly from Bostic himself. I asked him about it, after reading this FSF page: "People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like GNU/Linux. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them..."
This is the setup that RMS described using well over a decade ago. Is there any reason to believe he is still using it?
This isn't new. Read up on the dark ages, and how Gutenberg ended them with the printing press. As technologists, the best thing we can do is figure out how to build technology that scales down enough to be wielded by individuals. That includes education and media distribution technologies.
Also, climate change models that estimate economic damage project annual damage from extreme weather exceeding global GDP in a few decades. Humanity will probably survive, but its unclear that anything resembling the modern economy will.
The issue isn't just being "called out for being a jerk". It's one thing to call someone a jerk. It's another thing to be entirely unwilling to look at facts objectively, to reason about them, to listen to those defending the person and yet throw wild allegations, as well as vilifying anything an anyone that is in any way close to that person.
Nobody is actually concerned about "cancelling" just because people call each other "jerks". You can call me a jerk if you want. I won't feel cancelled.
Er... what?
He's known for forcing the name Gnu to be appended to Linux because of some wildly exaggerated claims of ownership.
We're talking about rms, not Linus.
I did hug him later and he was very sweaty - but we did just traipse across London in a bit of a rush and he was absolutely exhausted.
Interestingly, even after years of professional hardware engineering, I still feel some hesitation when interfacing with 230V AC.
I think it's deeper than that; I think the problem is app ecosystem. More and more apps that you need to use (e.g. the only way to perform 2FA with your bank) are dependent on Google/Apple services, use anti-root, anti-tampering and remote attestation techniques, making them impossible to run on free (libre) mobile OS alternatives.
Chemo subsumes a large number of different medications. What they have in common is that they are basically poison, and you hope that the cancer cells die faster than you. The effects differ wildly between different treatments and patients.
It's also true that chemo treatment has gotten better over the years. Chemo 20 years ago was much harsher and it's not the same anymore. Advancements in pharmacology.
The MIT License is a permissive free software license that isn't copyleft, as it allows proprietary modifications.
https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.en.html
>This is a scan of the “Copyleft (L)” sticker on the back of the envelope mailed from Don Hopkins to Richard Stallman on 1984. The envelope contained a 68000 manual that Don borrowed from Richard, that he was returning. The sticker inspired Richard to use the word “Copyleft” for licensing free software.
>attention:
>READ NOTE BEFORE OPENING!
>Copyleft (L)
>The material contained in this envelope is Copyleft (L) 1984 by an amoeba named “Tom”. Any violation of this stringent pact with person or persons who are to remain un-named will void the warrantee of every small appliance in your kitchen, and furthermore, you will grow a pimple underneath your fingernail. Breaking the seal shows that you agree to abide by Judith Martin's guidelines concerning the choosing of fresh flowers to be put on the dining room table. Failure to break the seal on a weekday is […]
Unless I misunderstand them, what about using the actual definitions?
- Proprietary software can be closed-source or source-available
- Open-source software can be under a permissive or copyleft license
- Free software is a philosophy around open-source software, but in practice FOSS and OSS are mostly the same thing.
A permissive licence doesn't really transmit the intent of the author, philosophy or not (it doesn't really matter, the licence is the same).
A copyleft licence, on the other hand, backs the philosophy behind free software via the actual licence.
But you are right, it should be "copyleft vs permissive open source".
the less people can do it the more valuable the skill is, or maybe they're really smart people and I just ain't got what it takes.
I think realistically, the reason I never got into that sort of thing, and probably for the same for you, is that it requires a lot of intelligence (probably more than I have aha), but for the most part some of the most extreme levels of dedication and specialisation of any field.
I like technology _in general_ too much and I don't think I'd have ever had the mental capacity nor willpower to dedicate myself to such a narrow but incredibly deep slice in such fashion as those who are at the forefront of that field.
I wouldn't be able to use Word attachments (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)
I wouldn't be able to use Windows (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/upgrade-windows.html)
I wouldn't be able to package useful non-free software for my Linux distro (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html)
I would have to call the Linux distro a "GNU/Linux distro" (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html)
I would have to ideally stop, but at least reduce, my usage of WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, etc. (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/saying-no-even-once.html)
These are just all-in-all minor examples I could find in a couple of minutes on gnu.org. I remember reading much more radical takes by Stallman and his companions, but would have to spend more time searching for them.
During the civil rights movement black people were encouraged to not use the buses while segregation was in place. You'd be the guy complaining about how difficult it would be to get around without the bus.
Sometimes the way forward involves going back to fix the wrongs of the past. People like Stallman see the world from a higher dimension. He isn't living on flatland like you and me. There is no world where proprietary software and computing freedom can coexist. If there was you can bet Stallman would be advocating the shortest path to such a world.
Prognostic factors
- Median overall survival of > 15 years
I've read he has had inappropriate behavior with women. I can't know for sure to which extent it is true or false. I find this plausible but have no proof and it could be wrong. The best I can find is this tweet from 2018 I cited in another comment about women at MIT trying to avoid him by putting plants in their offices. I find this quite bad but would agree it's weak.
I also had in mind his harsh email answering this guy announcing his baby on some mailing list, or the numerous times he harshly dismissed questions at his presentations that were not perfectly phrased (that I actually saw it first hand).
There's also this great talk from Keith Packard [1] were he states they didn't use the GPL for X (mostly) because RMS was so annoying.
But the unacceptable status of any of these things is arguable and I fundamentally don't want to witch hunt him. In the end I still admire him and spending time on this is just annoying.
So let's just say that I indeed have no strong evidence of him having unacceptable behavior, so let me clean things up and retract this claim until some strong evidence shows up.
Thanks for keeping me in check.
[1] A political history of X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yqDJv4W7m8
For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities.
Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and insurance and collect my paychecks, so my taxes would be simpler next year.)
Even if I somehow managed to connect to the Internet without indirectly paying for a SaaS, I wouldn't be able to browse it in practice without agreeing to ToS contracts from companies I haven't even heard of.
Don't agree with the cloudflare, google and aws ToS agreements? Try blocking all their servers (since continuing to use the services implies agreeing to continuously-updated ToS terms). If you succeed, you'll find that the internet doesn't work at all. You can't even use email normally, since it's unclear what addresses get routed through which service providers, and what terms you have to agree with to "use" their SMTP services.
Anyway, as for the rest, you can pay mortgage by check in the US. No software required.
You can also file your taxes by paper.
As far as connecting to the internet, Stallman somehow manages it, I'm sure you can sort it out.
The private schools, supplementary education and home school resources I know of all operate web sites, including online registration, emails with parents, and so on. The Amish fought this battle in the 1950's and lost badly. The compromise was that Amish kids don't have to go to high school (whether that's private, public, or home-schooling):
https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/social-organization/ed...
> Anyway, as for the rest, you can pay mortgage by check in the US. No software required.
To process the check, my bank has to have an ACH backend. That's a software service. I can't run my own, and it's likely using GPL software.
> You can also file your taxes by paper.
The IRS does not accept cash unless you call them first (requires a phone, which is a service), or pay at a retail partner (likely also requires use of some sort of service or agreement to a ToS. Plus, payments are limited to $1000.): https://web.archive.org/web/20230514105205/https://www.irs.g...
Also, I don't think there's any way to get them to mail you your refund in cash.
How do you suggest downloading and printing IRS forms and reading the directions explaining how to fill them out (and which forms you need) without using their website (and therefore third-party services)?
> As far as connecting to the internet, Stallman somehow manages it, I'm sure you can sort it out.
The last time I checked, he borrowed internet access from universities and strangers. He slept on couches to avoid agreeing to hotel contracts, but I think ultimately ended up compromising his principles by purchasing commercial airline tickets.
Also, I'm not a celebrity, so it would be harder for me to get random people to let me sleep on their couch.
How does he do that? Even Google didn't want to take the time to battle ISPs.
He founded the idea of Free software. Him being "gross" is completely orthogonal. "I would have agreed with the guy who fought against slavery if he didn't pick his nose in public."
These "gross" people are the ones who made overpaid dev positions possible.
Whereas nowadays you can do a few weeks of a javascript crash course and land a $100k job organizing text windows on a webpage for a few hours a week from your bedroom.
No one person knows the entire modern x86 architecture. And ofc those who know a lions share are paid top dollar. Maybe still underpaid for the value they bring to the entire world, but very comfortable.
Don't have much to say about the web dev stuff. Just note that CoL is still kinda crazy in the places with most demand. I'm not gonna say "100k is so hard to live on" like some spoiled CS students but it does cut a lot more into your spending power than you'd expect.
Every time I have to use my Windows 10 corporate laptop, I become even more bewildered that people actually tolerate such a farce as their daily computing environment.
I do tolerate Windows to some extent however, it doesn't bother me too much. But that might be the gaming nerd inside talking.
It's fine when I'm derping around in Photoshop or something, but it's infuriating for actual work.
Debian is home.
Obv he doesn't seem to mind the question. Just my approach.
But yes, when I spoke to radiation oncologist when I was diagnosed 2.5 years ago (and before they had a full picture of what my cancer looked like), he told me to expect to be hospitalized multiple times because the lymph nodes they'd treat were so close to my esophagus and the treatments would burn my espohagus. "Thankfully" the cancer was spread too far and the field was too large for radiation, so the only radiation treatments I've had have been the ones described above.
More info on the different kinds of Stereotactic Radiosurgery: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/stereotactic-rad...
When I did chemo, I had cycles with 5 days on - and I couldn't do anything useful during that week, or most of the next week. It was, truly, an awful experience. I completely understand and respect how some people can decide treatment isn't worth it and surrender to the disease.
Some things are worse as you note, but there have been som important improvements.
I have never tested the fingerprint reader, all other features work.
- professional domain-specific software now available, both free (such as KiCad) and commercial (such as DaVinci Resolve) and supported by vendors on Linux.
B) RMS is very well known as someone who is, amongst other things, not a communist.
Frankly I fail to see how this could be taken as anything other than a provocation. Why would you have a picture of RMS as Che and then ask him to sign it? The only other explanation I can think of is you're too stupid to not see A or B.
RMS was probably right not to sign it though. I also believe producing a t-shirt with RMS depicted as the Che is not quite right.
So... no.
Besides, it was in Europe. Us Europeans do not have the same epidermic reaction to communism that Americans have.
What could be more capitalist than remixing a photo of a communist revolutionary and selling it for profit? I see them as ironic, not endorsing, especially in their remixed state.
I guess this just underlines the fact RMS shouldn't have signed the t-shirt - it's just a graphic, so you could make out it means anything.
Regardless of your views on 'communism' (and I say that as someone who will quickly detest any of those governments at that time in history), they faught against overtly fascist regimes that trampled on all personal freedoms and routinely rounded up dissidents to be summarily executed. RMS 'not endorsing' fighting for personal freedom is an endorsement of the status quo of that era, where governments like Pinochets would literally kidnap dissidents, sedate them, throw them into the cargo holds of 747s and dump them out over the ocean from tens of thousands of feet in the air.
That's their decision, but it's a career limiting one, akin to saying the VAX has everything I need and it won't be changing so I refuse to learn any other system.
Free software isn’t about API churn, it’s about rights.
I don't know for sure what the movie business will look like in 10 years, but one possibility is that everyone is able to create their own movies just by describing them, and a small number will say some variant of, "Give me a biopic of this Richard Stallman guy. Base it on his wikipedia entry and whatever else you know about him. Make it factual but an action neo-noir; you know what I like. Probably starring an amalgam of Bogart and Mitchum, the rest you can just make up."
I'd bet less than 10% of professional developers could say who he is, and that a tiny portion of the population has any clue.
There are probably thousands of similarly important/influential people in various subfields that we have never heard of, because they're not our Subfield, and I highly doubt any of those would get a biopic.
Plenty of people with physical disabilities make people "uneasy" -- who's wrong here? The burn victim or the person taking offence to it? Stallman didn't do anything towards women that warrants the criticism he received. The claims have been debunked and it just comes down to him coming across as a 'creep' -- aka considered unattractive. Yeah, okay.
> I remember being walked around campus by an upperclassman getting advice during my freshman year at MIT. "Look at all the plants in her office," referring to a professor. "All the women CSAIL professors keep massive amounts of foliage" s/he said. "Stallman really hates plants."
If this is true, he must have been doing something to women that goes beyond being unattractive, no?
You really really should avoid making people build such workarounds to avoid you. And the fact that it's women specifically is suspicious.
Now, I'd really like to be proven wrong, that'd be pretty great. It saddens me that RMS was like this.
I agree its incredibly dangerous to accept bs just because someone is famous, but i also worry that if we throw out all the sinners we'll have no heroes left.
Its a hard question how to square all that and i don't have the answer.
And I think we should also stop considering huge assholes as heroes / models, like Picasso.
Of course not. I'm obviously not talking about his appearance and could not care less about his hygiene.
Stallman weeps.
Edit: link to old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/16ts15z/stallma...
Mostly the "superior" ethical stance. You do things this (my) way, then it is ethical and you love freedom or you are not ethical and don't want freedom.
Sorry, but I just have some different opinions about some things, but I rather feel not like working together with people who consider me lower. So the result is not cooperation but lot's of fragmentation in the free software/open source world. I do not think that helped the common cause. Otherwise we would not be where we are. Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.
You're comparing yourselves to a guy who has changed the face of software and privacy, probably forever- his license is quoted to be one of the most important decisions in Linux by Torvalds himself.
> Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.
It just wouldn't get made. Software would be worse without OSS because there would be no fire under Microsoft's ass
And how often projects gets reimplemented because people and organisations don't want to have to deal with copyleft.
That was my point, not comparing my hacker skills with RMS which I do not recall having done with any word. I just said, I won't work together with people of your attitude. And I know I am not the only one, see above.
His operating system, GNU, is the de-facto UNIX implementation and runs many critical systems around the world.
Anyone who claims that the guy is unlikeable has never truly bothered to hear him speak and isntrad relies on what they've been told by malicious actors. Stallman doesn't attack other people or ideologies.
If anything his biggest mistake was using Linux as a kernel for people decided to call the GNU operating system "Linux" and it eventually took most of the funding and development away from the OS and its ideology.
Well, what other kernel could he have used instead? Hurd? And linus is writing code till today and activly leading the developement.
What relevant contributions did RMS made, since gcc and emacs? So do you really think it is accurate saying "his" operating system is so much used today?
Not to mention the common principles in most free software around interoperability and loose coupling. Apple and Microsoft (and the rest) have less to do on this, because they don't have to make their software nearly as generic. Microsoft famously fixed something in SimCity at the OS level. Google and Facebook don't have to worry about interoperability, which undoubtedly removes a lot of complexity for them. In some ways, free software has a greater burden to carry.
The problem with usability in free software is not one of culture or cooperation, it is one of capital. The fact is, Apple and Microsoft have at this point invested hundreds of billions in finding the best engineers and designers around the world and paying them to focus on polishing their operating system. By comparison, Debian's (very impressive) 3500 or so developers, maintainers, and contributors, are almost exclusively volunteers and working at most part time on their chosen packages.
If you want to see better free software, what I'd suggest to you and everyone else is this:
Next time you want to buy a phone, pick something cheaper, and donate the difference to a developer of free software. If you're an iPhone user and you switch to a Fairphone 5, say, you can throw £600 at someone like Joey Hess, or just pick an organisation that makes good stuff and give it to them if you don't want to find a specific author. Let's remind ourselves that if 1000 people did this, it'd be £600k of funding to improve free software.
Personally, I'd recommend a donation to the NLNet foundation: https://nlnet.nl/
(plug for nlnet, they're currently taking proposals and will fund successful ones: https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20230801-call.html )
Free software works for devs and geeks, yes and I happen to be one of them. But for common people? Usually not very good, as they don't know the terminal and don't know config files. I know, because I tried to spread linux. It is hard work.
Examples:
* Norman Finkelstein (blacklisted from Academia for his work relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict)
* Richard Stallman (made to resign from his positions at MIT and FSF due to comments relating to Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein)
* James Watson (ostracized from the scientific community due to his comments about race)
* Justin Roiland (forced out of Rick and Morty due to alleged crimes)
etc.
He wasn't "cancelled" for being "woke", that's straight up political fallout for going up against Israeli interests.
> Richard Stallman (made to resign from his positions at MIT and FSF due to comments relating to Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein)
He's back at FSF. Clearly not "cancelled" as evidenced by this entire thread. He received relatively mild repercussions for supporting a known sexual predator combined with his own list of accusations of sexual predation.
> James Watson
This is the only one that is possibly a "cancelation" and that's a stretch. Being repeatedly and openly racist and then getting kicked out of your cushy chancellor emeritus position because of it, again, doesn't feel like "cancellation".
> Justin Roiland (forced out of Rick and Morty due to alleged crimes)
Ah yes, the "guilty until proven innocent" version of "cancellation" ... not associating with people with multiple credible accusations of crimes is not "cancelling" them.
In general, you seem to think that because these people deserved the punishment they faced, that they were not really cancelled. This is a wrongheaded way to think about the matter. A person is cancelled when he faces certain punishments for having done (of being thought to have done) certain actions. Whether these punishments were just does not play into whether they constitute cancellation. Justified or unjustified, it's cancellation the same.
Now, it is true that people who are the most vocal about cancellation tend to be against it as a rule. Or, to be against it when it is seen as going against freedom of speech - Justin Roiland and others who are seen as having been credibly accused of having committed a crime may be seen as fair game.
P.S. I never said Finkelstein was cancelled for being woke (you likely misread the word "work"), in fact he is very much against woke culture - see his latest book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!"
It's very hard to name a historical figure who lived prior to the 1900s who didn't express something racist, sexist or homophobic for example. Similarly, even people who were in the public spotlight 4-5 decades ago have often said things considered morally objectionable today. Even people who are obviously anti-racist like Justin Trudeau used to believe black face was acceptable until very recently, for example.
I don't know if Stallman has been "cancelled". I'm not even sure what that means. But his reputation has been harmed like almost anyone who's been in the public spotlight for long enough.
From what I understand, Stallman had several role at FSF. One of them was spokesperson, which is basically Public Relationship. Then, he made several actions showing that he does not understand the basis or does not have the skills to work in PR. So, we was asked to step down from this position.
If you hire a front-end developer and later discover that they are not able to do the basis of programming, are you "canceling" the developer if you decide to not continue to work with them because they are not what you need for the job?
(As for MIT, apparently, it's based on a series of incidents. Again, his work requirement included skills that would imply he would not have done those mistakes. Positions a universities obviously includes as requirement basic skills in knowledge communication and ability to work with pairs, that's what universities are supposed to do.)
One can be cancelled but still adored by the masses - see Norman Finkelstein
One can be cancelled but still adored by minority - see Socrates
One can be cancelled but later regain his previous position - See Richard Stallman
That was a few decades ago, so perhaps things have changed, but he was well within normal odor back in the early 90s.
A few hours in a row of hearing and typing C-Space C-u 2 4 M-w C-x C-b <RET> C-y C-x C-s is exhausting. It was also amusing (in retrospect) to get a polite-enough admonishment to "don't think about what the keystrokes are doing; please just type what I say" when he could tell that I was slowing down because I was paying too much attention to what the intent behind the keystrokes was.
I hope it's far in the future, but we'll see how the media spins it when Stallman dies. They can easily sell him up as some Godfather of computers. Or it can just be a small whimper in the corner of HN. I'd still bet on something closer to the former, but it's not a sure bet.
Let's be fair here: stall man's last technical contributions were when he was Linus's current age. Some people will code to their deathbed but I don't think that is a requirement to properly champion tech. He's more than paid his dues there.
Tech is relatively young and Stallman is one of the oldest living people left. Older than Gates, older than Jobs if he was still alive today. I see Linus less as a comparison so much as a torch Stallman's generation passed on.
There's also a few other tools like Fusion 360, games, etc. that I prefer having Windows around for.
Re. photography, do any specific features of Photoshop come to mind that you miss in free alternatives?
If I do graphics I mainly use Gimp or InkScape but I don't do any of that very often. Mostly I just code or game.
> But his reputation has been harmed like almost anyone who's been in the public spotlight for long enough.
These kinds of affirmation are really easily the result of the bias. You see a lot of public figure in the spotlight having their reputation harmed, but you don't notice the ton of people who are just "normal" or "not unlucky" that are not and will never be harmed.
For example, it is true that when Trudeau dressed in black-face, it was not such a big deal. But then, the probability of dressing in black-face was still very small. How many innocent people just dressed in black-face just for an innocent joke at the time? So, people who are "unlucky" are statistically a minority.
As another example, behavior like Stallman or Roiland are not "normal". "normal" people are just not that abusive or inconsiderate. So, people who are "not normal" are also a minority and to some extend even deserve it a little bit (they should have known better than being jerks, having their reputation harmed for being a jerk is not a bad thing, it is a normal consequence).
My personal view is ... did this person move society ahead? I will give someone who fought against slavery 200 years ago, a pass for being what would be considered misogynistic now or a racist who fought for suffrage at the turn of last century. If the person was just all around "a product of their times" or specifically evil, cancel away!
> Even people who are obviously anti-racist like Justin Trudeau used to believe black face was acceptable until very recently, for example.
This is an interesting case. When I first saw the picture, I was immediately struck by the fact that Trudeau was dressed up as a Djinn which were historically often (mostly?) displayed as black skinned in Islamic art. I totally understand why he didn't try to explain that and just took the hit (when I dressed as a Djinn, I went with green rather than black for the obvious reason that Trudeau also should have gone with red, green or blue).
To the extent to which "black face" just means for a white person to play a black character, they were entirely right in thinking so. All actors play things they are not.
This is the 2nd time this word has been used to describe the Linux desktop in this thread, and it's disingenuous. FOSS doesn't do any of the things described with enshitification article: it doesn't sit between buyers and sellers and screw each of them in turn. That's not what's been happening. Maybe the software goes shit, but it is not "enshitification". At every turn there's been alternatives (GNOME3 -> Unity/Xfce, KDE4 -> Trinity, Pulseaudio -> Pulsewire, systemd -> upstart, Debian -> Devuian, etc)
Stop misusing the word, you're discrediting the good work of FOSS.
Bland, corporate, utterly inoffensive and lifeless "design"? Check. Trying to remove theming from users? Check. etc....
The only reason why they haven't succeeded like other OSes is because it's FOSS. But they really want to take away the user's choice, shift the Overton window, and pretend like things were always bad.
Yes you are, see:
>they are just progressively making things worse
That's things going "shit". That's been around for as long as software has been around (e.g. Borland). Enshitification is a very specific thing: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
To quote it:
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
>shift the Overton window
You're all over the place. This has nothing to do with enshitification.
I'd prefer we reserved this word for when stuff gets worse because of money / investors, with incentives at odds with the user needs.
I don't believe Gnome suffers from decisions that are bad because of financial incentives.
I also think enshittification is a strong word, and a wrong one.
Because praise the shit. Praise the choice of shit. You like your shit. I like my shit. I enjoy my Gnome shit, I enjoyed Gnome 2 shit but I love Gnome 3 shit. I don't like KDE shit. I can't remember how to spell XKFG shit because it's not big enough to fit in my memory.
It's all choice. And praise choice. I do like Gnome. If you want to keep running Gnome 1 like it's 1999, I'm sure there's a way to do that too.
They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.
They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.
That's what I think.
I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.
I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.
So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)
I'd need some strong evidence that they are selling you to some other party in order to enrich their investors. Who are these investors? How do they even get profits from Gnome? What choices have been made that let 3rd party companies get better access to you/your data from Gnome itself?
Differences of opinion aren't evidence of intentionally screwing over users in order to get more money for investors.
My first successful experiment with Linux was in 2003 (having flopped in the late 1990s, when Linux could be found on the shelf in stores everywhere). The desktop I used then was Gnome 2. My current desktop is Gnome 2, with more or less the exact same look and functionality, though it's called Mate. It's only enshittification if you have a way to force it on people against their will.
And the great thing about e.g. a window manager is that there is no lock-in effect. I must use GitHub because everyone is using GitHub (even thought I like the git e-mail workflow better), I must use WhatsApp because everyone is using WhatsApp, and I must use the Slack and their damn Electron app because my company chose Slack and I don't have a choice.
Gnome does nothing like that: I don't use it, and I don't even know how many people use it. I don't see why there would be a reason to complain about it; if you don't like it, don't use it.
To be honest, the only thing that bothers me about Linux desktop environments is that there isn't a simple way of getting a 4G dongle and using my laptop as a phone (calls, SMS, etc).
And it may even be true this time around (I love me some KDE).
But for me, it doesn't matter. Once I discovered i3 I just never went back, there is just no desktop that can compare to it.
Obviously I'm not your typical user, so this is an aside from a "nerd", but it's sometimes interesting not having a horse in that race anymore (I've been using i3 for 10-15 years I think at this point?)
Besides, I recommend servicing the device every so often. People create weird failure modes (putting too many files onto the device, clicking at random in menus). I also recommend setting up a backup.
As a figure of speech: Nobody is expected to service a car on his own. You'll get professional help every so often.
I will try that.
"As a figure of speech: Nobody is expected to service a car on his own. You'll get professional help every so often."
And also windows computers can have serious problems, but usually they are easier to solve for beginners, compared to when I try fix someones linux computer, that has not been updated in a while ..
If I were in either of your shoes (sandals?) in that situation, I’m sure I would be super frustrated all the time. Impressive on both your parts.
I ended up doing 4 sessions totaling about 10 hours and when I told him I was quitting, I was apologetic that I felt like I'd wasted his time quitting so soon after starting. His response I can remember to this day and it was something like "Don't worry about it; most people quit after the first session. You helped me out and we'll make sure you get your check."
I see. Well then, carry on.
But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.
Oh and Plato is well known as a philosopher, but yes, most people do not know that he proposed a very totalitarian state and is rather known for platonic love.
30+% of my country can't even be damned to vote for their next president. Getting the layman to care is really hard, which is why advertising is a trillion dollar business.
Perfect enemy of good and all that. Lawyers for 99% of their cases don't rely on public sentiment to get their argument through. At least not active public sentiment.
I mean, i would more wonder why people would think the rest of the world care about the gnu project's four freedoms or even understand them.
Half the time we can't even get citizens to care about basic things like freedom of speech.
But if you can get them to understand, that open source eventually means consumer friendly, that the device will be fully under their control(no ads, no restrictions) and working if OSS gets more support, they will listen. But since they largely do not know all this, I think it is exactly because most free software preaching evolves only around devs.
His message is pretty much user-centered.
(and programmers deserve good message delivery too)
The only time it's a problem is when an artist doesn't release their music on a certain platform and it's now work to try and go download a second app, make an account, possibly pay a subscription, and THEN listen to the new album. These are the kind of things users actually care about, not whether the app/backend is FOSS or not.
HN is a power user community so it's easy to improperly extrapolate our experiences and what we tolerate to what "normal users" will tolerate.
> who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore?
That's the thing, he is trying to raise awareness on this stuff. I do too.
If people cared, he'd be mostly done with his raising awareness work.
Open source is pretty much a developer issue. Free software, though, is a user issue.
(Of course we often use the terms interchangeably)
There are even strong theories connecting early Christianity directly to Plato.
[Before anyone gets offended, this is just a metaphor. Obviously plato had a much more significant impact on the world than RMS did]
You'll need a local webserver running to serve the redirect, but that's a simple nginx config. Maybe I'll write a blog post for this stuff...
Or do you have to manually accept your own SSL certificate (at which point you perhaps might as well install a redirect extension)?
Then there comes the persecution complex. The horror.
One should listen to them.
One should also be aware of the massive selection bias in views you're going to hear.
Absolutely. The dead tell no tales.
> One should listen to them.
> One should also be aware of the massive selection bias in views you're going to hear.
And I presume that you feel the ones who died trying to escape would have a different opinion of communism than the ones who lived to produce your selection bias?
This is a good point, and shows why we need people like Stallman to press us on important but unglamorous issues.
I don't really see the point of the term "cancelled" if it is what you describe: what you describe is just the normal usual consequences of living in society, and it existed since millenia without the need of using a specific term like "cancel".
It is also not really good because it muddies the water. We have people who are saying that the cancel-culture is a big danger. What they have in mind as "cancellation" is mainly a fantasy, and it is true that what they have in mind practically never happens in real life. But then, if you come and say "yeah, there is the list of people cancelled", these people will just start to believe these people went under the way more extreme definition of "cancellation" they have in mind.
> P.S. I never said Finkelstein as cancelled for being woke (you likely misread the word "work"), in fact he is very much against woke culture - see his latest book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!"
Oh. When I saw that, I was thinking "Good, this list contains some people that would have been cancelled for not conforming to right-wing ideal. Then I guess it is already more believable". But if it is not the case, I find it problematic. There is absolutely no intrinsic reason that only people would be cancelled for "not conforming with a left-wing ideal". If "cancellation" is a real thing, it should happen to right-wing or left-wing.
Norman Finkelstein is as left-wing as it gets. He views wokism as a right-wing ideology (correctly).
But on this discussion you've provided a list, and some people have highlighted that there is legitimate ground for their "cancellation" and that their lives are not destroyed. Therefore it does not correspond to this idea that we have a kind of crazy inquisition randomly punishing perfectly innocent people.
Sure, those "cancellation" can be criticized and discussed, but they are not more a big danger than any other decision about rule of society.
My comment here is rather: "I was told that cancel culture was bad, life-destroying and unfair. Then, someone asked for a list. Someone else provided a list. But then, others have noticed that this list does not correspond to what I have been told: it's way milder than bad, life-destroying and unfair."
It is possible that what I have been told is not the "popular conception of cancellation", but it would be surprising: it is still very much how it is depicted in mass media (from "official newpapers" to "twitter feed of politicians").
About Finkelstein: it is not really what I mean. I'm not saying Finkelstein is right-wing or left-wing. I'm saying I'm interested to see example of cancel culture of someone who wanted to do something left-wing and was canceled by people who defend right-wing ideals. Was Finkelstein canceled because he was too left-wing to the taste of people who liked right-wing?
It's a honest question, the answer can be "yes". The situation is just that I first saw "Finkelstein was canceled for being too woke", which seems to be a description that correspond to that. When you said that it was not the case, I thought "oh, ok, maybe it's not the case, then".
As for "wokism is a right-wing ideology", I would be more convinced by argument saying things like "wokism shares aspect with authoritarianism" or things like that. Something "right-wing" is first and foremost "something that is loved and adopted in the right-wing community". At the end of the day, it fails against to reach my argument. My argument is not really that "a good list will have people who are blue and people who are red in it", my argument is rather "a good list will have people who are canceled by the group A and the group B is outraged by the cancellation, and people who are canceled by the group B and the group A is outraged by the cancellation". So, in fact, it does not matter if wokism is theoretically right-wing or left-wing: if the cancellation is done by the left-wing community acting like the right-wing community, and that the right-wing community is upset about the cancelation, it still has the problem I've raised: why are all the cancellation examples always done by the left-wing community?
One possibility is that one includes ideological orientation in the definition. But even so, if cancel culture is bad, it would be because it's unfair or arbitrary, and "being unfair" or "being arbitrary" is possible whatever ideology you have. So it feels strange that "cancel culture" is a danger while something that is as unfair and arbitrary is not considered as a danger.
On the other (left) hand, I'd definitely buy an ironic t-shirt of ESR as Che labeled "Free Software Liberator" and ask ESR to sign it, just to piss him off and provoke him to threaten to shoot me, like he did to Bruce Perens.
The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.
ESR's Death Threat Email to Bruce Perens:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html
Bruce Perens Dead:
https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10
Terrorismistic:
Otherwise it's mere faux-pas, at worst.
What's more, you don't necessarily know everything about a person. I would not know anything about RMS's political opinions if I had not read his website a bit, I would only know him for his stance on free software.
That's strictly about businesses not willing to give back in the way the GPL forces you to. It's nothing to do with how RMS behaves.
You probably don't think that's a worthwhile ideal, and fine. I'm not here to convince you of my ideals. But your assertion as to the reason behind the increasing prominence of permissive licenses is overly reductive and not true.
In an ideal world sure. But I'm guessing Stallman made this license precisely so people can't "do whatever they want", which from a business standpoint is taking that code, modifying it in-house, and closing it off. Prevent a tragedy of the commons, so to speak.
Stallman didn't approach this as some idealist of "we make great code and everyone will share and progress society". Partly because tbf: open source was a lot harder to doiin his time. He came from an angle of trying to combat proprietary software. That's why he didn't make the MIT license (even if it preceded him, I'm not sure).
Possibly. The push to use MIT/BSD from businesses, however, is very much real. To mention one, Apple methodically purged their OS of pretty much anything GPL. Most businesses involved in opensource insist that everything should be MIT/BSD, and absolutely nothing should even smell of GPL. They certainly don't do it because of philosophical differences.
Not everyone is a fan of enforcing freedom, as that is a contradiction to some.
Like I said, different opinions. Freedom etc. Not accepted by RMS and co I know. Which is why I will continue to stay away from you.
I first used desktop Linux in 1996 and liked it well enough. I remember using GNOME 2 and Xfce around 2010ish and liking both of them well enough, too. And they're still around if I want to use them.
But honestly? I don't use them because I like modern GNOME better. I use it every day, everything just works, and I like it more than the alternatives.
Same here, but with KDE - and I'm a former XFCE user, and before that I was a Gnome user...
None of us is the whole market !
I use those despite their horrible UI, not because of their horrible UI.
You used a word that has a specific meaning to refer to something else, hence the miscommunication.
"The Democratic People's Republic of Murderistan is a human rights violating hellhole, so that's what you want whenever you say you support Democracy. There is no selection bias from people from there because they should know what Democracy is if anyone does".
I think the difference is that we have more than one example of masses of people fleeing to democracies, even if they have to do so illegally, while there are no examples of masses of people fleeing to communist countries.
It's pretty obvious what the non-armchair citizens of various governing styles prefer, and what they don't.
This. They have this kind of Apple syndrome of belittling use feedback, minus the part of being a billion dollar megacorporation
Also, things would have gone differently if they forked gnome 2 into a new project and left the original sources intact, instead of dragging all the userbase and distros with them.
To me, this was the shittiest move. Instead of saying "hey, we want to remake gnome into a very opinionated DE so we will make a new project for it", they said "we will use the same gnome2 sources so we will not listen to you but you are forced to listen to us!"
Distros were also free to follow, or to migrate users to MATE.
(of course, I would strongly care about not breaking users habits if I can help it, but that's the direction I would take)
Anyway, you're being illogical. A flawed argument will remain just as flawed when it is used to reach a true conclusion as when it is used to reach a false conclusion.
If you want to prove me wrong, show that it is sensible to infer from the fact that an extremely selected-for sample has some property that the entire population has that same property - and do so without appealing to a bigger picture. Because if you were to claim that appealing to a bigger picture is necessary, you would be making the selfsame claim that I am making.
Under communism, China went from being "the sick man of Asia" to the most economically successful and politically powerful country in Asia, no?
It's the greatest single power on Earth other than the USA, no?
But perhaps under a capitalist regime China might have had even greater success?
Well, let us see:
How does one compare the stumbles of early Communist China to the consistent failure of capitalist India? Which path would you have preferred for your country?
Of course, communism is a system where the workers have control over their workplace, and by "the workers" I mean "random government bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers", and by "have control" I mean "they have their choice of vote in the single-party election for the government that appoints said bureaucrats".
I wish I can be one of those young people who can be a worthy successor to Richard Stallman. I already am to a great extent, preferring FLOSS whenever possible (with an unfortunate exemption for video games, especially many PC and all console games).
My primary issue is now trying to find like people who are also into FLOSS as much as I am, and they're not as common as tech illiterate people are. Maybe someone can advise me on how I can get started (online or local around the Houston, TX area).
An important thing RMS did was producing good software along with his advocacy. For example, even though it's inferior to vim (joking), it was and is a killer app. What RMS didn't write himself, he helped to drive and organize, and ended up as a force behind some of the most important tools we still use today, like gcc.
For RMS it was pretty obvious where the needs were. Today it's much less so, but if you want to make a big difference and start a name for yourself, I would probably look for areas where there aren't great FLOSS options and try to take on one of those. It will be challenging no doubt.
My best advice (take with a grain of salt as I'm not the next RMS which is where you want to be), keep preaching the gospel of FLOSS! Help people find and use software (and hardware) that respects their freedom! Pay attention to users that you teach, and identify usability issues that hurt adoption and work to fix them. Be "that guy" that people call when they have a problem and need a solution.
I feel like this is a bit of a misperception. Does this historically happen?
It’s not too late by any means, but it’s looking very bleak for Free software with most kids’ computing being smartphones and cloud services via chromebooks.
I think that's why we don't see many new people flocking to FSF projects.
I definitely agree that the general trend towards less advanced technology will harm that though (some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder), but some cohort of the generation will _always_ be interested in digging deeper.
It perhaps doesn't help that the general attitude of someone in FOSS/tech in general could be perceived by the average person as elitist or exclusionary - I try my hardest to challenge these notions.
(Let's see if one of the other founding members of the new club will read this comment)
yes there are; but also not really.
due to my age cohort I'm see my self as this "next generation" software scientist/engineer who is aware and believes in FOSS and "liberty minded software";
I suppose most of use are millennials but the whole generation-label stuff is not accurate so maybe in the USA this next gen of people are a bit older but in other poorer countries they're younger???
in any case I think a lot of younger engineers got swayed away from the FSF/GNU ideological stuff by means of 'being pragmatic' which is just a consequence of when the open source movement distinguished itself as different from the free software.
I think the impact of this may have something to do with leidenfrost's appraisal that there's no next-gen to pass the torch to.
it seems like us millennials do not rally, we don't come together into any kind of social movement or dunno.
TBH I would put Drew DeVault in this category.
> Fuck Richard Stallman and his enablers, his supporters, and the Free Software Foundation’s leadership as a whole. Shame on you. Shame on you.
(He uses the word fuck in that post five times.)
Drew has done some great work in OSS but he has a history of going after people he doesn't like in a very vicious way. You can't really behave like this and be a leader. A leader needs to unite not divide. For all the criticisms leveled against Stallman he saved most of his vitriol for the enemies of OSS. If everything he wrote had been as personal and expletive-laden as what Drew writes the FSF would not have gotten very far.
I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability.
These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.
Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
The internet makes it really easy to purity test a community into an echo chamber. Many people willingly subject themselves to these purity tests to fit in and be part of the community, which is also why we see negative communities tending toward a downward spiral (like any of the 4chan communities) as people walk step by step to more extremism in their views.
What can we expect when most of the internet is paid for by abusing people's vices. The "whales" of the mobile gaming industry exist in other industries too. The majority of alcohol is purchased by a relatively small percentage of consumers - meaning the alcohol industry's main source of income is people so addicted they drink as much as they can, regardless of consequences.
When your money is made because people can't help themselves, that's blood money. It's not surprising that a society which tolerates (and encourages!) companies to pursue blood money would likewise have other moral failings, including a tendency to separate into tribes and attack different tribes.
Apple is ultimately going to work in their own best interest. Their particular brand aligns that with the consumer fairly well, but there will be disconnects.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
via
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...
> Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
If you look at major MacOS or iOS releases, you will often see new features being advertised that were copied from FOSS systems that experimented with them and proved them out often many years beforehand.
That is to say: iOS might have the edge on QA, but if you want to have impact and shape the future of how people use computers, contributing in the community is still a good way to do this. And in fact, commercial development tends to rely on this talent pool for survival, as companies do a comparatively poor job in educating new talent. It's where you get people with "job experience" in doing certain things.
That makes it rather easier...
I think that people leaving a country are more likely to dislike that country than those staying.
I suppose we're fortunate that options like Xfce and MATE are around, but I can relate re: compatibility. Truthfully I'd be just as happy with MATE as with GNOME 3.x, but last time I tried I ran into issues with high DPI and mixed DPI and didn't want to invest time trying to get it all working to my satisfaction.
Perhaps FSF has solved all the problems the community at large deems as worth solving.
It makes me wonder if a new org isn't what we need. I love the FSF and feel they did a tremendous service to the world, but the religious extremism limits their appeal only to true die-hard believers.
As a result, he was denied tenure and was never able to get a job as a professor, other than occasionally working as an adjunct. Really, I'm not sure how much more severe it could be without being something other than cancellation.
He was cancelled long before his work on wokism - that topic was only brought up because someone misread one of my previous comments.
Another example of someone on the left-wing being cancelled by those on the right is Paul Robeson, who was perhaps the most famous American alive at one point, but lost everything due to his left-wing beliefs.
I do think you're confused about the popular conception of cancellation. Stallman lost his position at the FSF and MIT. His speaking engagements were cancelled. Article after article came out about how terrible he supposedly was. Almost all of it was unfair, almost all the claims against him were inaccurate. If these things don't constitute cancellation, nothing does.
> If these things don't constitute cancellation, nothing does.
I think that is exactly my point: what you describe constitute the usual social interactions that always existed, and for which we don't need to invent a new word. And for which we certainly don't need to pretend it's a new "culture" and a new "danger".
So, yeah, what you describe is real, but it is not "cancellation" because this concept does not correspond to any new phenomena.
This is demonstrated by your example of Robeson, that happens decades ago and nobody never mentioned "cancel culture" to talk about that at the time.
So, yes, nowadays, we have people who claim there is this new phenomena, super dangerous or getting worst than before, and they call it "cancellation". This new phenomena does not correspond to anything real, because there is no new phenomena. There is and there always will be people who will choose to not work with people they don't like and who will share and defend their opinions on this subject.
> Stallman lost his position at the FSF and MIT.
The way I understand it, Stallman lost his positions for demonstrating he did not had the skills required for these positions. For instance, his lost position at the FSF was as a spokesperson, which is a public relationship role. The blunders he has repetitively done demonstrate he is not competent for this role. Same way a driver that keeps have car accident will end up being fired.
> almost all the claims against him were inaccurate
I agree with that, and that is regrettable. But one have to understand that it is not only inevitable, the pro-Stallman were as bad as the anti ones. Almost all the claims in defense of Stallman were also unfair and inaccurate, accusing people of hidden agenda or dishonesty because they were just jumping to conclusion. While we should give the benefice of the doubt and while it is unfair to have article after article coming out about how terrible he supposedly was, it is exactly the same crime to not give the benefice of the doubt to the panel who decided that Stallman should step down and writing, without any more proofs, how innocent he supposedly was. I was disappointed to see no reaction (or really really few) defending Stallman saying "I understand the honest mistake of incorrectly thinking that ...", they were all trying to "cancel the cancellers", applying exactly the same method. For example, as I've just said, it looks to me that Stallman's position as PR was revoked because he acted in a way that shows he is not the best person for this position. Yet, the very very large majority of articles in defense of Stallman choose to lie about this situation, dishonestly presenting it as if his position was totally disconnected to any social skill.
And one needs to understand the following basic bias: if you think Stallman was unfairly treated, for sure you are going to particularly notice all the articles against him, and it will looks like it's a lot. And the article defending him will just sound "normal" to you and therefore as good measure. You will end up thinking the wave was dominated by article against him, ignoring that Stallman was also very well supported. In fact, in the past, there have been situations where Stallman would normally have been asked to step down, but he was spared because the pro-Stallman prevailed (some of the element that the MIT considered were reported at the time they happened and the decision was taken in favor of Stallman). In other words: "we never talk about the trains that arrive on time, and end up thinking there are more late trains than trains on time, even if it is not true".
When picking a phone I like to see if it's on the LineageOS devices page (you bring up a good point that different variations of the same model aren't equal, definitely watch out for that), as that means both that the bootloader is unlockable and that someone else is already maintaining a ROM for it, and hopefully will for years to come. If I just go after the shiny new hardware, chances are the bootloader is locked and it will never be unlocked, generating e-waste.
I mean, how many articles and blogs are there about how to make money with foss and how many desperation and frustration is around that topic? How many games exist, that are donation funded?
I mean, please tell me, I want to publish a game, how could I make money with it with the GPL?
Selling it to only one person, who then can publish the code?
Having the code open, but serve ads or ingame purchases, rewarding addictive behavior? Sounds not so ethical either.
That leaves only donations and traditionally people do not value things they get for free. Some do and I hope their number will grow. But as of status quo the majority does not. Some GPL games I know make money, because they sell at steam and the users do not know they could also download it. Is that really ethical? What other GPL buisness modells exists?
A game is not a professional software, people would be willing to buy support contracts for.
And your proposal for how to make money with such a moneymaker game and the GPL is eventually down the years take on donations and talk at conferences? Was that irony? Then I missed it. Because the context was someone above claimed that it is only the stupid lawers fault, that companies reject the gpl.
Yes, it would be very hard. But today it is impossible, so very hard is hardly a complaint you can make in comparison.
Did my other two examples seem more reasonable?
The caveat is that sometimes an initiative can be funded by charity or bounty to keep interest, but relying on generosity for 99.99% of projects is a fool's errand.
It is a bit like a Linux distro running Steam. Yeah, there are proprietary bits, but the FOSS part naturally happens on the FOSS parts.
All I'm saying is that there's a big difference in jailbreaking an OS when most of the source code of that OS is publicly available for study and experiment. Surely that is not a controversial statement?
No you don't. It's not all starvation deaths. Mao deliberately - through the insane power Communism bestows on the state - told farmers what to farm and how to farm, and punshed harshly those who disobeyed. And because they obeyed, and only a child who still thinks their parents know everything would think the state (parent-surrogate to many Communists) knows more about farming than farmers, millions starved. Even worse in some ways (while it's stupid to trust the state with farming techniques, it was at least trying to make farming better) - the Soviet Union imposed harsh quotas on Ukraine, causing the death of 3.5-5m people in the Holodomor.
This is what you should expect when you give your "bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers" all the power, trusting that they can do all the hard and expert work in allocating resources both extremely well, and without any human failings such as corruption or violence.
Markets aren't perfect at resource allocation, but they are very very good at it. Replacing the experts at it whose livelihoods depend on doing it very well, with bureaucrats who know nothing about it, and whose livelihoods are guaranteed either way, and who might get disappeared if they displease their superiors' whims, seems impossibly naive on the face of it.
This is a very strange comment. Where did I agree to that?
From 1850 to 1874 the Nian and Taiping rebellions caused 20-30 million deaths. Is this what you're referring to as capitalism?
Still, around 20 years ago when I was a teen, some edgy kids did wear Che and Marx t-shirts and it was considered cool in some circles. I'd say it is an imitation of the West. As paradoxical as it sounds, since communism is seen as edgy and cool in Western Europe, the kids in Eastern Europe who want to seem in-the-know and up-to-date had to copy it. But it was indirect in this way, it didn't grow out of the Eastern European experience.
It is a continuation of a historic West-imitation that's as old as taking on Roman Catholicism or adopting the Renaissance in Matthias Corvinus' court.
Hungarians in the 80s didn't long for some different philosophical organization of society. They wanted the cool Western things, good home appliances, higher salaries, vacations abroad, jeans, shoes, porn magazines, Western pop rock punk music, Coca Cola, McDonald's etc.
So shortly after the change of system in 1989 edgier kids also started to adopt the teen rebel fashion including Che. Just like there were a few goths and emo kids in every class later on. And today it's kpop and whatever is trending on tiktok.
Western Kids larp communism so eastern kids larp the larp. Its not unlike importing Buddhism and mindfulness from California. People adopt it because it is cool in the West and adopt the western interpretation of it.
Imagine if a hip Indian tech worker in Bangalore adopts Californian Buddhism. It would not be because of the local history of Buddhism, but the coolness factor put on it by Silicon Valley. It's like when pizza was backimported to all of Italy, after it got popular in America, even though it was a much more local thing in a small part of Italy before.
They would had GLADLY spit on the graves of every Communist they came across. Killed so many members of my family.
You're just making it worse and worse. I'm also European. I'm guessing you're Western European though? I'm also guessing your country wasn't under soviet occupation for 50 years? Eastern Europeans very much do have a bad allergic reaction to communism, just like Americans, and just like everyone else who came in contact with it. Che was at best a useful idiot.
Worship of this mass murderer is repugnant:
“We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
“We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.”
“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood…I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”
“We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.”
“We send to Guanahacabibes [i.e., Cuban labor camp] people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals…it is hard labor…the working conditions are harsh…”
Hate of communism was just never as rabid 'round here. In 1993 we had one of the mainstream pop songwriters write a love song to it (Rouge) and it had the Red Army Choir singing there and sold a million discs on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(Fredericks_Goldman_Jo....
We still have 'revolutionary' communist (troskists, and other variations) like Lutte Ouvrière, la Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire at each presidential election, gathering between 3 and 6% of votes...
Europe is diverse...
To Westerner, they never saw communism in action, only propaganda.
Which means that kids can proudly wear their capitalistic-made Che Guevara t-shirt at school.
However, in Eastern Europe it's an absolute no, wearing such shirts is worse than the nazi symbols
because it shows support to extreme atrocities in front of people who were victim of them.
- a theoretical economic model that is opposed to capitalism
- the atrocious regimes of the 20th century calling themselves communism you are referring to that have vanishingly few things to do with the first.
Vanishingly few people in Western Europe support these atrocious regimes. And therefore, communism the way you are using it. What's more, there's not much propaganda for communism here (I believe there was propaganda in the past, though). The confusion is usually here and people mostly don't see communism with a good eye because of the confusion (or because they are knowledgeable and oppose the theory - which is a better reason to be against it). Now, it's true that we have weaker feelings about it than in the US (and, I guess, the parts of the words that suffered from the atrocious regimes).
(The usual response to this is that theoretical communism invariably leads to these atrocious regimes, but I believe we don't know this - invariably, it seems they've been set up by possibly sadist assholes with huge egos and thirsts for power, we haven't tried without - as well as we don't know if it would work. I don't have any further useful point to make in this discussion so I probably won't engage in it.)
As a Hungarian, this is just not true. The Western view of communism has been imported and the more time goes on, the more the younger generations base their views on what's cool in the West vs what their old and uncool grandparents blabber on about.
With the Internet and media and travel options and exchange semesters etc. the Western European attitude is diffusing into the east as well. It was already cool to wear Che t shirts 20 years ago in Budapest. Though of course Budapest has always been a West oriented cosmopolitan liberal city, so copying the west in this is not so surprising.
You could say that the survivors of the Titanic didn't want to drown, sure, but you're selecting for the people who survived. The people who all drowned might have wanted to!
I.e. there's a balance. People basically always migrating in one direction must tell you something other than "those exact people just wanted to".
Nah, by that point I may as pitch to some billionaire studio and make a hefty salary that way. Or you know, sell your IP for actual millions if it's that valuable. If "exposure" is the alternate currency I'll happily sell out. I'm not my game IP.
I know you mentioned Minecraft, but it's not 2010 anymore. That "poor" indie creator sold off the game for 2.5b dollars and it seems like he still got the short end of the stick given how big the game is.
I'm fine with open source games, but the fact of the matter is that mods need a community and community is hard to build. If you're trying to replicate MC's success, note that it also wasn't made with modibility Orr convinent licenses in mind. You gotta make something appealing first and then you can futz about with nodding support if people bite.
Not saying it was good or anything, it was a terribly autocratic regime without self-determination and liberty, and i'm sure 99% are better without it, whatever their feelings are. I'm just saying that the sentiments about it are more complex than you seem to say. Anecdata is only worth that much, and in topics so close to personal feelings, it's worth even less. And you seems to essentialize your opponents too much.
Huh? Finder is the macos equivalent of explorer.exe and it's the GUI for the file system. I assume you're taking about Spotlight which searches the entire file system and the internet much like the Windows start menu.
Anyway people have been making claims like this for as long as computers have been around. Smart people use Spotlight and the start menu because it requires fewer keystrokes than typing full paths or clicking 10 times to navigate a directory tree with Finder. It would be stupid to avoid using the fastest tools available
It's just like if you tell someone a joke. You can still claim credit for coming up with it, but not to stop its propagation.
In particular, you can still make money as a developer by asking for it upfront, whether from an employer, or patrons, or early access, or whatever model. Similar to how Netflix might pay someone upfront to develop a stand-up comedy special
That said, I basically never seen anyone charge for a distribution. I figured that people think there's no point, so they just don't.
Now, charging for development? That absolutely happens.
I charge for development of (F)OSS. It's my salary. My employer likewise charges the patrons/funding agencies. But we get paid once for the effort, like any usual labor contract. We don't try to get paid again when our past work products are copied.
In the old days, paying a distribution cost was more common for free software, when it actually took effort such as writing and shipping media. This handled the case where someone asked for a distribution, so that sharing did not become a financial burden. It's a mostly obsolete concept now with pervasive internet and many low cost or free hosting options to put content out there at essentially zero marginal cost to deliver copies.
No - Mao isn't a prerequisite. A global system to latch on to is.
As for the others, these are modernization/consolidation of power which don't require Marxism to happen. Whether the KMT or someone else could have achieved these without a "Great Leap Forward" (30~45 million dead) is another question, but I think the answer is "probably".
I don't believe that's true, no. China does have a lot of natural resources, and a large population, and also it's true that any very authoritarian regime, fascist Italy under Mussolini being another good example, can do things like create good infrastructure, because it can have long-term bets. That is an accelerator for long-term economic growth. But the actual economic growth has come from China allowing capitalist economic systems to develop, where the people doing the work or risking the cash make decisions. Of course, Communism dies hard, and so if you say the wrong thing you can be "reminded" that the Party is all-powerful[0], but China has done well to allow individual people create value, evidenced by its economic growth.
Everything that has happened in China is possible only because of the victories of communism. From a non-existent school system (Mao managed to attend school because his father was the wealthiest in his village, but the schooling was nothing but rote memorisation of poems) to a well-educated population. From a nation controlled by war-lords to a nation controlled by the CCP. From a nation occupied by various foreign powers to a nation controlled by its own people, capable of controlling its borders. These were not the achievements of capitalism.
China had authoritarians before communism. Many countries has authoritarian leaders contemporaneous to Mao but achieved nothing. Mao's successes were not what "any" authoritarian could have achieved. It needed to be an authority with faith in the masses of its people, and an authority altruistic enough to put aside its own immediate interests for the good of the people. Fascism shares some of these qualities, but the fascists were expansionist, impatient, etc. Fascism lost, Mao won.
Well; fascism (or Nazism, maybe?) was socialistic ideas but on national boundaries rather than class boundaries. Hitler (mostly) wanted to kill non-Germans. Communist uprisings tend to kill their own citizens, and nonsensical edicts from hyper-powerful beaurocrats tend to starve same.
To be fair, China always had great famines, at least twice each century. This changed only recently, which in fact is a good argument pro-revolution: after one last famine, it never happened again. The same cannot be said for other countries that were colonized or invaded by capitalist powers; and the famine and problems caused by them during XIX century in China were much worst than the famine after the revolution.
The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war between the Taiping (ethnic Hakka, Han subgroup) and Qing dynasty (ethnic Manchu). While yes British opium was a destabilizing factor, so was rampant Qing corruption, religious/ethnic zealotry, etc. China had constant wars for millennia, and this war coincided with the invention of modern guns and artillery while still using pre-modern tactics, which (like the American Civil War) made it especially deadly. Its disingenuous to pin an internal and ill-timed conflict on "capitalism".
1956 is also interesting as it became relevant politically again with the war in Ukraine. And it is my impression that many people in Hungary look at this not as something happening in a bordering country but as if trying to see it through Western European/North American eyes. A bit like vampire Transylvania, which might as well be a totally different entity than Erdély. So is "Ukraine whose flag the celebs put on their profile pics" a separate entity from Ukraine, east from Nyíregyháza and Mátészalka, where the cheap cigarettes come from etc. A very different set of connotations.
Similarly, the communism that's cool is mentally compartmentalized away from historic reality like 1956, Rákosi, Kádár etc.
Ultimately, some people are just not interested in technology or using it efficiently.
https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/percentage-of-households-wi...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/748551/worldwide-househo...
Though they failed in that regard too I think.
I'm sorry I was not clear enough, but I'm afraid I won't be able to express myself better so I'll just leave it at that.
You are free to make this point if you want, just don't make it look like it comes from me because it doesn't.
I've learned about communism from two types of sources. Philosophy books and history books, and the takeaways are quite different.
I don't agree with it, but you've coined a first rate phrase there.
It's a reasonable hypothesis, just not the only one.
This week I only saw white people in the streets. I could conclude all people walking in my city are white. But that's false.
But I'd say we don't have any example neither: regimes from your history books weren't "communism" we find in your philosophy books. You can see it if you read both carefully enough.
(and again, I'm not stating communism can work, because we don't know that).
But even if we assume both "communisms" are the same: you are saying "Communism has failed N times, therefore it will always fail". You don't know that (though I would admit it's quite solid evidence in this case)
We don't know. And I'm not arguing for or against communism here neither.
So would you agree with the statement that all attempts failed?
You see, you're mockingly presenting me as simply going "never happened therefore can't happen". I would say that you're the extreme opposite where you're going "what happened doesn't matter, we learned nothing from it".
You know, we can reason about the future past the data...? There's a reason why communism failed all attempts. That reason is something which apparently you're missing, but I'm using to support my prediction that it can't work.
Yes, to the extent there were none, really. And if we consider all the regimes calling themselves communism, yes, sure, failed in every possible ways too, of course.
> you're mockingly
No no no, I wouldn't dare making fun of you / mocking you. I have no interest doing so and I would not find this funny. I'm sorry I made you feel I'm mocking you, in any case that was not my intent.
> There's a reason why communism failed all attempts.
You didn't address the hypothesis I exposed in my first comment and that I will restate: any regime calling themselves "communism" were set up by huge assholes using the noble name to call their totalitarian views and misusing the concepts to make it look more legit. Maybe they even liked the idea but still wanted the power.
I feel like I won't convince you and that's fine.
On my side, I haven't discarded the hypothesis that communism can't actually work. We don't know either way.
Ok lets break it apart.
> any regime calling themselves "communism" were set up by huge assholes ( ... )
Agreed.
> ( ... ) using the noble name to call their totalitarian views.
Wrong. Research into the inner circle writing of Stalin show that he and the top people in the party believed themselves to be communists and doing the right thing for the ultimate goal of making the world communist. He wasn't just "using the noble name" (lol?). He behaved like a communist even when no one was looking as per the decisions he made even after attaining absolute power. I'd suggest you read Steven Kotkin's book "Stalin". Of course, if you dispute the expert take I'd have to ask for your credentials.
EDIT: bit frustrating to talk to someone whose starting point is "it's unknown if X" when X has been known for a long time. It's like, do your homework before coming in here. I'm out, good luck.
Taking a shortcut. I meant using a name that possibly had good reputation back then.
For the rest, I'm no expert on the topic, you seem to know better than me, continuing to argue would be pointless.
edit: (to answer your edit) Okay, but then why didn't you counter me right away with solid arguments if you had them from the start? Happy to learn from an actual expert! Like, you could have just written: "Actually, there's strong evidence that both are the same. Here are some references: ..."