Richard Stallman was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen.
I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. I’m not defending blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I claim that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever.
This is really an important note. I’ve always maintained that while not every little one of Stallman’s ideas are gold, his ideas on things he’s got expertise on (especially open-source software) are pretty much on point—even if his ideas are a bit too idealistic and are seen as aspirational ideals rather than calls for action and the fact that a lot of them are painful for ordinary people to follow.
Yeah, I agree. Stallman’s philosophy has some obvious blind spots (e.g. usability) but a number of his values continue to be proven correct as technology keeps advancing.
Yes! For example, his “no javascript please” stance, which is unfortunately nearly impossible to follow if you’re to have any semblance of normalcy in browsing the internet, I take as an “ideal to aspire for”. If anything, his warnings against Javascript reminds me to be ever mindful of the code I invite to run in my machine.
Free software is foundational to our society today. We should be much more aggressively protecting and encouraging it
RMS has never stolen my personal data and sold it to criminals, or deprecated my hardware by deliberately throttling its speed. The worst things you can say about him that he’s a wierdo and a bit of a fanatic. But, he’s a fanatic about personal and societal freedom, which is something everybody should be a fanatic about.
Unlike humanity’s heroes like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs that man doesn’t want to sell you anything. He is not popular or rich. He just wants you to care about freedom and to this day he still travels the world to educate people about Free Software. Who cares if he is a little weird? He dedicated his life to fighting for freedom and he will never sell out. He can’t be bribed and he will never stop fighting for what’s right.
Very timely article and a good reminder for us to 1) release our software under strong copyleft licenses and 2) do not invest our time in software that does not do .1
I wrote this eulogy to St Stallman already quite a few years ago, with the point that he may be wrong, but he is wrong in the right way, and that is a good thing. Still relevant:
Really good piece but I think revolving the subject around a person does it a disservice. Surely he can’t be the only one who thought of forbidding for profit use of foss. Honestly I’d be much more interested in reading this if the author wrote it around his own experience.
This has nothing to do with profit. It’s about freedom and being able to control our computers. Richard Stallman created the Free Software movement. Without him there would be no GNU/Linux. He invented Copyleft.
Forgive me if I trivialize, but we should not mourn too much: the obvious solution is to pirate it all. Do not waste time and energy for reinventing the wheel in the form of writing open source software. These resources can be used better for Revolution. Instead of diving into exhausting dispute and overintellectual arguments of Stallman, just do what said Marx: seize the means of production. That is, fucking pirate it. It is simple as that.
There’s more to it than just having free software. The source code is important too because it lets people learn from it, improve it, and use it to write or improve their own projects. Free software is only half the equation.
Unless you mean pirate the source too, in which case yeah absolutely but easier said than done.
One time, I spent whole day arguing with some anarchkiddies about that, and no one gave me a short, convincing argument like that. Their posts were emotional rather than seeking for truth. That’s the difference between debate and dialectics.
I’m mostly just paraphrasing Stallman’s own arguments. They’re worth checking out. He’s not without his faults, but his reasoning in this area is very sound.
All right, that’s an argument. Also, having fun from coding is also a valid argument. Though, from my experience, it is easier to start learning programming from some simple, isolated cases, as in thextbooks, than from real life programs, which can be very nasty and domain-dependent.
To start learning yes, but as I’ve gotten more experienced I find myself getting a lot more value out of real life examples. Cracking open a git repo and seeing how they did something can save me hours of reading documentation or at least give me a better context to grasp it. People learn differently from each other, and also themselves at various stages of their understanding.
You are wrong at so many levels.
If you were to pirate something, not only it doesn’t work all the time, doesn’t scale to large corporations, the large corps control you.
The whole point of this is to gain full control, meaning legally, of what we think should be free.
it doesn’t work all the time
Neither FOSS. There are excellent programs in open source, but many are in some ways much inferior when compared to the cummercial. First example from head: many printers and other devices have drivers only for window$
doesn’t scale to large corporations
i consider pirating software for private use
the large corps control you
They are spying using regular software too
The whole point of this is to gain full control, meaning legally, of what we think should be free.
Why should we bother by unjust capitalist law? Today I shared with my students pirated books which would cost shitton of money in Poland. This should be free for education. But the law forbids it so fuck the law
Pirating a program doesn’t let you study what it does or change it. So you still don’t control it. It solves nothing.
Everybody hates him because he doesn’t speak to their woke ideals, but at the end of the day, OSS should not have to distinguish between woke or not. Some might not like his phrasing, but this is the internet, get over it
No. He simply wants tech / society to fail so hard that it actually comes to true. ahaha
Your concept of “failure” might not exactly fit everyone else’s, but I’m sure you can contribute to the conversation!
