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.
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.
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.
He wants people to stop using proprietary software and that includes proprietary javascript. That principle is not impossible to follow, since some people do follow it. I run proprietary javascript myself, but that is not a valid criticism of Richard Stallman or the Free Software movement. Freedom requires sacrifices. If you don’t want to do something - that’s up to you. But that doesn’t change the fact that proprietary software is unethical and we should have higher standards as a society. His message doesn’t become incorrect just because we aren’t willing to give up some conveniences. If we all stopped using proprietary javascript, all web apps would have to become Free Software and the problem would be solved.
I am actually agreeing with you, it is not impossible.
However, given that Javascript is ubiquitous in the internet nowadays, giving it up would mean practically having to forego the “normal internet experience.” Not many people are willing to go that far.
I am not saying he is wrong. I am saying that there are people like me who, despite not being prepared to go as far as he did, still recognize that he’s right about such things.
For most people Free Software is probably a journey. You can improve your freedom gradually by slowly removing more and more proprietary software. The goal is to have as much freedom as possible. Javascript is at least sandboxed, so it won’t be able to do you as much harm as a regular program. I can’t stop using it either for now, but that’s the only proprietary software I use. Most people aren’t even willing to install a free operating system though.
For most people Free Software is probably a journey. You can improve your freedom gradually by slowly removing more and more proprietary software. The goal is to have as much freedom as possible.
Yeah. This is what I’ve been trying getting at when I said “are seen as aspirational ideals rather than calls for [immediate] action.”
It is not that what he said (especially about Free Software) is wrong, it’s just that it’s so far from some people’s “normal” that for some, it might as well be a lifetime’s journey to get there, if at all.
Is it a journey worth embarking on? Yes. Is it a journey that sometimes requires a lot from people? Also yes.
But I think it’s worth it if we want to have a better future.
Free software is foundational to our society today. We should be much more aggressively protecting and encouraging it
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:
We definitely need GPL-alike mechanism in the early age of AI, we most likely need that too in the distant future.
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.
Not this man pls, he is too radical. No, im not talking about free software, im talking about Richard Stallman the person. He ate dirt from his foot in public lecture, shout at the crowd, throw water bottle. I mean, he is not the one and only person who has an ideal, the way he acts is rude to say the least.
Let’s get back to the free software, GPL and FSF, i think it will work wonders when we have difficult time securing basic human rights, and save us from losing more to large corps and power. However, the legal system has to function according to the GPL to properly constraints large corps. With that being said, GPL is a powerful communism license or mechanism to fight the large corps and power. It is 100% free for all, but it is not 100% free in any sense. If you develop a software base on GPL licensed software, closed source, you can be charged and legally ask you for the source code. It is also radical af if you think about it, except that it is nowhere near as relevant as what we have to fight for right now, which is free software.
Yeah there’s a reason everyone that’s worked in the field has a Stallman horror story. Love the ideas but Stallman has been a POS for a while.
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.
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.
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.
Pirating a program doesn’t let you study what it does or change it. So you still don’t control it. It solves nothing.
I got your point, but please look out of the programmer perspective. For a moment, look from the perspective of, for example, mechanical engineer: all she or he needs is a copy of AutoCad, Inventor or Catia. They know nothing about code, they do not need to modify the code, they are just use the software as any other machine. That’s all they need. BTW, there is no open source competition to these programs. Free CAD, with all respect, is not so good. Not because it is made by bad programmers; simply because making such complicated software costs tons of people, time and effort, so only big enterprises can do that, and now they are sadly capitalistic.
Free/Libre Software solves this too. One of the 4 rights that it gives you is the right to distribute. So if AutoCad was Libre Software, any mechanical engineer could legally get a copy for free, from someone else. But this is only one problem in our society. We also want to be able to control our computers and in order to do that, we need to be able to control the software that runs on them. Otherwise our devices are not uder our control, but under control of corporations. Someone who developed a program might not have your best interest in mind. On the other hand spyware, DRM and other unethical practices are usually pointless to add to Libre Software, because anyone can remove them from a program and share this modified version with others. This benefits everyone, not just programmers.
Nobody says that Libre Software can’t be commercial. Corporations can make Libre Software and sell it. Just because most Libre Software is released for free, doesn’t mean people can’t charge money for it.
Perhaps FreeCAD isn’t as good as AutoCAD. That’s a shame, but there are other areas where Free Software is just as good or better compared to proprietary alternatives. Blender is one example and it is available for free and funded entirely through donations from users and companies.
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
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
They hate him, because they are happy to make compromises on their freedom in exchange for convenience. He isn’t, because he knows that will only lead to more compromises in the future.
What does woke mean in this context?
s/woke/treating people with respect and dignity/g
People who have a problem with “woke”, well… yeah. Not worth your time.
But the real issue with Stallman wasn’t the ideological extremism of computing, which he has been proved 100% right. The problem was the unwelcome sexual advances, commentary, and physical actions towards women around him. Or, you know, his casting couch in the faculty room. Or the “and hot ladies” sign.
His unrestrained sexism (treating women like objects, and not fellow humans) is why I quit donating to the FSF. And it detracts from the real message that FLOSS software is HUMANE software.
No. He simply wants tech / society to fail so hard that it actually comes to true. ahaha
He kinda acts like a prophet of the doom. I’m sure you know about all those who believe that if you want something really hard, if you project / manifest it will happen. Normal people use that in order to get good thing in life, Richard Stallman seems to do the opposite with tech - manifest a bad present / future :D
Your concept of “failure” might not exactly fit everyone else’s, but I’m sure you can contribute to the conversation!
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Future? Those problems have been affecting us for over 30 years. Do you like spyware, DRM, planned obsolescence in software? Do you want to be able to control your own computer or do you prefer to be at a mercy of some developer/company? The Free Software movement solves those problems. Perhaps you don’t understand what this movement is about.
I understand the movement and I’m all for it, but not for the way he typically sells his ideas and inappropriate behaviors. He behaves like an extremest environmentalist that pushes for a world where we would all be living live caveman instead of providing solutions that actually matter / make sense / keep progress rolling.
What inappropriate behaviors? How is living without proprietary software living like a caveman? Most people can easily remove most proprietary programs from their computers and take back control over their own devices if they only cared. I don’t understand why you would want software developers and corporations to have so much power over us.
I don’t want “software developers and corporations to have so much power over us”, what I want is for people to be reasonable. The fact that companies like Facebook, Apple, Google etc can do what they do is simply a political issue and a total lack of regulation (or application of regulation that exists for everything else) in the digital space.
As we all know open-source can thrive alongside the interests of big companies and those same companies can keep innovating and pushing for better and more as long as they play fairly by keeping open standards / solutions and being actively monitored by govt agencies for abuse.
What Stallman offers is a view of the world would totally stall corporate sponsored open-source / innovation and a total hypocrisy that is very close to the extremist environmental BS we see nowadays. The truth is that he wouldn’t be able to live his life without being directly or indirectly in touch with closed source software / solutions that he dislikes so much.
What we need is to regulate certain things and above all police big tech companies until they start to play nicely.
The truth is that he wouldn’t be able to live his life without being directly or indirectly in touch with closed source software / solutions that he dislikes so much.
Except he does. He uses an entirely Free Software GNU/Linux distro (I think Triquel). His laptop even has a libre BIOS. He doesn’t use a mobile phone, because they are tracking devices (but libre operating systems for phones do exist). He doesn’t even use websites that have proprietary JavaScript.
You don’t have to live like him, but it is clear to see the world would be a better place without spyware and if we could control our devices. Thanks to him we have operating systems that are fully Free Software. Many people don’t run proprietary software on their computers. I don’t understand why you are pretending it’s impossible. I’m typing this comment from a fully libre operating system.
As we all know open-source can thrive alongside the interests of big companies and those same companies can keep innovating and pushing for better and more as long as they play fairly by keeping open standards / solutions and being actively monitored by govt agencies for abuse.
Open Source is a corporate term created to avoid talking about freedom and ethics. But your solution is to keep letting companies write proprietary software and the government is supposed to make sure it’s safe and ethical? So then we have to trust the government, which doesn’t always have our best interest in mind (remember NSA?). Would you use encryption if the algorithm was secret and controlled only by the government? The reason why we know encryption is secure is because anyone can try to verify how it works and try to break it.
What we need is to regulate certain things and above all police big tech companies until they start to play nicely.
Regulate them how? We could just ban proprietary software. Or at least educate people to not use it. Problem solved. This solution was invented by Richard Stallman over 30 years ago. It solves most of humanity’s problems with software. It makes it super easy to remove any spyware, DRM, planned obsolescence (in software). It makes our computers safer. It would even make cars and airplanes safer if they ran on Free Software.
