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.

  • JerkyIsSuperior@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • megane-kun@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • megane-kun@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • rrobin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • coderade@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Free software is foundational to our society today. We should be much more aggressively protecting and encouraging it

    • wargreymon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We definitely need GPL-alike mechanism in the early age of AI, we most likely need that too in the distant future.

  • jamescathybleak@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • lemat_87@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • underisk@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • lemat_87@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • underisk@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • lemat_87@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • underisk@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • TCB13@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    No. He simply wants tech / society to fail so hard that it actually comes to true. ahaha

    • pancake@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Your concept of “failure” might not exactly fit everyone else’s, but I’m sure you can contribute to the conversation!

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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