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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Pirating a program doesn’t let you study what it does or change it. So you still don’t control it. It solves nothing.
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.
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
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
Your concept of “failure” might not exactly fit everyone else’s, but I’m sure you can contribute to the conversation!
