"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
We should all be thankful to rms for his unreasonableness. It has literally been the underpinning of so much of what we take for granted vis-a-vis free software.
Eben Moglen. He's also more "presentable" for all the folks that have leveled that criticism against RMS. I don't think age-wise they're that much different, but at least he's got a redundant backup.
I want stallman.org to remain simple: not a "user experience" but rather a place where I present certain information, views and action opportunities to you.
...and as a result, I think it gives a very good "user experience" - I wish more webpages were like this, plain and informative without distractions.
1. It loads lightning fast on my 512 kbps connection.
2. The font is preinstalled on my system, no separate request needs to be made.
3. It's easy to tell what is a link and what isn't.
4. Scrolling works like I'd expect it to, and doesn't involve any clever "transition" effects. More generally, there are next to no distracting animations or effects on the entire page.
This is awesome. When I had a small college blog running, I build in all in raw HTML with a small bit of CSS.
It loaded quickly, and it was a pleasure to edit. I liked it much better than writing tons of JS based on big web frameworks that often had bugs or non-obvious functionality.
Even with the small college blog, though, the CSS was a bit much. The fact that sites like this exist: http://howtocenterincss.com/ seems like a testament to the idea that CSS is a bit broken.
i've heard the same thing too, but sometimes ghostery shows stuff noscript doesn't so i use both "just to be safe" but i guess i shouldn't use ghostery?
hmmm ublock for me (on opera) doesn't block the frame where the ad is so I see an area on the page with "cannot be displayed" so for me it looked like adblock plus is still the better option; is there one area where ublock better than adblock?
I maintain a site (for a loose definition of "maintain", I suppose) called http://fuckingblocksyntax.com. It's wildly popular in the Objective-C development community, due in no small part to the memorable ___domain name. But the site itself doesn't contain profanity or over-the-top machismo bravado, and there's a safe-for-work mirror URL at http://goshdarnblocksyntax.com.
And the Objective-C community thanks you for it, Michael. We wouldn't be software developers, however, if we weren't hopeless pedants who lose the forest for the trees and point out that goshdarnblocksyntax.com is MISSING the amazing attention-to-detail favicon from the original ___domain. Where's the craftsmanship?
No, it wouldn't work as well without them. The swear words are there to wake you up and make you pay attention. Because making simple websites that work should be obvious. But everyone's so distracted by the latest javascript libraries and css frameworks that you have to scream to get your point across.
It's all a continuation of the trend that started with that "Look at these fucking peppers" image, and produced things like "What the fuck should I make for dinner" etc.
Very much disagree. It's written for developers, and I've never met any developer who finds profanity offensive.
And, more importantly, it makes the whole thing much more eye-catching. It's a fun way to a deliver a message - as a vitriolic, spit-flying rant. It would be ineffective if it was friendly and delicate.
I'm a developer and I dislike work environment where swear words are uttered every 10 seconds. Dunno about US, but here in Slovakia swear words are used mostly by teenagers and uneducated people with lousy jobs.
Well, you wouldn't see a rant like this in an actual work environment in the US; that would be wildly inappropriate. But I think most developers are completely okay with this in reading material, once in a while. They certainly wouldn't be offended by it, in the sense of it having a strong emotional effect.
Depending on the company, swearing might not be tolerated at all. At my company it's fairly common, but I only do it when in meetings with people I'm fairly comfortable around (my team, my manager, people I commonly work with).
I'm a dev in the US, I really dislike profanity (especially in excess), and in most work settings, it's completely not-OK.
I'm not saying it should be "friendly and delicate", just not gratuitously shoving in profanity every other word.
All this pseudo-hipster "the web became a worse place when designers got involved" stuff really annoys me.
Seriously, if all the web looked like this it would be more complicated to use for 99.9% of the world, so it would have remained a niche, so its overall usefulness would have remained limited.
Instead, talented hard-working people put lots of effort into making the web look a much more friendly place. This has made the web a much more inclusive place, and thus, much more of the world has started to use it.
RMS is a brand, and this 'zero design' is part of his brand. You already know who RMS is before you visit his site, and if you don't, you probably aren't part of his 'target market'. The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser, are comfortable adjusting the line width in whatever client they are using, so it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that the rest of the web would be a in a better place if it had remained looking like this. It would have remained an obscure corner of the world where a group of geeks met, and so many of the benefits of the internet would never have transpired.
To me -- someone reasonably tech-savvy and with questionable artistic taste -- the whole "web became a worse place when designers got involved" has a lot more to do with the entire ecosystem and a lot less to do with the design itself.
I don't really miss Geocieties. I do, however:
* Think it's unpardonable that web pages are about as snappy as they were ten years ago, despite including about the same amount of information, while the available speed and bandwidth have increased at least ten times, not to mention computing power.
* Have to keep a full array of extensions and browser hacks in order to keep my own fucking choice of font types and especially sizes. If I wanted to see brilliant examples of typography and calligraphy, I'd have gone buy a book or visited a bloody exhibition.
* Miss the days when I could move around without having my ass tracked at every corner and having to keep an array of extension and browser hacks just so that I don't get spammed with questionable, sometimes outright tracking-based scams at every step.
The web can hardly be called "friendly" when the experience of browsing it without at least three or four extensions that deal with innovations in e-marketing, web design and development is so painful.
Saying that the web "got worse" in the last ten years is certainly midway between "you're not sure what Netscape is, right?" and "I bet you also think Motif was fucking sweet". But a lot of people who have seen it grow (myself included) are certainly disappointed at the huge, gaping chasm between what we dreamed it would be and what it turned out.
The web experience is optimised for the average user, who typically prioritises features over privacy, aesthetics over performance, and ability-to-use over ability-to-customise. Your priorities may be different, but you can run your own website which does meet your priorities, and even a search engine of websites of which you 'approve'.
And yet practical experience shows the complete opposite: the average user prefers something simple from an aesthetic and functional perspective, and does not believe that there should be a trade-off between features and privacy (which is, in fact, correct).
I guess we need to establish what we're talking about here.
All those one-page ThemeForest sites with their whizz-bang animations, parallax scrolling and gazillion custom fonts are not the kind of sites I am holding up as good examples. There is a happy medium between RMS and those sites, and you can see it on sites like Facebook, Google, BBC, Trello, Basecamp, etc. It's no coincidence that the most successful sites are all rather well-designed.
If you walk into a cafe in the middle of London (or Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro) and showed three random users in a coffee shop, say, RMS's site and a BBC news page about an equally esoteric subject and asked them questions like:
* What did you learn by reading this page?
* What are your opinions of the author of this page?
then they are more likely to have positive thoughts about the BBC page than about RMS, because they are more likely to struggle with parsing the information on RMS's site, and because the RMS site simply looks 'broken' when compared to the rest of the internet.
> does not believe that there should be a trade-off between features and privacy (which is, in fact, correct)
There _is_ a trade-off between features and privacy. If I don't implement analytics, my resources are less likely to be spent efficiently, resulting in fewer features. Implementing an alternative to Google Analytics will use resources, so that will come at the expense of a feature. True, if you ask a user "should there be a trade-off between features and privacy?" they will say "no". But if you look at user behaviour, the majority of people don't care enough about privacy to give up the features. That's why Google and Facebook can be enormously popular despite their privacy invasions.
"Ordinary people" or whatever were quite capable of enjoying web sites, even personal hand-made terrible HTML pages on GeoCities, back when web sites were primitive.
I don't take it for granted that random people the world over would prefer BBC's site to rms's. It's an interesting claim, and I'd love to see actual results from such an experiment if someone were to try it.
It should be viewed in an evolutionary perspective. If you had an equally functional amazon website that used only basic HTML elements, which is orders of magnitude lighter (but still loads in about the same time for most users), which one do you think would succeed?
Do (most) users need all the shininess? Nope. Do they (most) prefer it? Absolutely.
Each product has an optimal "clutter" (in competitive terms, maybe a "Nash equilibrium"?) -- a good example is the Google homepage/search results; anything more complicated is clearly unfavorable in terms of competition, unless you offer a qualitative improvement.
Have available speed and bandwidth really improved 10x?
I feel like it's more like 2x, maybe -- I got broadband in 2000, and it was 1.5MB (12Mb) down / 768KB (6Mb) up dsl with sub 10ms ping to most of the internet. It took me more than 10 years to get significantly better, and I pay more than I did then.
The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. You have a point that is would have remained an obscure geek meeting ground, but the reasons for the modern web aren't to make it easier to use, it's to make it not feel so much like reading.
Logos and colors, design and layout are designed to make the web appealing and inviting to some group. Black text on white feels too much like a book and an amazingly large segment of society is put off from that.
Yet his page is fast, responsive, standards compliant, easy to navigate, accessible (screen readers have no problems with it). I don't have to addblock it, turn on readability, or any other nonsense to focus on the content. We've succeeded in simply trying to reinvent what we already have.
> The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable.
What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs.
There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads.
That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
> We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator.
Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites.
I'm sure you do call it that. How many people listen to you when you do?
A one-sentence summary has grabbed people better than pages and pages for as long as people have been people, and that's not going to change because you want it to.
I would thank you, my supercilious friend, to not fucking put words in my mouth, okay? What I am asserting is that it has not, "as a matter of fact", changed. You can point at Presidential elections as oh, hurr, shallow, and I'll even agree with you. And then I will point at Obama's convention speech in '04 or even Bill Clinton's in '12 as modern examples of long-form rhetoric. Because that stuff happens today, too. And people watched, and listened, and talked about those, too (but they had the temerity to talk about it on Twitter, so I'm sure it didn't count).
Lincoln-Douglas looms large in the retrospective eye because it was important (and was at the confluence of a number of factors, not the least of which that it was a geographically diverse set of venues but mass communication was still the newspaper and the telegraph). Perhaps it is worth reflecting that modern presidental elections may not be so important--I mean, the gap between a right-wing and a center-right party is, on balance, very small--and the level of discourse may reflect it. Consider also the consular elections of the Roman republic during times when very little of importance was happening. They're venal, they're often populist, they're regularly pandering and stupid. They look like--well--today's. Because nothing is as stupid as fights when there's nothing of meaning to gain.
I mean, shit, dude. You know what came most of a century before the Lincoln-Douglas debates? A little speech by a dude in a church in Richmond. It's about fourteen paragraphs long. I've read it. But there's one sentence from it that you actually know: "give me liberty or give me death." Patrick Henry laid the groundwork for that sentence. It's a good speech, if you care about that sort of thing. But nobody was reading it then (it wasn't published for forty years, and nobody's actually sure how much of it is the original speech). That sentence is what caught, because it is distilled sentiment and meaning and requires no attention span at all.
You are arguing against history as well as the tide, to heroify dead people and pretend they were other than how they were. I don't understand why.
People that are arguing to treat popularity as the primary metric by which to gauge quality and importance of content are doing two things:
a) being dishonest
b) performing an active disservice for the human-race.
To address point a: Take Gawker - it's popular, ok, maybe Gawker is just as good as a well-written article, I'm sure there are at least a few people that would argue that; but eventually that argument reaches a dead-end - you might never want to read an academic paper, but you're probably damn glad someone wrote it if only for the scientific advances which provide for your material comfort. You might prefer to watch a sitcom, to reading about economic policy, but you probably would prefer the president should do the later.
That is no matter how people may argue (e.g. Why is a Video Game any less a work of art than Shakespeare play) the kind of absolutist-populist position, they will eventually back-pedal on that argument when you run it out to its furthest point, I mean hell Hitler was resoundingly popular, and so was slavery in the South.
Since it's on topic consider RMS - he's rather a secular nut now -- and that's after NSA/Snowden revelations -- 20 years ago he must have appeared as a complete crackhead (the new printer at MIT was closed-source and I decided I could no longer participate in that [not-verbatim]) to 99.9% people and significantly less-popular than idk: Tele-Evangelists, who probably have much more compelling presentation and better websites and public image.
The active disservice part is where people that don't want to be educated, and don't want to read, and would rather watch a sitcom (there is nothing wrong with these in an of themselves) argue and promote their intellectual laziness and ignorance as important values, and accuse those who disagree of being out-dated, elitist, or whatever other such bullshit.
> People that are arguing to treat popularity as the primary metric by which to gauge quality and importance of content are doing two things
I am done with your disingenuity, but for the readers I'll clarify to make it unmistakable: while you can keep on being you all you want, it will not change that to have people listen to you, you must approach them with something they want to consume. You must understand people, and to actually deign to do that instead of to try to lord over them with imagined superiority is not pandering but communicating.
John Oliver understands this. Stallman doesn't. That's why Oliver did in a week what the second guy couldn't do in thirty years. So you can keep arguing and keep sneering. I'm pointing at the elephant and saying it's an elephant. It won't stop being an elephant because you don't like elephants.
> John Oliver understands this. Stallman doesn't. That's why Oliver did in a week what the second guy couldn't do in thirty years. So you can keep arguing and keep sneering.
Yes, Stallman really hasn't done anything. GNU, GCC, GPL and Free-software are really worthless contributions compared to comedy routines, we should all quit working on things that we care about just because you and Joe say we aren't ever going to be popular or important.
We've made the consumer web look like TV and magazines. Not much more complicated than that. People find color, icons, animation, and video engaging.
Sure we may be going overboard with some of the latest javascript effects. That's just Flash all over again. But there's a reason that the web no longer looks like academic journal articles. Those are boring.
I agree with what you're saying, to a point. If it hadn't become monetisable, then services like Youtube and Netflix etc, would never have taken off. I wouldn't have been able to convince family to use email. I would still need to stand in a queue on my lunchbreak to transfer money from my savings account to my current account.
Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.
I don't think any one is claiming that design is bad and designers should never have "got involved", your parent comment is saying that we've gone too far.
Today, lots of websites use full-width images and videos on their landing pages, make multiple requests for all sorts of assets and use all sorts of tracking and analytics code. More and more often I find myself closing a tab in frustration because the page is taking too long to load. Blogs, e-commerce sites, this is getting quite common.
I interpreted your parent comment as a call for minimalism, nothing more.
> The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience.
But I honestly don't experience that moment. I see some text and I start reading it. You're over-thinking, IMO.
That you didn't notice the lack of CSS is precisely why you need to see this from the point of view of a non-technical person. If my mother-in-law saw this page, she would probably call me screaming that her computer had broke or she had been hacked.
No, he's a person, trying to live the life he wants - just like everyone else. That he is talked about does not make him a brand. GNU is his brand.
> The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience.
Actually, Stallman's website has been around for decades - as has the GNU project - and his sites have always been very plain. I don't think I'd describe consistent apathy for gimmick as a gimmick.
> The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser
"Reading mode" on Safari is an integrated support for Readability (http://www.readability.org), which presents a minimally styled, highly readable, Web page.
I prefer a strongly similar design for my own sites.
I think that it is something invented by the people that have pushed for huge javascript monstrosity websites so that they can avoid the javascript monstrosities...
It's funny how anyone we don't like is a hipster. You think they're the people who like plain web pages. I think hipsters are the people who insist on using a dozen artisanal hand crafted fonts on every web page.
I see what you mean, and re-reading my comment I was wrong to use such a cliche. What I was referring to is the 'everything 20 years ago was so much better' mentality. If I were to rewrite that sentence I would talk about nostalgia and a self-centred worldview.
"Hipsters" nowadays are people who shun trends and only want in on the "underground" stuff. "Hipsters" are also those that are all about being trendy. "Hipsters" are also those who care about the new-and-shiny, even if they don't bring anything new or useful to the table, or if it's a reinvention of some wheel. "Hipsters" are also those who indulge in retro stuff, even though they may be archaic and not useful any more...
Agreed, the minimal design does have its place but I don't think the web as a whole would be any better for it. Pretty much all the webpages for the modules I study on my CS degree are of a similar kind to Stallman's, because that's all they need to be.
Odd that none of your parent comments mentioned designers, yet you felt they were being criticized.
Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc.
You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure.
It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs).
No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.
The first is nothing but HTML and text, the second is a fully functioning web front end to a DVCS with issue tracking and documentation, plus metrics and graphs, all only possible due to the 'worsening' of the web with Javascript, CSS, Flash and so on.
I know I prefer GitHub, and the same is true for most modern web applications where there is a choice. And apologies for the shameless Apache Brooklyn plug ;)
Why would you need JS, CSS or Flash to have issue tracking, documentation, metrics or graphs?
An issue tracker is essentially a forum where the threads have an open/closed state attached. People have built such web applications before JS even existed.
Documentation is even simpler, just a bunch of HTML documents, maybe with an HTML form to edit them.
The problem with your first link is not the lack of CSS, it's that the information listed is less relevant than what Github shows.
But instead of comparing with that, try disabling the CSS in the GH page. Ignoring the header section, I think the file list and README look just fine, and I wouldn't be bothered at all to use it as such.
You'll notice though that the main documentation on github is basically just what we already had in the web 1.0 days and not much more.
We had most of those other things in the web 1.0 days too.
Here's a directory hierarchy that's just as navigable as github's
ftp://modland.com/
in the old days, ftp sites used to even have some kind of readme that browsers would autoload and put at the top of the directory list as documentation.
Graphs have been back-end generated and served in web 1.0 days as well and just inlined as <img> tags.
It was basically the same, with less control of look-and-feel, but about as usable and hundreds of times quicker. Responsiveness and accessibility just sort of "happened".
I agree with you, but it's not about what you prefer, or what I prefer. It's about what can be done. The great thing about the web is that we can have BOTH of these designs. If Jack prefers #1 and Alice prefers #2 then there's no problem as they can both co-exist.
But if Jack starts saying design #2 is awful, so we should remove the ability of browsers to display that kinda stuff, then Alice has to use #1 and may well stop using the issue queue entirely. That doesn't seem like a good outcome.
Let's optimise so that the maximum amount of utility can be had by the maximum number of people, instead of trying to push our own worldview on what the web should look like.
The first one is at least kind of responsive. I can zoom in my web browser and get a text size that I'm comfortable with.
On GitHub, I vastly prefer the mobile site. Unfortunately you have to spoof your user-agent to get at it on desktop.
I use a lot of mobile versions of sites, even on desktop. They're usually much better for me. To a large extent because they're simpler. Even news sites tend to have mobile versions that are somewhat human-friendly, easy to understand, fast to load, etc.
Who knows why the built-in Git web UI is so abstruse? Whatever the reasons, they have nothing to do with Javascript, Flash, or even really CSS. A skilled and dedicated designer or typographer could certainly come up with a simple text-based layout that conveys the necessary information, if that were the restriction. Probably git's web UI is not the result of professional designers?
Most web pages "guilty" of this are owned and operated by corporations and they're doing it for a reason: visitors apparently trust websites more if they look professionally styled, so they prefer those over simpler looking competitors at first sight. Market pressure forces websites to polish their UI so it becomes attractive, usability is only an optimization (if you don't have a significant number of users due to the website's initial impression, it's not as important to optimize for maximum profit).
Some early movers got away with crappy visual aesthetics for a long time (like my former company), but today an 'RMS-style' (or old craigslist style) website would not stand a chance upon entering a competitive market.
This works a bit like we judge other humans, perhaps: based on appearance, before they even open their mouths (and maybe that's the reason why we have better haircuts now but whether we are better characters than a few generations ago, is debatable).
People might choose websites with a "more polished UI", but better converting isn't always better for consumers. Most websites are like junk food: clearly optmized for getting users to "convert", but lacking in any real substance.
which is how the web worked originally, how it was intended to be. in some ways the ecosystem has gotten better than the 90's, in others its been getting worse. too many sites are getting too cluttered, too slow, with too many moving parts and unnecessary optional tangential things forced into your face at the expense of the main dish. Text, images, forms and links -- you can move mountains with those alone. We should bias to them wherever we can, keep things as simple as we can.
Wonders for YOUR readability. Other people have different viewports and screen sizes/resolutions and that would most likely interfere with some of them. Some people might even prefer dense text and long lines (doesn't bother ME).
As others have pointed out, you should be able to adjust your browser to get the reading experience you want. Turn your tablet vertically if reading in landscape. Open current tab in new window and make it as narrow as you want. Or have smart browser extensions that do it automatically for YOU.
Feels a bit silly to resize a 20-tab browser window because one site failed to have proper content width. I'm very happy with having a 1920px maximized browser window. I don't like having non-maximized windows (in windows), it's just clumsy without a good layout system. You can have windows snapped at half width but I also want content centered on the screen.
So no: failing to set max width on a web page is not a good way to just present a clean page of information rather than an experience. It's just a bad webpage.
For a longform page it may be worth doing for readability, but the whole idea of fiddling with the borders of my browser window (which is shared between all the tabs) back and forth as I switch tabs is silly.
It even is themeable: http://blog.fefe.de/?css=bild.css (to make it look like the German tabloid BILD) the CSS links can be external, as well, and an empty css parameter clears the theme cookie.
We are - all of us - the slowly boiling frogs of the story.
Google, Netflix, Amazon, Uber & AirBnb - What you search for & e-mail about, What you watch, What you buy, Where you travel to & from & Where you stay - perfect tracking of everything. Add NSA & others on top & 1984 seems like a poor cousin of the world we live in.
We need some one like Richard to show us what the COLD water looks like. Not the slightly boiled one, not the warm one, the COLD water. Zero tracking of anything as much as possible.
He has lived his life trying to be as true to his philosophy as he can - at great personal cost & a LOT of sacrifice. I have personally seen some of the medical issues & his assets as such if any are shockingly meager for someone so well thought of (not something he will admit). Not like most of us (me included) - who will give up any data if it means a little bit of convenience.
I always enjoy Richard's writing. I would like to take more of his advice but some practicalities interfere, mostly about social media. I tend to not post much personal stuff on social media but posting links to my recent blog articles, new books I have written, and when I release open source software is very valuable to me because it increases the number of people I get connected with. He is absolutely correct about the dangers of losing privacy on social media.
I have considered the all free laptop route and technically this would not hurt my writing and work efforts, but I like to experiment with new stuff, and I really enjoy having a Windows 8.1 and a Mac laptop to experiment with, in addition to my Linux laptop. I have the bizarre work habit of rotating between Linux, Windows, and OS X every four or five hours. My work flow is the same, and I enjoy the variety so much that the slight change-over effort is worthwhile. This is a stupid habit that I should probably change.
Stallman is really important for our tech community and I personally like his political stands. +1000 for Richard Stallman.
There is an extremely interesting post describing what a few days living with RMS look like. It describes a trip of RMS to Spain, to give a talk in Majorca University.
It get to great length to describe how uncompromising and coherent with his views RMS is, to the point of showing how tough it is for him and everyone around.
Unfortunately, the post is only available in Spanish:
Its a bad thing. While you may not agree with Stallman's analysis of the morality of software, should everyone think about the tools they use - not just their apparent functionality, but also the broader ramifications of characteristics of said tools.
The world would be a better place if fewer people just went on autopilot and short-term gratification.
There is also an option that you can think long and hard about the tools you use and come to conclusion, that Stallman is wrong.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
Yes, this is a good option. I view Stallman's writings the way I view most polemics. While they're useful in understanding the roots of an idea and challenging the way things are, they often aren't practical. If everybody had to use a computer the way Stallman does, they probably wouldn't use computers.
The benefit accessibility, which unfortunately often relies on non-free software, provides is of great value to many people.
Stallman has the privilege of an education from MIT where he learned the ins-and-outs of computing and is able to function efficiently with this knowledge. I have friends who have to work for subsistence wages who simply wouldn't have the time nor the energy to learn everything about how to use fully free software, and they get huge benefits from using the Internet.
My mute brother often uses proprietary voice assistance software to speak that locks him into Apple's platform. He doesn't care. The benefits of him being able to communicate efficiently far outweigh the cost in terms of both the cost of the software and the "dangers" of using proprietary software. Admittedly, I'd like it if I could modify the source code, but it's better than starting from scratch.
Even his stance on cell phones ignores the concerns of many people. I don't know where Stallman lives, but I'm betting it's a pretty safe area for him. He can live without a cell phone because the likelihood that he will need to call 911 when he's out and about is low. Constant tracking is bad, but being assaulted is worse.
All that being said, I wish more software was free. It'd lead to more eyes on the software everyone is using which would probably improve it a lot in terms of functionality, security, and performance. It's hard for one person or a small group of people to have expertise in every area that a good piece of modern software requires.
I think this is an uncharitable reading of the page. rms' stance doesn't ignore the concerns of people, because it isn't a proclamation telling how people should live; it's just a description of how he lives.
The only parts that proscribe are the sections about DRM, and even those are not "you should sacrifice yourself to oppose DRM" but "only buy DRMed content if you can break it", which is more a personal advice than a moral commandment.
In general, rms doesn't tell software users they are bad people for using proprietary software or for allowing tracking; he's just alerting people about the dangers of doing so. His criticisms are usually solely directed at software producers and at the organizations that track people.
Fair enough. I think he comes across as looking down on people who use proprietary software, but you're right - the page is just about how he computes.
> There is also an option that you can think long and hard about the tools you use and come to conclusion,
I think this is the benefit we can gain from RMS' article. Most of what he's outlining here are very extreme executions of fundamental viewpoints. Most of us are not going to turn down watching a show on Hulu or a documentary on Netflix with our friends if we value that kind of social interaction more than having our "freedom". The important thing here is that by reading this and going "why the hell would anyone do that?", RMS has perhaps made us think about the software we use on a slightly deeper level than we usually do. Whether you or I draw the same conclusions as him is irrelevant, the most important thing is that we took a second look at the stuff we use because there's someone out there that either doesn't use it or uses it differently.
Or there is the third option to think long and hard, largely agree with Stallman, but still continue to mostly use the tools you do out of habit and practicality.
I'd say I fall into that category. He raises a lot of very important issues, however it would be too much for me to change my lifestyle to address all of those issues, and then some of his points, such as proprietary software being inherently evil, I don't agree with.
Life is about compromise; You only have so much you can do. Mr. Stallman has decided never to compromise on his principle of freedom. We've gained some benefit from his life, though most of it has already been extracted.
Does your software choices harm you, not could harm you, but harm you? Do you want the freedoms described in all cases, or are you willing to trade some parts of them for other goods? That's the bargain you should consider.
Freedom isn't the end-all of life, nor should it be. If you want to live on principle, do so, but it really doesn't make you intrinsically better as a person.
I think it is important for free software to provide free graphical user interface software, which is why the GNU Project arranged to launch three projects to develop that. The third, GNOME, was successful, so we never needed a fourth one.
Does anybody know what the first two GNU windowing systems were? Is he talking about GNUstep?
A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever. These streaming dis-services are malicious technology designed to make people antisocial.
Right, Richard, it's the Netflix users who are antisocial, not the people who get irate when their "friend" tries to load a website.
This really irked me too. Sounds like he would be great fun to be friends with. I guess if I made it my full time job to avoid every modern product or service possible I wouldn't have much time to be social or have fun either.
This may not be a direct comment rms's computing habits, but it's related and as good a place as any bring it up. I've been trying to reconcile two views on free software. I like to think about it in terms of car ownership because its more tangible to me:
As a car owner, I should have the freedom to open my car, inspect its inner workings, change/fix things as desired, and share my knowledge others. The ability to openly inspect the inner workings also allows me to assure that the car is only performing operations I purchased it to perform.
However, as a car developer, I cannot possibly hope to make money by giving the car away for free. There have been significant hours invested into the design of the car. Sure, there's money to made in maintenance, but realistically most people don't care about routine maintenance. They'd rather buy the car and ride it 'til the wheels fall off - maybe an oil change here and there.
Are these two views fundamentally incompatible? Does anyone pay an upfront cost for free software in recognition of the time spent building/designing the product as they might with proprietary?
One of the arguments of the movement is that by participating in it, by giving away your labor to all mankind, others can benefit and this works vis-a-versa, others give away their labor so you can benefit as well.
The problem of course is that this also says that labor is worthless and nobody gets to eat and find shelter unless they have some significant patronage. So sure I can build my Sprocket-Cog Software more easily because many of the software components that go into it are available to me for free (beer) so long as I free the entire thing at the end (freedom).
The follow-on argument is that you can always try to build a services model around Sprocket-Cog Software and live from that. But there's a subtle implication there that building turnkey software is not an option if you want to live, but making broken, user-hostile, hard-to-use software is the only morally "good" option.
(there's another argument that can be dismissed that you aren't prohibited from selling your software commercially under the right license, but that's a stupid argument, nobody will buy software from you if you just make it available for free (beer) anyways, so your only valid option (and the only one that has so far sorta "worked" in the marketplace is to provide services)
RMS of course dismisses all of this with a bunch of handwaivyness, like he does issues with hardware, food, etc. because he simply doesn't have to worry about them (because he has money) or because he can't find a path he can personally follow. It's hard to take claims about morality seriously when they only apply to software and not anything else that's far more embedded in life.
RMS doesn't say that work is worthless, or that you have to give your labor away to all mankind. It's purely an issue of what people can do with the fruits of said labor.
I've been programming professionally for 15 years, and I've gotten well paid for it. But I never worked for a company that sold its software without handing out the code right with it. Many times it has not met RMS' standards, because some of the code used proprietary libraries, but using said libraries was always the customer choice.
Most of the time, the customer that uses the code keeps it to themselves, just like they keep the actual executables they compile to themselves. A few times, however, my code was just released with an open license. Either way, I'd have still gotten paid, every single time, if copyrights or patents did not cover software at all.
Remember that the original complaints that made this movement happen had little to do with software being for pay, but with the chains that come along with not allowing modification: Printer driver has a bug? Tough. Game doesn't work in a newer computer? Buy a remake. Bought a new computer because the old one broke? Call MS and see if they will let you transfer the OS from machine to machine. It's issues like that free software wanted to change. Making it hard to, say, sell videogames in that kind of model, is not the real objective, but collateral damage.
It is not because he has money that he can find a personal path to follow, he really doesn't. His speaking fee is modest, his position at MIT is unpaid. He lives like a student, if you've ever read that long document he asks others to read if they book him for a speaking gig, can't find a link to it at the moment, it's mostly about avoiding unnecessary expense and distraction.
You do realize that he is actually in possession of a reasonably large amount of money and can live independently (if frugally) without payment for the rest of his life.
RMS' view is simple: Work is valuable, people should be paid, but putting proprietary software into the world is harmful, so you should be shamed for that, not paid for it. Thus, he will readily acknowledge that making a living writing freely-licensed software may be difficult, but since it is the only ethical way to write software, we just have to figure out the best ways we can to do it.
An extreme absurd version of the logic (NOT to say the moral implications are the same, just to understand the logic!!) is this: it may be easier to get rich owning slaves, but you should not own slaves. I don't care how hard life is for you or how hard you have to work or how impossible your business would be without slaves. No slavery.
I think the biggest difference is that cars are physical objects which require nontrivial resources to produce, even just to copy. Even if you had all the knowledge about a car to the point of being able to make a copy, you still have to acquire the raw materials.
Software is different; copying and distribution essentially costs only as much as the power it takes to move bits around.
As long as physical materials are not free, I don't think it contradicts supporting free software - even paying developers for their effort - and also paying for a car. There's no incompatibility here.
... but today, cars do contain software, which makes the situation a lot more complex...
> I think the biggest difference is that cars are physical objects which require nontrivial resources to produce
I disagree. Software, too, requires nontrivial resources to produce.
I guess what I'm arguing is that inherent value for both is in production / design. When you buy a vehicle, you're paying for the design, the function, etc..., not the physical materials. However, the object being purchased in the case of a vehicle must manifest itself through physical materials, and so the physical materials are the barrier for reproduction / distribution. This barrier forces payment towards the production / design.
In the software case, the barrier is artificially introduced by closing the source. This seems to be the way many force payment to the production / design of software. But naturally this cripples the users freedom.
If you follow physical materials back to their source they are free. Dirt, gravel, minerals, oil, water, coal, rubber, etc, they are freely sitting around waiting for labor to collect them, labor to process them, labor to deliver them. When you buy a car for $30k you aren't paying for $30k of materials you're paying for $30k of labor and/or perceived value.
Obviously software can be duplicated for free but it often takes significant labor. Often more than making a few thousand cars.
Dirt, gravel, minerals, oil, water, coal, rubber etc. aren't free. Land ownership is a thing and natural resources are usually controlled by someone. Simply controlling the access to natural resources can make you rich without lifting a finger.
More fundamentally, the production of goods comes at a price that can't necessarily be easily expressed in terms of money. Extracting and using natural resources often damages the environment and more obviously deprives other people of the use of those resources.
You aren't paying $30k just for materials, but you aren't paying $30k for just labor and perceived value either. Resources used in the production of cars are sometimes naturally scarce, and if you own such resources, people will pay you to extract them.
your misconception of the position is addressed in the above essay.
RMS: Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
But isn't the distribution charge nullified by the first person who distributes the software free of charge (and they are free to do so because the software is libre)?
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price doesn't make the software free, or even closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
also:
making closed and open versions is OK by rms.
I think the point is that once you sold a copy of your free software once, the buyer may give it away for free.
Realistically I'd say it's not really possible to make money by selling free software. That's okay if you can make money off from services and integration but selling isn't really possible and some free software advocates tend to ignore that fact. Especially if it's about other digital content like music. I don't think that Wu-Tang Clan's model of just selling one copy will very be sustainable.
I don't know, I appreciate his convictions and what he does, but I don't believe software in general would be where it is today if it weren't for commercial and closed source software. Google and Apple have done a lot to shape the world we live in today despite being "unethical" in terms of openness.
Software would not be "where it is today"; it would be a fundamentally different place. Many of us see that place as being far better than what we have.
It's strange to me that you mention Google and Apple, because in both cases they built their empires largely on using open-source software that was available to them, and keeping some software closed isn't obviously relevant to their business model or success.
If it weren't for Google and Apple (and microsoft, of course) and everybody used computers the way RMS wanted them to, there would be a lot less people using computers.
I've got a lot of respect for RMS. What he does is important, and i want him to keep fighting for what he believes in. I just don't want him to win. We're all better for the opposition between the corporate interests driving forward usability and inclusiveness, and the philisophical interests pushing openness and ethics and impractical idealism.
People should be really thankful that RMS is out there making all of these issues visible. People might not even know that these issues could effect them in the future if it weren't for a vanguard standing up and taking notice now.
I would bet that the vast majority of people who use computers and the internet have never heard of Richard Stallman and never think about these issues at all.
So he thinks emails can't be spied on. He doesn't mention which computer runs the email wget-like program, but if it's traceable to him, then it's trackable, or if the email isn't encrypted at any step. He doesn't mention using PGP for that, and without that it's likely that the emails are in plain-text.
About DRM: he seems to say that if you can break it, it's ok to use it, even if it's unfree. Also, is Netflix breakable? I don't use it myself, but I was once told you can rip the movies with some programs.
Quite the contrary. Since the Snowden revelations, all of his emails have the following header:
[[[ 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. ]]]
Compare the number of government-level full-take Internet surveillance programs to the number of surveillance programs run by small "analytics" and "customer engagement" companies.
By this measure, browsing the web through an email proxy renders most surveillance methods blind to your activities.
It would still depend on where the email proxy is running, though.
Anyway, a regular free vpn (from his description, I'm sure he'd never exceed the limits) would achieve the same goals (and he could still use lynx et al and browse offline). Hell, browsing with javascript and cookies turned off shoud already defeat most surveillance, plus maybe change your IP every so often.
I agree with your comments in the second sentence of your second paragraph.
However, you're moving the goalposts. You said: "So [RMS] thinks emails can't be spied on [because he said 'One consequence of <my internet browsing> method is that most of the survellance methods used on the Internet can't see me.'". My comment illuminated the reasoning behind RMS's use of the word "most" and addressed your misunderstanding of the same.
That's fair. My reasoning was something like "this seems specifically designed to obscure IP, the only attackers likely to be able to do something about IP can also read email, therefore RMS doesn't know what he's talking about with regard to a threat model here". This was mostly implicit, which lead to my claim above that he thinks email is secure; it seemed like the only way to justify his claims for any threat model.
Actually... if you use a console based email program (like pine) that you use over SSH, then all of your email to other users on the same system never traverse a network.
If it's a web based interface, then you need to worry about stripping SSL and rogue CAs and all of those threats.
But if two people SSH into the same system and send email to each other with pine (or elm or whatever), the email itself never traverses a network (it's just a local copy operation) and the reading of the email is over SSH.
It may interest you to know that not one single piece of rsync.net internal company email has ever traversed a network.
This is what I don't get. Why browse the web through this URL email method? It doesn't hide him from the government (arguably easier to track emails from a specific address instead of a changing IP). I guess it'd disguise him from the viewpoint of websites, but wouldn't Tor or a VPN accomplish the same? Seems like a lot of work for little (if any) benefit.
EDIT: nevermind, just read elsewhere that this technique was for offline browsing and now he does use a browser.
That seems very unlikely. Since the stuff in the emails is publicly available on the net there would be no point in encrypting them. You might be able to determine what RMS is interested in, but everyone already knows what RMS is interested in ... in some detail.
An idea: if somebody makes the diff between the page then and now we can talk about what he changed since the previous discussion and also refer to the previous discussion for the unchanged aspects.
A bit late but I took the April 7,2012 version [0] of the page and the recent version [1] from the internet archive and made a diff [2] using `wdiff` after converting the html to text and cleaning up the pages a bit. The diff doesn't look so great and mangles the before and after text together, but it was worth a try.
The main differences seem to be updated information such as about his laptop, and changes to the prose for clarification.
You know, my feeling for rms is quite bipolar. On one hand, I respect the severity of his commitment. On the other hand, as time passes, he sounds more and more like those extremist whackjobs. Seriously.
For example, what is wrong with paying for digital services on the web? I mean, serious, what is wrong with it? Or, I found his opinion on Netflix quite funny. Netflix never intends to sell its users anything. The whole premise is to watch without buying. Like library (but you pay for the service). You can't exactly complain that you can't, says, tear apart a library book, can you? So, why DRM on Netfix a problem? The users don't own those video! Well o well.
I don't think he finds paying for digital services unethical, but he chooses not to since that payment is always personally identifiable (since you have to have an account, use a credit card, etc). He has 2 major stances outlined here -- an ethical opinion on free software, and a personal choice on privacy.
> However, I can suggest that it may be wise to use an email service that is not connected with your search engine. That way you can be almost sure that your email contents don't influence your search results. You shouldn't identify yourself to your search engine in any case.
I don't understand this, if it makes your searches more relevant to you, what's wrong?
I used duckduckgo for a while, but the results were very poor compared to Google, since Google knows what i usually search (i.e. programing-related stuff, not cooking or w/e) and what interests me.
If you fear about being prosecuted, then sure don't use the service, or you could also fight to improve regulations.
The search bubble may benefit you on occasion (such as your programming example), but it will affect you on every search, showing you mostly results with similar politics, etc, to the sources you already read.
Specifically, the seller must use the term "GNU/Linux" for any reference to an entire operating system which includes GNU and Linux, not "Linux" or "Linux-based system" or "a system with the Linux kernel" or any other term that mentions "Linux" without "GNU". Likewise, the seller must talk about "free software" more prominently than "open source."
....am I the only one, or does it seem petty to anyone else?
RMS refused to speak at a Linux Users' Group I used to be involved with because it was a "Linux Users Group" and not a "GNU/Linux Users' Group", so this doesn't surprise me.
The first part is rather pertinent. Android is precisely bad because it contains very little of GNU, which allows Google to develop the OS on an Apache license, and is the root of our closed-source Android problem. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.htm...
The second part is also problematic, first because it's inaccurate (MIT- and BSD-licensed software is also open source but not free software i.e copyleft, which is bad), and second because it misses the point of free software: allowing others to use your work without contributing back is is very comparable to the right to enslave. So free software says that software being free is more important than people being free to do what they want with it. Much like we generally think that people being free is more important than others being free to do what they want to their neighbors.
So it's only petty if you're not accustomed to these ideas, which you are supposed to be anyway if you go through the effort of reading these rules. That's why this label exists after all: so you don't have to give it as much thought as these people did.
MIT/BSD are free software though; Open Source adds licenses that allow viewing the source, but have various restrictions on redistribution. They're just not copyleft. Regarding Android, Google provides the source, and there was nothing precluding them from using something like DirectFB instead to build android on. With such a system, you'd end up with something that looks a lot like gtk/gnome, which "...is licensed using the LGPL license, so you can develop open software, free software, or even commercial non-free software using GTK" [1].
Additionally, it makes for awkward copy. Made with GNU/Linux can be mentally parsed a few different ways; it could mean they're joined, or could mean an either or. Furthermore, the FSF shows their pettiness in other ways, such as how they cram GNU/ into the names of Linux distributions that don't use it [2]. Their actions on this front just end up feeling petty and petulant.
Not really. It's one of the things he is most famous for. Even people who otherwise have no idea who RMS is have often seen the "I'd just like to interject for a moment" copypasta.
"I read a book about Java, and found it an elegant further development from C. But I have never used it. I did write some code in Java once, but the code was in C and Lisp (I simply happened to be in Java at the time)."
Personally I do use Netflix and I don't think that the company or its users are unethical, but ultimately if there were a reasonably priced service that offered DRM-free content and didn't rely on closed-source plugins and apps, I would switch in a heartbeat.
My guess is that Netflix couldn't negotiate agreements for a lot of the content that makes the service attractive without relenting on DRM. We'll know when Netflix turns evil, because it will force you to sit through commercials and previews before showing you the content you want and paid to see.
I think you are absolutely right. It's not content providers that are pushing for DRM, it's content producers. There's absolutely no way a rightsholder would let Netflix show their content if, god forbid, there was any remote possibility that a user could download and use their content outside of a controlled environment.
In some ways it parallels internet piracy. ISPs for the most part are sick of policing their users and sending out C&D letters for copyright infringement, but they more or less have to due to pressure from major studios.
"The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant."
You would have thought that rms would have made more of an effort to build a great Lisp on which to build better free software. Developers would be much more productive in Lisp than C or Java, for example.
My comment is that he should have built more of it in Lisp since it's a better language. First he needed a better Lisp (ie. high-performance Lisp). Then he would have had a better foundation. Wouldn't we be better off with hundreds of millions of lines of free software in Lisp rather than C?
You are probably not aware of the details of what he did with Emacs and GCC. The short answer is: it was possible to implement reasonably effective Lisp in Emacs, but it was impossible to replace the most of Unix infrastructure in it. Therefore the GCC was necessary.
It's not about the "theoretical possibilities" it's about the practical limitations.
I can't refer to you to any single resource regarding the limitations of any Lisp for implementing the free-source replacement of Unix, but if you investigate how the Lisp in Emacs was actually implemented you can get the picture. Provided you have enough basic knowledge about the low level aspects of the CPUs, compilers and interpreters and also the limitations of all the hardware before the most modern CPUs. Even today, what's "good enough" on the desktop can be "too much demanded" from the lower power systems. But the lower power systems of today are also much more advanced than what we had for decades during which GNU project grew.
GCC 1.0 was released in 1987. The 2000 USD computer had less than 1 MB of RAM then.
Million polygon levels running at 60fps when the majority of games on that system had 1-2 orders of magnitude less geometry and ran at 30fps and were written in C/C++
I'm NOT saying therefore RMS should have used lisp instead of C but I am suggesting that any perf objections or memory objections are mostly not factual. It's perfectly possible to make a performant non-memory hungry lisp.
Written using Allegro Common Lisp, a "commercial implementation of the Common Lisp programming language developed by Franz Inc." Which was related to the Macsyma and going proprietary, and "the closing of the MIT Lisp
and Macsyma efforts was a key reason Richard Stallman decided to form
the Free Software Foundation."
Thanks for the slides (the second link)! What I can conclude is that only the game scripting was ever based on Lisp, never the whole engine? This sounds much less impressive and makes the achieved FPS claims almost irelevant.
And there were some other opinions on usefulness of such approach:
"Despite its advantages, the concept of implementing the game logic in a separate scripting language and writing an interpreter for it was soon dropped (even by John Carmack who had implemented this concept) because of the overall inflexibility of an interpreted language,[3]"
On another side, there are a some games which used Lua for scripting:
As for the arguments that you can't interface with others because they don't know lisp and there aren't lots of libraries that's true of every language at some point in their lifecycle. There might be other reasons that's never happened for lisp or it might just be that no one has successfully made a concerted effort to get it there?
Maybe one of the LLVM based lisps would help a transition or at least let people try lisp on part of their C/C++ code base
"Of the 1.2 million lines of code, roughly 900,000 lines are written in GOAL."
Still that leaves 300,000 lines which were certainly the most low-level and performance-sensitive ones.
The 900,000 lines aren't exactly "the Lisp," but that custom language, developed using the commercial Lisp, but I admit it's certainly an engineering achievement.
Yes, I am aware. I didn't say that GCC wasn't necessary. Performance does matter. However, if he had a better Lisp then as Moore's Law advanced over the past 3 decades, Lisp could have become more common. Emacs Lisp is slow and it's also not a standard like Common Lisp or Scheme.
We'd all agree C isn't as necessary today. Lots of great stuff is done in Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, Clojure, etc. Developers are building editors in browsers (atom.io) and Microsoft used atom with 200k of Typescript in their new cross-platform tools.
There are loads of languages like that, I don't think that you can blame rms for this. For example, the MLs are currently kinda hot, ocaml especially, and have been around for donkey's years; but in the early 1990s they were very slow.
Lots of the applications written in ML are barely viable; the only reason they're performant now is due to Moore's law.
It doesn't matter what was before 3 decades. You have the environment that exists now. You can use better Lisp, if it's good enough now, for what you need to do. For the resource limited and performance critical stuff I still use C and a lot of actual environments still need C-level performance and the resource use patterns.
And all this is not because of what RMS did or didn't do. He did great things, and I don't agree that anybody can claim that he could have done something differently given the real constrains he had.
Maybe I should have said "a PC" instead of "a computer." As in, something that actually had a hard disk. Did GNU software run on Amiga 500? Had it been a good decision to target it instead of the PC-compatibles? I don't think so.
Stallman likely worked in the LISP your describing. He was a researched at MIT's AI lab. Their the LISP machines they went on to produce were actually a hybrid natively assembled OOP LISP, aimed at solving a lot of the low level issues you'll run into writing a kernel/system tools in LISP. I haven't worked in this language, I've just seen it referenced in a large number of places.
As he ultimately decided to not go this direction, I'm going to assume he considered it more of a dead end.
Guile scheme was meant to be use as a "scripting" language, to extend and customize software. As far as I know, from the GNU project, only GnuCash and Lilypond use it.
Very few of the software from the GNU project have been written by RMS, they are often starten outside the GNU project and join or get adopted later.
Appealing to microbenchmarks is not a useful argument because they are in no way indicative of real-life performance and tend to stress only a single part of the system being tested. They're fantastic for compiler writers, terrible for making any kind of judgement about the languages being compared.
More and more I feel nothing should be compared to Lisp, for it sits on the metalanguage line a bit too much, has no ___domain specific/concrete syntax and semantics (you can roll your own depending on your needs).
As with many benchmarks, you're comparing apples and oranges. A better comparison would be with another language that uses automatic memory management (e.g., C#/mono - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...). I'm assuming the optimization/safety settings are the defaults, too, which means SBCL ends up doing a lot of additional type checking at runtime.
It is, but there are situations where speed of execution and use of memory are less important criteria for choosing a language. For example, when developing very large and complex programs. Lisp(s) allow encapsulation (hiding) of complexity into small modules, easier than c-family languages. Programs in lisp are faster to write, easier to maintain and reason about. The cost of being a bit slower is getting less important with better hardware.
It was about Clojure vs Haskell and more specifically, dynamic vs static typing. Person was claiming that it was so much easier to change statically typed languages. It get more difficult to maintain large projects that are Lisps.
From what I've learned so far about languages, it makes sense. It looks that Lisps are more suitable for implementing algorithms because of the reductionism, but in more realistic systems world, you build interfaces, add random strings, and so on.
If you are patient and good enough, you can probably build significant part of a system, but not all of it. I do not know any systems built entirely on Lisp, but I might be wrong.
Common Lisp doesn't have full static type checking, and very little polymorphic type checking. Only one Lisp compiler (and its derivative) can even do something that's remotely close to static type checking, and even then it's woefully incomplete.
Yeah, it was wrong to say that Common Lisp has static type checking, as it's not part of the standard, and I'm not familiar with many implementations.
All I really know is that when I've programmed with SBCL, I've gotten useful type checking warnings at compile time.
I agree that static type checking is very useful for less stressful refactoring, and so on, and I'm a huge fan of Haskell. But I think very simple kinds of type checking can often be enough.
The argument was that Lisp lacks types to such an extent that building large Lisp systems becomes very difficult (due to the lack of typing). Well, there are lots of large JavaScript systems these days, and Common Lisp, in my experience with SBCL, provides at least more compile-time type checking than that.
It totally depends on what you're doing with your software; different tasks map better or worse to the respective paradigms, depending on what you're trying to do.
Static typing certainly makes it easier to maintain large systems, but it's certainly not a requirement.
You can certainly write entire systems in Lisp; people have made entire computers in order to run Lisp in hardware; there have been operating systems etc.
Moreover, you don't really need to use it for whole systems; use it where it works. There need not be One True Language.
At the moment, Clojure is used in production at Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, Akamai, etc etc etc.
Many of the benefits of Lisps that you talk about here seem to be refuted by writeups I've read where large groups switched from a Lisp to something else...often because it was hard to work with, slower to write and harder to maintain.
Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week. It was pretty much done in one weekend. (Disclosure: We used my web.py library.) The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain.
If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand.
...
We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear.
...
The entire task took less than a week, with 80% of the code written in a single weekend.
I know of several other large corporate projects over the years that made similar switches for similar reasons. Perl, Python, Java, etc. were faster to write in, performed better, and had better long-term maintainability (okay, maybe not Perl). Nobody regrets those switches except for a couple Lispers who continue to complain about how none of this is true, even after Lisp didn't provide the results, and something else did.
Continuing to claim that Lisp is better than all the proven better alternatives starts to make it smell like religion. Trying to explain away why a Lisp didn't work for whatever reason, but it's still the best start to taste like religion.
At some point its important to just make a call and realize that Lisps are interesting, you can compute with them, and they've had important influence, but they aren't the best way to do things - for many reasons. There's always another language choice that's faster, or easier, or offers a better ecosystem.
GNU CL has been out for a long while now, and it hasn't taken the world by storm. "Better", while qualitative in many respects, is also obvious, and it's obvious across a sample of millions of software projects that there are simply better holistic software development tools.
edit it makes me really happy when this gets downvoted without comment. Nobody ever downvotes an anti-Lisp rant with a pointer to a large and ongoing Lisp-based project. They just virtually claim I'm wrong without any substantial backup.
At reddit were not really Lisp experts - more like they heard the hype and believed it for a while, without having written anything substantial before. They wrote not more than a sketch of the site in Lisp and at the first sight of problems they switched to a language/implementation they were more familiar with. Neither Lisp in general nor SBCL specifically were/are that much used to form the bases of high profile websites.
> I know of several other large corporate projects over the years that made similar switches for similar reasons.
I've seen lots of large corporations rewriting all kinds of software. For example I've seen a lot C++ software being rewritten in Java.
Large corporations are not interested to use 'powerful' languages like Lisp. They are more interested in cost cutting, outsourcing, offshoring, 'industrialized' software production, cheap supply of labor, ...
> Continuing to claim that Lisp is better than all the proven better alternatives starts to make it smell like religion.
It's religion. Stallman's statement is decades old. Lisp is powerful, flexible, etc. ... but there are a lot of great alternatives. Plus, as I said above, in many companies 'powerful' and 'flexible' is not the most important criteria when selecting languages and tools. Java got successful because of other qualities: being developed by SUN (then Google and IBM) for enterprise software development.
'GNU CL' was never a GNU project as such. GNU CL based on KCL/AKCL and has been used in a few applications. It never has been a focus of the GNU project - it's merely published under their umbrella.
Stallman also never was a fan of Common Lisp - when he developed Emacs Lisp, he developed a very much simpler version, also based on Maclisp - which Common Lisp replaced.
So here's the list you provided, somebody had to rebut me, we may as well enjoy the debate.
- to use a lisp on large-scale production software, the developers need to be experts, while the same isn't true of other languages
- if you just commit long enough, a lisp will come through in the end
- unless it's the wrong lisp (without specifying what is a right lisp)
- large corporations don't want to use languages that are powerful or flexible, they prefer weak and rigid languages
- lisps don't provide cheap, large-scale, easy to synchronize development at an industrial scale
- other languages became successful because they targeted their audience
So let's invert that and derive the ideal audience for a lisp that you just described:
- not on a large scale project or team (something you can write 80% over a weekend in Python is too large)
- already at an expert level
- will commit to a path even when it's not working
I'm not saying this to bash your statement, but I think you've provided a microcosm of why not to use Lisp. From a language selection standpoint, there are pitifully few consequential projects that scope to the ideal for a lisp. There's no obvious as to why its better, and there is to all of the alternatives. Based on this, it's possible to make easy arguments as to why to choose Asm, Perl or 80's Basic over a lisp that make those languages look like great ideas for almost any project where a lisp might be proposed.
And nobody still has backed up a downvote with a pointer to a good lisp project. Not even one. I can probably find a list of ongoing MS-Basic projects without too much fuss, but it's like doing dentistry on an angry tiger to get something similar from the lisp community.
Nope, it's actually what you said, point for point in the same order.
1. "At reddit were not really Lisp experts" - this implies that they would have been successful if they were Lisp experts. Not needing to be an expert in a language to be productive is a powerful reason to use something that's not a Lisp.
2. "They wrote not more than a sketch of the site in Lisp and at the first sight of problems they switched to a language/implementation they were more familiar with" - implies that they didn't commit long enough to the language and that it would have worked out in the end. Reddit says their code wasn't even all that complicated, and they were already hitting huge intractable problems. Problems large enough that moving to an entirely different language was a better solution than continuing to fight with tools that didn't work.
3. "'GNU CL' was never a GNU project as such. GNU CL based on KCL/AKCL and has been used in a few applications. It never has been a focus of the GNU project - it's merely published under their umbrella." - This implies that GNU CL is not a good Lisp. What is a good Lisp? No idea, apparently there isn't one because RMS had to roll his own. Having to write your own dialect of a language to be productive does not sound like a good language.
4. "Large corporations are not interested to use 'powerful' languages like Lisp. They are more interested in cost cutting, outsourcing, offshoring, 'industrialized' software production, cheap supply of labor, ..." - you use a lot of words describing what large corporations want. The implication is that Lisp doesn't offer or support these things or corporations would be using one.
5. "Plus, as I said above, in many companies 'powerful' and 'flexible' is not the most important criteria when selecting languages and tools. Java got successful because of other qualities: being developed by SUN (then Google and IBM) for enterprise software development." See #4 above.
And yes, anybody can go to the "Applications" section for Common Lisp on Wikipedia. What's more interesting is that Lispers, part of the Lisp community, can't just name some interesting projects off the cuff. Most developers can rattle off a list of interesting projects in languages they have only tangential relationship with.
If you look around in the Lisp community, you see lots of "stuck at square one" with hundreds of implementations of some kind of Lisp, or Lisp compilers, or Lisp written in Foo language or Lisp-likes, but not a real big ecosystem beyond that.
Why don't lispers just say "Hunchentoot", "Maxima" or something (Heck HN is written in a Lisp last I checked). These are legitimate, interesting projects!
Lisp is exactly where it has been for decades, despite being taught formerly in major schools, have the same access to the internet and community as elsewhere and having supposed benefits that make it "better". But something like 90% of the time, when developers have to choose a language to work in, they don't choose a Lisp.
It's not powerful if it doesn't solve people's problems.
This bizarre cognitive dissonance among lispers is a real problem for the community and a big part of why the language is stuck in such a quagmire.
You use all kinds of generalizing faulty logic. This won't get you very far.
> Nope, it's actually what you said, point for point in the same order.
I told you what I said.
>1. "At reddit were not really Lisp experts" - this implies that they would have been successful if they were Lisp experts. Not needing to be an expert in a language to be productive is a powerful reason to use something that's not a Lisp.
'this implies' nothing. Speak about yourself. YOU infer something from what I said.
I said 'a'. You infer that this also means 'b' and tell me that I said 'b'. What kind of strange discussion tactics is that?
> this implies that they would have been successful if they were Lisp experts.
That's YOUR opinion, not mine. You are not listening to what I say.
> 2. "They wrote not more than a sketch of the site in Lisp and at the first sight of problems they switched to a language/implementation they were more familiar with" - implies that they didn't commit long enough to the language and that it would have worked out in the end. Reddit says their code wasn't even all that complicated, and they were already hitting huge intractable problems. Problems large enough that moving to an entirely different language was a better solution than continuing to fight with tools that didn't work.
A beginner in a language sees a 'huge intractable' problem. Okay...
> 3. "'GNU CL' was never a GNU project as such. GNU CL based on KCL/AKCL and has been used in a few applications. It never has been a focus of the GNU project - it's merely published under their umbrella." - This implies that GNU CL is not a good Lisp.
Why do you say it is not a good Lisp?
> What is a good Lisp? No idea,
Now you are discussing arguments you made up with yourself. Sorry, you are wasting my time.
> apparently there isn't one because RMS had to roll his own. Having to write your own dialect of a language to be productive does not sound like a good language.
> 4. "Large corporations are not interested to use 'powerful' languages like Lisp. They are more interested in cost cutting, outsourcing, offshoring, 'industrialized' software production, cheap supply of labor, ..." - you use a lot of words describing what large corporations want. The implication is that Lisp doesn't offer or support these things or corporations would be using one.
> 5. "Plus, as I said above, in many companies 'powerful' and 'flexible' is not the most important criteria when selecting languages and tools. Java got successful because of other qualities: being developed by SUN (then Google and IBM) for enterprise software development." See #4 above.
> And yes, anybody can go to the "Applications" section for Common Lisp on Wikipedia. What's more interesting is that Lispers, part of the Lisp community, can't just name some interesting projects off the cuff. Most developers can rattle off a list of interesting projects in languages they have only tangential relationship with.
I've written down these examples without looking at Wikipedia. Maybe you need to do that. Not me.
> If you look around in the Lisp community,
Where? The 'Lisp community' is extremely diverse.
> you see lots of "stuck at square one" with hundreds of implementations of some kind of Lisp, or Lisp compilers, or Lisp written in Foo language or Lisp-likes, but not a real big ecosystem beyond that.
That's why there are languages like Common Lisp, which have mature implementations and allow code sharing between implementations.
> Why don't lispers just say "Hunchentoot", "Maxima" or something (Heck HN is written in a Lisp last I checked).
I gave you other examples. American Express 'Authorizer's Assistant', or PTC's 'CREO are Lisp applications, too. DWAVE's quantum computer also.
Great, if you can name more. We can play this game a long time.
> These are legitimate, interesting projects!
The applications I told you about are legitimate, interesting projects.
> Lisp is exactly where it has been for decades, despite being taught formerly in major schools, have the same access to the internet and community as elsewhere and having supposed benefits that make it "better". But something like 90% of the time, when developers have to choose a language to work in, they don't choose a Lisp. It's not powerful if it doesn't solve people's problems.
You are thinking in some bizarre way that developers need to choose Lisp. There are literally thousands of programming languages out there.
Why are not more people driving a Mercedes S-class or the recent BW beetle. Aren't they supposed to be good cars? 99% of the time drivers are choosing another car. This is all pointless.
> This bizarre cognitive dissonance among lispers is a real problem for the community and a big part of why the language is stuck in such a quagmire.
Maybe the bizarre cognitive dissonance is in YOUR head?
Thank you for continuing to demonstrate the precise issues I'm trying to illustrate. I even quoted you and you refuted your own quotes ... absolutely stunning example.
Until lispers like yourself can get over these mental blocks, Lisp will continue to not be chosen as a computing tool. Right now it's requires too many qualifications, more downsides than up, and the community has deluded itself into being comfortable with those issues, and excusing them, rather than fixing them.
It's a cool language family, but it has lots of problems, and the state of denial the community is in about those problems won't solve them. Unfortunately, it's also a community of ideological purists who can't see the problems with their religion to fix them.
Lispers are right, once you commit to a Lisp, and it 'clicks' something in your thinking process changes, and I'm pretty sure it's not a good change.
edit and goodness, Amex doesn't use the lisp Auth Assistant anymore. What is this? 1991? You can stop bringing it up, they moved away from Lisp just like everybody else. And it never provided more than summarized database information as part of the larger authorization enterprise.
It's far more important for there to be new, or well maintained projects than to continue to rely on old, irrelevant glories that have long been surpassed by something else. Go out and write some and put them up on github! Do something interesting!
The web browsing part is obsolete. In the last LibrePlanet he said he now uses the GNU IceCat browser (free software distribution of Firefox + several privacy protection add-ons, http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/) with Tor.
Also, keep in mind that one of the reason he wasn't using a web browser was that he often only had time to read articles and other material from the web when he did not have access to the internet (airplanes, trains, cars, taking a rest while hiking in a mountain, etc...), so he used this technique to treat the internet like offline emails.
It also, intentionally or not, allows him to remain uninformed through an email thread. Stallman makes a claim (perhaps about some projects licensing policy), someone refutes the claim with a link to the policy, stallman dodges with "I can't browse the web, but based on what I was told..."
I would like to understand why he's got an account on Twitter. Yes, he uses to proxy his credentials to other sites, but I see the other reasons for not having an account on other sites also applying in the case of Twitter.
His ideas are mostly hugely idealistic and categorical, ignoring real world scenarios and downplaying the downsides of free softwares. People who believe in complete anarchy can perfectly choose to live in their enclosed community, but if the world were to follow their way of living it would be a total disaster. Though of course debating their ideas would contribute to the development of practical, real world ideas in some ways. Better to have such a voice around than not, of course, but most people, after thinking it through, would just rightly reject taking his ideas verbatim.
That's not a contradiction. He says "someone signed up an account in my name, it's not me" and "I happen to now that G+ has certain rules, and I don't like them" and incidentally the rules prohibit someone from impersonating him on G+, but that doesn't mean the rules have perfect enforcement.
I am not sure why anyone cares how RMS does his computing? Would you complain about Michelangelo using his chisel in a certain way and not in your preferred way? Or Gaudi drawing just with ordinary pencils on a thin paper instead of using all the technology available in his age for initial drawings of his architectural wonders? Get over it.
Everyone knows the technique you use influences the final work. If I draft a novel by talking into a tape machine, it's gonna come out different if I wrote it on paper.
A truly remarkable tech veteran, Richard Matthew Stallman is. My utmost respect for you, sir.
This webpage and its content made me thinking about the purpose of internet as both communication media and e-commerce. Can someone picture the alternative internet following contents of that page as guideline?
I wonder if this guy also does not have bank accounts, credit cards, phones (land or cell) to their name, and all live in a cabin in the woods without paying taxes.
It's also a bit odd that for a guy who intentionally buys a 10+ year old or so hardware to run free/libreboot on it (at least partially to trust the boot layers), didn't mind buying a Chinese laptop which was not only made in China, but also designed from parts natively developed in China including the CPU by a government institute.
His browsing habits are also a bit well laughable tbh, both because at the end even if he hogs the free WiFI at Starbucks he is traceable, and delivering internet pages of email ins't intrinsically more secure or surveillance resilient than browsing them directly.
This guy always interested me in some ways, it's quite amazing how one can be so talented and so coo coo for cocoa puffs at the same time, and in contrast to the usual extreme left social anarchists or marxists also very accomplished.
Sorry i don't see this exactly as an insult, yes there is quite a bit of abnormality in there probably with a slight touch of insanity, if you fail to see that well that's your problem, not every thing is criticism, some are just observations.
"Criticism" might be too lofty a word for your accusations of "abnormality" and "insanity" in this level-headed personal page. Please reconsider the value of sharing your subjective and uncharitable "observations."
Here's a more complete quote, for anyone interested:
"Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency. (Bill Gates made this comparison in a 1998 issue of Fortune Magazine.) No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price. Microsoft aims to teach poor children this dependency so they can smoke Windows for their whole lives. I don’t think governments or schools should support that aim."
With a small issue that Bill Gates have never said it, the entire quote is by RMS. Bill Gates made a comparison on the fight against big tobacco and the anti-trust campaign against MSFT in the mid to late 90's in that issue, but this isn't even quote mining, it's a complete distortion of the facts.
Bill Gates said in an interview together with Warren Buffett that people in China who were using pirate copies of Windows would get "sort of addicted" and that Microsoft would "somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." That's what RMS is referring to; it's not a fabrication.
RMS characterization of it is a fabrication. Gates did not make the comparison that RMS says he did.
RMS could have accurately described the characterization Gates made, and then launched into how that related to the criticism RMS would like to have made, but choose instead to be dishonest to get a little more rhetorical impact with audiences unfamiliar with the truth (or already committed blindly to the cause) at the expense of his credibility with others.
I disagree with your charge of dishonesty. Gates said that cheap copies of Windows would ensure that many people in China get "sort of addicted" to Microsoft technology. Stallman's "characterization" of the comparison says that Gates likened Windows to an addictive drug. That is not incorrect. Your claim that he is fabricating is itself a rhetorical point intended to discredit Stallman as a liar.
"05 June 2006 (Dutch paedophiles form political party)
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
That's not the problem. The problem is how he expresses it - especially the phrasing "voluntary pedophilia". It's very similar to the hullabaloo about Todd Akin's statements where he spoke about "legitimate rape victims".
By definition in the law children are not in the position to make such a decision, therefore the world voluntarily does not have any meaning in this context. Pedophilia is always classified as rape regardless if you think it is ok because the victim said so.
I am just pointing out the status quo by the law that is supposed to be the written, clear representation of the moral behind it.
If you want to challenge that, first you have to recognize children in the law as individuals who can make decisions including about their sex life. This is not going to fly. Without this the entire argument is invalid and making such statements like RMS about this topic is just stupid.
You seem to be saying "[T]he law that is supposed to be the written, clear representation of the moral behind it. If you want to challenge [a given law], first you have to [change that law to recognize as valid the point that you wish to talk about].". Am I wrong?
Then, your statement can be better phrased as "Illegal things are always illegal for a good and proper reason. It's improper and non-productive to discuss whether or not the things that they make illegal should be illegal.".
This is an indefensible statement.
Here are a few relatively harmless, or -in some cases- everyday things that are or were illegal in parts or all of the US:
* Oral and anal sex between unmarried persons (known in the state as "Deviate sexual intercourse") is currently (at the time of this writing) illegal in the State of Alabama. [0] What is "Deviate sexual intercourse"? "Any act of sexual gratification between persons not married to each other involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another." [1]
* Polygamy and polygyny are illegal in the US. [2]
* Until recently, gay marriage was illegal across the entire US. Now, it's just illegal in significant parts of it. [3]
* Less than a hundred years ago, it was illegal for women to vote in the US. [4]
* Marijuana consumption and production is still very illegal in much of the US, and is considered by the Federal government to be just as bad as heroin, crack, and cocaine consumption and production.
Bad law gets made all the time. What's more, the values of a population tend to change more rapidly than the laws that govern their behavior. Bad, or no-longer-useful laws continue to be enforced for ages before they get struck down (if they ever get struck down).
One critical part of the process that prunes useless law is earnest public discussion of the applicability of the law. Silencing earnest honest discussion of the form "If this illegal behavior actually causes no harm, should it be illegal?" is troubling and harmful, as this sort of discussion is a huge part of how improper laws are removed.
History is littered with accounts of people consummating marriages at ages far below 16. In many jurisdictions, this would be considered pedophilia.
Keeping in mind that -other than overall improvements in health- a man from Ancient Greece is physiologically no different from a man from Today's Greece, Is it your position that the husband or wife in these socially acceptable ancient marriages was a pedophile?
Either a "yes" or a "no" is a totally acceptable answer here. I'm interested in an earnest discussion; I'm not trying to lead you down a garden path or anything.
in contrast to the usual extreme left social anarchists or marxists also very accomplished
I can't find any evidence for him being either of these things. He has described himself as a Liberal [1], and praised Dennis Kucinich, whose political positions are quite progressive, but hardly "extreme left anarchist/Marxist" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, these kinds of views are pretty mainstream in Western Europe and other places.
I suggest your read his essays, I've never said he's a Marxist, but his creed to stick to his principles is very similar to some extreme left organizations.
And no sorry, but his views are not mainstream in Western Europe, I live in London, I've lived in Frankfurt and in Amsterdam, and I spend most of my summers in Iceland per the orders from my "female unit", while some of his views might be shared with more or less with main stream views in modern democracies including the US btw, the reasoning behind his views, and the vigilance and the veracity in which he practices them even if it hurts certain organizations (take a look at his protests against OLPC when they decided to look into Windows which actually resulted in them losing some funding), heck he and his marry band went to Peru to protest OLPC's being delivered with Windows in hoping to build up enough counter pressure to actually revert that decision.
Now being a vanguard for free software is one thing, but using your reputation to go and protest children in developing nations getting PC's because they've switched from GNU to Windows? That's some hard core vegan shit there like dying because you refuse to eat a burger..
So yep I do hold his views and actions as extremes, not all of them ofc, some i might even agree on in practice if not in justification.
The guy protests charity's that get money from Bill Gates, he actively attempted to prevent children from getting computers under the OLPC's program because they could run Windows with a 7$ extension card.
When Steve Jobs died he made this post on his site:
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Sorry but i don't need a hyperbole to relate my position that this guy has quite a few extreme views, and takes quite a few extreme actions.
P.S.
Wanting to cancel a program that was aimed at bringing computing to children in underdeveloped nations is actually worse than dying out of stubbornness for your beliefs, it's actively denying people who have very little just because you think that running Windows is a Sin, this is the equivalent of Christians evangelists holding out donations to African countries that do not institute anti-gay and anti-sodomy laws.
i think you've levelled some very hyperbolic accusations re his OLPC protests.
can you provide me with the source materials for these protests? i'm not really accepting them at face value, due to your previous hyperbole.
in many cases you can protest against behaviour whilst allowing that behaviour to continue. peaceful protest versus using violence for example.
thanks for the apology re the previous hyperbole.
here's links to the steve jobs statements that you find so extreme, in case anyone is particularly interested in them(rather than reading the shortened version you have presented)
I always took him for a liberal (in the American meaning) libertarian. I don't think he's an anarchist or a Marxist at all, though I expect some of his opinions on private property (especially intellectual property) might be somewhat agreeable to a Marxist.
Maybe if he tried to learn some of these other tools which he currently 'has no time for' - He would realize quickly that they pay for themselves in time saved.
I guess it's probably more of a sentimental thing for him though.
While I admire RMS's passion on freedom and privacy and the abhorrence of using non-free (free-as-in-freedom) software, I just wonder what he'll do or feel when non-free software has to be used to save his life one day.
Could you please qualify your statement with an example.
In his essay, He has already mentioned that he considers Microwaves, TV's, ATM's as utilities and has no qualms,
>"if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer.",
So, it derives that he is OK with flying on planes (which has proprietary software but is not prone to updates like your PC software is) or maybe an MRI machine or an Xray machine of the sorts for your life threatening scenario you mentioned. These are utilities.
For that matter, I don't really consider updating my iPhone "normal use" though I'm pretty sure it doesn't get an exception given his remarks about "iThings".
So, software upgrades are such a normal part of the day-to-day operation of an iPhone that they happen automatically.
Thus, the iPhone is very much a computer.
Contrast this with -say- most computer monitors. There is software running in them, but -in (almost?) every case- upgrading that software requires either gaining access to programming ports inside the monitor and performing an arcane ritual that might involve specialized hardware or physically swapping out chips.
I can't speak for the man, but given my understanding of his positions...
If, in some convoluted way, one were faced with the choice between death and purposely installing non-free software on one's own device, I expect RMS would consider you to be a victim and feel sorry for you, but recommend that of course you should do the thing that saves your life.
I would further expect - only slightly more weakly - that he'd take his own advice.
Particularly given that he's himself used a proprietary BIOS when there were no other options, for simple "ability to do computing" which is clearly less severe than preserving life (it's awfully hard to do the one without the other).
I know many people, a lot of doctors, who say that they would prefer to just be allowed to die when the time comes. Not everyone expects to have their lives extended by modern medicine and even if you do get longer to live, it usually isn't very pleasant anyways.
or even just taking cholesterol medicine, or having skin melanoma removed. I doubt many doctors are thinking "whelp, I have high cholesterol, guess it's my time to die"
That doesn't have much to do with him using non-free computer systems though.
As a side note: the pendulum is swinging the other way in regards to cholesterol - so in many cases doctors are not actually concerned about high cholesterol in the same way they used to be.
Oh yeah that is a little more complicated. I'd still imagine that he might choose death, I suppose that will be a real test to his ideology if it ever occurs.
RMS is a genius programmer but debating his opinions about what makes for a better website is like Debating Don Knuth's opinions about what makes for a better email client. We canonize these people and yet they are luddites.
Stallman is a leech. He lives off the productivity of others. His lifestyle and brand is a luxury afforded to him by being employed by academic institutions. His free software is only possible because other people sell software and hardware. He is arrogant and naive, not revolutionary.
I know that it doesn't necessarily sit well with the libertarian streak in most technical people, but political organization is the only way that change can be made in the systems that are actually threatening democracy and personal liberty.
He may think that he isn't participating, but he is. GCC is used by every major vendor to both Wall St and the DOD. IF we are only talking about the freedom of people who purchase expensive consumer items to use them as they see fit...and that includes, let's say, a data mining company that produces metadata that is used for targeting drone strikes WHO USE GCC...then we are talking about a very narrowly focused issue...and yeah, he's probably right that it's bullshit that I can't get the source code to the OS that runs my TV...but I don't think that it's necessarily as important as he does. That is, if its even actually important at all.
i think free software is one of the greatest tools to protect civilization against the rapidly growing 'techno' totalitarian state. and also in providing education.
you are still critiquing his behaviour and not saying what he should be doing instead.
consider that gnu, fsf and eff are related organisations.
We should all be thankful to rms for his unreasonableness. It has literally been the underpinning of so much of what we take for granted vis-a-vis free software.