This sentiment gets repeated all the time and it drives me crazy.
I've read a lot of stuff by RMS and am certainly aware of his concerns.
I have an iPhone and Mac so I guess you would consider that I "ignored" him. This is a ridiculous conclusion. I considered the risks and trade-offs of non-FOSS software, and regrettably accepted them, because the FOSS alternatives had trade-offs that cumulatively (for me) were much worse. Unlike RMS, I am not a one-dimensional person that only evaluates tech on the single dimension of freedom. Tech is not a religion for me; it's just a tool.
RMS pontificating about FOSS does not magically bring iPhone comparable FOSS software and hardware into existence. If the FOSS community wants consumer adoption, ratio of pontificating about to building consumer products needs to be much lower.
This is a very solipsistic way to look at the world. FOSS has no duty to try to appeal to you personally, and if you accept the end of your privacy over UI niggles, that's your choice to make. The reason Apple can spend so much on UI is because of your willingness to eat whatever they serve you.
After emancipation, there were plenty of slaves who wouldn't leave the plantation, and became slaves-by-another-name in the sharecropping system. I don't think any of them were so up their own asses that they blamed the slaves who left for not making it easier to leave.
Also, RMS didn't talk about "FOSS." He talked about the inevitable future if we continued our trajectory, and suggested Free Software as the solution.
I'm also not going to make lowering your carbon emissions just as easy and convenient as using all of the carbon you want. Take responsibility for yourself, or at least don't actively denigrate people for being right.
All I said is if the FOSS community wants consumer adoption, the path forward is making things consumers like, NOT blaming us for "ignoring" RMS, because no one ever did that.
Basically everything your post implies (that I think I am entitled to something, that I think everything should be easy, etc...) is not true.
As I keep pointing out again and again, all I'm saying is that people don't use FOSS, but it's not because they don't value privacy, not because they don't value freedom, and for the love of biscuits not because of anything to do with RMS or ignoring him.
The options are use an iPhone (not freedom), use an Android phone (not freedom), or use something like LineageOS. Using something like LineageOS is major commitment that most people don't have room in their lives for, because they have different priorities, which might also be very good.
EDIT: Here's a metaphor, it'd be like if you asked your friend who owns a car with an ICE why he keeps ignoring Al Gore's warnings about the climate. It's like, Al Gore can be right, your friend can believe in Climate change, and he can still decide he needs an ICE car because he's barely making ends meet and is trying to support a family. You can claim that your friend has made bad choices, but there is no argument that he "ignored" Al Gore.
I guess consumerism is at the heart of the problem. And juicy complexity successfully keeps consumers remaining such.
I think humans - having been nomads for the most part of their existence – just aren't equipped to care for their habitat (say: ecosystems). It's rather recent that became important, <8k years compared to 250k before.
This is easy to say, but it’s clear from decades of cognitive science that people find it extremely hard to avoid the affordances and incentives in their environment. Blaming the victims of a concerted corporate and political effort to constrain individual liberties seems churlish. This is a tragedy of the commons and the only solution is cooperation and dialogue to set common standards and norms.
> I've read a lot of stuff by RMS and am certainly aware of his concerns.
> RMS pontificating [...]
Uh, no. RMS was right all along and you're still not getting it.
You bought devices you can't upgrade, you can't run software on, that oppress indie devs, that tax 30% of the market, that sell out freedom fighters in oppressive regimes, and that now spy on you. And now you realize the problem.
The only way out of this madness is to get the sensible representatives in Congress to move forward with an antitrust case. Breaking up the power monopoly will perhaps get us back to a place where we have rights. The way it is now, Apple is a central point of failure.
Again, everything RMS spoke was truth, and it's here again rearing its ugly head.
Congress is trash, but they're the institution that runs your life, and you at least get a nominal say about who is in it. If you're arguing for revolution, I won't disagree, but what it really sounds like is the traditional "we can't do this one thing until we do everything else first."
Congress isn't wholly incompetent, despite the fun we have poking at it. The US has a functioning democracy and leads the world in so many good and important metrics.
Our government isn't one person or one party, and that's a strength.
One of my local reps is leading the big tech breakup movement, and I'm incredibly proud to have her representing me.
>leads the world in so many good and important metrics.
Can you help me with a few? Maybe 5? I'm pretty low on the US government at the moment. I can name quite a few things we lead in that are horrible.
>One of my local reps is leading the big tech breakup movement, and I'm incredibly proud to have her representing me.
I think that's great but I doubt that will ever be allowed to happen. Too much money will be thrown at congress and they will either do nothing, or do nothing in a way that makes them look like they did.
That's the crux of it. There are a few edge cases, but quality of life across the whole spectrum of wealth is worlds ahead almost everywhere else. Things aren't perfect, but they are pretty damn good compared to almost anywhere else. People get too hung up on first world problems to appreciate what they've got.
The funny thing is that you are failing to recognize the value of devices that can render web pages, give navigation instructions that won't get me lost, run games, have long battery life, great screen quality, and a bunch of other things.
I have yet to see a phone with the build quality and value add that I need a mobile phone to have from Free Software endeavors. These are the table stakes for the majority of people. Not the list you just rattled off. You aren't even in the running to compete on the other value adds if you can't do the above.
You're right. Free Software isn't there yet. So I just took some of my money and donated to a few projects.. Drop in the ocean, but a drop nonetheless.
> The only way out of this madness is to get the sensible representatives in Congress to move forward with an antitrust case
What are you looking for out of this anti-trust case? Apple is not a monopoly. There are numerous privacy-focused phones and Android distros available. I think there just isn't a huge market for a privacy-focused phone (no, 1000 people on a HN and twitter is not a huge market.)
They didn't buy Apple products for any ethical reason, and didn't claim to have done. They bought Apple products because RMS didn't personally make the UI of Free Software polished enough for them.
Trust in this discussion isn't a binary 1/0. You do trust Apple in some regards, else it'd be impossible to use their devices for anything. There's a tradeoff being made, that Apple does not do 'certain evil things'. This one's crossing the boundary for some, opening the floodgate for others. That's the issue at hand.
For example, say US government. I trust the US government not to kill me (Dutch citizen, not a terrorist, not a criminal, etc etc). Does that mean I trust the US government with my personal data? No, that's a different discussion. And if I were to trust them with my personal data, does that mean I believe the US government has integrity? No. I've been very disappointed with the US government with regards to a recent war (I'll refrain from details as its irrelevant), so they need to earn back credibility. In my language there's a saying 'vertrouwen komt te voet, maar vertrekt per paard' which translates to something akin to 'trust comes on foot and goes on horseback'.
> magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence
Well, purchase a Pixel 5, install CalyxOS or Graphene, lock bootloader again. Job done. Probably you'll lose some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.
> Probably you'll lose some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.
The amount of money needed to bring CalyxOS to the iPhone level of polish and to get the same sets of popular apps on there is probably in the millions.
> Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.
I'm afraid that'll never happen, at least, until most people don't care about their privacy and are willing to accept one-sided tradeoffs with phone vendors. BUT, there are alternatives like LineageOS that do a pretty good job. They only need more acceptance by public to be able to compete at the level of a trillion-dollar company like AAPL.
Right. And I think projects like LineageOS are super interesting.
My beef is just with statements like "people ignore RMS," as I have yet to see any evidence of this. Everything I have observed is that anyone who has heard of RMS is fully aware of his concerns, but most of those people just have different priorities.
That much was known upon purchasing the axe - maybe it cuts trees 50% quicker and thus was worth the tradeoff, but now you can re-evaluate your options and purchase a different axe.
TL;DR: You understood the trade-off, and chose to become a product for the convenience. The majority of us here have done the same, because becoming a product is part of the modern life. Nowadays choosing digital purity is like becoming a digital Amish.
I'm pretty sure that most go with habit and convenience. I mean.... Apple could lock MacOSX down tomorrow and charge you $100 for terminal access and "informed decision" people would still argue how good MacBooks are (they aren't that good)
MacOS personally looks nice and functions in a logical way - so I consider MacBooks good. It’s a personal choice while weighing negatives like how MacOS is not ‘free software’ that anyone can fork, change, and sell on their own.
I literally have to have an app to make my bluetooth mouse scroll in the opposite direction than the trackpad, because there is "Scroll Direction" checkbox in both mouse and trackpad... but it's actually one config option. And with every update I hope that they don't screw up that app... OSX has less and less of "less is more".
I think people don't like to think themselves as a product, but that's what we are. We're a potential source of income, and companies will want to know how's your health, where do you go, what do you buy, how you use your time, etc., in order to realize as much of that income as possible.
It's a mutually-beneficial trade-off, it's just that one party gains individually, and the other gains by quantity. Advertisers wouldn't care a lot what restaurants you like, but they care a lot about what restaurants people in your city like.
Well your sentiment drives me crazy, especially for techies. It is up to us whether a non-feudal digital society will exist or not. It's true that FOSS will never be as good as the monopolists' who are able to pour billions of dollars into polish while tightening their grip over our lives. But if we are unwilling to make sacrifices in this fight then the battle is already lost.
Agreed and a great example of why his message on free software is so important. I would never have been as cognizant of the topic if not for his laser-focused and committed work.
"Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform."
RMS is as close to the opposite of hypocrite as it gets. He definitely practices what he preaches to the degree that he used a slow Loongson when he couldn't get an Intel machine with free BIOS, for example.
He might not act diplomatic, be way outside social norms, or not people-please, but that does not make him a hypocrite.
Everything has software. If he follows his ideology that everything he uses be open source then he can't do anything except live off completely off grid without anything that has a semi conductor in it.
No electric meter at his house, no internet (even if his router is running open source, the ISP he's connected to certainly isn't), no transportation of any kind, no entertainment of any kind, no shopping of any kind (inventory management, cash registers, logistics). The equipment used to manufacture all the pieces of his precious decade old laptop was running proprietary software (not to mention all the small firmwares like wifi and Ethernet controllers).
You cannot escape it.
So, we should be pragmatic about it. We should push for it, but realize that it's impossible to live in society without interacting with closed source software.
Richard Stallman's positions are actually more pragmatic than that. Here is how he describes them:
> I firmly refuse to install non-free software or tolerate its installed presence on my computer or on computers set up for me.
> However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's license, or make me responsible its being present in the computer, or make me the possessor of a copy of it, so I don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of course, I explain to the local people why they should migrate the machines to free software, but I don't push them hard, because annoying them is not the way to convince them.
> Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then. (I do consider what those machines and their owners might do with my personal data, but that's a different issue, which would arise just the same even if they did use free software. My response to that issue is to minimize those activities which give them any data about me.)
> That's my policy about using a machine once in a while. If I were to use it for an hour every day, that would no longer be "once in a while" — it would be regular use. At that point, I would start to feel the heavy hand of any nonfree software in that computer, and feel the duty to arrange to use a liberated computer instead.
> As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think the user need not take cognizance of whether the device contains a processor and software, or is built some other way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that means installing different software is a normal part of use, so it is a computer.
This isn't children sewing soccer balls with their teeth type of principles. This is a machine controlled by code the end user doesn't get access to building another thing the user actually buys that has no closed code in it. Who cares how the thing was built using whatever software to control the things to build the product? That software affects the end user in no way other than to produce the thing. That's like in an entirely different universe than running code on your computing device where you should be able to decide who/what/when/where type of questions. Telling a manufacturing company to do something regarding their software in their processes is out of this world insane. It is their software after all, so your freedom to run stuff your way should also reciprocate to them doing what they will with theirs.
With all due respect, I don't believe you are familiar with RMS positions. I'd argue most people who have not followed him closely and haven't carefully listened to what his PoV is, have a very hand-wavy understanding of the nuances of what he stands for. The fact that you talk about open source is the tell. The term "open source" was deliberately invented to de-emphasize what RMS cares about in favor of a business-friendly justification for why it benefits businesses to share source code with others. Open Source philosophy is not about emphasizing the user rights and ownership over their computers.
And yes, he is concerned about microcode--he still uses a Core 2 Duo laptop that can work without the microcode blobs in firmware, as opposed to more modern processors, for that exact reason.
I really don't see Amish as hypocritical when they hire a car or take the train. They are using the absolute minimum of tech that lets them get on with their life, I suppose Stallman is doing the same when he borrows a phone, otherwise avoiding them to the best of his ability.
To portray RMS as "against tech" is a very misleading characterization of him (he is an OS developer after all). To judge someone as a hypocrite, you have to first understand (1) what they say, (2) how they act, and then (3) compare the two. I don't think he ever said "don't use tech". You are vastly mischaracterizing what his position is.
> To portray RMS as "against tech" is a very misleading characterization of him
It's also a poor characterization of the anabaptists, for that matter - they are not in general against technology but against the impacts of particular technology (nothing to do with RMS's concerns, theirs are about community).
For example, some anabaptist communities disallow cars, some allow them in limited ways, some allow them completely - but this is decided based not on a doctrine but on their communities evaluation on the impact of peoples housing spreading apart...
You are vastly mischaracterizing the few sentences I wrote.
In the case of RMS it is non-free software tech. In the case of the Amish it is many kinds of tech and depends (as the child comment mentions) on the community. One community I lived among they weren’t allowed to own phones, but they would borrow them all the time.
To call everybody to stop using non-free software phones while depending on thise same people to own them and let you borrow them in order to live is hypocritical. Sorry if that bothers you.
He refuses to own a cell phone, because they're all closed-down, closed-source systems and that goes against his principles, but he's totally fine with using one when he needs to make a phone call. This comes across as startlingly performative.
I thought I remembered other instances, but none of them come to mind and obviously googling has turned up a ton of opinion pieces without a lot of actual substantative points made, so I'll leave it at that; not enough to argue that he is, by his nature, a hypocrite, but also not 100% pure to his principles in every circumstance.
My point is you have to understand his principles first before calling him a hypocrite: in your cell phone example, the phone call he is making with someone else's phone is not depriving him of his freedom/privacy, but its owner's. He would likely advise and nudge the owner not to carry a cellphone for the owner's own benefit, in his capacity as an advocate, but if they have made the choice to carry one anyway, his use of someone else's cellphone for making a call is no different to him than utilizing a landline phone in his capacity as a user.
In fact, he has stated his principles/policies publicly and clearly, and someone posted it here as well. He never says "You are not supposed to use someone else's cellphone, but it's okay when I use it." That would make him a hypocrite.
Thus your example is a strawman here, with the implicit assumption that he has said "you ought not to use any cellphone" which he never said.
I think most misunderstandings of RMS come from the fact that people project on him what they think he would say and how he would act, not what he actually says and how he actually acts; while assuming he is merely some sort of activist engaging in civil disobedience and boycott, just trying to make a point and show the world a pure example of how to live. The way he should actually be thought of is he is fighting a war against people building proprietary software that, based on his theory, inevitably will lead to unjust power over users' lives through control over their devices. He is very pragmatic in that sense and willing to take any strategic advantage he can get in that fight, not deprive himself of that just to make a point. My understanding is at the beginning he used proprietary UNIX compilers to build GCC, for example.
> the phone call he is making with someone else's phone is not depriving him of his freedom/privacy, but its owner's.
Maybe he's not being hypocritical, but that position -- I will pragmatically use others' phones for my convenience, but I will not retain one myself -- just seems shitty. Not sure why, maybe because it's even less of a universally applicable tenet than "phones are bad, mmkay," it's just "I'll use the systems as convenient for me, no matter how others may suffer under them."
He played Age of Empires II at a friend's house once. Is that enough?
I think he makes a pretty big tradeoff that nobody else would, without completely shooting himself in the foot. Even if he had a fully FOSS phone, the people he called probably wouldn't. He's drawn the line far enough out that I don't doubt his sincerity.
Saying that it's problematic to take RMS seriously because of the things you mentioned is in my opinion one of the problems that led us to the hellish things we're exposed to today.
It's the well dressed, well socially adjusted people with their silver tongues that convinced the masses that giving up privacy is in their interest. People like that are the people responsible for the shitshow we're now observing.
RMS is strongly opinionated, and without that kind of strong conviction, we would be far worse off. I do agree he's taking an extreme position, but when you're standing against giants with money and power, being extreme is sometimes the only way to stand a chance.
For whatever failing RMS has, hypocrite is obviously not one. There are few people on the world who are so consistent in their message and actions as RMS.
HN loves throwing around accusations of "ad hominem", but dismissing someone's ideas on IP because he picks his toes is a quintessential ad hominem attack.
