Wow, the casual ableism. RMS has a distorted worldview when he talks world politics, but his persistence in the community was/is an important drive to make the world of free software what it is today.
And acktually, lemme dunk, dingus got it all wrong anyway:
Presumably by "vanilla Linux", they meant GNU/systemd/Linux. Their conclusion is obviously flawed because other UNIX systems like BSD and Haiku exist.
On Android, presumably they mean OEM ROMs, afaik, upstream AOSP is clean, as GrapheneOS devs pull from that and harden it themselves.
Fuck off with this misogynist apologia. Comparing the way he to a christofascist's successful crusade to propagandize a fake genocide in a ramp up to cold war 2 is disgusting.
We can criticize Stallman and also point out that the recuperationist Open Source Initiative was founded by even worse misogynists than him.
Unless you think that this 'propaganda tactic' to discredit him went back in time to 1983 to fake the grad student women complaining about misogyny at MIT, I suggest you retract this.
given the long history of documented misogyny attributable to him ('not aware of any women contributors to GCC or Emacs', Emacs virgins joke, etc.) you'd have to be awful fucking naive to think he didn't contribute to that
again, do some fucking self crit we're begging you
I don’t have any experience working with women in programming projects; I don’t think that any volunteered to work on Emacs or GCC.
A number of women have contributed to GCC, including:
Janis Johnson maintains the test suite and has been a contributor since 2001
Sandra Loosemore is the lead author of the GNU Library Reference Manual;[3] RMS is listed as her co-author.
Dorit Nuzman made major contributions to loop scheduling and vectorization.
Carolyn Tice is also mentioned as a contributor.
sorry I don't brook misogyny in free software. take this apology and liberal great manning somewhere else. free software doesn't need rms
e: you can review my comments in this thread and see that I do find some nuance. but that doesn't mean I'm sticking my head in the sand over his misogyny. there are plenty of neurospicy ppl who aren't sexist
"Free Software" has failed as a movement specifically because it does not threaten capital. The FSF's strategy for liberating computing from megacorps was a somewhat restrictive license that weakly defends a very narrow set of apolitical values, and neoliberal faith in the power of consumer choice. There is no serious, well-funded voice for liberated computing today. Neither Torvalds nor Stallman are radicals. Microsoft won, and it did it with the implicit assistance of the FOSS partisans.
I do not respect the FSF nor the OSI, yes, that is correct.
The fossil fuel industry is an excellent metaphor actually, It is winning. It continues to win. The propagation of "green" alternatives has done nothing to slow it down. Cap and trade has not slowed it down. Numerous international agreements that NGOs have pushed for and that have been signed and summarily ignored by partner nations have done nothing to slow it down. Lib green politics has only served to give cover to governments that need to pretend that they're doing something.
I don't know why anyone would die on the hill of defending a now completely irrelevant guy, who is very likely a pedo, just because they did some good software things like 40 years ago.
At the very least the Epstein stuff and the pedo defending make him extremely . People here labelled Chomsky a pedo for less.
The double standard regarding the "old blog posts" is weird to me as well. Imagine if Shabibo or Jordan Peterson had written something like that, they'd be rightfully raked over the coals for it even if it was "decades ago", but this fucker gets a pass.
Sorry I didn't make it clear enough; I'm not discrediting RMS for his FSF work. In fact, understanding free software vs. open source is an important distinction. I'm explicitly talking about his aimless political rants that are in fact pretty reactionary. I separate the art from the artist in this case so I am by no means discrediting the FSF and his role within it.
Edit: Let's be Marxists about this. I think we can look at history to acknowledge, respect and improve upon the groundwork of a free software visionary. What we shouldn't do is proceed to uncritically support the visionary outside of what he has done. The FSF has matured and it is no longer just RMS, there is no need to put him on a pedestal and be idealists about it.
Okay, I'll be honest and I went and dug into the controversial stuff he apparently said. Considering he's ND, I find it a bit uncomfortable that the whole world seemed to take a lot of it out of context, since he's retracted his views on children SA and has hurt no one. I don't want to further this act of ableism.
Originally, I wasn't commenting on those scandals. I admit I didn't even know all that much about them. I used to just read his political notes before I was radicalized and now looking back a lot of his notes, there's a lot of liberal takes on China, HK and the likes that I have no interest in reading about anymore, because he doesn't engage with those topics with as much nuance as he does with his main work and other US/EU topics. I'll edit to retract the sentiment in my OP where it indicated that he's "old and irrelevant".
He advocates for social justice alongside very militant software beliefs that honestly should be pinned, and not mixed in between with his liberal world news stuff. However, he can structure his blog anyway he wants to.
The point is, I have no ill beliefs regarding his profession work. I also don't really find it necessary to "dunk" on his takes, most of them are good, perhaps lacking a bit of reading at most (but that's not his field). He seems to have received enough hate from people that just heard and regurgitate the sentiment that "he's weird", which is indeed, like you said, character assassination to a certain extent.
I think most of his shit takes can be attributed to being overly pedantic or ND, it's the misogyny that he's never retracted or atoned for that I can't forgive. free software doesn't need him and the FSF was cowardly bringing him back.
Capitalism destroys everything it touches. The Free Software movement should be an openly and completely anticapitalist one. Allowing capitalism in is ultimately what led to the Open Source wreckers.
I'm generally sympathetic to Melody Horn's (boringcactus's) assessment in hir 2020 article, "Post-Open Source." I deviate / branch out in a few ways, but it was a timely polemic which caught a lot of attention, spawning a struggle session on the Orange Site and becoming the basis of a very good episode of General Intellect Unit.
The Free Software movement has not liberated computing. The "Year of Linux on the Desktop" is never coming - and it has nothing to do with how prepared or mature or comprehensive the collection of Free Software has become. We are still not living in a tech utopia. Our computational infrastructure overwhelmingly is designed to spy on us, rat on us to the state, propagandize us, and empty our pockets. The labor of Free Software contributors is typically exploited by megacorporations and plunderbunds to collect rents on private computational and network infrastructure. Microsoft "loves" Linux, now that they are able to charge you a monthly fee for running it in Azure. Companies like Facebook are perfectly happy to "Open Source" core frameworks like React.JS as a method of outsourcing the costs of maintenance, development, and training.
The Free Software movement has produced a vast collection of useful software, but without control over the networks, the data centers, or the factories where personal electronics are produced, all this software is severely stunted in its capacity to transform daily life. As some posters here have pointed out, the original sin of the Free Software movement was the assumption that people would "vote with their feet," and embrace the technically and socially superior option. And yet, the end-user market share for libre operating systems like GNU/Linux, BSD, etc is still at 1%. It is still nearly impossible to buy a machine with Debian, Guix, Ututo, Gentoo - whatever - anywhere. A few boutique manufacturers sell Libre laptops and smartphones, but they are EXPENSIVE compared to mass-produced computers and phones subsidized by end-user exploitation and sprawling monopolies.
Personally, I have taken the "be the change you want to see" route. The result is that I have a very cool computer which runs games like Witcherino on Gentoo at 4K on an entirely free software graphics stack. It isn't making my internet bill any lower or dissolving the monopoly platforms. We need to take over the networks. We need to take over the factories. We need to take over the data centers.
If every minute of dev time put into GIMP had instead been put into comprehensively stealing and reverse engineering Photoshop that would have been a better use of time.
The thing I don't get about the whole GNU/Linux thing is: aren't there a lot of tools that have become pretty standard to what Linux is at this point? Like X or Wayland? Most people aren't exactly running servers.
Depends on the distro, most by de facto only come with GNU coreutils and the kernel, the rest can come with display servers and managers and DEs but they all share a common intersection that is GNU/Linux.
Wow, the casual ableism. RMS has a distorted worldview when he talks world politics, but his persistence in the community was/is an important drive to make the world of free software what it is today.
And acktually, lemme dunk, dingus got it all wrong anyway:
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Fuck off with this misogynist apologia. Comparing the way he to a christofascist's successful crusade to propagandize a fake genocide in a ramp up to cold war 2 is disgusting.
We can criticize Stallman and also point out that the recuperationist Open Source Initiative was founded by even worse misogynists than him.
Unless you think that this 'propaganda tactic' to discredit him went back in time to 1983 to fake the grad student women complaining about misogyny at MIT, I suggest you retract this.
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given the long history of documented misogyny attributable to him ('not aware of any women contributors to GCC or Emacs', Emacs virgins joke, etc.) you'd have to be awful fucking naive to think he didn't contribute to that
again, do some fucking self crit we're begging you
deleted by creator
sorry I don't brook misogyny in free software. take this apology and liberal great manning somewhere else. free software doesn't need rms
e: you can review my comments in this thread and see that I do find some nuance. but that doesn't mean I'm sticking my head in the sand over his misogyny. there are plenty of neurospicy ppl who aren't sexist
"Free Software" has failed as a movement specifically because it does not threaten capital. The FSF's strategy for liberating computing from megacorps was a somewhat restrictive license that weakly defends a very narrow set of apolitical values, and neoliberal faith in the power of consumer choice. There is no serious, well-funded voice for liberated computing today. Neither Torvalds nor Stallman are radicals. Microsoft won, and it did it with the implicit assistance of the FOSS partisans.
deleted by creator
I do not respect the FSF nor the OSI, yes, that is correct.
The fossil fuel industry is an excellent metaphor actually, It is winning. It continues to win. The propagation of "green" alternatives has done nothing to slow it down. Cap and trade has not slowed it down. Numerous international agreements that NGOs have pushed for and that have been signed and summarily ignored by partner nations have done nothing to slow it down. Lib green politics has only served to give cover to governments that need to pretend that they're doing something.
I don't know why anyone would die on the hill of defending a now completely irrelevant guy, who is very likely a pedo, just because they did some good software things like 40 years ago.
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At the very least the Epstein stuff and the pedo defending make him extremely
. People here labelled Chomsky a pedo for less.
The double standard regarding the "old blog posts" is weird to me as well. Imagine if Shabibo or Jordan Peterson had written something like that, they'd be rightfully raked over the coals for it even if it was "decades ago", but this fucker gets a pass.
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Yeah, this isn't distorted at all:
CW: Pedo apologia
"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."
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children. Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That's not willing participation, it's imposed participation, a different issue."
"The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness."
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CW: Pedo
That snippet is from less than a week before he was forced to resign from MIT for claiming that the underage trafficking victims on Epstein's island were "entirely willing."
Stop doing pedo apologia.
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do some self-crit
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Sorry I didn't make it clear enough; I'm not discrediting RMS for his FSF work. In fact, understanding free software vs. open source is an important distinction. I'm explicitly talking about his aimless political rants that are in fact pretty reactionary. I separate the art from the artist in this case so I am by no means discrediting the FSF and his role within it.
Edit: Let's be Marxists about this. I think we can look at history to acknowledge, respect and improve upon the groundwork of a free software visionary. What we shouldn't do is proceed to uncritically support the visionary outside of what he has done. The FSF has matured and it is no longer just RMS, there is no need to put him on a pedestal and be idealists about it.
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CW: csam, SA.
Okay, I'll be honest and I went and dug into the controversial stuff he apparently said. Considering he's ND, I find it a bit uncomfortable that the whole world seemed to take a lot of it out of context, since he's retracted his views on children SA and has hurt no one. I don't want to further this act of ableism.
Originally, I wasn't commenting on those scandals. I admit I didn't even know all that much about them. I used to just read his political notes before I was radicalized and now looking back a lot of his notes, there's a lot of liberal takes on China, HK and the likes that I have no interest in reading about anymore, because he doesn't engage with those topics with as much nuance as he does with his main work and other US/EU topics. I'll edit to retract the sentiment in my OP where it indicated that he's "old and irrelevant".
He advocates for social justice alongside very militant software beliefs that honestly should be pinned, and not mixed in between with his liberal world news stuff. However, he can structure his blog anyway he wants to.
The point is, I have no ill beliefs regarding his profession work. I also don't really find it necessary to "dunk" on his takes, most of them are good, perhaps lacking a bit of reading at most (but that's not his field). He seems to have received enough hate from people that just heard and regurgitate the sentiment that "he's weird", which is indeed, like you said, character assassination to a certain extent.
I think most of his shit takes can be attributed to being overly pedantic or ND, it's the misogyny that he's never retracted or atoned for that I can't forgive. free software doesn't need him and the FSF was cowardly bringing him back.
RMS has had only one bad take on Free Software in his entire career and it's that selling Free Software is okay to do.
That's a pretty big one!
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Capitalism destroys everything it touches. The Free Software movement should be an openly and completely anticapitalist one. Allowing capitalism in is ultimately what led to the Open Source wreckers.
deleted by creator
Freedom and capitalism fundamentally cannot coexist, in software or anywhere.
I'm generally sympathetic to Melody Horn's (boringcactus's) assessment in hir 2020 article, "Post-Open Source." I deviate / branch out in a few ways, but it was a timely polemic which caught a lot of attention, spawning a struggle session on the Orange Site and becoming the basis of a very good episode of General Intellect Unit.
The Free Software movement has not liberated computing. The "Year of Linux on the Desktop" is never coming - and it has nothing to do with how prepared or mature or comprehensive the collection of Free Software has become. We are still not living in a tech utopia. Our computational infrastructure overwhelmingly is designed to spy on us, rat on us to the state, propagandize us, and empty our pockets. The labor of Free Software contributors is typically exploited by megacorporations and plunderbunds to collect rents on private computational and network infrastructure. Microsoft "loves" Linux, now that they are able to charge you a monthly fee for running it in Azure. Companies like Facebook are perfectly happy to "Open Source" core frameworks like React.JS as a method of outsourcing the costs of maintenance, development, and training.
The Free Software movement has produced a vast collection of useful software, but without control over the networks, the data centers, or the factories where personal electronics are produced, all this software is severely stunted in its capacity to transform daily life. As some posters here have pointed out, the original sin of the Free Software movement was the assumption that people would "vote with their feet," and embrace the technically and socially superior option. And yet, the end-user market share for libre operating systems like GNU/Linux, BSD, etc is still at 1%. It is still nearly impossible to buy a machine with Debian, Guix, Ututo, Gentoo - whatever - anywhere. A few boutique manufacturers sell Libre laptops and smartphones, but they are EXPENSIVE compared to mass-produced computers and phones subsidized by end-user exploitation and sprawling monopolies.
Personally, I have taken the "be the change you want to see" route. The result is that I have a very cool computer which runs games like Witcherino on Gentoo at 4K on an entirely free software graphics stack. It isn't making my internet bill any lower or dissolving the monopoly platforms. We need to take over the networks. We need to take over the factories. We need to take over the data centers.
If every minute of dev time put into GIMP had instead been put into comprehensively stealing and reverse engineering Photoshop that would have been a better use of time.
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The thing I don't get about the whole GNU/Linux thing is: aren't there a lot of tools that have become pretty standard to what Linux is at this point? Like X or Wayland? Most people aren't exactly running servers.
Depends on the distro, most by de facto only come with GNU coreutils and the kernel, the rest can come with display servers and managers and DEs but they all share a common intersection that is GNU/Linux.
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