But you have to keep in mind that RMS advocates the free software philosophy - the complete left end of the software spectrum - the white angel on your shoulder (not the red devil on the other).

And while I find some of his points too radical to implement practically in my own situation, I believe it's very important that we have someone like him in the tech world. As a result, whenever there is a RMS talk, I listen to it. And each time I gain new and valuable perspectives about free software that help guide future decisions.

Most people would probably find his views and recommendations as too extreme to be practical, but he really does practice what he preaches in terms of only using free software for his own computing:

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Wow. My first thought upon reading that is that seems quite extreme. Having said that, it just shows you how normalized it's become to track all transactions.

He and you could both live by the principle that you do as much to fit your principles as you feasibly can.

If you have someone to help you get online anonymously for free, you do that. If you need to pay to be online, you do that instead.

If you can get by in life without buying things and being tracked, you do that. If you can't do that, because it's not the life you can imagine living, you don't.

The more important the principle (to you), the more you sacrifice to implement it.

Low-to-no military spending is important enough to me that I won't work for a defense contractor. It's honestly not important enough for me to purposefully earn less than the taxable minimum (and thus pay no taxes, and thus pay no military money).

And of course by evidence, "Anonymous internet" is important enough to RMS to live an ultra-hippie life, but not important enough to use no internet at all.

If you do agree with parent then you are simply communicating differences in what is worth what.

You then point out what you see to be RMS shortcomings, based again on disagreement with parent comment.

Don't get me wrong, all that is OK, just nowhere close to complete agreement to the parent comment.

Which is it?

Personally, I really hate all the tracking. But I also really need to advance some aspects of my life because time grows short and I ended up raising my granddaughter.

(She will either kill me off, or I get a lot stronger! Lol)

So, I pay. But will also contribute time and money to good causes. Not happy about all that, but I need what I need too, so does the fam.

Tons of people struggle like this. It has to be important to have the conversations sans the judgement.

One perspective would say "RMS/Free-software advocates are saying only free games should be played" -- but another is:

"If we want to have access to the code for the games we play (as a value), what economic, legal and technical infrastructure (rather than depending on current copyright, DRM, etc) do we need?" If that's something we want, how do we advocate for it?

True. I'm not saying he can control the impact of his viewpoint, I'm making an observation on what that impact may be.

>and there is much room for debate on whether or not they're extremist.

Also true. I classify RMS as an extremist, but recognize that reasonable people may disagree.

>Some viewpoints can be logically categorized as being at the end of a defined spectrum

That is pretty much the definition of extremism, being at the final end point on either end of a spectrum. But then that's why I don't gravitate towards viewpoints that exist only as a single point on a spectrum. I prefer a multi axial approach that takes various considerations into account. Unfortunately for me that often makes it significantly harder to convey a short answer on my views, because they are fairly nuanced.

As far as RMS, he may have planted a very good seed, but I don't think that OSS would have gained dominance in many areas if there had not been more moderate & practical people working in the area.

He expanded the Overton Window (wrt FOSS). He created the necessary space for us to even have these conversations.

I have no opinions on RMS the person; I've never met him. But I have great esteem for RMS the ideologue. And I too respect that he walks the talk.

Nobody is perfect, focus on one's strength serves everyone better.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

How is that not always going to end up being "free of charge"? Someone is always going to end up redistributing it without charge.

• selling physical media (e.g. an installation disk or drive)

• selling downloads from a trusted, official server (with the bandwidth to serve a global audience)

• selling support

• asking for donations

• adopting a patreon model (if you want so-and-such feature or modification, please fund me so that I can do so)

and so on. Admittedly, it is more difficult to make money from libre software than non-libre software, but that seems to be a consequence of the law allowing non-libre software to be sold as it is (i.e. treating software like other copyrightable material). "It's more difficult to make money from libre software" is essentially "it's more difficult to make money when you don't threaten to sue people for inspecting, modifying, or exercising ownership of the tools they use". We could similarly say "it's easier to make money when you can threaten people at gunpoint", which would simply be true! were it not for society imposing a high price (imprisonment) for doing so.

> > How is that not always going to end up being "free of charge"? Someone is always going to end up redistributing it without charge.

If you redistribute it. Doesn't mean you cannot sell your own software and allow the user to have the source code. The GPL allows the end-user to redistribute it, for free if they want, but it's essentially a non-supported, always behind version.

If the end-user adds some nice functionality to the software AND they then redistribute it, then they are forced to provide the source for the changes they made, which allows you, as the vendor, to incorporate those changes into your product. The idea is that, for any piece of software, the entire community of users will have the ability to modify that software.

After multiple iterations, even companies will get in on the act because they save money by contributing to, and using, the commons.

The point of the free software movement is not to prevent companies from making money writing software (that's a side-effect, sure), it's to ensure that the end-users' freedom to change the software is guaranteed.

Now you may argue that such a position, taken to its logical conclusion, will result in software developers never getting paid again. You may even be right. However that is not relevant to the movement's goals. Their goal is having a particular right for the end-user. Their goals does not include the well-being of the software developer.

It is pointless to argue that the movement, if successful, will result in software development being a non-paid activity, because not only is that not a goal for the movement, it's not even a concern for them. Hence, the argument is irrelevant.

That is incredibly false. It is always legitimate to argue implications.

It's not "incredibly false"; like everything else in life, it's "sometimes it depends".

In this case, making a successful argument against free software based on a side-effect of the movement has little to no effect:

1. The movement doesn't care. It's of no concern to them, so at worst they'll ignore it, at best they'll suggest mitigations. They aren't going to stop their cause.

2. The developers of the free software don't care. Many of them are already paid well even though the movement has been around for most of their entire lifetimes, and for most of them their jobs already depend on free software. They aren't going to care about what the implications are because in the last 40 years there hasn't been any negatives for the clear majority of developers, while they currently depend on it.

3. The users of free software (which includes almost all developers alive today) care very much that free software continues being a thing. They depend on it. Doesn't matter how accurate your argument is, they'll ignore it too.

So, once again, who is the target audience of any argument against free software? If all the audiences are going to mostly ignore it because it is against their best interests, why continue tilting at windmills?

The confusion comes from the fact that beer generally isn’t, well, free!

> ...I believe it's very important that we have someone like him in the tech world.

Indeed. It feels natural that these yin and yang extreme-opposite archetypes exist as they allow the rest of us to find the center, therefor balance.

I don't think this is true! There are notable portions of the free software community that are farther left (or whatever direction you may consider it to be) than Stallman and GNU.

Debian, for instance, rejects the GFDL as a non-free license when the "invariant sections" or "cover texts" mechanisms are used. These are clauses that allow GFDL documents to include words or even entire chapters that cannot be modified or removed from copies of the document. Stallman uses this clause to include a section about the ethics of the free software movement in documents like the GCC manual. Now, explaining the ethics of the free software movement is of course an important cause. But the manner in which this is done - preventing the GCC manual, or portions of it, from being freely modified in its entirety, from being recombined freely with other documents or code with otherwise-compatible licenses - is, in the view of Debian and others, incompatible with the free software philosophy.

This is a farther / more radical view. Stallman's view is that making some unmodifiable and unremovable sections in an otherwise-free work is an acceptable compromise. Debian's view is that there is no room for compromise. And Debian is an entire (and quite influential) Linux distribution.

Or take the AGPL, for instance, sponsored by now-defunct startup Affero. There are many people (myself included) who believe the AGPL is a restriction on use, freedom 0, because it prevents you from using AGPL software in certain contexts where the requirements cannot be fulfilled. Suppose I find some AGPL code with a neat algorithm for a session cache, or something, and I want to incorporate that into a TLS library. There is absolutely no way to fulfill the AGPL's requirement to make source code available to users who interact with my code over the network. The clause triggers, because users are indeed interacting over the network, but since there's no TLS extension to offer source, I can't actually do so. This is, it seems to me, as much of a restriction on use as "You can't use this in commercial settings" or "You can't use this for military applications." There's a reason that even GNU still uses the GPL for much of its software - they know the AGPL would make lots of their code effectively unusable in contexts where it ought to be usable.

Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely. The GPL fundamentally relies on copyright law, else it cannot have its particular effect over the MIT/BSD/etc. licenses where it requires redistributing source along with binaries. The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory. There is certainly a popular view, popular among the BSDs and others, that those licenses are freer than the GNU ones. But there is also the farther and more radical view that even the MIT and BSD licenses are a compromise, and the goal should be questioning the validity of software copyrights the same way much of the free software community questions the validity of software patents.

(In fact, among non-experts, you can find a very common view that because something is released to the public in certain ways it ought to be "public domain." The Berne rule of every creative work being automatically copyrighted isn't clearly obvious to the general public, and it's a relatively recent rule, too!)

Stallman is influential, yes, and very passionate. But that's entirely different from him being all the way at the end of the range of discourse. It is worth listening to folks whose positions are less well-known but more radical.

IIRC, RMS rejected forfeiting rights, eg public domain, to better protect users of software. Maybe the thinking was that the absence of copyright would lead to seizure (capture) and exploitation of the works.

I'd love to know how that's actually worked out, empirically. Like comparing outcomes of similar projects which used different licenses.

> The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory.

There will _always_ be such restrictions. For an extreme, but derived from the same philosophical core, example: the act of murder is an individual freedom, but it imposes on other peoples' freedoms. So we have to make a choice between which freedom is more important: that of the person whose life is at risk, or that of the person who wants to take lives. The formal concepts are referred to as negative liberty (freedom from murder) and positive liberty (freedom to murder someone).

The modern world leans heavily towards negative liberty because we recognise that freedom isn't some absolute individualistic freedom, but rather that it is better to balance freedom in favour of most people. That's why stealing, killing, sexual assault, and many other things are freedoms we deem unethical and unnecessary.

Some people say, "well, it's just software" which is dismissive of the idea that software can have very bad effects, indirect and direct, on the world, so we must empower ourselves.

> Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely.

There are also those on the left who want this, but also to go _beyond_ simply abolishing. If you abolish copyright without requiring code and build instructions to be open source as well, you just end up with people and companies who instead keep their code secret.

It's why, when slavery was abolished, it wasn't enough. The former slaves were free, but were now in a world where the power structures were not in their favour, meaning they could still be taken advantage of and treated like slaves and were still being oppressed.

Libertarian views are usually rejected by the left as right wing, instead when you talk about leftists with less authoritarian views, they call themselves anarchists (or even reject that label, and say they're "doing anarchism" rather than being "anarchists").

I don't get how these don't qualify as a government. A very small scale one, but still a government.

But either way, that isn't relevant to the example. It is still either a yes/no question, and <insert your chosen name for group that believes in no entities of any sort that can enforce their will on you or change your behavior without your full consent> claiming that there should be no group who can stop you is still answering yes.

i'm sorry but i just can't read this without laughing. what does stallman think gamers are like?

i can only imagine the average teenage gamer trying to get their friends to stop playing virtually every game on the market and instead play some obscure game and trying to teach them how to install gcc and git to get it running

It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust. It's already so bad that you practically need a separate machine for many games if you want to run anything remotely resembling a VM on your main one, and it's going to get much worse. (ex. TPM requirement in some games on Win11)

And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.

Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface.

Which means, that in order to do anything useful, you need to communicate with some other service that is running software that has access to your data. The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious.

Take something as old and as open as IRC. I have absolutely no way of knowing if the server Im connecting to is actually running the software I think it is, unmodified. The only people who have that level of access, have root on the server.

Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.

How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they are a far worse option, precisely due to the loss of freedom and autonomy for not much additional gain.

Sure, if you accept that all your software are belong to them, then clearly the freedom to run libre stuff is useless, tautologically. But maybe you shouldn't be ready to give away that freedom just yet?

That you cannot be sure what someone else is running "over there", on a machine you don't control, is a fact of nature. Trading away your freedom for a foolish attempt to control that is misguided and shortsighted.

Your argument sounds like it is against the use of software that requires such an upstream service in the first place, which is a fair stance to take. The Problem is when that upstream service is Necessary for whatever you are trying to do. Like in circumstances where interaction and collaboration with other users is the goal.

Until that service (such as a bank) decides that your rooted, user-controlled phone is no good, and forces you to use one controlled by the manufacturer, if you want access to your bank account.

The fact is it’s not just us that are stakeholders in the devices we carry. Our mobile network provider is a stakeholder, the manufacturer is a stakeholder, our bank is a stakeholder. This is why e.g. we don’t have unlimited rights over the bank cards or those access code generator devices some banks used to issue.

If you want to use your phone for some of the functions of a bank card, then some of your banks interests in the functioning and management of that card roll over into your phone. If you want to play a social online game on your device, then now the games company and the wider community of gamers playing that game with you has an interest in the management of your device. If you don't like that, that's fine you should be able to have as much control over your device as you want ideally, but you wont be playing those games or using those services.

Cory Doctorow is one of the few people in the techie public space that seems to have a really good grip on these issues and some practical ideas on how to solve these problems, through chains of trust based on users owning the keys to the chain of trust on their devices. It’s a really hard complex problem though.

Ah, you mean in the case where you have a different computer available to you, that has not (yet) been locked against its user like your phone has. But we are so certain that this locking of compute won't spread, that we treat all other computers (that are locked), as an exotic exception, and the only remaining class of devices not yet locked (PCs) as the norm.

> Our mobile network provider is a stakeholder, the manufacturer is a stakeholder, our bank is a stakeholder. [..] some of your banks interests in the functioning and management of that card roll over into your phone.

Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate. Especially when freedom-respecting options are nearly absent from the market, and one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones.

But most importantly, there's one item missing in your list of interests: the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations. What use is free software if none but a handful of hobbyists can run it?

> Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate.

Whether that interest is legitimate and acceptable is a decision for the user. If I decide to accept the terms for my banking app, what’s that got to do with you?

> one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones

I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.

> the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations

How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?

Whether you accept those terms has nothing to do with me. What has something to do with me is that there is no bank that allows me to access my account with my phone, without requiring me to relinquish control of that phone to its manufacturer.

But you're right, I can always use my PC for access, and, when that option too is removed, go to the bank in person, to one of their increasingly scarce physical offices, and slowly get locked out of more and more modern society. Alternatively, I can try to proselytize free software, to be met with "Sorry I can't install that, if I unlock my PC I won't be able to use my bank".

> I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly - what I meant was that one cannot argue almost all consumers are making that choice. As you point out, many people chose the moderately free Android. That freedom is growing more moderated by the day.

> How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?

Extremely:

Apple Removes App That Helps Hong Kong Protesters Track the Police - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...

Of 3,200 apps missing from the China App Store, almost a third relate to hot button human rights topics targeted by China’s censors, such as privacy tools, Tibetan Buddhism, Hong Kong protests and LGBTQ issues. Porn and gambling apps made up less than 5 percent. - https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/apple-censo...

Apple orders Telegram to block some Belarus protest channels [..] Among all the things that the Telegram CEO revealed, here is what’s most concerning: Apple apparently restricts app developers from informing their users that some content from their app has been hidden on request by Apple. - https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-orders-telegram-to-block-som...

Cattle that waits until the day of slaughter to attempt escape does not fare well.

(I don't mean to single out Apple - they get the most coverage, but I'm not sure if/how much better the situation is with Google's Play store. Which locked phones cannot escape.)

If the bank and the game cannot function in this reality, then the only solution is for them to provide separate devices for me to interface with them.

In fact, I find it a total jump in logic and a fallacy to conclude that I don't want or need freedom on my own device just because I'm a heavy user of upstream services. How does that even remotely follow?

I personally think that its important to have that control and freedom for its own sake, but I understand the sentiment that "if my data is getting shipped off Anyways to some unfree system then why bother? I can't make the same guarantees around privacy and security as I can with a fully libre application"

You are right about network services working hard to own more and more of the interactions and make it increasingly difficult to manage one's relationships and interactions without those services.

Frankly, I've responded by making damn sure I have interactions with the people I care about that are not owned by these services. Should one change, or I somehow am cutoff, I can maintain my relationships and interactions with people I care about.

Regarding IRC, the resolution to your dilemma is open data in tandem with open code. Sure, they could be running an IRC like thing. But, your data, interactions with others over IRC, are all open. Same goes for email and such. You can take it with you. You can change servers. You can read all of it without enabling technology.

Regarding cheating...

That's a social problem being attacked with technology and it's going to bring grave consequences. Personally, I would rather not play than deal with what's being done in an attempt to prevent cheating. The people interested in doing that are playing their very favorite game, and the cost of escalating that cat and mouse impacts all of us. Impacts you.

Any problem in the last couple of centuries is being attacked with technology. That's what the industrial revolution is about.

Steam engine? That's a transportation problem being attacked with technology. Covid vaccines? That's a healthcare problem being attacked with technology. Anti-missile missiles? That's an international relations problem being attacked with technology.

steam engine has been adapted to transportation, after transportation was invented, they haven't solved any social problem.

there wasn't a transportation problem, there was a problem applying the technology to transportation, for lack of better alternatives.

steam engine in cars were banned until 1920s, so cars used electric engines.

it worked (kinda) on trains

main application of steam engine still remains steam turbines for power (electricity) generation, which is a modern technological challenge by itself.

> Covid vaccines? That's a healthcare problem being attacked with technology

COVID vaccines helped an economic problem, people would have survived by avoiding contacts

they have been in fact deployed firstly and foremost in developed (AKA rich) countries (2.8 billion people around the world are still waiting to get their first shot).

modern drug manufacturing is not about society anymore and hasn't been for at least a century now.

> Anti-missile missiles? That's an international relations problem being attacked with technology.

That's a warfare problem that has always been about technology, since forever.

Social problems are just very hard to solve, and they're rarely made simpler by automation or algorithms. They often require trust in another person's intent.

This describes every competition ever; person A wants the winner to be A, but person B wants the winner to be B. Should we stop doing doping tests at Olympic games, as it's an application of (non-free) technology to a social problem?

That dynamic is exactly why so many people oppose electronic voting, electronic court "guidence" and other similar things.

People are super messy, complicated and the strength of automation coupled with the allure of doing less work is the root cause for an awful lot of unnecessary grief, despite let's say for discussion, the best of intent.

What we can do put process in the mix.

The available solution coupled with time tested, production proven ways and means is about as good as we can get. And that is not very good, but it is livable and people value that a whole lot more than is given credit for.

Bad things are gonna happen no matter what, right?

Humans doing the messy human works are important. It ain't cheap. Never was, and for sure isn't now. But when we do that work, people do get options and overall harm is reduced, but more importantly, consent, acceptance, compliance all go up.

Furthermore, this restraint tends to impact people unevenly. As ineffective as the government may or may not be, at least the goal is for all people to be considered equal in the eyes of the law. With technology the power lives with those who own and create the technology, who have even less oversight and accountability than those who make the laws.

Right now, our tech is not capable of understanding meaning a mere child does easily. This makes it very poorly aligned with the problem domain in that applying it will create at least as many and probably more problems than it will solve.

Other problem domains have seen better tech alignment and have also seen greater success, though one could argue we also poorly understand the new problems created in some cases. (Global warming makes burning fuels a much worse deal than initially believed)

The side effects inherent with such blunt instruments as appear to be required to apply tech to social, human problems warrant consideration well beyond, "just because we can."

In the future, when our tech is much better, perhaps it can address human, social problems with far fewer costs to those subjected to the solutions.

Just how much control over your life and expression do you feel is necessary?

Right now it is well beyond anything I feel good about and it has just gotten started!

Otherwise, I had been denied boarding in the Covid era because the software had had a bug, so I tend to generally agree with your sentiment that the technology has too much control over my life already.

One area where technology is not a good idea is civics. Our votes the law things like that. At the present time, humans are best at managing human Affairs. That includes things like cheating crime who will be the leader oh, what's socially acceptable downtown, all that kind of stuff.

With voting in particular, we are in a position of forced trust with technology. It is going to be cheated, exploited, and has multiple times, and we really don't have options. We need people to physically vote and deal with the votes, or we're going to be under the thumb of the people that own the machines. That's pretty clear.

I am open to the idea of cheating not being in that collection of stuff that humans are best at dealing with. I also think we should have more options like we used to, setting up her own servers and what not like what used to be possible. And frankly still is possible. From time to time I like to play a little Q3A, and I just set up a server and run with friends. I don't think that game will ever die for us.

I want a lot of us, myself included, oppose is the very blunt instrument currently being used to manage cheating. It affects us in ways that really hurt the open Libre software causes. We can't know what's running on our machines, we can't run what we want on our machines, and so forth.

I did this on voice fall in the car, so please forgive typos, but perhaps this puts the chat in a better place. We shall see.

I think this is a good conversation personally.

Now, are you unconvinced that the act of cheating itself is a social problem?

I did use course terminology, it could be a moral failing as well. I lump a lot of those under social. And that's to my detriment obviously. But let's sort that out.

And then there's the part I'm convinced that I understand you on, and that is I believe our current state of technology is not a good fit for social problems, and you believe that it is. Or maybe more accurately, the solutions work and you're happy with that I'm concerned about costs and risks associated with said solutions.

I think once we understand one another there let's have a short chat.

I was coarse. Reading through, I was able to see it

Life, people, come with a bazillion, edge, corner, intersection cases, right? I am moved by the likes of Lessig, RMS, others in that we are super complex! And computer tech right now is missing a couple big things!

Meaning and reasoning basically.

Context is hard.

In the "we just want to play on a fair field" context, of course! I get it. Tech can help with cheaters for sure, though I do think it is a temporary help at best. The really brilliant people with resolve get through and may well be as great of a gamer as they are cheater. The challenge, "real game" is what really gets them going.

One could say the same of a cartel leader, thief, and others who play this game of life in that way.

And we struggle with tech and law constantly!

There are parallels.

Poor law causes a lot of grief, wasted time, people enduring punishment that should not, and we have a process for that.

And it is a shitty process!

I would feel a lot better with a similar dynamic applied where we do reach for tech tools.

Another parallel: mandatory sentencing. We put people, many of whom are elected, others selected, who we believe worthy of judgement (And I know how debatable that all is, just roll with it for sake of discussion please!), into a position of real power, and we accept that because our lives are generally better for having done it.

Mandatory Sentencing is a mess. Now we basically take this complex human capable of judgement and boil it down to a more rule based thing not so unlike what computers would do. I am not sure that ever made sense. Whether it does is an interesting discussion, but what I really want to say here is more about where tech falls short and put some meat behind "social", as I should have done.

We are perhaps not so far apart on this. Seems my lazy comment got me a robust discussion I find far more worthy than the comment was!

Nice when that happens.

Circling back then, if I am to say anything, it is process which bothers me the most.

When we are really impacting people, ruining lives or changing them seriously, or improving them frankly, there are no do overs. Our time here is our time and taking that very, very seriously seems like it should matter a whole lot more than it often does with tech and social / society.

We are trending toward more bad fits than good in my view.

RMS, character that he is, absolutely does take it hard to an extreme. He should not have ruling power, but we need that voice, just as we need ours.

In that context, your push back was solid and for me useful and productive! I am better for having worked at this a bit. And these matters are important. Increasingly so.

I hope my attempt to clarify and back away from the worst of my thoughts here is similar for you.

We both are likely to come away from this tuned up a bit and better at the topic at the very least. (True for me)

Cheers and game on!

And its almost always done to remove agency from the user and give it back to the corporation. Again, RMS is right. You can only truly have digital freedom if you are running your own software on your own hardware. It only seems old timey because we have been drinking the everything as a service kool aide for so long.

It doesn't have to be this way and it's not necessarily technologically superior. Its due to business forces more than anything else.

>Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.

Not everything he advocates for is always practical, the game example is one. You have to have some kind of central control in multiplayer games to make sure people aren't cheating. But there is still wisdom in what he says. We have single player only games that are demanding the same kind of access and control that multiplayer ones are. Obviously that isn't to prevent cheating.

And sometimes he is still right about a problem even if he sees every all of them as technological nails to be solved with a FOSS hammer. That's not going to work but he is identifying the problem correctly. Banks and governments are weaponizing the financial system against people they don't like and can't be trusted. How do you prevent them from doing it? I think ultimately its not a technological problem, its a political/societal one. Banks need to be reigned in and politicians need to be more afraid of the people.

Personal machines are actually new-time'y, not old-time'y. In the old times there weren't that many computers, and you accessed one via a terminal.

The difference is more in how remote services are now things you can't program and modify and tinker with, but rather closed-source "products" or "services" in shiny wrappers.

The decline of the early open hacker culture in favour of corporate proprietary software during the 70s deeply informed the idea behind Free Software.

But also the network is profoundly different than the PC to the point where "free software" doesn't mean as much. Picking HN as an example because it is really easy:

1) We don't control the content we create for HN.

2) At some point all that content will disappear.

3) If viewed as an API, there is nothing complicated to it (disregarding dang's daunting fight with comment threading & similar issues). We get a "post" button and a text page.

So there seems to be a freedom problem here but it is about data control rather than software control - far harder to solve and also not so clear cut an issue. Does it, fundamentally, limit my freedom if all my HN posts disappear? Since they are public anyway, does it mean anything for it to be exploited by someone? Things like the piratebay.whichever and youtube-dl have been in the news today as part of ongoing examples that the network is still a very free place for who we can connect to and what API they can offer.

I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?

> For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust.

The driving force was (and still largely is) protecting copyrighted video content. That is bullshit, of course, but cheaters and video games were far down the priority pile when hardware DRM was designed. Now, it’s all about secure computing and sandboxes, and video games are still pretty much an afterthought.

> And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.

The average teenage gamer does not care. There are things we can do to improve the situation with DRM, but “how do you do fellow kids” from an old neck beard is way off the mark, and indeed laughable.

[anecdotal]

luck has nothing to do with being wise.

anyway, I think unwise in this context means that RMS has been right more times than he's been wrong.

And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.

https://banksyexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LAUGH...

> The average teenage gamer does not care

that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.

Ok, let me reframe it. Do you have any example of anything being adversely affected by the fact that anybody ever laughed at RMS? Sure, he sound profound and far seeing, but his rhetoric is anything but subtle. He’s been way off for about 30 years now.

> And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.

I know what we owe him, but his contribution is long passed now. It does not turn him into a kind of universal genius. He’s outlived his usefulness as far as software freedoms are concerned. These day he’s more of a boogeyman than someone to take seriously, and he’s got only himself to blame.

> that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.

Do you remember what you did when you were in this situation? Personally, I mostly told my parents to fuck off and did whatever I wanted on my side, which was mostly what they did not want me to do. A condescending tone when you tell them what they ought to care about is not going to cut it. And I am saying that as a neck beard father.

But whereas a lot of others think the problems are structural to how society operates, and that fixing it would require rebuilding under a new economic framework, Stallman's only insight is that software you can't modify is the devil. DRM is bad not because it upholds a capitalist supply-and-demand system by restricting theoretically infinite supply, but because you can't modify the .c files yourself or send them to a friend.

It's an extremely limited way of thinking that ignores any external structural or economic motivations, and focuses on an unreasonably small niche subset with a black-and-white moral answer. It sometimes makes good points, mostly accidentally, but it still has a lot of misses, e.g. the religious persistence on "software" leads to programs like the FSF's Respect Your Freedoms with incoherent policies around hardware, firmware, and ROMs, mostly from a place of ignorance.

The free software movement was quickly co-opted by corporations as the "open-source movement" by executives looking to offload their labor costs onto unpaid workers, leading to a lot of under-funded core software infrastructure as corporations rank in the cash. Stallman's "Open Source Misses the Point" essay doesn't talk at all about this, it doesn't talk about the ways that open-source is about externalizing costs, nor about the way that it's leading to maintainer burn-out, it just points out that it's kinda bad that they're releasing stuff under the MIT license instead of the GPL, and would really much prefer if people didn't do that, while not realizing that was the goal all along.

The FSF has very little force in accomplishing their goals; it's a wet paper towel tossed vaguely in the direction of actual change.

To be fair, his position was interesting in the 1980s. But he’s been hopelessly out of touch with the vast majority of computer users since the 1990s. He can keep harping on about the GPL and keep watching the world pass by.

He doesn't care, and likely has never given a single iota of thought to it, as he assumes what is best is to think like him.

And dear RMS acolytes who will almost certainly bristle at this statement; I spent enough time around him and his satellites in the 90s/oughts, to feel quite comfortable saying this. He has near zero interest (and I would argue the capacity) to try to understand what drives other people, just the self-righteous purity of his own views.

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’.

Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.

This is because the definition of 'unreasonable' is relative. For Edison, wasting thousands of hours of lightbulb experiment was quite reasonable.

For most people before him, it was squarely in the unreasonable territory, and hence it took Edison for lightbulb to happen.

https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-ligh...

did they?

I think that in history those that caused quite a lot of damage to the World are those that laughed at unreasonable men, thinking they could not achieve anything substantial.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead or wearing toothbrush moustache, is purely coincidental

And I wouldn't disagree with that as an abstraction, but being in direct contact/proximity with him is an utterly dreadful form of masochism.

See, when hardware was more open, I was able to preserve and continue to play the games I enjoy. In fact, I can disassemble them, learn from them, make my own.

The gamers of today won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms, if they are playing them at all.

This is just one of the many things Stallman is right about. Laughing at him is generally unwise. Ask a bunch of us how we know. Seriously.

Do they care? Lots of these games are like fashion, where the core gameplay loop is pretty similar to exactly the same as previous games, just with a different art direction on top. The fact that its popular is what makes it popular until its not.

I guarantee you that they will.

They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the impossibility of porting it without breaking some law), then they will care.

The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most.

And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as binaries.

If I really want to play Marble Madness on an Amiga emu, I can, even though the original code was never open sourced.

The emulator community your beloved games run on is rife with dodgy things. You know, how to get certain firmware, how they cracked this or that protection, and of course the ROMs themselves.

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche? I totally disagree. It feels like a niche until you feel it yourself. Most gamers haven't aged enough yet.

PS "the modern hardcore gamer market": I care little about that short-sighted institution. I want to preserve the cultural digital heritage of mankind, and videogames are a vital part of it. And because they are games, they are meant to be played, so a blog post with some screenshots won't do. If you disagree -- we are not on the same page, and it's not worth continuing this conversation.

A lot of people thought gaming is shallow, but it's really not. It has packed a major league punch on culture, tech itself given its age.

My take is we're going to have the early Roots stories oh, because things are open enough and simple enough but we can get them, and we're going to get them wall a lot of the people are still alive. But after that it's going to be a mess.

Think of the situation with today's games 40 years in the future rather than 40 year old games today.

Thankfully, I am PC gamer so most things work, outside certain set of DRM...

and I'm sure someone actually into the scene could pump out a long list of much better links than these.

8 bit systems, and I mean consoles, computers, industrial automation, enjoyed relevance through what is seen today as a long, diverse era of computing and gaming. The Apple 2, 1Mhz 6502 systems, was sold in various forms from 1977 through to 1994, I believe. That is crazy!

Sidebar: I snagged a 1990's machine and if you want to explore this early era of computing, an Apple Platinum is the most recent system and is very reliable. Recommended.

End Sidebar

Today, there is an active hardware scene with people making new old computers and sometimes extending their capabilities a bit. Jim Bagley and Spectrum Next wishbone example.

The MISTer FPGA system is basically a hardware emulation of a ton of retro hardware. These are hard to distinguish from the real deal, and connect to newer and old displays for a great visual experience.

Hardware cards are being made for the Apples. I have several in mine. Great experiences.

Games are being developed, and Nox Archaist is an Ultima style RPG worth a look. The C64 is seeing a lot of releases, AtariAge is where you can go for news on that.

RetroRGB has news on a lot of consoles, MISTer and others.

Sorry, no links I am on mobile and just killing a few minutes here. But, a quick google on the names will get you somewhere fun in no time.

Retro is pretty big right now. There is a lot going on.

Since joining some C64-related facebook groups after buying my TheC64 retroclone, I was surprised to find the large number of new and original games for the C64 being released all the time. And they are commercial, not free!

Really happy to find the community lives on.

And what I appreciate is a modern take on these older systems. It is a sort of, "what if..." it had all continued. The Nox Archaist RPG I mentioned plays GREAT. All the hard edges Ultima style games had are gone for the most part.

The result is a very playable 8 bit game in that style, good elements maximized. Too fun.

As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.

His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale.

It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him.

But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

Modern FOSS is the exact opposite of open computing. Computing affordances are trapped inside an inaccessible technical monolith instead of an inaccessible corporate monolith.

To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.

..you're blaming FOSS for not solving the "programming is hard" problem?

> To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.

Yes, if you ignore all the secondary and ecosystem effects, such as getting to use the resulting free software. I have not once looked at the source of the linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, or Firefox, yet I benefit enormously from the development method and spirit that gave birth to them. That is not zero difference.

So the direct utility of open-source in being able to fix your own itches is in fact extremely rare, even for people for whom programming isn't hard.

There is a better point about FLOSS creating an ecosystem of usable utilities for getting stuff done, one I have availed myself of on innumerable occasions. However, I will also point out that the Stallman stance on software has impeded this goal on several occasions, since GPL or even LGPL [1] licensing can prevent reuse of code. This leaves me wondering how necessary the FSF/GNU stuff was in bootstrapping the open-source ecosystem.

[1] LGPL requires you to link software in a particular way to avoid the license spreading to your code.

* Microsoft is apparently pushing to make it impossible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft online account. [0] I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that.

* Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state

* Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed

* Mobile apps that sell your location data, and anything other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security

* Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics

* Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox)

* edit Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption

* For more see [1]

If you only run Free Software, you get many benefits even if you're unable to modify the software yourself.

> Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

This cannot be done. You can't make a car that anyone can repair, either. Software development is a skilled craft. That doesn't mean there's nothing to gain in Free Software.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387866

[1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html

Example:

https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw

Basically he foresaw people will not be able to own books. He is a genius who *really* does not care about money. That makes all the difference. Very rare to find people with this trait. To top it off he is relentless in his cause. Think if there is any one who can meet these standards. Very few.

The answer, at least partially, lies in free tools, engines, and community content.

Anyway Doom has this great community around it not just because the tools are free, thought that’s a an important enabling factor, but due to its cultural significance to gamers and games developers.

Doom released in 1993, its engine was open-sourced in 1997 (4 years).

Quake released in 1996, its engine was OSS'd in 1999 (3 years).

Quake II released in 1997, OSS'd in 2001 (4 years).

Quake III released in 1999, OSS'd in 2005 (6 years).

Sure, in most those cases they were at least 2 generations of their own tech ahead when releasing source code, but considering how they were at the cutting edge of game development at the time, arguably those engines still held considerable value at the time and far from worthless.

i am missing my unreal tournament days and would even pay money, if one would build an opensource clone where i could load the original maps of Unreal tournament and UT2004 into the game like with Command & Conquer: Red alert.

(UT2004 crashes randomly on linux and it's always a hassle with the 32bit libs)

Edit: the maps are different, but yesterday I joined a server that had one of the Quake Arena maps on it.

There are certainly ways to run Linux UT2004 binary in modern Linux but it'd be way more effort than running the Windows binary under Wine.

https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/

I especially like this model. You get the source but the people who worked on the game still get paid.

Romero spoke about this a while back. Several members of the team at ID, Romero included, got started on the Apple ][ computers. Those machines were completely open, software driven everything! I keep one as a reminder of my own roots, and the machine is still fun! (Romero keeps his too, as do many from that time period, but I digress...)

The author behind Beagle Brothers software and educational materials was a huge impact on many of us, and ID. They released their code so that others may create and so that their games live on for the people who enjoy playing them. Open matters, and that's why one can play doom on almost everything these days, as one example.

It's a great model.

What I've enjoyed is seeing the ID team watch what others do, and share in all the fun from a secure position having been well paid, no worries beyond that.

And frankly, they can STILL sell those creative assets. People would still buy them.

  sudo apt install nethack

Stallman isn't a free culture person

[0] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli... (under Non-functional Data)

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#exte...

And everything gets released on GNU/Linux two months before it gets ported to anything else.

Many modern competition games like VALORANT or PUBG are free-beer with paid food, built on free-beer semi open engines like UE4, and are also streamed free-beer on Twitch or YouTube.

And kids are moving towards F2P from paid games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty franchise, because the former category is free(-beer). The former is also startin in to surpass the latter in quality.

It’s “just” a matter of turning free-beer into free speech, and I think it could well happen as an inevitability, just not in a quarter or two.

I mean that's a bit what quake 3 did, the content kept its copyright.

I honestly don't think it's posing a threat to the company who makes the game, because there won't really be anybody forking the game and making it better than the original creator, in a short period of time, while also selling it. It will only bring bad publicity.

This does not give you as much (legal) freedom as opening up the whole thing does but gets pretty close and most importantly removes most of the technical challenges for improving and maintaining the game. It's also probably way easier to accomplish since writing, art and music has even less of an open source culture than software.

Being dogmatic doesn’t help here I think. Start from the fact (people must play billion dollar budget games) and work backwards. How can privacy be improved, etc.

Saying “solitaire has fewer privacy issues than this AAA game” is like saying “walking is better than driving”. That doesn’t improve cars.

I also like your train of thought however. Which is why I'm happy to support Steam in their effort with Proton. They surely can't make everyone release a Linux version, so what if Wine could run all of the games instead? I like this idea in general and it also enabled me to not reboot into Windows to play some of my favorites.

Today I downloaded a free game and having fun [1]

$ colossal-cave-adventure WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

Phoronix reported that 5.18 removed the Andes NDS32 CPU arch code. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-51...

The reason they do this is because a lot of these systems can break as the internal kAPIs change all the time and the users will not know since the embedded custom distro of software + kernel is not upgraded. Support can be broken for these arches for years until someone gets these systems second hand and posts about them, but may not care to fix it or it is cheaper to replace it.

RMS calls this a major issue, specifically 32-bit support in Ubuntu. I do not agree. My last 32 bit computer died a long time ago after the battery died years ago. It was a Gateway so getting replacement parts would be difficult. I also was never able to get it to run Linux. Aside from my brother-in-law finding his old laptop no one I know uses 32 bit computers (well except for myself with my Pi Zero: ARM v6, which I used once).

It just feels like the wrong battle to pick when Linux's biggest competitor is forcing practically all PCs to use a bootloader signed with their key. Major vendors can choose to refuse to allow users to install their own key. They are already locking CPUs (Ryzens) to their brand of motherboards with a builtin fuse provided by AMD. He of course talks about it-it just feels like the 32 bit part distracts from it.

Pragmatism will always gravitate towards the “middle”. But the middle can never be truly found by pragmatism unless it can see either extreme.

Without Stallman, the closed software extreme has a ton of supporters (Microsoft, Apple, etc) but the free software extreme has almost none.

What Stallman does is define the free software extreme which allows the pragmatists to find a much better middle than if he wasn’t pushing that boundary.

I suspect most kernel developers mostly operate with virtual machines in mind, but as a sysadmin I would argue that physical machines also has their use cases. I also suspect that if the linux kernel stop supporting 32-bit machines, others will continue. Are the BSD people thinking about dropping 32-bit support?

"Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on." [1]

OpenBSD includes their Xorg port in a base install, and you can run a reasonable graphical desktop on a 32bit machine. Firefox is not packaged for i386 I think. I just use Seamonkey when I test the 32 bit image now and again. There may be other package limitations relevant to server only use. Seems a rational approach to me.

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

Source: https://liliputing.com/2015/07/install-ubuntu-14-04-lts-on-t...

A friend of mine had one of those laptops and I wanted to install Linux on it. It took me a few weeks for other reasons (those M.2 drives were the worst), but thanks to the work of Ian Morrison, it was possible.

Turns out a bios flash can in some cases enable the 64bit functionality.

Its not a particularly fast system though...

It’s enough for an embedded system, but vastly underpowered for desktop computing or web browsing.

Remove 32-bit x86 support, and it will pin me down to the few 64-bit machines that i have.

Also missing a discussion about the role of open standards as opposed to open implementations, such as POSIX/LSB, picture and A/V formats for personal storage and streaming, standards for messaging, and the absence of a GNU/Browser despite the presence of so-called web standards.

To deal with that, consider using GNU/Linux phone Librem 5 recommended by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide.

> and Linux being used for cloud lock-in

What do you want to discuss here? There is always a possibility to use tools for the evil. Non-free software is used for that, too (much more).

The fundamental reason is the shift towards the web as a platform, not the abundance of Free Software. As for the oligopolies you mention, the process is as democratic as possible with extremely low barrier to entry: many of the current big players weren't millionaires who had to invest piles of money into factories and wait for decades for their dreams to materialize.

> What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?

I don't believe RMS would object to that, he is not a Linux fanboy and concentrates on Free Software instead.

And surely using cloud service, no matter built on open or closed or free or not software, will tell very little of the modifications that were done to the service and the packages. Basically I know nothing about the cloud-based mysqls, elastic searches, etc that are provisioned for me by s.o.

It's not like closed-source software would have prevented any of this.

SaaS is the only way left to force most people to actually pay for the FOSS stuff they leach.

Take a look at Ardour for an example. Red Hat too.

I should also note that nowadays Red-Hat belongs to IBM, so there are other forms of funding beyond support contracts for Red-Hat enterprise.

Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.

Alternatives popped up literally days after the annoumcement of centos stream. We got back to original point. If you know the history of rhel and its clones, you surely know they used to be tenth of projects similar to centos, some much more active/reactive. The redhat funding of centos as a perfect rhel clone is more a parenthesis in history than anything.

So in the end freeloaders still get exactly what they want.

> Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.

I would say that isn't what some freeloaders think they want. All the feedback I get from people deciding to stick to centos stream and trying it out before a potential switch to something else has bern mostly the same: a lot of fuss for nothing, their life hasn't changed and centos is still meeting their needs.

Recurring income is a stronger business model, nobody's denying that, but that doesn't mean it's an improvement for the user or that those producing software with a goal of financial gain would have just released standalone open source software if only free software licenses had been more sympathetic to their needs. Rather, I think if SaaS did not exist, if their first goal is revenue, many of these groups would have just released straight up proprietary software.

The "free" in "Free and Open Source Software" is free as in speech, not free as in beer. We'd like to think that decision to charge or not charge for the product is orthogonal to the decision to make the source code available. In practice there is some interrelation.

But FOSS was never "you can't charge for it."

Recall that the thing that kicked off the need for Free Software in the first place was the 1970's move to an enclosure of software under IP law to enable the existence of a "software industry" built on shrink-wrapped products. This move often comes in tandem with hostility towards users and non-repairability, but the underlying key point is that of ownership vs stewardship.

What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat that finagled some marginal and often self-interested incentives for the creation and maintenance of the software. Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image, of the "we use it internally but we can't tell you how to set it up" sort.

But more recently, we've see the rise of the Patreon developer, who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project. You don't actually need a huge number of those to substantially propel projects forward, since if they do the job well, the drive-by contributors are much more effective, and more user issues get addressed. That is an example of how stewardship is starting to take over software. It is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, and brings certain inequities of its own, but there's some potential to devise better standard arrangements of this sort.

I'm not so certain. There has been a strong pull away from GPL software towards weakly-licensed software, which is difficult to resist. Hell, _I_ have not been able to resist, and my publicly-available software is 3-BSD-licensed.

So, I would say that advocacy for GPL-style licensing and virally-FOSS software is still very much necessary.

The same goes for many of the principles RMS argues for.

> What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat

No. Since the software is free, we are not dependent on an organization maintaining it. Naturally, if the maintainer "drops" a piece of software, that is a problem and a challenge, but still.

> Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image

Unlike commercial software, free software is unusable if Joe User can't it figure out themselves. So, without documentation and relative consistence of functionality - it's of very little public use.

> we've see the rise of the Patreon developer,

No, we haven't. What fraction of FOSS developer can use that as a living? I'd be surprised if it's 1 in 5,000.

> who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project.

Again, very few projects are this bug. Most FOSS projects have a small number of users.

He makes GPL to give users control over programs. Companies end up using GPL software to power server side software which ends up giving users even less control than proprietary on-device software.

He makes GCC to break free of vendors dominating compiler development. IBM(through Redhat) ends up being the major GCC contributor.

He is worried that companies will use their proprietary software that is sold in exchange for money to maximize revenue by squeezing users. Companies and up using open source software to create proprietary services that are sold in exchange for attention, and to maximize revenue optimize for “engagement” which is now tearing society apart.

Most computer users are using proprietary systems, but now they are cheaper to build thanks to open source software.

Who had/has more control over their data, a Windows 95 user running Microsoft Office on a PC, or a modern Chromebook user running Google Docs? The later incorporates a lot more open source software.

I am thankful every day of being able to live in the world where this is possible and having been able to do so from a quite young age - at first because when I was a kid my parents did not have the money to buy any software at all so learning how to use free software & systems has quickly been a necessity, and now because I know that whenever there's a bug somewhere in the stack I have good chances of being able to peek at the exact issue and if not fixing it myself, at least reporting it to the person who most likely wrote the code almost directly .

It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.

If you think all information should be free, like all software, then the creators of information are not being financially rewarded for creating it. That’s how you end up with cloud data centres making huge profits whilst most OSS projects struggle for cash. It’s also where the business models of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok arise.

Lanier makes a rather odd statement about how web links should be two way to solve this problem. I get his drift, but a better idea is that the web should be built on a more rigorous foundation (see Joe Armstrong’s talk - “the mess we’ve made” - for how it could work). But the general idea is correct - in an information economy either everyone is fairly rewarded for the valuable information they provide, or else you end up with giant companies capturing all the value instead, which leads to gross inequality.

Tbf to Stallman, he is more focused on constraining the worst commercial uses of software, but his fundamental idea that (as per this post) “knitting patterns should be free”, originally something that sounded like an exciting and inspiring idea, has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. He was maybe philosophically correct but in practice, the idea does not serve the best interests of most people.

Information shouldn’t be free (!!! I said that on HN) but rather information should be provided at a cost that is based on both (a) the cost of its provision and (b) the economic value that recipients of that information derive from it. So, for example, OSS authors writing code that underpinned Google’s empire or someone’s SaaS, should get a (small) slice of that pie.

I think once you recognise this, you end up in a really exciting place: like, how could this work in practice? What new concepts do we need to apply to information to do it? Some of the ideas of crypto should come in here: we need to be able to identify information uniquely, for example, so we can track its value. We need to know how many SaaS products are using Bootstrap or whatever. A new type of economy based on fair reward for information is possible. And for once, we do actually need a technical solution to a social problem.

I wonder what Stallman would say about anticheat software. Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.

But without it, there's a client-side arms race against the server code which is a different kind of metagame than most players would want.

Generally the people who are actually into multiplayer games accept anticheat software as a necessary evil. Yes, they're not exactly enthused about what amounts to game-supporting spyware, but playing a game that's rife with hackers is a miserable experience.

The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.

I used to play competitive dota (the original wc3 map) back in the day and the inhouse leagues were a massive pain in the ass. Same with all the various leagues for counter strike (1.6 at the time). UX was terrible, the moderation sucked and you still had to have anti-cheat as people would cheat even in private spaces. Usually the easiest way to get up the ladder was do something dubious and be good friends with the mods so they would rule in your favor.

People use cheats even at LAN events too. So yeah for competitive multiplayer anti-cheat is pretty much required.

For average players yes, central developer driven model is much easier and simpler.

Also smash is played on consoles that prevent one from installing cheats basically the fact that the whole platform is fully locked down is the anti-cheat. Still controllers are sometimes checked at tournaments for any additions that can run macros (most adapters that allow one to use a different consoles controller can do this)

https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros...

This is more of an "exception that proves the rule" since Smash is pretty much the only competitive game with zero centralized support that has broken out of a tiny niche to compete with big names.

Fake lag is in a similar situation. The server could simply hold the true state of all positioning and ignore what the clients think is their position. This might work fine in a very low latency situation, but as latency increase it would make playing the game feel sluggish. It would also make aiming difficult, since the key press for fire would have to travel to the server in order for it to occur, and by then the location of players could have shifted.

Trigger bots however is mostly impossible to stop server side. Any action that is identical to human actions can only really be detected through statistics and heuristics.

Which is why games that do that will still send you data about player who you are almost able to see. This will be their exact position and look direction along with what they are holding. Even limited wallhacks can give a competitive advantage.

I think you misunderstand fake lag. With fake lag you get fake packet loss / latency which causes your character to stutter making it harder to aim at you. The server isn't getting a regular stream of updates of your position.

With Client side movement, Player A sends in even intervals their location to the server. Let say they move right for 3 unit of time, the location get updated from 0:0, 0:1, 0:2. The server then relay the information to Player B.

With Server side movement, Player A tells the server they want to move to the right. The server create a path over time, 0:0, 0:1, 0:2, ... and continuously sends this to player B.

Let now add a fake lag with client side movement. In the first case the we see Player A send locations like 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:5. The server sends this to player B. If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval they might miss because player A is not there. The server might extrapolate an virtual path between 0:1 and 0:5, but that depend on game logic.

Lets now add a fake lag with server side movement. Player A tells the server that they want to move right. After 2 units they add a 3 unit lag, and finally sends tells the server a stop command. The server would construct the following path: 0:0 (start moving player A), 0:1, 0:2, 0:3, 0:4, 0:5 (halt moving Player A). If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval, the server see that player A is at that location and will mark a hit.

This is why server side movement isn't vulnerable to fake lag. The server has the full game state and thus know at any point where all player are and what they are doing, and if the client lag then it simply mean that their input gets delayed. Server side movement is however vulnerable to real lag, as between any action there might be a delay and thus events might not occur at the server when players want it to occur. Server side movement is also slightly more vulnerable to ddos attacks if players can identify the IP address of other players.

Player A may send 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:2 0:3 0:4 0:5

The location for 0:2 that B would have been wrong via your approach. If player A's actual location at 0:2 isn't about the same B will miss his shot.

Imagine you are talking over the phone to someone who is driving, given them directions. That is server side movements. If you suddenly stop talking, the car doesn't just stop, nor does the traffic. All you have accomplished is that the driver is no longer getting any further instructions from you.

[[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.

In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.

Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.

For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing.

Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.

Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.

Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible

Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.

I do miss the quirky nature of private servers, custom maps and game mods, and all of that, but cheating was a big problem back then too.

More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.

[Citation needed] at the last part. Of course they're not gonna prevent 100% of cheaters, but I have doubts that they don't do anything.

OP's point here was that anticheat - while necessary in practice - is particularly egregious at invading privacy and/or degrading the user's experience, which i think is fair to say goes against the free software ideal. the experience would certainly be worse without any anticheat, but that doesn't mean anticheat couldn't be better or isn't still very non-free.