Re:Libreboot – A free BIOS or UEFI replacement
by Spivak on Saturday October 08, 2016 @10:49PM
(#12669682)
> So, ultimately, there's a long history of the GNU folks not anticipating ways in which people have their computing freedoms infringed and basically going "Well you're doing something wrong, stop doing that."
RMS agrees with you! From his Reddit AMA a while back [1].
All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!
> very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser
I mean 15-20% market share for Firefox doesn't really sound like much but it's much better than the 2% that Linux has.
> possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser
Not that it really matters in this discussion but that's not really true anymore. He supposedly uses Firefox with Tor.
> not running JS is better
He's not exactly wrong. Just from a security perspective alone, would you feel comfortable running random binaries downloaded from the internet? You're putting a lot of faith in your browser's sandbox. Outside of F/OSS libraries most JS on the web is proprietary. The LibreJS [2] project is something that's supposed to counteract this (and I support it on my site) but it's beyond niche even in tech circles.
RMS agrees with you! From his Reddit AMA a while back [1].
All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!
> very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser
I mean 15-20% market share for Firefox doesn't really sound like much but it's much better than the 2% that Linux has.
> possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser
Not that it really matters in this discussion but that's not really true anymore. He supposedly uses Firefox with Tor.
> not running JS is better
He's not exactly wrong. Just from a security perspective alone, would you feel comfortable running random binaries downloaded from the internet? You're putting a lot of faith in your browser's sandbox. Outside of F/OSS libraries most JS on the web is proprietary. The LibreJS [2] project is something that's supposed to counteract this (and I support it on my site) but it's beyond niche even in tech circles.
[1] https://redditblog.com/2010/07/29/rms-ama/
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/