In some ways, perhaps RMS is who led us here? Or maybe it was Eric Raymond (and "open source") who led us astray?

The "Cloud" is certainly a clever means to extract value from GPLv2 software stacks that many of the services are built upon, frequently without having to give much of anything back.

How many "cloudy" services run on Linux and other GPLv2 software?

I sometimes wonder what the world would look like had more free licenses (such as MIT/BSD) been just a bit more popular during critical points in history, or had less free options like GPLv3 or AGPL come a bit sooner as viable options.

Would we have to pay for more software, and if so, would the privacy equation have turned out differently? Would software simply not have advanced as quickly as it did? Would the direction tech is moving still be a web-centric one, or would it be a bit more of a desktop/local centric world with more shrink-wrapped software?

RMS would have probably said "If you didn't want it in their control don't put it on their computer."

And really paying for software is no guarantee that you won't also be the product - I'm not sure where that naive notion came from. Paying for the software isn't what keeps your privacy safe - keeping your privacy safe does. That it is an inane tautology is the point - they are separate aspects.

> And really paying for software is no guarantee that you won't also be the product - I'm not sure where that naive notion came from.

It isn't a guarantee, but not paying for software means that the developers have a strong incentive to figure out other means for extracting value out of you. So it isn't so much that paying for software wont make you the product as it is not paying for software will make you the product (note that this is when businesses are concerned - personally as an individual i give a bunch of stuff for free and i do not care about getting any value out of them, but at the same time i wouldn't build a business around giving out stuff for free).

Past tense need not be used. You are not forced to give all your data to others, even today.

It's just less than trivial to get it running yourself.

Reminds me I need to check in on https://Sandstorm.io and see how they're doing. I've tried to install it a couple of times and bounced off of it a couple times, not always due to things that are their fault (i.e., they do sensible things with DNS but my managed DNS provider won't let me set up the requisite records in their "easy" interface, and I'm not quite motivated to go all the way back to running my own bind).

As Kenton has said [1], Sandstorm is basically dead. I regret that I didn't do more to support and promote it before it was too late.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312789

> I sometimes wonder what the world would look like had more free licenses (such as MIT/BSD) been just a bit more popular during critical points in history, or had less free options like GPLv3 or AGPL come a bit sooner as viable options.

It would have stayed as it was and how we are now back to, thanks to adoption of MIT/BSD and daemonising of GPL.

Public Domain, Sharewhare, Demoware, whateverware.

They too used to occasionally provide source code for the free/demo version.

Very valid point. This is the elementary difference between open source (which won) and free software (which lost).

I blame RMS for forcing an ideology down our throats that a majority don't care about for the sake of some unfeasible purity. It's like he said to himself, "What would I have to do to be the smuggest most technically correct man in existence? Alright, I'm going to live like that regardless of the world and shove it in everyone's face."

I use my computer to do work. I don't have time for my computer to be some social battleground first-world-problem and quite frankly I don't care. RMS is right but he has the answer to an irrelevant question that nobody asked.

The ideology had a place when the majority of computer users were the high priests and the rabble didn't need to be accommodated. Now the computing literati are a small minority and corporate interests can't be influenced by them.