News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on An elegy for GNU and RMS. Parent comment

Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by shadowgovt on Saturday October 01, 2022 @11:53PM (#33052659)
If anything, I think Stallman represents an increasingly-obsolete view of computer freedom. It is perhaps worth meditating on what happens to the protagonist of A Man For All Seasons.

This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.

New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by yjftsjthsd-h on Sunday October 02, 2022 @12:10AM (#33052761)
> Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer?

Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute.

> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud,"

Er, no? They wrote the AGPL.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by shadowgovt on Sunday October 02, 2022 @01:36PM (#33058209)
> Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute.

Sorry, that makes no sense. I have no right to the source code of the bank's ATM, and even less right to run any software I choose on that hardware.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by yjftsjthsd-h on Sunday October 02, 2022 @07:38PM (#33061556)
You're welcome to that opinion, but you're just arguing against Free Software in general; that's exactly the same argument as saying that the user has no right to inspect or control the software running on their own machine.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by shadowgovt on Sunday October 02, 2022 @11:02PM (#33063042)
It's not the same because the ATM isn't my own machine.

Nor is an AWS node.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by matheusmoreira on Sunday October 02, 2022 @12:58AM (#33052998)
No idea why you're being downvoted. You're completely right. Computing is increasingly centralized in corporation servers. Our computers are becoming appliances. We're no longer in control. We can't run software on them without some corporation's blessing.

Free software presupposes free general purpose computers. It assumes we can write software and run it on our devices. What is the point of free software if we can't run it because the corporation that actually owns the keys to the machine won't sign off on it?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:An elegy for GNU and RMS by jlkuester7 on Sunday October 02, 2022 @10:56AM (#33056386)
> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.

Lol wut? I feel like this comment is willfully ignoring hugely popular projects such as Nextcloud! There are lots of GPL web services that are available which provide 'Cloud' functionality without being crazy invasive proprietary data-mining platforms....

It seems to me that these services certainly reflect a good portion of 'GNU Philosophy'...

[ Parent | on HN ]