/tech/ - Technology

Is that really him? Holy shit

>>21739
mans shit got fucked up harder than Brendan Fraser

This is so sad, I didn't know he had cancer.

>>21741
it was revealed today

>>21742
It was revealed two days ago at the 40th birthday party of GNU.

Noooooo

GNUbros..

>>21747
;_;

sign the get well card
https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/96283632

>>21751
> RMS has actual autism (though he claims he only has a "shadow variant") and hates socializing and public speaking, but he still traveled the world arguing for his beliefs despite it. He's still at it despite having cancer, being old and being hated by the mainstream tech press. He is devoted to his ideals in a way few people are.
:(

>>21751
What an awful site. You can tell they tried copying leftypol.org but failed miserably.

Are YOU safe?

>>21761
Yeah…

>>21761
incels take note not everyone is born to be a bvll turn ur sexual energies inwards

>>21761
disregard popularity, acquire freedom

A major problem is that the chemotherapy machine uses proprietary software so he's refusing treatment :'(

I'm happy for u or sorry that happened

>>21761
Based as fuck.

>>21737
the sad reality is that no one has taken up his ideological mantle and the worst part is that the FSF is full of vultures looking for an opportunity to compromise his vision on behalf of corporate and government scum. they already tried very hard once and almost succeeded in kicking him out but he returned, they will completely subvert the FSF if he isn't around.

here's the final get well card and rms' response to it. it warms my heart that I was able to brighten his day

>>21817
also I was able to hide a message in it without /g/ noticing

>>21817
>>21818
>also I was able to hide a message in it without /g/ noticing
wait what

>>21819
bottom center

Nah the FSF will be fine, but it is a shame to see a real one go out like this.

BSDgods WON

>>21737
It won't die if they'll appoint someone who actually cares about libre software like, I dunno, Mako or Moglen.

>>22016
>[OSI shills] won
BSD has nothing to do with the OSI whatsoever, opinions of some of their outspoken developers notwithstanding, OSI has influence both in GNU/Linux and in BSD communities, excluding more ideologically dedicated distros like Debian and Trisquel.

>>21818
you should use steganography to do that

Stallman isn't the only person in the world that cares about FOSS and libre software. Most stuff GNU did, it did without him involved.

>>22896
He has a pretty strong influence on the "party line" of the FSF due to his position in the organization, despite not being personally involved in coding projects for several decades.

He'll make it. He's too annoying to die…

>>22899
He is still "personally involved", just not writing any of the code.

>>22896
is that why corporations are trying to get rid of him personally so much even inventing false controversies

>>22903
My impression was that those were mostly driven by opportunists who want to be the next prophet of Free Software, not corporations. Corporations have open source, they don't care about Free Software.

>>22904
>Corporations have open source, they don't care about Free Software.
Depends on how greedy the corporation is.

https://unixsheikh.com/articles/some-of-the-problems-with-the-gpl.html
>One of the problems is that when a company cannot fully control how they share their code, they either don't use the software, or instead try hard to "hijack" the project by political maneuverings or by simply purchasing the project.

>These restrictions not only harm projects with more open licenses, such as the BSD lincenses, but it also sometimes put a company in a really difficult position. Rather than releasing source code, the company may try to influence the upstream project by hiring one or more of the developers and then try to effect the project to make changes upstream that helps the company implement whatever solutions they require. Once these political maneuverings begins it often has very detrimental effects on the free software community because it rarely stops there.

>>22905
This is retarded, systemd was not hijacked, it was a new thing.

>>22904
>My impression was that those were mostly driven by opportunists who want to be the next prophet of Free Software
usually by watering down its radicalism

>>22905
wtf is that rightoid permissivecuck article you just linked

>>22905

Unixsheikh has always been dumb, this post is just generic, run-off-the-mill permissive license proaganda that many BSD users ( including unixsheikh ) propagate. There's some valid criticism in there, but to accept the blogpost at face value, there's lots of things one needs to presuppose that radical left-wingers question.

There is some credence to the idea that we should license permissively because companies will never care and these freedoms might make it easier to petit-bourgs and freestanding individuals to use these softwares.

Another valid criticism would be that permissive licenses serve the devs, not the users, though this dichotomy would be lifted in care the software was easily programmable from the get-go, and would lead the users naturally to programming it. The term for this kind of software is "malleable". Emacs is one such example, but there used to be more such things around. The dev-user dichotomy only serves companies who want their teams of chosen "elite" to develop the their wares in order have control over them, so this kind of software mostly died out.

This lead me to think that social organisation behind the software and the human-computer interaction is want to create is infinitely more important than licensing or contracts. I think we should judge software based on how much (use) value it provides to what kinds of people, and how its development is done. Is the software made by, and for, corporate entities? Does using it make it easier for the local community to do their daily tasks? In my opinion, malleability with out freedom is assholary, and freedom without malleability is mostly doomed to fail, unless it's situated software.

I recommend the following essays and blogposts. They display the struggle for liberatory change, and might give people ideas on how to act.

https://lipu.dgold.eu/free-doesnt-mean-free
https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html
https://malleable.systems/
https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
https://applied-langua.ge/posts/the-poverty-of-post-open-source.html
https://www.lord-enki.net/medium-backup/2019-09-20_Freeing-software-3e3ede439f20.html

>>22938
>The term for this kind of software is "malleable". Emacs is one such example, but there used to be more such things around. The dev-user dichotomy only serves companies who want their teams of chosen "elite" to develop the their wares in order have control over them, so this kind of software mostly died out.
Another term is "communal computing", see >>22110

I don't remember which video, but Luke Smith once basically made a Ted Kaczynski-ite argument about how if you use software that you don't fully understand and can't maintain yourself, it's not really "open source" in the way that you would hope. You're kind of at the whim of the direction the project takes, so it controls you more than you control it. Thus the motivation to use suckless/minimalist software.

>>22976
>if you use software that you don't fully understand and can't maintain yourself, it's not really "open source" in the way that you would hope
Hot take: all libre software should be written in Python with a quick compiler/interpreter like PyPy making it executable at a fast-enough speed.

>>22976

Yes, communal computing is a great term.

On the whole stack thingy: I don't really like the "primitivist" argument. I think this is a reactionary idea, an idealized, mythical, "simpler" past. It also stems from the myth of the "lone hacker", who is empowered. IMO communities should be empowered instead. A blogpost I really like on the topic is https://amodernist.com/texts/counterfactual.html . The idea is that personal computing atomizes people, makes them into individuals in the same way as neoliberal ideology likes to imagine people.

>>23006
>The idea is that personal computing atomizes people
False, it just gives you autonomy. Personal computing is not contradictory to cooperation. Or what, you want to return to the times of terminals connecting to a single mainframe or perhaps want us to send all our data to third-party remote servers?
>makes them into individuals
Ughhhh, how many times do I have to say this? An individual is born, not created.

>>23016 (me)
Marxists: "Personal property is not private property."
Also Marxists: "Personal computing is bourgeois individualism."

>>21737 Seeing Stallman without hair is like a bear without hair. Just unnatural, wrong. Hoping he makes a speedy recovery.

>>23006
I'm pretty sure Luke Smith is a fascist, so I think your instincts are mostly correct. Small projects can be built by a lone individual, so it make sense that most suckless software is basically just rehashed existing unix utilities. But bigger, meaningfully useful software requires people with different areas of expertise.

the free software movement has basically been irrelevant for awhile now anyways, and rms hasn't helped that with how it's all devolved into an asinine cult of personality around him and his autistic nitpicking that doesn't actually do anything to advance free software. under his leadership, we've seen FOSS get totally co-opted by corpo software through "open source" shit, including linux itself. I don't have any ill will towards him as a person and think he deserves recognition for the things he's done to found the free software movement and developing GCC, but to paraphrase rms himself, I won't be glad when he's dead but I'll be glad when he's gone.

>>23037
its more popular than ever though (it was even less popular before)

>>23038
the popularity of linux has come at a massive compromise to the principles of free software. I say this as someone who is relatively critical of stallmanist autism that leads to shit like people saying that the *BSDs aren't free software because of firmware that is provided in the repos despite the linux kernel literally having binary blobs in it (unless you use linux-libre, which hardly anyone does). but there's a huge amount of corpo astroturfing going on with linux, lots of tech companies are deeply invested in trying to push their agenda onto the linux community, and like I said, companies like Google have literally been successful enough at this to get their proprietary binary blobs into the kernel.

you can argue that this is a pragmatic compromise, but if that's the case, then it's contradictory to say this when the official position of the FSF and GNU has been rms's autistic nitpicking about certain competing UNIX-like OSes not being free software despite by default being entirely free with no binary blobs. the hardline FOSS movement has become totally irrelevant and basically provides free labor to tech companies, and I blame a lot of this on rms himself and his cult of personality influence over it.

>>23040
>the hardline FOSS movement has become totally irrelevant and basically provides free labor to tech companies
but it doesnt because youre talking about the open source movement

>>23041
linux is the flagship FOSS project and has for a long time been increasingly exploited by tech companies who not only get to profit of the labor of FOSS development but also force themselves into positions of influence within projects like linux so that they can secure positions of entrenched authority. as much as people meme about this for the wrong reasons, systemd is a good example of this: it's become increasingly difficult for linux distributions to work without systemd because so much of the linux desktop has become reliant on it, and this is a project that is explicitly controlled by vested corporate interests. I don't like systemd very much personally, but I understand the value it can provide, but the problem is that there are corporate entities who get involved in FOSS projects and astroturf it by "giving" them "free" development with the intent of sliding projects towards being dependent on their technologies.

it doesn't matter what software is licensed under, corporations will find a way to subvert these licenses and retain control over things they're using and have a financial incentive to have control over. it's otherwise pretty risky to take advantage of all this free labor but be at the whims of unpaid hobbyist developers just making cool shit for themselves. this is fundamentally a problem with the free software movement, especially under rms's leadership, is that the threat of corporate subversion has never been within its scope. as much as leftists want to cope about how FOSS is communism-esque, it's more like history repeating itself with the enclosure of the commons.

there is not, and never has been, any significantly radical politics behind the free software movement, and the blame for this can be placed squarely on rms's leadership, who is at best kind of a weird libertarian or Green Party guy with some demsoc sympathies. this is why, as I said, I don't have any ill-will towards him personally. it's not like he's a lolbert or a nazi or something like a lot of tech people, but he's always been kind of misguided and naive about certain things because he has the autistic tunnel vision. which like, I get it, but it doesn't change the fact that the free software movement is failing to succeed at its own aims. it continues to work on its projects like linux, GCC, and the coreutils, and their labor is taken advantage of by tech companies who don't just "steal" it without contributing anything back (which would be a far preferable option since it's not like there's any scarcity with the products of programming labor) but also try to essentially put themselves into managerial positions. the more hardline FOSS gets, the less it's able to get anything done that matters, and it leads to nonsense like "FSF approved" hardware/distros that are irrelevant to everyone except for people who have fallen for the PURE IDEOLOGY *zizek sniff* of stallmanism.

>>23036
>I'm pretty sure Luke Smith is a fascist
He's just a Christian conservative boomer. He's still annoying, I don't watch him.

>>23037
>his autistic nitpicking that doesn't actually do anything to advance free software. under his leadership
>we've seen FOSS get totally co-opted by corpo software through "open source" shit
Pick one. The "open source shit" exists precisely because Stallman cannot actually force everyone to promote software freedom, the OSI was basically an external initiative by people unaffiliated wich RMS. RMS has denounced the OSI from the beginning but what do you expect him to do really? Threaten the OSI leadership with suicide bombings?
>>23040
>I say this as someone who is relatively critical of stallmanist autism that leads to shit like people saying that the *BSDs aren't free software because of firmware that is provided in the repos despite the linux kernel literally having binary blobs in it
It's not contradictory. If a *BSD or a GNU/Linux installation has no proprietary blobs then they're 100% libre software. If not then they're not, it's just the reality of life (still better than Windows certainly). The FSDG exists purely to promote libre software and the FSF, it doesn't actually tell you what distro is libre and what isn't. Debian is libre and so is Gentoo.
>there is not, and never has been, any significantly radical politics behind the free software movement
It was always a single-issue movement, what did you expect? Its main benefit is providing radicals with the tools to hide from surveillance capitalism and resist the expansion of the Big Tech's proprietary spyware, I never viewed it as actually "revolutionary."
>their labor is taken advantage of by tech companies who don't just "steal" it without contributing anything back (which would be a far preferable option since it's not like there's any scarcity with the products of programming labor) but also try to essentially put themselves into managerial positions
>the more hardline FOSS gets, the less it's able to get anything done that matters
Again, pick one. FOSS becoming more hardline is precisely the response to this corporate influence, it's dialectical, Watson.

>>23045

What he stands for in the public eye (what remains of it) and in IT culture these days is basically equivalent to
a) personally not owning slaves
b) not eating meat
c) etc.


Not doing the bad thing won't amount to the replacement of the old system. On the other hand, the nitpicking about what are basically lifestyle choices are exclusionary and deter action. Fits into the "pick your identity" lifestylism of the era.

This is expected, capitalism hijacks movements to the best of its ability, and free software was capitalism-friendly from the start.

>>23045
>what do you expect him to do really? Threaten the OSI leadership with suicide bombings?
yes

>>24777
Happy Hacking, tripsman.

>>23067
Gentoo is old forced meme now. Install guix, it respects your freedom by default. Stallman, the GNU project, and the FSF approve.

>>24777
So he wasn't just hiding a balloon under his shirt…

>>24777
Alright I'm happy for the blessed autist. He was right about a lot of things. Nature is healing.
>>24778
> Install guix
Gib your comrades a paragraph about it