[SwellJoe]

I've always argued that RMS is an excellent counter-balancing influence. While the line for acceptable behavior keeps being pushed by corporate and state interests away from privacy, away from user and developer freedom, away from the notion that there are conversations that should be free of marketing, he holds the other end down, making the center fall somewhat closer to recognition of human dignity in digital matters.

That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations.

The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story).

Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.

[mikegioia]

I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google.

How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you.

There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.

[hga]

Forget about smartphones for a moment; with minimal exceptions, he doesn't use the web interactively (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html). That very much makes him a "relic", and detached from so much knowledge, the Zeitgeist of the times.

Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.

[vezzy-fnord]

I don't follow. How does supporting RMS' ideals imply you have to adopt his computing habits to the fullest? I don't recall him ever making such a claim. His is mostly to avoid profiling and non-free JavaScript, but not something he insists everyone advocating free software to do.

[hga]

One point is that his take on the "technological vastness of the future" we now live in has become so circumscribed that his advice WRT to is is getting less and less relevant.

At another level it's making him more and more ignorant, since the price for him to do the research necessary to chart wise paths in things like FSF/GNU governance is so high.

To draw back from the weeds, how can he be "The Hero the Internet Needs" when he is so disconnected from it? Per the essay, his argument has no nuance, it is to not be a part of this thing which, at least to my paranoid mindset, is indeed just as dangerous as portrayed, but which offers vast benefits for being (a careful) part of. Especially for the vast majority of us who, aren't, you know, (any more) a part of the MIT community or the like.

ADDED: Maybe to draw back even further, he's not wise; that doesn't disqualify him from being A Hero of the Internet, but it's a significant thing.

[vezzy-fnord]

I still don't follow. Most noteworthy computer scientists, programmers and hackers have workflows that are totally heterodox or outside the norm. That doesn't make them any less authoritative or informed.

He definitely is informed on the subject, too. You can tell from his constant political notes and regularly updated boycotts or calls to action. He's active enough that he understands much of the web's giants from third-party sources or observation without having to directly use any services himself. Or are you suggesting that one cannot understand and criticize Facebook or Twitter without being a regular user? What a puerile and ludicrous assertion.

He's not disconnected from the Internet, nor the Web. He merely limits his exposure to it. Again, does one need to be intimately involved in their social media profiles to have the necessary prerequisites to speak against it?

I further do not understand how heterodox computing habits make the free software message any less relevant. What is so grand about the web that such a conclusion should be derived? SaaS? Non-free JavaScript? He voices out against those.

[SwellJoe]

Agreed. Popular culture has begun to appreciate nerds, but usually only the ones that have exhibited sort of evil tendencies at least some of the time (Zuckerberg, Jobs, etc.). So, a rich nerd who abuses privacy or profits from monopolistic practices is cool, but a nerd without a shitload of money is still just a nerd. Especially if the non-rich nerd is weird and uses weird phones, computers, etc. while treating it like it is an ethical decision rather than just being weird and isolated.

I can't criticize the general public, and kids, too harshly, because while I use Linux and Open Source software almost exclusively on my laptop and desktop, I also use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone (if I could find a decent Firefox phone in the US, I'd switch), I have an active facebook and Twitter account, etc. It's hard to treat these things as inherently dangerous, and thus something to actively avoid, when the world is so tied to them. And, replacing them is hard, because it takes millions of dollars and armies of engineers to build GMail or facebook at scale.

Which is kind of what I'm getting at. Without a mass movement of brilliant hackers, or at least very prolific ones, building open alternatives, we will eventually lose everything resembling privacy, developer freedom, and communities free of marketing. I'm not arguing things are worse or better than they were 20 years ago (that's an extremely complex and nuanced discussion to have, and for every stride forward, there have been dramatic losses), but there was an almost religious fervor behind the development of the Internet. Nearly everything that ran the Internet in the beginning was aggressively free or Open Source software: Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, QMail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, BSD, etc. Even the web browser, and all the other client software, started out free. It was based on a cultural belief that this thing we were building was meant to be free; a safe haven from state and corporate power, and a place where an individual had a meaningful contribution to make without needing permission.

So, while there's more Open Source and Free software than ever, and more developers building more code in public, I think that religious fervor has faded, and I think it's to our detriment.

I don't know what to do about it, and it may be that I miss the subtleties of what can be done about it (I grew up without the Internet, and learned it as a second language as an almost-adult; maybe there's something positive happening that I don't see or understand). But, I feel vaguely like we (anyone who cares and understands where we're from and where we're heading) should be doing something about it.

[mikegioia]

The religious fervor has definitely faded, yet we're in the largest open source software renaissance of all time. The reason is probably because OSS has "won". Not in the absolute sense that all software is open, but in the sense that businesses have fully realized the impact Eric Raymond prophesied in the late 90s.

That's why I think you're right. Without a growing movement of FOSS developers committed to making both software AND hardware, there won't be the necessary alternatives that regular people need to satisfy their underlying desire for the conveniences they're used to.

Each of these services would have to be dropped or replaced for you to consider yourself a full Stallmanite:

    - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat
    - Gmail, Outlook
    - Google Calendar
    - Google Maps, Mapquest, Bing maps
    - Mac computers, any non-Gnu laptop or desktop
    - Dropbox, iCloud, Skydrive, G-Drive
    - Google search
    - iPhones, Android phones

That's just some, and even I use Gmail because I can't find a valid alternative! That list is daunting and you're leaking privacy if you use even one of them. This is why the problem is so difficult: because you have to convince someone to stop using Facebook when you can't provide even a moderately valid alternative. Until there exists a compelling alternative to these services and devices, you have to rely on the general population developing that religious fervor.

So what do you do, build compelling alternatives? Or do you try to incite the masses on the dangers of privacy loss? It doesn't seem like option #2 has been working very well, but it actually does start to feel like #1 is developing. I'm starting to see more attempts at FOSS hardware on things like Indiegogo/Kickstarter. Maybe the secret isn't to replace each service, but to allow users to continuing using them more anonymously.

[jordigh]

> The reason is probably because OSS has "won". Not in the absolute sense that all software is open, but in the sense that businesses have fully realized the impact Eric Raymond prophesied in the late 90s.

This is kind of problematic and exactly why rms insists that we call it "free software" instead of "open source". The big goal shouldn't be to be a better business, but a better ethic.

[hga]

The religious fervor has definitely faded, yet we're in the largest open source software renaissance of all time. The reason is probably because OSS has "won". Not in the absolute sense that all software is open, but in the sense that businesses have fully realized the impact Eric Raymond prophesied in the late 90s.

I attribute this at least in part to the dot.com bust. FOSS, commodity x86s, etc. became a necessary virtue when you couldn't get VCs to shovel enough money to you to buy the expensive closed source stuff.

Did anyone use MySQL because it was a better database than Oracle? (OK, it was probably easier to administer, so substitute DB2 if you wish.)

[dwc]

> RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is.

I'm part of an older generation, and I view RMS largely as a crank. Yes, some of his ideas are valid and some of his warning seem almost prescient. But even way back when he wasn't the only person railing against injustice. I'd say that Stallman's effect has been net positive, but he's definitely not always on the right side of things.

We need not only new voices, but different voices coming from a different sensibility. We don't need an updated, modern Stallman. We need someone else, who shares Stallman's passion and commitment but not his off-kilter perspective.