[kergonath]

> Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise.

I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?

> For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust.

The driving force was (and still largely is) protecting copyrighted video content. That is bullshit, of course, but cheaters and video games were far down the priority pile when hardware DRM was designed. Now, it’s all about secure computing and sandboxes, and video games are still pretty much an afterthought.

> And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.

The average teenage gamer does not care. There are things we can do to improve the situation with DRM, but “how do you do fellow kids” from an old neck beard is way off the mark, and indeed laughable.

[peoplefromibiza]

> I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?

[anecdotal]

luck has nothing to do with being wise.

anyway, I think unwise in this context means that RMS has been right more times than he's been wrong.

And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.

https://banksyexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LAUGH...

> The average teenage gamer does not care

that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.

[kergonath]

> luck has nothing to do with being wise.

Ok, let me reframe it. Do you have any example of anything being adversely affected by the fact that anybody ever laughed at RMS? Sure, he sound profound and far seeing, but his rhetoric is anything but subtle. He’s been way off for about 30 years now.

> And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.

I know what we owe him, but his contribution is long passed now. It does not turn him into a kind of universal genius. He’s outlived his usefulness as far as software freedoms are concerned. These day he’s more of a boogeyman than someone to take seriously, and he’s got only himself to blame.

> that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.

Do you remember what you did when you were in this situation? Personally, I mostly told my parents to fuck off and did whatever I wanted on my side, which was mostly what they did not want me to do. A condescending tone when you tell them what they ought to care about is not going to cut it. And I am saying that as a neck beard father.

[Jasper_]

Stallman rightly predicted that corporations want to amass power and control over you, and that counter-culture technologies like the computer and the Internet would slowly revert to mainstream, corporate-friendly and capitalism-friendly ideals as they become wider spread. This is hardly a fringe position.

But whereas a lot of others think the problems are structural to how society operates, and that fixing it would require rebuilding under a new economic framework, Stallman's only insight is that software you can't modify is the devil. DRM is bad not because it upholds a capitalist supply-and-demand system by restricting theoretically infinite supply, but because you can't modify the .c files yourself or send them to a friend.

It's an extremely limited way of thinking that ignores any external structural or economic motivations, and focuses on an unreasonably small niche subset with a black-and-white moral answer. It sometimes makes good points, mostly accidentally, but it still has a lot of misses, e.g. the religious persistence on "software" leads to programs like the FSF's Respect Your Freedoms with incoherent policies around hardware, firmware, and ROMs, mostly from a place of ignorance.

The free software movement was quickly co-opted by corporations as the "open-source movement" by executives looking to offload their labor costs onto unpaid workers, leading to a lot of under-funded core software infrastructure as corporations rank in the cash. Stallman's "Open Source Misses the Point" essay doesn't talk at all about this, it doesn't talk about the ways that open-source is about externalizing costs, nor about the way that it's leading to maintainer burn-out, it just points out that it's kinda bad that they're releasing stuff under the MIT license instead of the GPL, and would really much prefer if people didn't do that, while not realizing that was the goal all along.

The FSF has very little force in accomplishing their goals; it's a wet paper towel tossed vaguely in the direction of actual change.

[MaxBarraclough]

Do you recommend any other thinkers on these topics?

[Jasper_]

Don't limit yourself to technology and computers. These systems are political in nature; that is, they concern the basic fabric of how society is structured. One of the biggest tricks any new field has is thinking we're way different, won't repeat the mistakes of others. Both of these make it hard for me to recommend anything good here without getting myself into an internet argument I don't want at this point in time, but at least start reading some history of labor, of capitalism, and of corporations. A People's History of the United States is widely recommended as an intro to these things, and I might as well give it a namedrop here.

[MaxBarraclough]

I think you've just described all of leftist theory. I was wondering specifically about thinkers on Free and Open Source software taking a broader scope than what we tend to see from the FSF.

[guerrilla]

Just Google "Stallman was right", sounds like you might be in a bit if a bubble.

[kergonath]

Well yeah. I know he has been right on a couple of occasions. Still, how does this make me unwise for laughing at him? What went worse because I did so?

To be fair, his position was interesting in the 1980s. But he’s been hopelessly out of touch with the vast majority of computer users since the 1990s. He can keep harping on about the GPL and keep watching the world pass by.

[guerrilla]

Seems weird to laugh at someone who pretty consistently predicts the future. Does it make sense to laugh at physicists too? Was their predictive theory only relevant in the early 1900s?