[bell-cot]

Reaction: Mr. Stallman's idyllic worldview does not seem to admit that someone may actually own the computer system in question, or otherwise have legal rights to set limits on who uses the system, when, and for what purposes.

And what was allowed by the social norms of the tiny 1980's *nix computing world, or what you can get away with when you're as famous as Mr. Stallman...those may not translate well to other contexts.

[seabird]

Stallman's ideas are often informed by high trust environments and business arrangements where the cost of the software itself is a fraction of the TCO. There's a big disconnect between the environment where Stallman made up his mind (large education/business environments) and how most people are introduced to free software (low cost entry into technical computer usage).

I used to think Stallman was an ideologue from a different era. When I started dealing with software projects measured in years and millions his thoughts made much more sense to me. When you're selling me a system that has a 6/7 digit implementation cost for it to stand any chance of meeting my goals, withholding the source code only serves to annoy me.

[Dylan16807]

Withholding source code is obnoxious in any era. But that's a pretty distant issue from administrative privileges.

[seabird]

Non-administrative users are given administrative privileges to complete their work all the time, even today. Misuse results in them being disciplined or fired. Heavy-handed privilege controls are very often a drain on the productivity of users and can result in stupid or dangerous (from a security standpoint) workarounds. 20 years on, you have to exercise more judgement in what you allow considering modern risks, but the idea that you shouldn't make things harder for people over a small number of bad actors that you can handle at an organizational level is still a good one.

[gorjusborg]

It does seem a very strange position when today's sensibilities are applied.

I do understand the point of view when I think back. Today, Unix-like systems are everywhere. Learning it and working with it is a given. Back then, having access to a unix system was not a given. It was very expensive for hardware and software. The idea that one would be so close to the system and could be denied enough access by an overzealous BOFH was too much to take.

It just goes to show that circumstances change, and things can get weird if we don't change with it.

[treffer]

Well, I am a bit unsure if it does or does not translate well....

One of my favorites is extensive rights management. Especially on CMS. More ofte than not it is part of a buying decision, but used Stallman style soon after.

The observation that these credentials leak is correct. Or that you grow permissions over time for no other reason than doing work. A wheel group would today quickly attract users, too.

So let it be. The latest iteration is "basically let everyone, but audited and short term only". I find that very close to Stallmanns idea, for very different reasons.

[hackan]

legal rights? "I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers." He is pretty clear...

[bell-cot]

Reaction: How does that ideal play out, when a few kiddies start running fork bombs on a *nix system that Mr. Stallman wants to use?

[NoZebra120vClip]

This actually went on for many years.

rms famously refused to secure his account @gnu.ai.mit.edu, and so the machine basically became an open shell server for every hacker in the world, ca. 1992.

Lots of hijinks ensued, and it was usually not possible to do anything useful in that account, since it was usually broken or pwned in remarkable ways. But they were wild, fun times.

[segfaultbuserr]

In a similar vein, EFF cofounder John Gilmore famously refused to secure his SMTP server at toad.com [1]. He believed SMTP should be open for all just like the old days, potentially making it basically an open relay for every hacker and spammer in the world. And so, he got into trouble with his ISP. Gilmore said the server was in fact rate-limited and the abuse potential was not as large as it appeared to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activi...

[NoZebra120vClip]

Hah! I don't doubt it, but amusingly that section of the article is blissfully free of citations or sources, just some original research. Cool stuff.

I used to do dumb stuff by telnetting to mail servers, back in the day. I think I really annoyed a few coworkers with that; one said he almost called CERT.

I think it was one of the earliest Cybersecurity realizations I had about how insecure the Internet really was, based as it was on blind trust among hosts that were supposed to have legitimate admins in control. I found that it was so easy to telnet to a mail server and feed it whatever you wanted, this must be the tip of the iceberg. And it was!

[thriftwy]

Fork bomb does not need root to function.

[berbec]

:(){ :|:& };:

explodes fine as a regular user

[TillE]

Only if you haven't configured sane limits.

[nisegami]

Legal rights are not moral rights.

[nightpool]

Compare to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37173339 which has a lot of discussions of similar issues for "modern" security configurations. Just because IT admins can choose to set a short session expiration on your SSO integration for your MDM managed laptop doesn't mean that we should cooperate with them or develop tools to let them do that.

[indymike]

> someone may actually own the computer system in question,

And that person may not be the systemadmin

[voz_]

I can’t stand his holier than thou writing. No amount of brilliance or clever code makes someone less of an asshole.

[rvnx]

Some people are so dazzled by singing and dancing skills, that they consider their singer to be a hero and a nice guy.

Similarly, Stallman's coding expertise can sometimes overshadow any potential shortcomings in the non-IT subjects.

[mcpackieh]

Personally, I'm dazzled by Stallman's singing and dancing skills.

Join us now and share the software,

You'lll be free, hackers, you'll be freee

Also by his uncanny tendency to be proven correct in matters concerning software freedom. His coding expertise are tertiary at most. Honestly, I never see people praise RMS's coding expertise, where are you even getting that idea from? I don't think you get it why people like RMS.

[rvnx]

You just pinpointed the problem.

He is good at one domain, and then by cognitive bias people think he is right on everything.

It’s not true at all, and I think you have to take a bit of distance with glorifying IT personalities.

Like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stallman, and many others (especially in the VC world) it’s important to take them with a grain of salt, and not accept them as perfect nice guys because they have money (Musk) or influence (Stallman).

Otherwise they can spread dangerous ideas that normally should 100% be challenged, but that are not, due to blind acceptance.

[mcpackieh]

> He is good at one domain, and then by cognitive bias people think he is right on everything.

You really don't get it at all. You're out of touch. People think that Stallman is right about one thing only, software freedom, and think he's out of touch with virtually everything else.

[rvnx]

Well we actually somehow agree, but for different reasons.

It's good, for a second I thought you were supporting his views on non-IT topics.

The problem is that the political speeches are part of the person, and the scope way way beyond software.

They are really interleaved with (supposed) IT topics, like if IT was a bait.

Once I went to one of his conference, and I had "learnt" more about "sex" and "facism" than software engineering or freedom.

[ye-olde-sysrq]

> If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

Should this be that far-fetched though? That employees might not be simple thralls of the capitalist, whose agency extends only as far as his master permits?

It reminds me of something I'd read that one of the reasons modern capitalism is so borked is because the founding fathers weren't conceiving of things like "Amazon" existing, where one entity employs a staggeringly large number of employees. Or that a small number of companies would employ such a large percentage of workers.

Their worldview was that where most people were "self-employed" - and if they weren't, employers were small and had a few or tens of employees at most. Or it was a matter of master and apprentices where both groups were investing heavily in each other in a trade and in the running of a shop.

So, while yes our current system finds it a matter of course that employees are utterly subject to the whims of their employer and the legal and economic system fully supports them in this, does it have to be that way?

(I know you can go be a contractor, but good luck with health insurance and etc etc etc all the other things that being yoked to an employer brings that I wish were just public taxpayer-funded services).

[aquova]

> It reminds me of something I'd read that one of the reasons modern capitalism is so borked is because the founding fathers weren't conceiving of things like "Amazon" existing, where one entity employs a staggeringly large number of employees. Or that a small number of companies would employ such a large percentage of workers.

I'm not quite sure I buy that argument. They lived in the time of the East India Company, which owned something like 50% of the world's trade at the time and ruled several nations.

[ye-olde-sysrq]

Yeah, there's definitely counterexamples. I thought of East India too. I really wonder what operating a huge company like that looked like in an era where the fastest way to transport messages was to have fresh horses pre-positioned every X miles and have someone gallop your message non-stop. I assume it was very different from Amazon employees peeing in bottles to avoid getting dinged for metrics.

[bell-cot]

> I really wonder what operating a huge company like that looked like in an era...

Lots of attempts to standardize procedures, etc., etc. - but East India agents far from home often had enormous latitude, and there were plenty of disasters and atrocities. (Not that either the British Government proper, or other European powers, were notably better. But they could certainly be worse - just look at the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, or the Belgian Congo.)

> ...the fastest way to transport messages was to have fresh horses pre-positioned ...

When there were enough short-but-important messages to be passed along a given route, they did have a far-faster-than-a-horse technology available - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph#India