[jacquesm]

Wow, what a lot of hate for RMS in this thread. All I know for sure is that I wouldn't be writing this on the machine I'm using here without him, and a ton of hardware in this house would spontaneously stop working if every line of code he had an (indirect) hand in or influence on disappeared. I'm pretty grateful for that.

Of course you could say the same about Edison or Maxwell, but that's roughly the right magnitude. Hating on Stallman as a person is not very elegant, hating him for the wrong reasons (at a glance, I spot: jealousy, misunderstanding, claims of irrelevancy and so on) is not productive either.

If you're going to criticize criticize the particulars of the linked article rather than the man. Thanks.

On topic: In case you didn't get it: the article (rightly) identifies software-as-a-service as a threat to open source, it allows companies that in the past would have shipped binaries and would have been compelled by the GPL to release their sources to do an end-run around all this so they can charge you for their software without ever having to release anything. That's a valid point and plenty of examples exist in the world today.

How serious this is is not for me to say but I do note an ever increasing trend towards lock-in and a more asymmetric internet which seems to draw a line between the 'haves' (the owners of infrastructure and services) and the 'have nots' (the users, smaller businesses). Ever larger chunks of a business operation are running on hardware and software even the business owners have no control over, stuff they couldn't keep alive even if their business depended on it. This sort of inter-dependency is exactly what we should be trying to avoid because it means that you are simply no longer in control, either because you don't have access to all the code that powers your business or because your code is only a minor extension to a bunch of black box code that you can not review or inspect on a machine that might be running all kinds of nefarious stuff besides what you think it is doing and that might come back to bite you one day.

[pmoriarty]

Software as a Service is a huge threat to Free software in particular, and Open Source in general.

This is why I release all my own software under the AGPL.[1][2]

I also try to avoid using SaaS as much as possible. But this is going to remain very difficult until fully decentralized, peer-to-peer communication networks become widespread.

As long as centralized forums like HN, centralized mail services like GMail, and centralized social networks like Facebook dominate, it's going to be hard for you to keep your data out of their hands without refusing to participate in electronic communication at all. While any sort of data, from email to TCP packets, flows from your own machine through others outside your control, this will remain the case.

Complete freedom will require complete isolation. Anything less will be a compromise. Everyone will have to determine where they draw the line for themselves.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

[2] - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

[jacquesm]

This should be periodically reposted or sticky somehow:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

John Walker was pretty prescient when he wrote that.

(and in case you don't know who he is: he founded Autodesk).

[MrDom]

> But this is going to remain very difficult until fully decentralized, peer-to-peer communication networks become widespread.

Do you think they ever will? There's not much financial incentive for companies to embrace decentralized p2p and there's a clear financial incentive for SaaS. Until that situation reverses itself, we have a problem.

[pdkl95]

In addition to the hate for RMS, just look at how many people are distracted by the argument over development models. PHK was right[1] - PSYOPS for nerds is easy; as easily-deployed distractions go, "profitability of Free Software" is right behind "GPL vs BSD".

[1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/nsa_operation...

[MrDom]

Most people hate individuals who act like they have greater moral authority than us mere mortals. It feels like an implicit judgement of our character. The fact that he's been proven right over and over makes it worse.

This thread could be a case study in debunking the claim that programmers are more logical and less prone to emotional manipulation than other humans. From everything I've seen, programmers are actually more emotionally sensitive than the rest of the population and thus are more susceptible to emotional arguments than logical ones. After all, logic we can trace and refute. It's harder to refute feelbad.