Slashdot Mirror
Stallman Does Slides -- and Brevity -- For TEDx
New submitter ciaran2014 writes Richard Stallman's long-format talks are well-known — there are videos going back to 2001 and transcripts dating back to 1986 — but he recently condensed his free software talk down to 14 minutes and set it to hand-drawn slides for TEDxGeneva (video link). He introduces with the four freedoms, as always, and then moves on to spyware, surveillance, non-free drivers, free software in schools, non-free javascript, Service as a Software Substitute and how free software is today necessary for a strong democracy. As usual, the talk is suitable for non-technical audiences.
There's a big difference between physical things that have limits (land, food, water, etc) and 'intellectual property' which can be copied any number of times at virtually no cost. Until physical items are limitless or there is overwhelming cost to reproduce ideas, GPL and communism will be incomparable.
Stallman is not a "communist"...it's 2014, and we've progressed as a society beyond pointless politically charged words like 'communism' because it means 'totalitarian state' in some contexts and 'socialist utopia' in others...one has freedom one does not...it has cause **litterally** millions of unecessary arguments for decades in the 20th century
slapping a dumb label like "communist" on theories like Stallman's only serves to cause confusion and pointless arguments
Thank you Dave Raggett
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Stallman is the crazy outlier. Where he stands, at the very edge, is exactly where we need him to be. You dont have to follow all of it, but there would be less of his ideas if he was more concerned with being central and accessible. There is a point to Stallman being far out there, its so the rest of us dont have to. Let him do his thing.
Good-bye
He'd be fine with everything being BSD licensed forever (FreeBSD is a BSD distribution / OS not a license). But he's smart enough to know that BSD licensed software doesn't stay that way in the real world. There is a long proven track record of BSD software getting embedded in commercial software and becoming effectively or actually closed.
What a load of Redmond Propaganda. If I have your binary, I will find lots of vulnerabilities because I am an x86 assembly expert with a CS degree. And I have some serious debugging tools. Of course, I also need plenty of time to do that. So if my financiers are the U.S. military or the Chinese military or the Russian mafia, I will get all your "hidden" bugs. Google did this for a demonstration and found dozens of exploitable bugs in Adobe products.
So you are "secure" against the badly funded criminals, but everything is open to the really dangerous criminals.
I will be snide and I will not post as AC. There are too many comments labelling Stallman as a uncompromising, communist, extremist, liberal, etc... Though it may be true, without his uncompromising stance on freedom, would we have GNU/Linux? Would the Open Source movement even exists?
Sure, there would be source code out there on the web, and the BSDs would probably exists, but he's fighting to ensure that we do not lose the very freedoms that we enjoy with (forgive the term) FLOSS software.
Yes, I run a Linux distro with non-free warts (Mint), I use proprietary software (Steam). But for the most part, I'm in control of my computer, and quite thankful of that. I may not live in the 'ideal' free world of Stallman, but without folks like Stallman and their extreme position on freedom, I suspect the world of computers would be much more closed.
Thank you Richard Stallman for your fight.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
I don't believe for a moment that Stallman is reduced to hand-drawing slides because he believes hand-drawn slides are better.
Yeah, I don't presume to know his rationale. The hand drawn thing just prodded me to make an observation between projection modes. It's not trying to argue from authority, but doing this sort of thing for 30 some years, I at least have a fairly informed opinion.
And if he does believe that, his slides certainly don't demonstrate it, as pretty much every other TED talk with a presentation is better than this one.
It gives the impression that whatever free presentation apps there are (Libreoffice Impress?) are pretty bad.
Well, we're all allowed to draw our own conclusions, although that is an odd one. Impress is fully functional, and I've done many presentations in it. Perhaps you just don't like Linux?
This is one of the major reasons I don't like free software. There is little attention to quality.
I suppose it depends on the definition of quality. I used to have nightmares trying to go between Microsoft Office for PC, and Mac. It was simply not compatible with itself. For that reason, It fails my quality test.
On the other hand, LibreOffice for Mac, PC, and Linux does not have that problem. I go back and forth, and the only issue is if I'm using an obscure font that might not be on another machine. And if I can get my work actually done, instead of fussing with fonts, background colors, and other non compatible differences, well, we might just have a different definition of quality.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.