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.

Comments

Where to draw the line

[TWX]

One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.

This confusion stems from his fairly regular changes as to what Linux distributions he's willing to endorse or criticize. At one point he was very happy with the Debian folks, but at some point decided that their making available non-GPL or other free-to-distribute-but-not-modify software was anathema, and last I looked (admittedly awhile ago) there were only a handful of very obscure Linux distributions that he actually endorsed. They're obscure because they don't have the software available that users want in order to have their computing experiences be the way they want them to be.

I get that the platform being open-source is a good thing, but I don't think that where he draws the line between platform and applications works well.

Re:Where to draw the line

[Grishnakh]

Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source. Remember, it all goes back to when he was trying to get a printer working, and couldn't because the driver was closed-source. That's why he invented the GPL, which just requires you to make source available to anyone whom you distribute software to.

But you're right: some parts are far more important than others. The platform being open-source is much, much more important than any high-level application being open-source. When the platform is closed and proprietary, you have all kinds of problems: you're locked in by the vendor, it's harder to write and debug applications, the platform vendor can have secret APIs to give them an advantage over third-party application vendors (we saw this with MS many times), you're stuck with drivers that vendors provide you and can't upgrade your platform software if the driver providers don't want you to (we've seen this with Windows upgrades, where older but perfectly functional hardware can't be used because the HW vendors didn't feel like updating their drivers for the new OS, since they want you to buy new HW), etc. Whereas if some random application is closed-source and proprietary, that doesn't affect anything at all except that one application.

Re:Where to draw the line

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused by your confusion. Stallman's been pretty consistent, unambiguous, and what irritates a lot of people about him, uncompromising. Since you mentioned the distros the FSF endorsed, then perhaps comparing them to the ones they don't endorse would help clear your confusion. http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

Re:Where to draw the line

[globaljustin]

drawing a line is the point...

i agree that Stallman's hyper-specific definitions are obtuse and ruin his theories...but they key here is to understand where he goes wrong and why it doesn't matter to discussions about FOSS

in Stallman, you can see the problem many anarchist/libertarian types have across disciplines...the problems they raise are good, their arguments are solid, but their conclusions about how to **move forward and fix the problem** are stilted and unworkable

it usually comes down to **language distinctions** which have deep consequences, and the mistake is to make distinctions linguistically where none exist functionally...you see a sort of logic game where every end is gamed out when forming language ontology...it's a fool's game...

Re:Where to draw the line

[ranton]

One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.

From what I can tell, he draws the line quite clearly. There is no place for traditional paid commercial software. It is okay to make money writing software, but it is never okay to keep even a single line of software secret from the general public.

I don't agree with his philosophy at all, but he seems to make it pretty clear where he stands. I honestly don't know every single public statement he has ever made though, so there could be some inconsistencies I don't know about. With such a hard line stance, it would be hard to not be accidentally hypocritical from time to time.

Re:Where to draw the line

[jbolden]

His position on platforms is:

a) Avoid at all costs embedding not free into free (i.e. what happened with commercial X11)
b) More free is preferable to less free, do the best you can.
c) For (b) the best you can is defined not by "this would be slightly annoying".

Re:Where to draw the line

[jbolden]

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.

Re:Where to draw the line

[guruevi]

A LOT of (embedded) appliances. VxWorks, Cisco, Juniper, McAfee, Check Point, NetApp...

Shortest version

[hajile]

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.

Well

[Ol Olsoc]

I've been in on maybe 5 thousand + meetings. PowerPoint is a dual edged sword. And both sides are kind of dull. The presenter always likes it, because it can make any old crap look nice and crisp, and has an undeserved cachet of credibility to it.

In the end though, it's effect is mind numbing.

If we could go back to pre-PowerPoint days for a moment, there were three main methods of presentation

1. Viewgraphs. These were the old 8.5 by 11 inch Ozalid or halftone images on transparent media placed on a light table with a projection lens.

2. 35 mm slides - this was for when you wanted to have a polished presentation. You knew you were getting some attention when presenting these.

3. Back to the view graph projector - the roll of transparent material that you drew on with a sharpie or similar instrument. Whne you were finished, you rolled a fresh surface, and drew some more.

What was good about these? The first two took a little work to prepare. And despite the idea that labor costs need to be minimized, just teh preparation effort mad you whittle the information down. That whittling process made presentations better.

The third method of real time drawing was pretty crude, but incredibly efficient for brainstorming.

Contrast to today, where it appears not a thought will be left unsaid. Presentations in general have become worse with the advent of PowerPoint. The ease with which you can add "one more slide" maenas that many people will add 25 "one more slides".

In the end, it is mind numbing. Engineers will spend time telling you about some minutiae they find interesting, Bean counters will spend forever trying to justify hiring a 100 k a year person to keep track of pencil theft, which is costing the company 5 hundred dollars a year, and on and on.

I'ts not a get off my lawn issue, it's just that the process has been made so easy it is abused, and pointless points are consistently made.

Re:Well

[CrankyFool]

I give a lot of presentations, both internal to my company and at conferences. Writing presentations is easy, and results in the issues you raised (and many others). Writing GOOD presentations is much harder, and takes a lot more effort.

For me, I find the key to making a presentation that my audience will value is exactly that -- the audience. I try to figure out what it is my audience wants to learn and hear about. I'm not there to talk about whatever the hell it is I want to talk about -- I'm there to communicate something that's going to make a difference for the people in the audience (and, given audience focus, I also make sure I practice my presentations well enough that I know how long they'll take and I MAKE SURE to leave time for questions. Presenters who run out of time are just lazy).

I think presentations are like writing code -- in the end, it's really up to the author, most of the material out there is bad, and the editor (whether vim, emacs, Sublime Text, Atom, IntelliJ, or pick your favorite IDE) has little to do with the quality of the product. At most, and at best, the presentation software makes the mechanical effort a little easier.

Re:Well

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

not communism

[globaljustin]

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

Re:not communism

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds RMS totalitarian in his views.

Against the backdrop of the current U.S. political climate it seems particularly absurd to label RMS of all people totalitarian.

Re:not communism

[smittyoneeach]

I think his role as FSF cheerleader #1 requires inflexibility. RMS certainly plays the role with gusto. What else is he supposed to do? I guess we'll find out when existential inevitabilities catch up with him, and someone else has to try to be RMS.

Re:not communism

[jafac]

Does he endorse the workers owning the means of production? If not, then he is not a communist. End of discussion.

Re:No thanks

[Smallpond]

Have you noticed that Stallman only has power to the extent that people agree with him? That he has no means of enforcing anything other than by making a convincing argument? His highway has less tolls than any alternative.

Link to the video

[BasilBrush]

For those who want something more useful than webm:

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video...

Re:gonna enjoy it on my non-free computer + os

[UnknownSoldier]

"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

Re:No thanks

[spire3661]

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.

Re:how I prepare a presentation

[Registered Coward v2]

I started doing presentations back in the days of 35-mm slides. I didn't have to prepare them myself—I sent the text to the corporate slide presentation department, and they sent me back the slides.

I prepared my presentation by first writing out what I wanted to say, word for word. I then distilled that document into a few topic lines, which I had made into slides, generally about three topics to a slide. At this point I discarded the original manuscript. When I gave the presentation I glanced at each slide to remind me of what I wanted to say, then spoke extemporaniously.

Today I prepare the slides myself using LibreOffice Impress, the free equivalent of Microsoft PowerPoint, but I use the same method.

I have a similar background, except we had an editor who approved all slides. She was a ruthless, heartless person who lacked a soul while wielding a red pen like calvaryman's saber as she edited. In other words, the perfect editor. To this date, I cringe at a presentation withe text less than 16 pt and more than 20 words on a slide. When I see a sentence with a period on a slide I remember her admonition "Women have periods, slides don't."

Democracy is NOT freedom

[mfwitten]

Indeed, free software projects aren't even run as democratic organizations; rather, they are emergent hierarchies formed via the spontaneous participation of individuals.

Each person involved in free software chooses how to appropriate his own resources—that is, how to appropriate his own capital, including time, intellect, money, etc. Democracy, on the other hand, is about choosing how to appropriate someone else's resources, especially against that someone else's will, especially by threat of violence as punishment for noncompliance.

Democracy is no friend of freedom, and certainly no friend of free software.

Free software is flexible

[tepples]

Over the past few years, I've learned that people care more about "freedom" when it's called "flexibility". So I've come up with my own sound bite to summarize the benefit of free software: "Free software is flexible software. Using free software gives you the flexibility to hire anyone to make the program do what you want instead of some other big company wants."

FSF says permissive licenses appropriate sometimes

[tepples]

Give Stallman some software with a BSD license and see how he responds.

The FSF recognizes that a non-copyleft free software license is better in some cases, such as when trying to replace entrenched patented MP3 with newcomer free Vorbis (source; more reliable ones would be appreciated). It's also better for programs shorter than the GPL itself, as mentioned in the page about the suggested license for build scripts and the GPL FAQ's recommendation of the Apache License 2.0.

Practical problems with a hard line stance

[tepples]

Things I noticed from the video:

11:25 "Don't bring any proprietary software to this class." So which cell phone running free software should students be putting in their bags instead? Even Replicant OS, which is based on Android Open Source Project with the non-free parts cut out, uses non-free radio firmware.

12:48 "So how to help? Well you can write free software." So how would you go about feeding yourself while you write a free video game? Video games can't rely on support to the same extent as software critical to a business.

Re:Practical problems with a hard line stance

[I'm New Around Here]

You answered your second question already. You write the indispensable business software first, then with all the money you earn, you support yourself while you write the next video game of the year.

Re:Practical problems with a hard line stance

[parenthephobia]

12:48 "So how to help? Well you can write free software." So how would you go about feeding yourself while you write a free video game? Video games can't rely on support to the same extent as software critical to a business.

Get a job? You don't have an automatic right to be paid for making video games.

If you really feel that you couldn't make a video game whilst also doing other paid work, and you can convince other people that you can make a game they'd like to play, then some of those people will pay you to write it. If you doubt that, Chris Roberts has $52M of evidence to the contrary. 3% of Kickstarter games projects get $100k or more. That's not going to fund a "AAA" development process, but it'd pay your living costs for 3 or 4 years. And sure, only 3% of the people who apply get funded to this extent, but see above: it's a privilege, not a right, to be paid for what you want to do.

Re:Practical problems with a hard line stance

[BadDreamer]

11:25 The answer is do the best you can. Support those who are the least closed.

12:48 If you are paid to write software, do what you can to have that software under GPL license. If you develop video games, do what Id Software does, and release the code as GPL when it's feasible to do so. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than not releasing anything ever.

Re:Practical problems with a hard line stance

[Bob9113]

11:25 "Don't bring any proprietary software to this class." So which cell phone running free software should students be putting in their bags instead?

Depends what your primary objective is. If your primary objective is to have a cell phone with you, you sacrifice freedom. If your primary objective is to give no comfort to those who are harmful to that end, you sacrifice carrying a cell phone.

Me? I'm pretty serious about Free Software, but being connected is also important to me. So I have a CyanogenMod phone, and I'll keep going more Free as it becomes practical and as my budget allows.

12:48 "So how to help? Well you can write free software." So how would you go about feeding yourself while you write a free video game?

Depends what your higher priority is. If financial responsibility, to your lifestyle or to support your family, is most important to you, write proprietary video games. If freedom is most important, you can sell your games through Humble Bundle, have embedded ads and ask people not to disable them, ask for voluntary payments, use one of the crowdfunding systems, live a modest lifestyle and work some other job to pay the bills, or whatever you want; there's lots of ways to make a living while writing Free Software.

Me? I work a pay-the-bills job consulting, working less than full time, live a modest lifestyle, and work on pro-social projects the rest of the time (not Free Software for me at the moment, but with similar goals).

He's not telling you that you must always blindly obey the principles that lead to freedom. He's telling you what principles must be satisfied to be free. He says very clearly, early in the presentation, that being free requires sacrifices. Whether you choose freedom or convenience in any particular choice you make in life is up to you. Just make it with your eyes open; be aware of your personal opportunity cost and the cost to society.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

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, for one, and thankful for Stallman

[jfbilodeau]

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.

Surprisingly bad public speaker

[sjbe]

Slightly off topic but I watched the video. I've read a lot of what Stallman has written but haven't heard him speak before. He's a pretty bad public speaker judging by this TED talk. His slides looked like something a sixth grader would draw, he sounded like a robot and he clearly didn't spend enough time rehearsing. He kept looking at his slides as if it was a surprise what was coming next. If you want people to take your arguments seriously, having a good argument is not sufficient. You have to be able to present it well. He's been making these arguments long enough that he ought to be more polished by now. I respect the stance he is taking but based on this talk he's doing a pretty crap job of being an evangelist to the general public.

I really can't imagine anyone coming away from that presentation convinced that they've had their eyes opened. His argument was moralistic but he didn't really explain convincingly the consequences of not-free software or why anyone should care. He explained that we control software or it controls us as if it was axiomatic which it is not. Here on slashdot we understand what he's talking about (whether or not we agree) but a more general audience will NOT be convinced by such a superficial argument especially when presented in such an amateurish way.

Free not open source

[sjbe]

Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source.

No he doesn't. He wants it to be free. Had you watched the video you would have seen him negatively describe open source as a way for people to avoid the subject of free software. He doesn't care at all about open source except insofar as it gets us to free software as defined by himself.

Re:No thanks

[grcumb]

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.

Just for the edification of the other readers here, which parts specifically do you feel you don't have to follow?

For the record, I know exactly which ones I would choose, but I'm interested to know what exactly you think makes Stallmann a 'crazy outlier'. Because, in my estimation, it would take a lot for someone to qualify for that kind of labeling.

I disagree with his statement that Linux distro maintainers allow non-free components because they're not sufficiently committed to freedom, but I don't think him 'crazy' for having said it. I think his blanket characterisation of profit motive as evil is too much of a generalisation, but tragically, I don't think he's entirely wrong in stating that the effects of profit motive on a lot of commercial organisations has been detrimental to our freedom - dangerously so. So yeah: same conclusion, more temperate language. That's not nearly crazy or even an outlying opinion, to my mind.

There is a point to Stallman being far out there, its so the rest of us dont have to. Let him do his thing.

I take your point, but I remind you that the same could have been said about Ghandi, or even Martin Luther King, when people were blaming him for the violence in Selma and the bombing in Birmingham.

See, the problem I have with this kind of rhetoric is that you seem willing to stand to the side at a witch-burning and say, 'Well, I would never cast a spell, but I can see why people bought magic services from her.' It's a little disingenuous, isn't it, that you would be willing to profit from someone's courage, when you're not willing to defend it?

Again, this isn't a case of 'My Free Software, Right or Wrong.' On the contrary, I'm arguing that you can quibble all you like with the arguments Stallmann makes, and the rhetoric he makes them with. But I have to ask: With an attitude like yours, how much have you actually done to promote freedom?

(Real question: I'm open to correction.)

Re:Free for the community

[trparky]

A BSD license may as well be proprietary because eventually it will become proprietary if it is of any use at all.

Is a horrendous POS. It is factually wrong. If you can't see or accept that then you really do need to grow up a little, both politically and intellectually.

Ok, so please explain this one.

Take OpenBSD, there's a reason why much of Apple Mac OS X is based upon OpenBSD. Apple needed a new OS, they looked about and saw an already written base operating system with a nice licensing agreement that states that if you make any modifications to the source code you are under no legal requirement release said changes back to the community from which the original code came from. That is essentially what the BSD license states.

However, the GPL states that if you make changes to the source code you are legally required to release said changes back to the community.

That's why Apple OS X is largely based upon OpenBSD. Apple can make changes all they want and they can keep those changes to themselves and the OpenBSD community doesn't have a legal leg to stand on to prevent that from happening.

Re:Free for the community

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so please explain this one.

What are we being asked to explain? Has Apple somehow robbed the world of the original BSD-licensed software they based their OS on?

Or have they simply said "We'll use this as a starting point, but we decline to release our own code to the rest of the world?"

The worst you can argue is that they're being poor citizens - using a "public" good for themselves without contributing back. If the OpenBSD community cared about "preventing that from happening," well... they probably would've chosen a different license - don't ya think?

Re:No thanks

[Eric Sharkey]

Just for the edification of the other readers here, which parts specifically do you feel you don't have to follow?

For the record, I know exactly which ones I would choose, but I'm interested to know what exactly you think makes Stallmann a 'crazy outlier'. Because, in my estimation, it would take a lot for someone to qualify for that kind of labeling.

On a number of occasions RMS has been asked how professional software developers can make enough money to earn a normal middle class income using only Free software licensing, and his response has been that earning money should not be a priority, to the extent that if a developer cannot earn enough money to support a family, that's ok. Software developers shouldn't have children. (example link)

If he had said that most software developers shouldn't expect to have as much money as Gates/Ballmer/Zuckerberg/Jobs/Ellison type people, I'd have been ok with that, but to take it to the extreme that you should deny developers the ability to have children, one of the most basic and fundamental life experiences, that was what tipped the balance into 'crazy outlier' in my opinion.

Re:words are not pointless

[globaljustin]

for sure...i agree with your 1 & 2

IMHO, i think Stallman gets tripped up with execution...which is guided by those uber-specific obtuse definitions he uses for concepts like what 'free and open source' mean

if anything, he's an uncomprimising idealist...

your point #2 rings especially true with my experience here on /. I've been reading since 2001 (didn't make an account until 2006 because **i didnt think i had earned it**) and back in the day i learned alot about how the industry really works from reading these boards, which were posts written by people who were inspired by Stallman

maybe it's a case of being too close to your philosophical hero...we see all his warts & flaws not the ideas which made him famous

Stallman can't separate free in theory

[aussersterne]

from free in practice, i.e. he is missing any concept of substantive freedom or constitutive practice.

Most users can make this distinction easily.

Free in theory but utterly constrained in practice is something most users don't care for. Since most users are not coders, most are much freer in practice with software that "just works." Sure, they *could in theory* be more free with free software that does less, since they could just rewrite the missing parts themselves, without IP encumbrances, but in practice, they would have to dedicate time and resources to learning how to code and architect software that most do not have the time and resources to dedicate.

The choice between "live without functionality that makes you more practically free" and "sacrifice other important parts of your life and study to become a programmer instead if you want that functionality" does not feel like freedom to most users, it feels like constraint.

On the other hand, "take this money that you already have, buy a product that you can already afford, and do the entire list of things you'd like to do" feels very much like freedom to most people.

Stallman's argument is a long-view, edge-case worry that will never affect most users. I'd argue that for 90 percent of the users out there, limiting themselves only to free software would actually make them less free in practice, because the actual, real-world universe of things they could likely manage to do with their tech on a day-to-day basis as a result would, in practice, be shorter.

Stallman's myopia is not new—it goes fairly far back in western philosophy. But as has long been pointed out, finding a way to drop out of society may be the path to the greatest freedom in theory, but in practice, society (roads, planes, trains, automobiles, electricity, grocery stores, and so on) makes most of us more free, even though it comes with a bunch of restrictions (a.k.a. laws) that don't afflict the lone "natural man" that has no connection to it.

But in fact the lone "natural man" is unlikely to ever be able to duplicate, in practice, every enablement and enabling facility that society is able to grant—even if he is free to duplicate them himself, without rules, when outside of society—in theory.