Richard Stallman: Online Publishers Should Let Readers Pay Anonymously (theguardian.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr writes: The Guardian has an opinion piece by Richard Stallman which argues that we should be able to pay for news anonymously. From the article: "Online newspapers and magazines have come to depend, for their income, on a system of advertising and surveillance, which is both annoying and unjust... What they ought to do instead is give us a truly anonymous way to pay."

He also (probably not coincidentally) has developed a method to do just that. "For the GNU operating system, which was created by the free software movement and is typically used with the kernel Linux, we are developing a suitable payment system called GNU Taler that will allow publishers to accept anonymous payments from readers for individual articles."
Publishers "can profit from defending privacy rather than from exposing their readers," argues Stallman, ending his article with a simple plea. "Publishers, please let me pay you -- anonymously!"

Comments

Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Because content creators think too highly of themselves. They want to sell and resell their work infinitely many times. And even though it doesn't work, whey think it does and they have the publishers on their side (and they think the same).

Working for a few days or a year to produce an article, a song, a video or whatever, does not automatically guarantee that you should get paid for it. It's the same for someone who works for a few days or a year to produce a chair. If you can get paid for it, great! But don't fucking expect that you should get paid for your work just because you put down the hours. And definitely don't expect to be paid for each copy when the process of copying is free!

Re:Good, but won't work

[jellomizer]

If the chair maker makes a chair that takes him 48 hours to make. He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it. That is partially why you can spend $15.00 on a cheap injection molded plastic one or $1500 on a nice hand carved one. Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.

The problem with digital media is that supply is nearly infinite so whatever the demand is the product it worthless. However there is real demand for the product and creator for the products will need to be rewarded for their work otherwise they will move to do different things. So right now we are finding different ways to make money for digital content. The micropayment method a dacade ago never got anywhere. Advertising is getting too saturated and not so effective. Paywalls stink because they expect you to stick to one form of media.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

If the chair maker makes a chair that takes him 48 hours to make. He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it. That is partially why you can spend $15.00 on a cheap injection molded plastic one or $1500 on a nice hand carved one. Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.

Typical BS arguments from pirates. Building the chair requires two things: design of the chair and the actual manufacturing of the chair based on that design. Step two is actually much easier and less creative requiring cheap labor, raw materials and machinery you pay for once. Designing the chair, OTOH, is harder because it is a creative process that is hard to replicate. So even though you pay $1500, only $200 to $500 may be the actual manufacturing cost. The rest you are paying for the IP (in this case, the design of the chair) and company profits.

Is this sarcasm or Poe's Law?

Re:Good, but won't work

[AmiMoJo]

I think the problem for news outlets is even more fundamental than that.

No-one owns the news. Things happen and anyone can report on them. There is some value on being there, on finding out the facts. The problem is that once found, anyone can re-report them for free and simply cite you as the source. How often do you read about some scandal that it must have taken a journalist many person-hours, even years to uncover on some other site that is just reporting on what they found? The moment it's published, everyone else can repeat the findings for free and few people will be willing to pay to read the original report.

The only thing this doesn't apply to is photos because a textual description is inferior, but since they are often taken by photographers who will sell the same image to anyone who will pay they are rarely exclusive. It's also quite difficult to advertise that you have a great, unique image without actually showing it to the punters who are then not going to pay for it.

Wikinews is the perfect example of this. Completely free in all senses, and more than adequate for most people's requirements. Some specialist outlets like the Financial Times do quite well on subscriptions because people pay for convenience and analysis, but that's not something most organizations can rely on.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Kjella]

No mass media would ever work if the first person to read/hear/watch it had to carry all the costs. Nor would donations work because most people would wait and see if they could get it for free anyway without donating or they'd complain about what they did or didn't get like on Kickstarter. We need to split the costs somehow. But it's not good that online news sites track every article you read tied to a subscription, it's another wet dream for totalitarian governments. If reading radical ideas and critical voices about the government filters back to the government you might end up on some kind of subversives list and that'd be the end of an informed public as they'd self-censor away from knowing what's going on.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

"He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it." Wrong. He is going to sell it at a price that someone is willing to pay for it. Otherwise it will remain unsold.

Re:Good, but won't work

[tomhath]

Or he smashes the chair and does something else for a living.

Re: Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

But if nobody will pay more than $500 for the chair, and there are lots of similar chairs for $500 the craftsman dies not have an entitlement to receive $1500 for it.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

If the chair maker makes a chair that takes him 48 hours to make. He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it. That is partially why you can spend $15.00 on a cheap injection molded plastic one or $1500 on a nice hand carved one. Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.

Typical BS arguments from pirates. Building the chair requires two things: design of the chair and the actual manufacturing of the chair based on that design. Step two is actually much easier and less creative requiring cheap labor, raw materials and machinery you pay for once. Designing the chair, OTOH, is harder because it is a creative process that is hard to replicate. So even though you pay $1500, only $200 to $500 may be the actual manufacturing cost. The rest you are paying for the IP (in this case, the design of the chair) and company profits.

Obviously, you're not a carpenter.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Only huge companies that own infrastructure or hardware platforms like Comcast, Verizon, Apple, and Samsung deserve to be paid. The rest of us should pass the cup around and ask for donations for our creative work, and slobber a "thank you" when someone contributes.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

What a rubbish example. Newpapers and their online equivalent are using low paid non-staff to crawl site like reddit and blogs to fluff up news. The more clicks, the higher their "commission".

Adverts are not paying for this garbage, we are! The massive bullshit surrounding the advert monstrosity is astounding. The huge sums paid by these scumbags are loaded back into the price of products. Fucking hell, even massive games and movies spend more on "ads" than it costs to produce them. The publishers aren't paying that, it's factored into the costs and claimed back. It's time the planet blocked every single ad, canceled their TVs and turn off the radio. You cannot even buy movies and TV shows without fucking adverts. Give it time and you'll have to listen to some bullshit at the start of albums - it's already being discussed.

Advertising is not effective in the slightest, at least when it's tagged on to something else. A captured market in a stuffy movie theater will react to shitty ice-cream and cool cola ads, but on TV, on a bill-board, on the radio? Like fuck.

Re:Good, but won't work

[arth1]

The only thing this doesn't apply to is photos because a textual description is inferior

Are you kidding? A textual description can describe any photo. But a photo can never describe what the lens cannot see. Text can, and does.

Re:Good, but won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

People want the news quickly. What they don't want is to read four extra paragraphs of a 2nd year journalist making 30k a year trying to describe a picture.

Re:Good, but won't work

[lgw]

But a photo can never describe what the lens cannot see.

You've never head of photoshop? Plenty of AP stringers did, when they photoshopped up pictures of the Iraq war (some of them quite blatant - dude, don't copypaste smoke FFS), and yet the AP ran them as actual news. (Or photoshopping all the black people out of pictures of Tea Party rallies, or I'm sure people can come up with similar disgraces against progressive rallies).

Textual description can also lie about the contents of photos, which makes for good propaganda if only a small fraction of the readers can spot the problem. This happens quite often.

Re:Good, but won't work

[exomondo]

If the chair maker makes a chair that takes him 48 hours to make. He is going to sell it at a price worthy of the time he put into it. That is partially why you can spend $15.00 on a cheap injection molded plastic one or $1500 on a nice hand carved one.

And while a single one of the injection molded chairs would cost many thousands to make in terms of design, engineering, mold production, machine setup and materials the fact that this can be done once and then the cost amortized across the production of many thousands of chairs is what makes it viable.

Obviously people aren't willing to pay for a bunch of journalists to travel the world reporting the news to them exclusively so instead the cost of this is amortized by everybody who receives that news contributing a little bit to funding it. It's produced once and then sold multiple times because the price to gather it is too great to be viable to sell it just once.

Anonymous

[Bert64]

Well publishers could quite easily accept bitcoin payments...
The problem is that the content isn't the product, the users have become the product and the customers are the marketing agencies that pay for the information.

Re:Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh, I don't know why we have to keep going over this. Repeat after me: "Bitcoin is not anonymous."

Re: Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh? Really?

Buy a gift credit card.
Create a bc wallet via tor or similar to hide source IP.
Load funds from the gift card to bc wallet.

How is this not anon?

Re:Anonymous

[lindseyp]

sigh... if you want to track down the owners of the wallets of all the preceding transactions before the one who paid you, then yeah. Let me know how that goes for you...

    Otherwise it's pretty damned obscure. The point of the article was DIRECT identification of payers by name authenticated by credit card details etc.

Re:Anonymous

[known_coward_69]

you want me to take the time to somehow find these bitcoin things? i'll just pirate it. faster

Re: Anonymous

[F.Ultra]

Your purchase of the gift credit card is registered somewhere and the "load funds from the gift card to bc wallet" transaction is registered and now there is a permanent link from your gift credit card purchase and your hash key in your bc wallet.

Re: Anonymous

[naughtynaughty]

Gift cards don't need to be registered. Buy with cash and there is zero record of who purchased it or used it.

Re: Anonymous

[mspohr]

Then why can't they find the people who install ransomware?

Re: Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

bitcoins don't do it for me. too easily exploited.

Re: Anonymous

[whimmel]

Cash you received from an ATM which records the serial numbers of each bill given to you. Your path to and from the store recorded by traffic cameras and toll transponders.

Re: Anonymous

[EETech1]

Besides the camera footage of you buying it.

Re: Anonymous

[theArtificial]

Which we all know is infinite. Have a smurf buy it for you.

Re: Anonymous

[Hylandr]

serial numbers of each bill given to you

Citation required.

Re: Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

So use cash instead of bitcoin? What a novel idea.

Re: Anonymous

[F.Ultra]

Registered as in your purchase being possible caught on camera in the store where you bought it, and somewhere in a database there will be an entry that this particular gift card where sold from store X at time Y so that backtracking can be possible. Next time you buy a gift card from another or the same store and this also gets registered and soon they would be able to pin point your possible location. Of course you could get a homeless person to buy it for you and make sure that you buy it in another state and so on but that is a whole other scenario than the parents "buy gift card, insert money from gift card".

Brave

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty much what the Brave browser team launched last week with their new Bitcoin micro tipping feature.

I don't want to pay anymore...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice everyone wants money, but we pay more and more taxes. Government + Banks, think about new ways to get money every year. I was happy with lots of stuff in the internet for free. I don't even know if I have enough money in 10 years, I could lose my house, my kids can't get education and such. And everyone is only talking about how to pay more. Just like those companies, lots of people don't have enough money, and are always thinking about saving a few bucks here and there...

Re:I don't want to pay anymore...

[110010001000]

100% correct. I already pay enough. The last thing we need is another way to pay.

Use tip jars

[pieterh]

Adverts are really inefficient, and paywalls just send readers to other sites. What IMO would work better, and fit US culture, is a tip jar that can be easily added to articles, blogs, etc. When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip. Why is this not a thing already?

Re:Use tip jars

[Anonymous Coward]

What Stallman proposed for paywalls could be applied as a tip jar too.
Here he was mainly targeting how paywalls require people to hand over excessive personal details just to get past a paywall.

Re:Use tip jars

[petes_PoV]

When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip

But so few articles are worth a dam'. Most aren't even worth the time spent reading them (so the authors should be compensating us for the time wasted by attractive headlines with content that fails to deliver).

However, we already have a system for rewarding authors who consistently produce worthwhile content that is good enough to explicitly seek out: subscriptions. Personally, I am still searching for a publication that produces enough of this high quality content to make the cost of their subs. reasonable. Having the occasional article - maybe one a week - that is relevant, authoritative and informative doesn't make up for all the time spent wading through (in this case: The Guardian) dross just to find it.

Re:Use tip jars

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like Flattr? It wouldn't work for modern journalism because modern journalism relies mostly on outrage. They try to outrage readers in order to get reader to look at articles and to post in the comments. Readers then come back repeatedly to view the updated comments, and each time get served advertisements. Integrity has disappeared from modern journalism. Journalists care nothing about the truth and are either focused entirely on increasing revenue and pushing their agenda.

You could argue that switching to tip based funding would improve journalism, but I suspect that the only people who would tip are people who agree with the agenda that is being pushed. This would lead to journalists becoming even more focused on supporting the causes of outspoken minorities in order to get more funding from those groups.

I don't think there's any hope for modern journalism. Slashdot works because most of the content comes from users posting rather than from journalists. Reddit used to work for the same reason, until they started censoring anything that didn't agree with their agenda.

Re:Use tip jars

[Visarga]

The user should assume to pay a sum of money, say, 20$ per month, in total. The actual tracking should be implemented in the browser. As you see various articles and spend time on websites, a local statistic is made. At the end of the month it can be reviewed by the user (and changed by hand) and then the appropriate percentages will be sent to the websites.

Re:Use tip jars

[tlhIngan]

The user should assume to pay a sum of money, say, 20$ per month, in total. The actual tracking should be implemented in the browser. As you see various articles and spend time on websites, a local statistic is made. At the end of the month it can be reviewed by the user (and changed by hand) and then the appropriate percentages will be sent to the websites.

The problem is, and always has been, the middleman. The user should pay $20 - first off, who's to collect the $20? And who's to disperse it? There has to be a common payment network to manage this, and you know what? They cost money. Sure it doesn't have to be as expensive as a credit card, but they aren't free.

And then there's the case of - what if the user doesn't pay? Now you have to collect on it, and collections cost money - either you write it off, or you send it to a collections agency who can pay you 50 cents on the dollar or less.

Bitcoin exchanges do it by building the cost of running the exchange into the cost of the exchange itself, and Bitcoin transactions right now are free, but that's because the miners are still mining to get "free" bitcoin. Once the last bitcoin is mined, then every transaction has a cost that goes to the miner because miners are ones who lock each block in the blockchain, and they're not doing it for free. (So miners will continue to make "free" bitcoin for providing the service).

And that's the main problem - it costs money to handle money - from the mundane billing, payment, collections, etc. And handling something like cash is very Internet-unfriendly - people don't want to go out and have to buy credits or whatever by mailing or visiting a store - they just want to buy it direct with a credit card and have it in the moment they click buy. (It's why Paypal is what it is today - because they were the first internet-friendly way to send money between two arbitrary strangers - who may. or most likely not. have a merchant account).

And as real life has shown, the network and currency itself isn't really an issue, but when you interface with real-world things like money, that's the big problem.

Re: Use tip jars

[Anonymous Coward]

disperse

"Disburse". I'm here to make the internet correct.

Re:Use tip jars

[KitFox]

This is an excellent point. Further, the subscription costs are nuts compared to what most people actually consume.

For example, if I had to pay, say, $4.99 a month for each site that I look at some things on from Google News, I'd be spending several hundred a month on news.

Let's take a look at the situation. If I don't block ads, I see about ten ads per page. Let's take a generous $10.00 CPM rate (I'll ignore any CPC because I'll be damned if I'm going to click any of that cruft). That means my viewing the article is worth "ten cents" to them. None when I block the ads. In a given month, I might look at five to ten articles from a given site, perhaps an average of seven from each site I view. Thus, if I'm paying more than $1 a month for their internet drivel, I'm spending way more than my eyes and private information would be giving them.

Since they won't deal with not accosting my eyes with ads in favor of a dime per article I view -at absolute most- (I'd be willing to toss in a nickle maybe honestly for most of this junk), they get adblocked instead and get diddly squat from me. Don't like my adblock? Too bad, I'll find the same article elsewhere, and when I post the link for people who don't block ads to look, it won't be yours. Chasing away my ad-blocking view means the loss of potentially hundreds of non-blocking views I'd drive their way.

I guess the real downside is that advertising is all about scamming everybody with their product anyway. The user's eyes are the product. The "articles" are just bait for the product, like we're fish. The advertisers pay for the product. The publishers then try to milk as much money out of the advertisers as they can with clickbait junk and a page crammed with dozens of ads. Then they complain that their bait is getting eaten off the line without hooking a fish as the fish are getting smarter. If they want the users to be their customers and the content to be their product, they're gonna have to have fish food, not bait, so to speak.

Re:Use tip jars

[ale2011]

The parenthesized statement doesn't explain why Paypal doesn't allow anonymous payments. By contrast, identifications based on money accounts are among the most reliable, and payment is almost universally accepted as a means of identification. That concept is rooted into assumptions at the very base of human society, along with death and taxes.

Lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the shit I do or might purchase in my life, a news subscription is one of the *last* things I'm worried other people will find out about. I guarantee not one person has ever not bought an NYT subscription because they were afraid their family would find out.

If you want to do us a favor, give us a way to buy sex toys anonymously.

Re:Lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet anonymity is a sham. If we can buy anonymously, we should also be to vote anonymously. But as many scientists have said, anon voting is impossible. Therefore, and similarly, anonymous internet buying is also impossible.

These "solutions" make the problem worse by aggregating all your purchases into a single middle-man (GNU Taler in this case), who may or may not sell that info to some govt or marketing agency.

Re:Lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to do us a favor, give us a way to buy sex toys anonymously.

Sure, as soon as someone figures out how to make their shipping address anonymous.

Re:Lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not too hard. We just need a service that's a variation of General Delivery but which relies on a secure anonymous token instead of your identity. The seller deposits the parcel anonymously at some automated dropoff site (shipping paid in cash, of course) with the "address" being the buyer's local pickup station. The seller gives the buyer the shipment ID number through some secure method, and the buyer uses it to pick up the package at his local facility when it arrives, again through some automated system. You (or someone else) would still have to go pick it up in person, but at least you wouldn't need to talk to anyone, and no one knows who the seller or buyer is.

Also, perhaps the shipping company can provide containers that will self-destruct and destroy the contents if an attempt is made to open them without the correct code. We could fully bring the recently-trendy "encrypt and anonymize every-damn-thing" philosophy into the real world.

Re:Lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

3D Printer ;)

Yes! wait No!

[thegarbz]

So online publishers who are struggling to scrape money together with journalists being let go from every corner, cutbacks in every department, poorer and poorer quality editing, shit fluff pieces about lost dogs to try and drive readship who couldn't care less about what's happening in the world, all should now further gut what little income they have?

Richard Stallman why not just straight go out and say you think online publishing shouldn't exist?

Re:Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

A mass reversion to actual newspapers? I like it.

As long as they go back to 50 cents like they were a decade ago instead of like fucking triple that now.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he doesn't want to gut their income, unless you mean the income they get from spying and tracking. He wants to pay them money so that they can afford to produce quality content. Only condition is: every purchase and personal interest which they reflect isn't logged somewhere.

The only feasible way to achieve this which I can think of is some type of cryptocurrency.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[AmiMoJo]

I'd gladly pay for Slashdot if the option existed (subscriptions are broken at the moment). The old ad-free premium version still kinda works because a lot of people don't have ad-blocking on mobile, and even on desktop when the site provides some genuine value.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[tomhath]

What he wants and what works in the real world are apparently two different things. Cable TV offered the same deal when it started out - pay for content, no ads. It didn't work because there aren't enough people willing to reach into their pocket and pay the asking price for high quality content.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything in your post is ad hominem and unrelated to the topic of anonymous payments. I don't agree with all of his philosophy but he gets it damned right too often to be ignored. It's quite telling how viciously he gets attacked.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone else that doesn't understand the GPL :(
The GPL is about giving freedom to the USER, not the dev. And ensuring that the USER keeps that freedom.
Not that I agree with everything he says, but the GPL is good.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[thegarbz]

I hear a lot of "he".

The reality is that "he" is somewhat unique in giving a damn and that his call for the news companies to do this will result in them gutting income of which spying and tracking is a large portion on top of subscriber fees.

There's no scenario that this would result in maintaining income in this already struggling and dying industry.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The GPL is hated by corporate lawyers and sociopaths in the business world, not to mention the self styled libertarians that the IT world has way too many of. Simply on that basis one can tell it's good for actual people.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[thegarbz]

I'm sure hundreds of others would too, and that's about the problem. There's a few hundreds of visitors who are typically annoyed enough by online advertising that they would be willing to pay to get rid of it.

I certainly wouldn't part with money for slashdot, and if the ads get too intrusive I'd either attempt to block them or find another site to read. Kind of like how I now just flat out don't click on any links that say forbes.com.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are _deliberately_ conflating Stallman's view of freedom for end users with those of distributors.

With the GPL there are zero restrictions on end users (those who do no re-distribute the code) but it does place a burden on those who distribute the code to not take away those freedoms.

With BSD you can take the code and re-distribute whilst removing rights from the end user of the software.

I don't always agree with Mr. Stallman and I'll use various licenses depending on what I'm working on, but don't misrepresent his point of view.

I think you probably need someone like him more than you might think.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[i.r.id10t]

Indeed. I was willing to pay $40 for a Raspberry Pi kit to run DNS on my home network and spoof many of the common advertising domains, pointing to a webserver on the Pi that simply serves up a 404.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[F.Ultra]

And where did egcs come from? There could be a hint in the actual name of the project, "Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System". It was a fork of GCC and the people who created is saw it as GCC:

We expect that the gcc2 and egcs communities will continue to overlap to a great extent, since they're both working on GCC and both working on Free Software. All code will continue to be assigned to the FSF exactly as before and will be passed on to the gcc2 maintainers for ultimate inclusion into the gcc2 tree.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[mspohr]

I think he is proposing a solution to the problems you outlined.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[unixisc]

Or currencies not recognized by any government, and which would fail in court if something ever got litigated. Rather than that, why not just put cash into an envelope, and ask for access? It's more anonymous than even GNU Taler is likely to be, since the last would require some sort of input payment from the consumer in order to be able to provide any output payment to the publisher

Re: Yes! wait No!

[thegarbz]

Spending many thousands of dollars so a handful of customers can pay a really low fee to protect their identities?

There's literally no scenario where this makes any kind of financial sense.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything in your post is ad hominem and unrelated to the topic of anonymous payments. I don't agree with all of his philosophy but he gets it damned right too often to be ignored. It's quite telling how viciously he gets attacked.

Barbie (the Rock?) Hudson has always posted illogical ad-hominem crap whenever Stallman is even mentioned. Likely S/he was/is in love with him but can't accept that this love is unrequited. Her fetishistic harping on about his hygiene habits has always been more than a little too detailed and suggestive much more of the idolisation of a sub than the mindless BSD troll she purports to be.

In other words, this is just someone else's sexual fantasy. Ignore everything she writes like you would a GNAA troll. It's in fact worse since it doesn't even have the dubious merit of being funny.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[BarbaraHudson]

Gcc was forked because Stalman fucked up development of gcc to the point that people said "F(or|uc)k it". Stalman eventually had to abandon his version and replace it with the fork, renaming it gcc

How would you react if Oracle took libreoffice and rebranded it as OpenOffice? Same situation.

Also the same situation with gnu Hurd, except that he can't abandon his failure and substitute Linux. Too many people would laugh at it. Stalman stopped being relevant at the turn of the century, if not before.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[lgw]

The GPL is about giving freedom to the USER, not the dev. And ensuring that the USER keeps that freedom.

As a developer, I'll go with BSD-style licenses, thanks. I look after my own interests, because for sure no one else does.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

> With the GPL there are zero restrictions on end users
Liar. You have removed the end-user's right to redistribute the code as he sees fit.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[F.Ultra]

This is the original announcement back when the EGC fork was created. As you can clearly see the fork was not done in anger. If Oracle took all the pathes from LibreOffice and included it back into OpenOffice proper then exactly no one would be upset or angry, in fact since Apache is currently discussing if they should drop OO completely there have been some signs of interest from the LO camp to get hold of the OO trademark.

A bunch of us (including Fortran, Linux, Intel and RTEMS hackers) have
decided to start a more experimental development project, just like
Cygnus and the FSF started the gcc2 project about 6 years ago. Only
this time the net community with which we are working is larger! We
are calling this project 'egcs' (pronounced 'eggs').

Why are we doing this? It's become increasingly clear in the course
of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the
objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and
improvement over the years. GCC is part of the FSF's publicity for the
GNU project, as well as being the GNU system's compiler, so stability
is paramount for them. On the other hand, Cygnus, the Linux folks,
the pgcc folks, the Fortran folks and many others have done
development work which has not yet gone into the GCC2 tree despite
years of efforts to make it possible.

This situation has resulted in a lot of strong words on the gcc2
mailing list which really is a shame since at the heart we all want
the same thing: the continued success of gcc, the FSF, and Free
Software in general. Apart from ill will, this is leading to great
divergence which is increasingly making it harder for us all to work
together -- It is almost as if we each had a proprietary compiler!
Thus we are merging our efforts, building something that won't damage
the stability of gcc2, so that we can have the best of both worlds.

As you can see from the list below, we represent a diverse collection
of streams of GCC development. These forks are painful and waste
time; we are bringing our efforts together to simplify the development
of new features. We expect that the gcc2 and egcs communities will
continue to overlap to a great extent, since they're both working on
GCC and both working on Free Software. All code will continue to be
assigned to the FSF exactly as before and will be passed on to the
gcc2 maintainers for ultimate inclusion into the gcc2 tree.

Because the two projects have different objectives, there will be
different sets of maintainers. Provisionally we have agreed that Jim
Wilson is to act as the egcs maintainer and Jason Merrill as the
maintainer of the egcs C++ front end. Craig Burley will continue to
maintain the Fortran front end code in both efforts.

What new features will be coming up soon? There is such a backlog of
tested, un-merged-in features that we have been able to pick a useful
initial set:

New alias analysis support from John F. Carr.
g77 (with some performance patches).
A C++ repository for G++.
A new instruction scheduler from IBM Haifa.
A regmove pass (2-address machine optimizations that in future
will help with compilation for the x86 and for now
will help with some RISC machines).

This will use the development snapshot of 3 August 97 as its base --
in other words we're not starting from the 18 month old gcc-2.7
release, but from a recent development snapshot with all the last 18
months' improvements, including major work on G++.

We plan an initial release for the end of August. The second release
will include some subset of the following:
global cse and partial redundancy elimination.
live range splitting.
More features of IBM Haifa's instruction scheduling,
including software pipelining, and branch scheduling.
sibling call opts.
various new embedded targets.
Further work on regmove.
The egcs mailing list at cygnus.com will be used to discuss and
prioritize these features.

Re: Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

NO, you have no such right under copyright law. Don't you get that?

As a user, you are free to USE the software for any purpose.

Re:Yes! wait No!

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't explain why paying customers of a movie theatre are subjected to half a fucking hour of fucking ads, followed by movie trailers (fine, within reason), followed by blatant fucking product placement within the movie itself.

When the first in-theatre ads first appeared, back in the day, I and others in the audience would boo them loudly. Over time people have become inured to this abuse. Presumably the theatres make enough money from it that it makes up for people like me, who now visit perhaps once a year if they're lucky.

"For the GNU operating system..."

[93 Escort Wagon]

Unsurprisingly, RMS seemingly has a different definition of "operating system" than most everyone else.

What happens when I use GNU tools on OS X - am I suddenly using that "GNU operating system"?

Re:"For the GNU operating system..."

[redback]

There is a GNU operating system in theory, its just not finished enough to use. The existence of linux made it kinda irrelevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:"For the GNU operating system..."

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno. Most of the tools and the libc will still be BSD. LLVM edges out GCC. The big things they jump up and down about is glibc and GNU CC inside the Linux stack.

Let's make everyone happy and call it GNUBOS ("noob OS" or "nub OS").

Re:"For the GNU operating system..."

[110010001000]

That is a kernel, not an OS. He is correct: much of what you call "Linux" is GNU. I'm still not calling it GNU/Linux though.

Re:"For the GNU operating system..."

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Stallman yes, it should by rights be called "GNU/MacOSX."

According to reality, Stallman hasn't been relevant since the early 90's and he's been having some serious issues accepting it ever since. The man still thinks that one of these days, GNU/Hurd is going to surpass them all.

I don't call it GNU/Linux, I call it Linux. Not out of disrespect for the FSF or what they've contributed, because they've contributed quite a lot. No, I call it Linux because I don't particularly feel like pandering to the ego of a delusional, petty little man like Stallman.

Re:"For the GNU operating system..."

[Anonymous Coward]

> Unsurprisingly, RMS seemingly has a different definition of "operating system" than most everyone else.

Indeed, Andrew Tanenbaum is unequivocal in his book Modern Operating Systems that "the operating system is the most fundamental piece of software and runs in kernel mode (also called supervisor mode)." I.e. shells, compilers, windowing systems, tools, utilities, scripts etc. are emphatically NOT the operating system.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Apple considers the operating system to be everything that gets installed with Mac OS X.

I do sympathize with RMS that the GNU project doesn't get the credit they deserve for making Linux useful, but if he had started with the kernel and then moved on to the rest of the system, there would be no debate.

Re: "For the GNU operating system..."

[BarbaraHudson]

The largest unixish distribution in the world runs Android atop Linux. There is no gnu userland. It also beats out every Linux distro on laptops thanks to Chromebooks. Welcome to the year - oops, the decade - of the gnu-free Linux.

Re:"For the GNU operating system..."

[Anonymous Coward]

> " I.e. shells, compilers, windowing systems, tools, utilities, scripts etc. are emphatically NOT the operating system.

Tanenbaum was writing a descriptive book which facilitates understanding- drawing attention to the existence of a kernel in what computing naifs may have thought of as Linux, Windows etc. However you're using the same phrase to describe different things, so start calling it "OS Kernel" if you want to make any progress.

Apple, for example, are providing an "OS" as a product that includes e.g. TextEdit, providing a base level of features for end-users. You cannot repackage macOS so the fact that you can discern that it has a kernel inside is as irrelevant as "a BMW engine" not being something that UK consumers generally buy at the BMW dealer whilst "a motor" is.

No conception of money

[shanen]

I actually admire rms and regard him as a great man, but probably for smaller values of "great". In particular, he has little conception of money and his financial models have never demonstrated anything approaching viability or critical mass.

In years past I actually ran a few alternative financial models past him. He did ask an extremely perceptive question in one exchange. The question led me to a significant improvement in a financial model, but mostly he convinced me that he never has understood money, and probably never will. He wouldn't even be interested in whether or not he helped out, but he lives in a kind of money-free fantasy land, and I think his latest suggestion is just more evidence. Yes, he sees part of the problem, but his idea of anonymity as the solution is completely half-baked. If someone is motivated to donate, why would that motivation be affected by anonymity?

What the online media needs is a focus on SOLUTIONS. How many of us are sick and tired of reading about problems without solutions, and the media should earn a kind of tithe for helping to SOLVE the problems. The articles should be followed by links to some solution projects, and if enough readers (or viewers of a video) agree to support a project, then it would get funded, and the website would get a percentage for (1) publicizing the problem, (2) bringing donors to the solution project, and (3) evaluating the results and reporting them.

The details don't really matter to me, so in that sense I might be as bad as rms. You can call it an agent's fee if you prefer, though before that discussion with rms I mostly called it RACS (for Reverse Auction Charity Shares) and at some point afterwards I favored the idea of a charity share brokerage. DAUPR.

Re:No conception of money

[Anonymous Coward]

In years past I actually ran a few alternative financial models past him. He did ask an extremely perceptive question in one exchange. The question led me to a significant improvement in a financial model, but mostly he convinced me that he never has understood money, and probably never will. He wouldn't even be interested in whether or not he helped out, but he lives in a kind of money-free fantasy land, and I think his latest suggestion is just more evidence. Yes, he sees part of the problem, but his idea of anonymity as the solution is completely half-baked. If someone is motivated to donate, why would that motivation be affected by anonymity?

Whether or not he lives in a "money-free fantasy land", it's quite clear that you don't understand the main issue here, which is really about privacy.

Re:No conception of money

[klingens]

Whether or not he lives in a "money-free fantasy land", it's quite clear that you don't understand the main issue here, which is really about privacy.

Newspaper reading never was about privacy ever. The paper you buy at the front of the train station is anonymous, true. But the subscription for your local paper most certainly isn't. The business model of all newspapers with ads precludes any form of privacy whatsoever. Just cannot exist in this world simply cause no one would pay the price of a paper without ads: about triple the current price, and online ads must be targetable and be able to build a profile of a single reader or they are worthless.

Re:No conception of money

[Anonymous Coward]

"and online ads must be targetable and be able to build a profile of a single reader or they are worthless."

I think you mean "worth less" rather than "worthless" given that before online advertisers figured out HOW to do targeted advertising, they got along just fine without it.

Re:No conception of money

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were true, then their business model would have been doomed long before they had the capability to spy on everyone like a creepy pedo hiding in the bushes. However, the fact that my city has not one, but several ad-supported papers printed and mass-distributed for free proves you wrong.

Re:No conception of money

[geekmux]

If someone is motivated to donate, why would that motivation be affected by anonymity?

Benefactors wanting or even needing to remain anonymous? That's hardly a new or unjust concept.

I know personally of many people who do this, and rather enjoy and relish in the fact that their donations keep the spotlight on the recipients rather than the benefactors.

Re: No conception of money

[Anonymous Coward]

If the media focused on solutions then it would also have to spend time identifying the cause of the problems better.

You know, sociopath CEOs, corrupt politicians, law enforcement behaving illegally, companies that violate labor laws, etc. People who advertise with them or control their access to exclusives in other words.

Before Reagan was elected, media outlets kept their news and marketing organizations separate. The laws of the time didnt specifically require this but it was the easiest way to comply with them. Corporations were sharply limited in the number of local outlets, newspapers, etc. they could own. This encouraged real, investigative reporting without regard for advertisers' and government officials' wishes. Reagan and the Republicans changed that and they damned well knew what they were doing, even as the idiots who voted against their own interests and put them in office did not.

Simple example from today: illegal immigration. This was not a problem in the 60s and 70s. Why? Strong unions kept people ineligible to work here from getting jobs. But the conservatives gutted unions with laws, lack of enforcement, and a PR campaign that lots of people here still fall for. Absent that, employers went with what was cheap with a wink and a nod from their bought and paid for enforcement officials.

To fix this now, you don't need a wall. You don't need mass deportations. You don't need amnesty or a 'path to citizenship'. You don't even need unions if that's not your thing. What you need is to throw CEOs of companies that employ illegals in jail. That will fix this problem immediately at much less cost. Which candidiate has proposed that as a solution? Right...nobody.

That's just one thing. There are so many things wrong which have the same basic solution (jail CEOs of companies that cause the problems) and a trail of corruption just waiting to be reported on and exposed, and we've got nothing.

Re: No conception of money

[mspohr]

I believe RMS is proposing a solution here to a problem with privacy. It uses money so it appears RMS does have some understanding of money.

Re: No conception of money

[Anonymous Coward]

...so it appears RMS does have some understanding of money.

Right.... Next you'll tell us he has some understanding of deodorant. If you stand within 5 meters of the man, you'll then realize he doesn't..

Re: No conception of money

[shanen]

Your reply is not very clear, and the issue of his lack of understanding of money isn't that important to me, but I'll try to clarify things a bit. Then I hope you can understand why this once again illustrates that secondary problem.

There is a real problem with the mass media depending on advertising. It creates a desperation for eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. The abuse of privacy part is actually secondary, but they are trying to increase the value of the eyeballs. The primary problem with that economic model for the media is results like Trump and terrorism. Trump has essentially played the eyeballs-for-advertising game to win free publicity worth billions of dollars. The terrorists also want the free publicity, though mostly in search of recruits, but their quest for publicity strongly motivates creating corpses, especially in new and more newsworthy places.

Now rms seems to think that anonymous donations can somehow replace advertising revenue or force media outlets to stop abusing our privacy. This is one of those cases where he's gone pretty far into his weird little universe... If someone wants to donate money to support a media outlet (often a news website), then the issue of anonymity is quite secondary, though some nice people do prefer to donate anonymously (while other less nice people want to make anonymous donations for reasons that can be downright nefarious). (Yes, I'm biased in favor of openness.)

The economic models that rms is most familiar with are different. As a tenured professor, his personal living expenses are covered. Not really a criticism, but I guess it should be mentioned because poor people often prioritize funding their next meals.

Most of his projects have been funded by large donors (though I'm including research grants as a form of donation). There are two problems there. One is that large donors can change their minds, especially when their pockets get shrunk a bit. The other problem is bad decisions from on high. (BtW, the economic models I discussed with him were oriented around small donors, people like me (and probably you).)

Re:No conception of money

[shanen]

I think you are exaggerating. You really know "many people" who want their charitable donations to be anonymous? I know a lot of people, but I can't think of any of them who make a big issue of anonymity when they donate to charity.

The primary situation where "many people" want their donations to be anonymous are political, and their motivations are usually quite nefarious. Some mix of astroturfing and tax evasion. For such reasons I think it is usually better if the charity know and keep track of where the money came from, though the donors' should certainly have the option to request that their names not be listed in such places as donor lists on public webpages. That should provide sufficient anonymity for most people.

In contrast, rms is focused on technical issues of anonymous donations as though the fear of being revealed as the donor would prevent people from donating to a good cause. Doesn't that strike you as a a bit odd? You might not want to make an issue of your donations, you might prefer to remain in the background, but should you be afraid of being exposed as a donor? (Actually, there are certain occasions when you should be afraid, but I don't see how to map any of them to directly to this proposal by rms on his terms. Those situations would be incidental beneficiaries.)

Re: No conception of money

[mspohr]

You kind of lost me at the money part.
Do you expect journalists to work for free like GNU programmers?

Re: No conception of money

[shanen]

Absolutely not, but actually the GNU programmers should not be working for free, either. However, I do think there should probably be a discount from market wages in exchange for the freedom and control over the work you are doing, whether it is writing articles or code.

My focus is on how small donors can get some of the respect and accountability that large donors have. It seems I'm failing to get that point across. Will it help to say that I think that donor anonymity (or redirection as in "on behalf of" donations) is a secondary aspect and that the technical approach of rms is barely relevant?

Re: No conception of money

[BarbaraHudson]

If he really understood the relationship between people and money, he would be pushing the idea that advertisers PAY PEOPLE to look at their ads, using a portion of the funds they already pay the ad distribution networks.

At least each party is then getting something in return. Tgrow in an opt-out, so you don't see ads, and everyone would be happy.

AND !! AND !!

[Anonymous Coward]

McDonalds should offer various toe jelly condiments, and not for just breakfast!

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS won't touch e-reading unless it has no DRM, and he can pay with cash. Sad problem is, the internet doesn't run on cash. It runs on credit cards. Sorry RMS, but I gotta say "tough shit".

Re: Old news

[mspohr]

He is proposing an anonymous solution similar to cash which will work on the internet.

Re: Old news

[unixisc]

And how does that work w/o inventing a new currency? And even if one did invent such a currency, tough luck getting any government in the world (any sane government, at least) willing to recognize it.

RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work

[klingens]

What RMS wants is logical, good for society, etc. but totally nonpractical and hasn't got a snowballs chance of working since he doesn't understand or ignore how newspapers, print and online both, make their money.

A newspaper hasn't been financed by the price of the paper in your local 7-11 for decades now. that nickel and dime is paying for distribution and maybe the cost of printing at most. The actual money, the biggest part of the cost producing a newspaper has been financed for ages with advertising. Ads from big and small companies but also from classifieds, death notices by relatives (not sure if that custom exists in the US), etc.

So ads are more important than the actual price paid for the traditional papers on dead trees. Now let's move on to the online version of the paper: the pretty much only thing of value one gets from online ads is to be able to directly identify the one watching the ad. To be able to exactly pinpoint the person and then in turn creating a very detailed profile about this person.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
So the online newspaper needs to do the same calculation of ads as main income and subscription price, or some other pay per view, as only very secondary or else the subscription will be so outrageous, no one will ever buy one. It would cost probably two or three times as high without ads than the dead tree paper version for the privilege of reading it on your IPad. Very few subscribers indeed for such a thing.

Since the ads however demand a detailed profile as seen above, no newspaoper can ever deliver what RMS here wants.

Re:RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work

[Anonymous Coward]

In the debate about 'acceptable' online ads, there are plenty of people who don't mind subscribing or seeing static ads as long they don't get tracked and spied on. But your position is the opposite extreme from the block everything, never pay for anything, living in mom's basement crowd.

The newspaper in my local 7/11 has ads in it, but will never know thing about me. I am quite happy with that arrangement.

Re: RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work

[mspohr]

Then why do online newspapers still sell subscriptions?
They can't make enough from advertising.

Re:RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work

[PPH]

This is true. Newspapers make their money from advertising. But the old 'printed on dead trees' newspapers didn't know who was reading their ads. Until the customer called or came in to the business and bought a product.

Web-based publication has given advertisers far more power in transactions than they ever had with printed publications. Not the businesses buying the ads, the advertisers. They have the power to dynamically direct to potential customers in order to maximize their profits, not those of the vendors they are supposedly doing business with. And, as an ad-buying business, you can't go down to the 7-11, grab a paper and see how well or poorly your ad has been placed. It will be different for every viewer.

Re: RMS doesn't understand how newspapers work

[Anonymous Coward]

If they didn't sell the subscription they'd have a hard time knowing who you are. Knowing who you are is important for the new closed loop advertising control system.

"Anonymous payments"

[hcs_$reboot]

TFA

Your transactions are private, neither the exchange nor merchant needs to learn your identity. There is no need to give our credit card numbers or other sensitive information, and the merchant will only be able to do exactly the transaction you confirmed using your digital wallet

That looks good, and will not be restricted to publishers... this will become a more general payment method.

I think that's a thing already...

[Anonymous Coward]

He means donations, right?

Systemic annoyance.

[geekmux]

"...Online newspapers and magazines have come to depend, for their income, on a system of advertising and surveillance, which is both annoying and unjust..."

I get he's trying to highlight a new solution for a known problem here, but RMS should really get out more to better understand just how systemic this bullshit truly is across almost every aspect of our lives.

Re: Systemic annoyance.

[mspohr]

I think he does understand the problem of privacy and is proposing a solution.

Re: Systemic annoyance.

[geekmux]

I think he does understand the problem of privacy and is proposing a solution.

Yes he does understand a problem of privacy.

My point here is this is hardly the problem of privacy today.

In the big picture, I foresee someone expecting a tidal wave from a grain of sand being dropped in the ocean.

Re:Meh

[gnasher719]

I am not compelled to listen to a man who picks stuff off his foot and eats it.

Sorry, but it's not funny. Not if you are in the same room. Or at lunch time.

Just don't try paying if you use iOS

[Bearhouse]

Funny, this coming just after this story;

https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...

What we clearly need is GNUcoin!

Completely correct but too expensive

[Antique Geekmeister]

"rms" as he's preferred to be called for decades, has repeatedly proven quite correct about technology freedoms. This seems to be another case where he is correct, but will mostly be tuned out becuase publishers think that they, individually, will benefit from reducing their client's freedom and protection.

The individual data of purchases and of personal interests and subscriptions, and even data on interest in particular articles, is being collected and analyzed to tune advertising and to provide links to content the publishers wish to highlight and wish to ease the reader's access to. The data is also being resold, allegedly as metadata but far too often as raw data, to anyone who can pay for or _trade data_ for it. The result is a quite amazing loss of privacy due to this data harvesting. This loss of privacy is _dangerous_. Government interest in political speech and membership always has to be balanced between a good government's desire to know the citizen's real needs and desire's, and a dictator's need to strangle opposition of any form.

Unfortunately for what rms proposes, targeted advertising _is_ effective for increasing advertising effectiveness for the businesses that provide it. It does not necessarily increase _profit_. Many such schemes are done quite poorly, so poorly that subscribers leave the site. Slashdot almost fell prey to this kind of advertising over content approach to publication, when they tried the new layout and it was roundly rejected. But there are _many_ jobs of advertisers, and a _lot_ of marketing money, tied to targeted advertising. Buyer anonymity interferes profoundly with that and will be battled in the boardroom and in the courtroom. If it goes to court, it will be battled with "think of the children" and "war against terror" claims that genuine reader anonymity cannot be permitted.

Re: Completely correct but too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't figured out one thing about targeted ads: why there's no proof they work anywhere. I mean, there's proof the targeting works, and sure we've all run into the occasional moron who likes seeing tailored vs random ads, but like most marketing pseudoscience there's no proof that anybody paying for it gets anything for their money...but people do because other people do.

For myself, whenever I see an ad that looks suspiciously related to something I've been searching on I know it's time to scrub the usual things slimy marketers use for tracking and then we're back to random ads. I'll admit I rather enjoy that feeling.

Re: Completely correct but too expensive

[mspohr]

I'm sure there are lots of studies showing targeted ads work.
The real proof is the millions of dollars being spent.

Re: Completely correct but too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there are lots of studies showing targeted ads work.
The real proof is the millions of dollars being spent.

Then these studies should be easy to find.

The alternative is that they don't work and that the advertising industry's millions are aggregated from the same cohort of businesses that have a 90% failure rate in their first year.

The only plausible study I have seen suggests that online advertising works by surreptitiously building brand awareness.

Re:Completely correct but too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure I agree about the fact of RMS being either correct or too expensive.

No, what concerns me is this. "...we are developing a suitable payment system called GNU Taler...". Really? We know your history RMS, how close are you to releasing GNU Hurd? Can we expect Taler in 2017? 2018? 2020? Or is it more like 2120? Or worse yet, to be co-released with GNU Hurd, which means more like "between now and infinity, with infinity being the more likely?"

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill G., don't you have enough money to NOT post anonymously?

CAP === 'vision'

Ditto anyone who writes a check to

[Anonymous Coward]

the nefarious Girl Scouts & their cookie racket - who "have come to depend, for their income, on a system of advertising and surveillance, which is both annoying and unjust..."

No, Richard. BAD idea.

[johnnys]

It's not a matter of anonymizing supporters who want to pay a few dollars to a non-mainstream news source who do a good job and report on unpopular subjects. It's a matter of hiding the identity of a 1%er who decides to pour megabucks into a news source deliberately misleading the readers.

I will cheerfully admit to sending a few bucks to a cause which is controversial as long as I get to find out when some rich creep tries to buy a "big lie" in one of these corrupt "news" organizations.

Re:No, Richard. BAD idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problems are completely unrelated. The one percenter doesn't hide his identity from the media company (he wants them to know who not to write about) and he doesn't use his browser to donate (rather a front company). You giving up your anonymity will do nothing to help find out who the 1%er is, in fact it likely gives him more of a haystack to hide in.

Re:No, Richard. BAD idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

that isn't entirely true, many times they want to remain completely separate so that the news source can claim they have no financial interest in the party being reported on and the beneficiary can also point at them and say look, this well funded news source publically agrees with me and I have no connection with them so I must be right. Once funding is connected to a source the value of the information in many peoples eyes diminishes greatly even if still independently verified and accurate.

you lose

[Anonymous Coward]

it does not matter if you pay for them anonymously or not, if you read them you lose, simple as that

media is garbage, literally garbage

people that pay for the news are into bsdm and shit like that, its a fact since they are paying for being spit in their brains

Re: you lose

[mspohr]

Yes, a lot of media is shit.
However, do you want to live in a cave?
The solution is to use your brain to filter out the shit.
You still need to think.

Re:Use tip jars automatically

[Richard_J_N]

Even better, let's have a protocol to do this automatically, perhaps built into Firefox or into Adblock.

At the moment, about 90% of web bandwidth is advertising. So it imposes a heavy cost of bandwidth/time/annoyance on the reader, yet it gives back a fraction of a cent to the author of the content. I'd much rather pay directly for the content I want, and not get the garbage. It would also improve content quality because nobody would worry about their articles being unpopular with advertisers. And it would be a great way for Firefox to lead over Chrome.

Re:Use tip jars automatically

[Richard_J_N]

One more huge advantage of ending paywalls is linkability.
If I want to share an article with a friend, or link something on my webpage, or cite it as the paper of record, then it can't be behind a paywall.
This way, publishers can get paid fairly, without taking themselves out of the internet community.
And we could be talking micropayments here - 1 cent an article or something.

GNU Anonymous

[Framboise]

Richard could start a profitable financial company that would play the intermediate role for ensuring the micro-bills and for hiding the customer names from media companies.

Who uses GNU Taler?

[unixisc]

So online publishers who are struggling to scrape money together with journalists being let go from every corner, cutbacks in every department, poorer and poorer quality editing, shit fluff pieces about lost dogs to try and drive readership who couldn't care less about what's happening in the world, all should now further gut what little income they have?

Richard Stallman why not just straight go out and say you think online publishing shouldn't exist?

That sounds pretty much like his jihad against software writers. Initially, he used to say that they should make money selling documentation, then he demanded that the documentation be free, er libre, while he continued to rail against companies that made money w/ FOSS like Tivo and Google.

Right now, the choice he's talking about exists. There are 4 types of people:

1. People opposed to both advertizing/surveillance as well as paying for it

2. People opposed to advertizing/surveillance but okay w/ paying (e.g. RMS above)

3. People okay w/ advertizing/surveillance so that they needn't pay for it

4. People who don't care - okay w/ both advertizing and paying for it

Category 1 is a can't win situation, and not even worth chasing. Right now, a lot of online publications cater to a combination of categories 2 & 3: you get advertizing if you wanna use the free stuff, but register/pay, and the ads disappear. Category 4 is the dream scenario for publishers, they get paid AND they can advertize.

The question is - who on earth uses GNU Taler? How does it work? Only way I can think of is taking x amount of CASH, giving it to someone working in Taler, and they'll put that $x into an anonymous account which they then give you. Otherwise, how is it different from any debit card?

1 bitcoin suki suki miss so horny

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this communist bitch is opening space for an alternative way for online payment to Tor users and their sick raping game.

YES!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a big reason why I will never sign up for subscription news services...as all I am doing is giving them real information to track and profile me better. If I could subscribe without the tracking I would be much more likely to consider doing it.

Glad to see more ideas entering the arena

[TrimTabTim]

Look, I know Stallman is a public figure who's history means some folks are already rolling their eyes before he gets a word out. But none of the comments here actually address the merit of this thing yet, or the fact that this problem exists to start with.

Regarding the post summary, let's evaluate the current situation. We have a world where media is beholden to advertisers and the public is the product. Injected with "flavor additive content" as tastes dictate, monitored, recorded and demographically categorized for convenient sale to 3rd party interests. I may sound overly dramatic but I don't think I'm exaggerating. The true customers for all ad based media are advertisers. Data aggregators then sell it all onward to corporate and nation state interests. I doubt any right thinking person would say this is a good state of affairs unless they've got vested interests in this particular food chain.

So a solution is necessary. Reading the FAQ blurbs about GNU Taller from the link given though, and as a self proclaimed monetary history and economics buff, I'm not convinced this is the best way forward.

I kind of like how they describe the difference between "sharing" which is anonymous and free as in speech and "transactions" where the income side is somehow not anonymous for businesses. This could be conducive for abolishing income taxation (an immoral action easily evaded by rich people) and moving to a pure consumption tax. Such as:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
Which I would support wholeheartedly. I don't see anything though which would stop GNU Taller from only perpetuating the income tax, which I am morally opposed to.

Lastly I see no mention of micro-payments. We need an anonymous way to issue fractional payments to content creators which doesn't require private details to set up, and which doesn't have service fees that would make arrangements like "a few cents per article" impractical. Bitcoin's upcoming micro-payment channel and side chain ideas are promising, but GNU Taller doesn't seem to touch on this. On this front GNU Taller looks like just more of the same whereby anonymity isn't a real thing: make an account at their site, accept cookies, sign in and be tracked as you use up your deposit.

To get back to the summary of this post, consider this question: Would you give a street musician money if they wanted your name, address and credit card details? No, but you'd toss a little cash in his hat gladly. Some of the improvements planned for bitcoin do have this future in mind, so I'll keep my bets on that square for the moment.

Good, but might work

[Sad Loser]

The obvious use case that might make this viable, and also the BRAVE browser

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

would be porn, which tends to power most great IT advances.

Re: Good, but might work

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn has been free for years. Why would people start paying now? The genie is out of the bottle. A 15 min clip of scenes from an hour long flick is all you should need. Considering 15 min of a porn is usually talking and undressing anyway.

Re:Good, but might work

[eric_harris_76]

Most advances, period, apparently.

At least, someone found enough instances of this to write a book about it.

_Sex, bombs, and burgers : how war, pornography, and fast food have shaped modern technology_, by Peter Nowak.

meet money! INNOVATION!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else think money, itself, is a bit arcane? Technology has brought us this far and some how we can't all stop saying, 'mine, mine, gimme, gimme'. I'm as big a coward as the next, but, gimme a break? The atom bomb, AI, space, the Higgs boson... Enough food to feed the entire planet into an overweight losers show and our only set back is an ancient and arcane way of transcending the value of physical objects into precious metals, paper, and binary digits? I'm sure I'll be harassed slightly if not a lot for this comment, if anyone even gives a fuck enough to read it; but, holy crap? The whole world has been having a hissy fit about value that decides it's own value? Well who the fuck decided the value of money should decide the value of money? I've thought about this problem a lot and the only thing I've realized in trying to discern how a person can get paid for producing a unit virtually 0 scarcity (hope i'm using that fancy word right) is that they can't, period. It's the wrong question to be asking. It's like telling some one to lick their elbow, trying to figure that shit out. And when the world is done trying to lick their damn elbow, well maybe we can all, i dunno... travel to the stars and live side by side with sentient machines...

One small problem

[iamacat]

How will potential paying readers discover those websites? Could it be through... advertisement to likely audiences? You don't say!

Nope

[DogDude]

Nope. The solution is simple: Newspapers need to sell and publish their own ads again, like they did with the paper versions. Their advertising revenue will come back, and they'll be fine. I know that we stopped advertising in our local newspapers because we know that most people won't see the ads, and those that do are the ones too dumb to use ad blockers, so they're not people we want as customers, anyway. Newspapers need to hire back their ad salespeople, and publish their own ads on their own sites. The model works fine, but the publishers broke it when they got too greedy, and thought they could replace their advertising departments with Doubleclick.

I'd pay ten bucks a year for Google news

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to be able to pick and choose - by the article. I don't want to be bogged down by paying all the providers separately. But would easily go $10 or 20 bucks through Google news. And I can pay with a prepaid card, so no exposing my credentials nor credit card. Lotsa onion routing stuffs around if I care if someone knows what I like to read (I personally could care less).

IOW, in the neighborhood of what I used to pay for a paper once you remove production and distribution costs.

Not sure we need *payment* tech to solve getting reporters paid is what I'm saying.

Media financing

[Anonymous Coward]

Relating to media financing. What media sites are selling to advertisers is also a detailed customer profile. Here in Montreal, The LaPresse+ editor (Guy Crevier) is boasting a 41min average daily attention span as an added bonus to announcers. He's hoping to sell his platform to other media outlets and newspappers. I applaude Stallman's initiative but he will meet some resistance...

I've been waiting for this for many years

[Anonymous Coward]

we should be able to pay for news anonymously.

This is the reason why I buy very little on-line.

In real life I pay cash for as much as possible, which is very important to me to retain some degree of anonymity (the security cameras notwithstanding).

But online, I don't have that option. I would have no problem paying a few cents for each article I read, but only if I can remain anonymous.

One thing I won't do, however, is to use any digital currency that deliberately wastes energy in its "mining" process. The current generation of digital currencies is an ecological travesty. We need people working on the extremely important problem of how to meet the twin goals of guaranteed-anonymous online transactions and energy-efficient design.

Could work for charitable giving

[Art Challenor]

I'd be more willing to give money anonymously to a charity because it drives me crazy that I make a donation the junk mail from any organization that is vaguely similar (but which is usually of no interest to me) starts rolling in.

Re:Could work for charitable giving

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an easy anonymous solution: Put $ in an envelope and mail it.

Re:Could work for charitable giving

[Anonymous Coward]

I donated my entire Christmas budget to the Salvation Army one year. Big mistake.

They continually send me pleas for more, to the point that they have eclipsed what I gave them originally with their marketing tactics. So much wasted cardboard, letters, envelopes and gimmicks, all straight in the trash.
Same with Red Cross and I can't recall how many others, MS, blindness, cancer, heart disease, etc.
All the charities seem to do the same, and now NONE of them get any money from me.
I now drop cash in a box on the street if I see one, but I'm buggered if I'm making any more payments that can be tracked back to me.
I don't care about tax rebates for charitable donations, I just want those charities to stop canvassing me.

The only way that seems to work, is to give them nothing for at least 5 years, and then they get tired of it and stop.
If they had an "opt out" option with their donation form, perhaps they might succeed again with me.

An anonymous contribution system would be a godsend, but the charities are probably still infiltrated with yuppie marketing-trained SJWs who insist on pestering people beyond their capabilities, so I'm not holding my breath...

Single minded Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

He just ignores big issues such as money laundering, and what happens if I pay for something and it never arrives, you can't expect companies just to send new things out to any anonymous person who asks.

Some media outlets accept BitCoin: freekeene.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks in part to the Free State Project and other liberty-oriented groups which have spring up in the past several years who are promoting the migration movement of liberty-lovers there are numerous small media outlets in New Hampshire that do accept BitCoin. BitCoin is big in New Hampshire with even small towns such as Keene having lots of businesses to spend them at.

The media outlet that comes most to mind most is: Free Keene (http://freekeene.com/). It's a great source of original liberty oriented news content that you won't find anywhere else. All stuff that is happening in New Hampshire. From police raids and protests to BitCoin. This is an online media outlet that really gets freedom and BitCoin.

The other one that I'm aware of is a small paper that has physical distribution in New Hampshire called: Free Press Publications (http://fpp.cc/) and it's centred around liberty oriented news as well.

We have other media outlets here accepting BitCoins as well including Liberty Radio Network (http://lrn.fm/), Free Talk Live (http://freetalklive.com/), and others.

Good one, Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, allow companies to privately +1 all the stories they want you to hear. Way to promote freedom and fairness. Just stfu, rms

Alternative approach to inverted advertising

[shanen]

How about a privacy protection agent (PPA) who sits in the middle? The broker would auction off metered bits of your time based on how much time you want to spend on shopping. Honest companies that offer valuable goods and services would be glad to make their pitches to qualified customers, while the PPA would be strongly motivated to protect your privacy to stay in the loop.

PPAs would compete for your business based on various parameters (such as the percentage of the auction proceeds you get to keep) and services (such as high quality spam filtering), while the PPAs would compete for the companies' business based on how well they can qualify the potential customers. You would always be free to pack up your personal information and take it to a different PPA, and it should be illegal for anyone to keep, copy, or use your personal information without your consent. (Okay, the last part went into pie-in-the-sky territory, though I think it is already implicit in the Bill of Rights in America and in various other personal-rights documents around the world.)

Charity share brokerage RIUHA

[shanen]

Would you be interested in donating to slashdot on a per-project basis? For examples, an ongoing-cost project could pay for some part of slashdot to keep running, while a feature-development project might pay for improving an old feature or creating a new one. If enough members chipped in, then the project would go forward?

Part of a much more complete idea, but here's just one obvious extension: If a feature incurs ongoing costs but its ongoing-cost project runs out of money, then that feature would be temporarily disabled until enough people funded it. Obvious incentive of letting wannabe donors use the feature while the rest of the funding is still pending...

By the way, the same approach could be adopted to journalism, though I think the projects would be more naturally oriented along the dimension of internal and external. Internal projects would be funding the authors, video producers, and researchers, while external projects would be targeted at solving the actual problems described in the articles or videos.

Re:Charity share brokerage RIUHA

[AmiMoJo]

Do a Kickstarter for fixing typing the £ symbol and I'll chip in. Make down mods count for 0.5 and my wallet is open.

Re:Charity share brokerage RIUHA

[shanen]

The main problem with Kickstarter is the lack of success criteria. I think that crowd-funding is actually a good idea, but their implementation seems fatally flawed because their business model is a flat percentage off the top, without any accountability. They just want to pump as much money as possible towards projects, and as far as I know, they do nothing to help with the planning or evaluation.

Are you familiar with the sad story of Diaspora as funded via Kickstarter?

By the way, RACS predates my hearing about Kickstarter, and I think it was already a better design because of using a fixed budget.

What you call something describes your values

[jbn-o]

Fine, call it GNU. It's a shame not to give the major components fair credit as the GNU Project asks, so Linux does deserve a mention too. But by calling the OS only GNU you'll also miss out on an opportunity to clearly distinguish between GNU on various kernels (due to GNU's portability): GNU runs on kWindows, kFreeBSD, HURD, and Linux and the choice of kernel means different features. For example, systemd is highly dependent on Linux kernel features so I wouldn't expect to find systemd features on GNU running on any other kernel.

Pay per seat

[DrYak]

Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.

Except that the chair is a physical object requiring a transfer of a physical object. There's no way to have "chairness" without having physical chairs moved around.

To keep your metaphor, the current situation is that for historical reasons, they have a different payment model:
they ask to pay each time you sit down on a chair. They'll happily provide you a chair for free, even an expensive one that would be worth 1500$ of a handscrafting. But all their chairs come with a contract stating that you must pay 10 cents each time you put your ass them.

(And if you think of it, it's not necessarily that weird: movie theaters have been basically selling you tickets to the privilege of coming an siting on their chairs, with the selling point being that there's a movie projected on a wall in front of the chairs).

And now they complain that their business (again: their business is not the creation of the chair itself, but the collecting a tax on the use of chairs) is losing money, because evil pirates have learned to home-build their own chairs using planks, more recently beer crates, and nowadays people are 3D-printing their own designs).

The metaphore isn't perfect, because in the case of recorded-media, the *designs* of chair would all come from the same person.
(Works a little bit better in the case of printed media/online journals: par of their competition is due to simply readers prefering to look at blogs for free instead of paying for quality journalism. They would prefere to reuse a beer crate that they already have laying around ratter than pay the 10c tax per sitting, even if that means that the 1500$ worth chair won't get re-imbursed).

And these 10c per sitting are really close to what is happening with digital media.

Back in historical times, when the music/etc, industries all started developing, the act of distributing the content was a very difficult and expensive part of the process: you needing to produce physical media, you needed logistics to move around said physical media, you needed physical outlets with employee to sell that physical media, etc.
so it made sense back then to extract money to cover the whole pipeline at the point of distribution of content:
the price of the disc doesn't only cover the physical object, the but the whole pipeline, starting from money that will be spent to pay the artists for the act of creation, all the way to the shop paying its employee through the difference between the bulk price they get for the discs and what they write on the shelf.

But slowly, the ability of home-recording first, and then later the ease to pass around digital media, specially thanks to internet, has made the whole distribution chain irrelevant. The thing where money is asked (the right for you to get a copy that you can play) is literally the cheapest and simplest step of the pipeline (as proven multiple times in recent history by sharing sites or software) - we are metaphorically doing the equivalent of asking 10c for the act of sitting.
The problem is that there are other steps (act of creation) that require money (artists need to eat), but don't get that money directly but used to get money with a processus that isn't relevant anymore: somewhere, there's a guy still spending his work to make 1500$ chairs, but as collecting 10c per sitting is as stupid as it sounds, this chair maker isn't getting paid anymore. Because on one hand people prefer to sit on empty beer crates (people reading free blogs instead of press) and other people simply push a button on their 3D printer to make themselves an exact copy of the 1500$ chair that he spent hours making and will never get paid for it).

So right now we are finding different ways to make money for digital content.

Yup, we're slowly starting to try to invent the concept of selling actual

HURD RMS

[unixisc]

To be fair to RMS - not that I like doing it - he has thrown in the towel on HURD eons ago, and it's right now the hobby of a handful of people who can't let go. They tried out 4 different microkernels before reverting to GNU Mach. Which is pretty lame - while Mach was a first generation microkernel, it gave microkernels the reputation of being necessarily slow. Which ain't the case w/ some other real microkernels, like Minix 3.

Coreutils plus two

[tepples]

If you use GNU Coreutils plus two other major components (such as Bash, Emacs, GCC, glibc), I'd say you're running GNU. Cygwin, for instance, stands for Cygnus GNU/Windows.

Accountability for view and click counts

[tepples]

If publishers (operators of ad-supported websites) sell their own ad space directly to advertisers and serve ads from the publisher's own server, how can the advertiser know that the view and click counts are accurate and not fraudulently padded? Paper newspapers had circulation numbers that were hard to pad because each copy had a more substantial cost to manufacture than a web hit. And advertisers are willing to spend more on online ad space precisely because of richer reach statistics.

Re:Accountability for view and click counts

[DogDude]

There's no guarantee that Doubleclick or any of the other ad networks numbers are accurate, either. Besides, people still advertise on the TV and the radio, and there are no numbers at all from those mediums.

Trust from scale; Nielsen ratings

[tepples]

There's no guarantee that Doubleclick or any of the other ad networks numbers are accurate, either.

Trust can come from scale. If a major ad network such as DoubleClick is screwing its advertisers, then everyone's getting screwed the same. At least DoubleClick is more widely deployed than any particular publisher's self-hosted ad inventory, and people are more likely to notice faults in it.

Besides, people still advertise on the TV and the radio, and there are no numbers at all from those mediums.

For one thing, TV and radio have third parties in the business of calculating ratings, or estimated audience size for a program. These are the old-media counterpart to web analytics. For another, an advertiser might be willing to spend more on web than on TV or radio because web is more targeted (due to tracking) and has more precise ratings.