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

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: Yes! wait No!

[BarbaraHudson]

Stalman doesn't like freedom when it isn't"his" brand of freedom. Like other little Hitlers, he thinks that people should jump through hoops to meet his ideals, even though they have been shown to take away freedom in the past - exhibit 1 being the increasing restrictions in each new license he proposes. The BSD license is much freer, but Stalman doesn't like it because it grants too many freedoms to anyone who uses it.

One size doesn't fit all, unless you're a pathological narcissist who thinks you're always right. I'll be glad when he's gone - his stupid insistence on prefixing other people's work with GNU is a lie when the biggest GNU project - gcc - was really a renamed egcs when the original gcc fell apart. And of course the Linux that ships with Android is gnu-free.

He might be happy living the life of a homeless tramp for years at a time, but society would fall apart if everyone tried to live by couch surfing and lab squatting.