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Richard Stallman Interviewed By Bryan Lunduke (youtube.com)
Many Slashdot readers know Bryan Lunduke as the creator of the humorous "Linux Sucks" presentations at the annual Southern California Linux Exposition. He's now also a member of the OpenSUSE project board and an all-around open source guy. (In September, he released every one of his books, videos and comics under a Creative Commons license, while his Patreon page offers a tip jar and premiums for monthly patrons). But now he's also got a new "daily computing/nerd show" on YouTube, and last week -- using nothing but free software -- he interviewed the 64-year-old founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman. "We talk about everything from the W3C's stance on DRM to opinions on the movie Galaxy Quest," Lunduke explains in the show's notes.
Click through to read some of the highlights.
"Instead of the DMCA, which makes it a crime to show people how to break DRM, it should be a crime to make, import or lease or sell devices with DRM," Stallman says. "Both the players and the media. It should be a crime. The executives of the companies that are now pulling the strings of the W3C, they should go to jail for doing DRM. "
Asked about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's endorsement of DRM in HTML5, Stallman quipped that "The fact that he's a knight means he was of service to the empire. And now he's being of service to another empire...What's happening here is that Berners-Lee and Jeff Jaffee have convinced themselves that by making this a standard, they will make the injustice of DRM smoother and less annoying in minor ways. And they've convinced themselves that that's the purpose of their lives... "
"He should handle it by saying no. But he can't really. And the reason is he set up an organization which is controlled by the businesses that want to put in the most money... By structuring it so it's controlled by the businesses, they've structured it so it wouldn't defend us from those businesses."
Stallman calls Skype "a non-free program with a network effect" whose users are "victim co-perpetrators," and also says that "Nobody uses Facebook, Facebook uses them. Facebook doesn't have users. It has useds. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is using you to get information about you and about other people you know..."
Stallman pans mobile devices "that are full of peripherals that require non-free software at the system level. So there's no way to free them and have them work, except lots of painstaking reverse engineering, which is proceeding slowly."
And Stallman reserves a special bile for "the internet of Stings", saying "I personally wouldn't tolerate anything in my home that was talking to the internet except for my computer. They're designed to mistreat you. And part of the way they're designed to mistreat you is that they contain non-free software. And as happens often in the non-free software world, they have malicious functionality... It's the act of folly to use such a device."
Citing evils including surveillance, DRM, and back doors, as well as censorship and tethering to a remote server, Stallman says "If any proprietary program nowadays has no malicious functionality, that's basically luck."
"With free software you can remove any malicious functionality [or] a few other users can get together and release their modified version, and you just have to use it. With free software the community of users can defend itself from malicious functionalities. With proprietary software, the users are defenseless. This is why the mere fact of being proprietary software is an injustice." At one point he even says that proprietary software is like a dangerous drug, and "we've got to teach people to get off of it."
His advice to others? "Reject products with DRM. Never use any product designed to restrict you unless you have, immediately to hand, what it takes to break the handcuffs."
Stallman says he's running Trisquel's GNU/Linux distro on a ThinkPad x60, "one of the models of computer that can run a free BIOS with no binary blobs in the BIOS or in Linux, no proprietary software at any level of the GNU system. This is basically what we were aiming for 34 years ago."
Lunduke asks Stallman how a staunch proponent of free software -- and a man who doesn't agree to EULAs -- gets his entertainment media? Stallman replies, "No movie or show or song is worth giving up my freedom for. So I don't. So the only ways I will get copies of publications is when there's an ethical way to do it, one that doesn't mistreat me, doesn't do injustice to those who are using it..." "I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"
As a recovering teenaged TV addict, he no longer owns a television -- he went cold turkey when he went to college -- but he loved The Prisoner, and quotes it. " 'I'm going to escape and come back and wipe this place off off the face of the earth' is an inspiration to me. You might say that spirit is the base of the Free Software Movement. I'm going to escape from proprietary software, and come back, and wipe proprietary software off the face of the earth."
Finally, Stallman says we need more free software champions to help with this great work, and when Lunduke conveys the thank-yous of many free software fans, Stallman replies, "The best way to thank me and the thousands of other people who've worked on GNU is by helping us advance. So look at GNU.org/help, and you'll see see dozens of different kinds of work you can do or contributions you can make. And it's not all programming..."
Click through to read some of the highlights.
"Instead of the DMCA, which makes it a crime to show people how to break DRM, it should be a crime to make, import or lease or sell devices with DRM," Stallman says. "Both the players and the media. It should be a crime. The executives of the companies that are now pulling the strings of the W3C, they should go to jail for doing DRM. "
Asked about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's endorsement of DRM in HTML5, Stallman quipped that "The fact that he's a knight means he was of service to the empire. And now he's being of service to another empire...What's happening here is that Berners-Lee and Jeff Jaffee have convinced themselves that by making this a standard, they will make the injustice of DRM smoother and less annoying in minor ways. And they've convinced themselves that that's the purpose of their lives... "
"He should handle it by saying no. But he can't really. And the reason is he set up an organization which is controlled by the businesses that want to put in the most money... By structuring it so it's controlled by the businesses, they've structured it so it wouldn't defend us from those businesses."
Stallman calls Skype "a non-free program with a network effect" whose users are "victim co-perpetrators," and also says that "Nobody uses Facebook, Facebook uses them. Facebook doesn't have users. It has useds. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is using you to get information about you and about other people you know..."
Stallman pans mobile devices "that are full of peripherals that require non-free software at the system level. So there's no way to free them and have them work, except lots of painstaking reverse engineering, which is proceeding slowly."
And Stallman reserves a special bile for "the internet of Stings", saying "I personally wouldn't tolerate anything in my home that was talking to the internet except for my computer. They're designed to mistreat you. And part of the way they're designed to mistreat you is that they contain non-free software. And as happens often in the non-free software world, they have malicious functionality... It's the act of folly to use such a device."
Citing evils including surveillance, DRM, and back doors, as well as censorship and tethering to a remote server, Stallman says "If any proprietary program nowadays has no malicious functionality, that's basically luck."
"With free software you can remove any malicious functionality [or] a few other users can get together and release their modified version, and you just have to use it. With free software the community of users can defend itself from malicious functionalities. With proprietary software, the users are defenseless. This is why the mere fact of being proprietary software is an injustice." At one point he even says that proprietary software is like a dangerous drug, and "we've got to teach people to get off of it."
His advice to others? "Reject products with DRM. Never use any product designed to restrict you unless you have, immediately to hand, what it takes to break the handcuffs."
Stallman says he's running Trisquel's GNU/Linux distro on a ThinkPad x60, "one of the models of computer that can run a free BIOS with no binary blobs in the BIOS or in Linux, no proprietary software at any level of the GNU system. This is basically what we were aiming for 34 years ago."
Lunduke asks Stallman how a staunch proponent of free software -- and a man who doesn't agree to EULAs -- gets his entertainment media? Stallman replies, "No movie or show or song is worth giving up my freedom for. So I don't. So the only ways I will get copies of publications is when there's an ethical way to do it, one that doesn't mistreat me, doesn't do injustice to those who are using it..." "I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"
As a recovering teenaged TV addict, he no longer owns a television -- he went cold turkey when he went to college -- but he loved The Prisoner, and quotes it. " 'I'm going to escape and come back and wipe this place off off the face of the earth' is an inspiration to me. You might say that spirit is the base of the Free Software Movement. I'm going to escape from proprietary software, and come back, and wipe proprietary software off the face of the earth."
Finally, Stallman says we need more free software champions to help with this great work, and when Lunduke conveys the thank-yous of many free software fans, Stallman replies, "The best way to thank me and the thousands of other people who've worked on GNU is by helping us advance. So look at GNU.org/help, and you'll see see dozens of different kinds of work you can do or contributions you can make. And it's not all programming..."
You opened the article, and even posted in it. You care!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Awwwwwwww.......you're such a caring person! 3
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He is Richard Fucking Stallman. He is going to be direct, blunt, and passionate, and everything he says is going to be true.
I can't say he's wrong, though.
That's Stallman in a nutshell. Particularly the "though".
> I sympathize with his ideals, because the truth is that a lot of DRM sucks ass [...]
This is probably the most insidious geek trap. "It can't be done perfectly, so I better do nothing..." "Oh! someone tweeted something!". Uncountable geek's corpses lay scattered around on that cliffs.
The best antidote is: Do as well as you can. Pick your battles. Keep it fun, while not losing the goal's sight. Accept imperfection. Above all, keep it fun.
Free software is winning. What is the most popular OS kernel? Is there a modern computer or mobile device that doesn't run GNU software? Do you think companies like Google would open source their software if free software was losing?
What about the internet? It was all proprietary, closed systems before free software and protocols set us free.
Netflix will give us DRM one day. They would do it now I think, if it were not required for licencing the material they offer.
Think how much worse things would be without free software.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"The reality is, we live in a world choke full of DRM and information harvesting megacorps - the free software idealism has lost and will never win"
His idealism has nothing to do with it, he's not an extremist. Basically its people like you who don't understand that the free market is a myth in a society of high speed internet where software producers are under private control, pre-high speed internet their was a balance between buyers of software and makers/sellers of software. AKA you got the software to run entirely on your computer because they physically had to let go of the software, post high speed internet. Basically Steam/mmo's/drm/software companies can take software hostage on the other side of the internet, break it into two pieces.
Free market theory can't work in such a society because 1) You'd have to be physically close to the companys producing software to hold them accountable and thereby prevent DRM from being forced upon you. 2) The average layperson in capitalist society is not technology literate enough to be a market participant. AKA the primitive primate brain was never designed to make rational decisions in a high tech capitalist society.
If anything permanently spying on people because private ownership of megacorporations doesn't work when the population using their services/products are physically not close enough to effect their policies. It's not that I wanted Steam or mmo's (drm'd rpg's with a subscription) to take off, it's that the informed members of capitalist society are not organized in a way to produce bad market outcomes. The idea that the average clueless tech illiterate kid is going to make rational decision regarding the future of videogames for instance (aka drm everywhere) is a myth. It has very little to do with Stallman being an extremist and everything to do with the free market having always been a myth, any large organization that controls a large share of the worlds wealth can simply forcibly impose policies on populations because the population is 100's of miles away, without physical proxmity in a post high speed internet age, there's no way to prevent having these policies forced on the population if they want to participate in the culture. Basically the myth of the free market is being shown to be a farce with the rise of the internet.
The myth of consumer choice is the issue - you can't have genuine accountability or influence over corporations policies without physical proxmity, aka drm wouldn't be a think if we all lived within a few blocks of these companies. They get to force it down our throats because they are taking advantage of the fact the internet allows you to 'distribute' the product while holding part of its functionality hostage on companies servers, aka it's corporate warfare on peoples right to their own personal computers and the files they are purchasing from these companies. UWP and encrypted computing Microsoft and big companies are working on are working to turn computing devices into magical dumb terminal permanently. The entire internet is being re-engineered to take total control of software away from the end user, since the end user is too technically illiterate to understand the sophistication of the attacks on their rights.
If anything stallman is right and the free market corporate extremists are wrong, in what world do you want to have you private data bought and sold by anonymous corporations and then sold to people who are hostile to your interests AND have your own computer files like games encrypted so you can't modify them while the legal environment is being remade to make file modifications illegal to software you've paid for? What kind of fucked up world do you live in that you want to be a slave of a giant corporation these little ceo kings and ignorant peasants? If anything its the average free marketeer that is the extremist.
No market relationship can exist when buyer and seller are 100's of miles away from each other, there's no accountability so producers can impose their will on society and the average person is not intelligent enough to make rational decisions regarding technology because the human brain didn't evolve to deal with it.
When he started there was no such thing as an entire operating system of free software and no hardware you could run it on. This exists today - it didn't then. It's not as readily and easily available as it should be - but it exists. And, as he rightfully pointed out, if he had compromised the ideal of that existing - it would still not exist at all. It only exists because he never settled for less than that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Thanks for linking to a 1+ hour video without telling us which minute this happens.
We all have nothing better to do than search in videos linked to by random people.
Stallman has never opposed commercialism - he has no problem with people earning a living - you just shouldn't get to earn money by ripping people off (stealing their freedom is arguably worse than stealing their money - and that's what's happening, it may be cleverly disguised but conjobs always are - they are still fraud).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Stallman is more like the kind of political extremist who would tell everybody not to vote because it perpetuates the system. He doesn't force anybody to do anything, he only forces himself and suggests to others. Forcing is what he's against.
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Once again, Stall man is on topic, on point, and right about everything. People hate Stallman because they hate freedom, and hate a man with principles.
But it's still hard to take Stallman seriously because he doesn't provide practical solutions to these problems.
Actually he does: opt out. It won't kill you to only buy entertainment which is DRM-free. So you can't stream the latest episode of Game of Thrones; if you have access to a library you have more alternative ways to entertain your imagination than you'll ever have time to use.
The problem is not being able to buy what the people around them are buying is just too radical for most people.
This is not a practical or tolerable solution for 99% of the population.
This is not anticipated to be tolerable by 99% of the population. They don't actually know, because they'll never try it. Stallman seems to be happy enough without Netflix. But Stallman is a nut. Why is he a nut? Because he's happy enough without Netflix. It's circular reasoning; for all you know you're a nut too, you just don't know it.
This is how powerful corporations control people: by manipulating their unexamined assumptions of what they can tolerably live with. They don't need police power, because people will police themselves.
In a sense this is nothing new, they're just manipulating a longstanding fact about human nature: people are very bad at predicting how things will affect their future happiness. I've recently developed an interest in the old Greek and Roman philosophers called the Stoics. They reasoned more or less thus: if happiness is having all your wants satisfied, the surest path to happiness is to want less. But even they realized that nobody can really adequately regulate their own desires. The best you can achieve is a kind of skepticism about what would otherwise be unchallenged assumptions about what you need. But even though it falls short, it goes a long way toward freeing you from self-afflicted dissatisfaction.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ahh, 'progressive'. It's funny how you lot are so scared of that word.
His ideals are, in fact, that much closer to european social democratic movements. But I don't know why you're so scared of Socialism; the US has lots of examples of it, and some of them aren't even corporate welfare.
On Chavez: I think a lot of lefties (me included) were very supportive of Chavez when he appeared on the scene; the first few years of Chavez rule were significant in terms of how they improved the lives of the poor.
Did Chavez go off the rails? Yes. But perhaps that started when the US backed an attempt to have him forcibly removed from an aircraft when it wasn't even on the ground.
his goal at the end - eviscerating proprietary software from the face of the earth - just reveals his evil Stalinist tendencies that have never left him, and never will.
The problem with Stalin wasn't his ideals. The problem with Stalin was that he killed people who disagreed with him. Either you have a very basic lack of understanding, or you are purposely trying to mislead people. Which is it?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Except that is not what he said.
Q: The job I am doing is unethical, but it earns me lots of money. Do you want my children to starve?
A: That does not make it ethical and there are other jobs out there.