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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..."
I sympathize with his ideals, because the truth is that a lot of DRM sucks ass and big companies like facebook are screwing their users in unethical ways. But it's still hard to take Stallman seriously because he doesn't provide practical solutions to these problems. 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 - and Stallman seems like a radical extremist that advocates blowing up parlament and engaging in civil disobedience by opting out of all the services modern life offers. This is not a practical or tolerable solution for 99% of the population. Most people want to watch Netflix, connect with their friends on facebook and perform Google searches. If you just tell them they can't have all that, you'll never win them over.
... that Lunduke would even interview RMS again after RMS telling Lunduke that he should go broke rather than develop software... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=radmjL5OIaA
I have enjoyed every interaction I have had with him because he doesn't bend his principles. He becomes a modern prophet of sorts to us calling out the truth we already know but are maybe too lazy to actually apply to life without being reminded.
Now my wife would call him and quite often me a real Sheldon Cooper but we need a few dorks around calling us to do the right thing to shepherd us against those motivated by personal or corporate gain and 'free' not libre systems which actually just use us as farmed cash crops.
He did like my suggestion for the next openmoko/Neo900 which included a POCSAG pager module though he disagreed on the agreed upon modem module implementation in that design. He would own a phone if it was one which didn't abuse him, having a pager on passive alert and only connecting to the phone network when he chose to to answer/call back his calls sounded good to him.
I suppose the problem is there is less commercial pressure to produce a phone or computer which fully respects the user when even a little abuse spread among thousands or millions of units can enrich a small number of executives. I think well over 90% of users in our endless September could care less about the mostly invisible abuse going on and like airline passengers just care about the price no matter how bad they are treated.
So, after 34 years, in a world of on-demand entertainment, mobile devices, in-home electronics, video conferencing, etc., Stallman is using a decade-old laptop, watching no entertainment at all, presumably has nothing in the line of other devices (e.g. tablets, phones, CCTV, etc.) and can't talk to anyone who doesn't use the same kind of software as him (e.g. everyone on Skype, WhatsApp, etc.). And he also thinks you should go to jail for wanting to put a restrictive licence on things you own?
And we're supposed to follow this guy's ideals?
The guy's a moron. And that's coming from someone who does do an awful lot of things the open-source way, including my own programming.
If you want to fix this problem, rather than mouth off, try and fix some of the primary problems identified by the FSF - which has included open-source video conferencing for years. Hell, they're still talking about an open-source alternative for Flash which has lived and died in the time they've been trying to create one.
The sentiment is overblown, the direction is a good one, but the reality is so poor that everyone gave up waiting (e.g. for Hurd which only recently got SATA functionality...). And you're seriously advocating a years-old laptop as the way to live? That laptop stopped manufacture before millions of the users of things like iPads and WhatsApp were even born.
Not only are you bad at fixing the problem, you're bad at finding interim solutions, and bad at making suggestions, and nothing but bad press for people who DO still want free and open kit.
I'm incredibly disappointed that NOBODY with these large organisations with tons of skilled people on board has thought to monetise the exact thing they can do : Make a series of machines that are free and open from top to bottom. You can use sales from them to develop further. People would buy one just for a certified "open" tag.
But, no, the closest you can get is System76 who recycle old IBM laptops still and who have just thought about getting into the game of end-to-end production.
We could have been doing that since the 386 era when this guy first started mouthing off publicly, but nothing has been done in that direction.
I'm all for free software but, you know what, I have to talk to real people. That means a mobile phone. I have to use computers. That means ones I can buy in a shop today. I have to live and enjoy. And that means playing games on Steam and watching movies on Amazon.
Because there are precisely ZERO viable alternatives, short of a 10-year-old laptop and giving everything else up.
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."
Thanks for reminding me: how is that Replicant project (or should it be GNU Replicant?) coming along? Are we likely to see it any sooner than HURD? Or will that too be a HURD like project - abandoned by you after going through an odyssey of experiments by the devs?
"I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"
Don't you still get CDs in the mail from BMG or Columbia House, like I used to, in the 90s? Here's what I consider mistreatment: having to put down anything from $7-15 on a CD w/ 11 songs, only 1 or 2 of which I like. And being spammed by them every other week, only w/ actual physical mail, as opposed to email.
I have 2 ways of getting my music. Since I prefer music videos, I just download them from YouTube, and by now, have quite a collection. Unfortunately, in my car, I can't control that from my steering wheel on anything but an iToy, and that doesn't allow me to upload my freely obtained music. So I did buy something like 10 of my favorites on iTunes, but for some of them, iTunes did not have the music video available (even though I had it from YouTube, usually from the artists' Vevo channels). So I am forced to make do w/ less. I do wish my car navigation system could simply work w/ Windows 10 Mobile's Groove and Movie apps, so that I could control that from my steering. That, and I wish that Groove could make itself look like an iPod to any external device, and that it could handle music videos, instead of handing that function over to movie.
Anyway, I digress. Bottom line: I prefer the current system, where I only pay for each song I actually want and like, and not for arbitarily selected groups of songs that the record company selects. Since everybody's tastes vary, this is easily the best way to distribute music.
I do agree w/ RMS on TVs: I too no longer have a TV at home, although I do watch some news programs over YouTube live. While he makes some good points, 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.
'Liberal' is being incredibly generous to RMS. Go through his website stallman.org: you'll see that he's a Progressive, bordering on Socialist. Of course, he claims that his ideals are closer to that of Social Democrat parties in Western Europe, rather than Socialist or Communist parties anywhere. Yet, he had been supportive of Hugo Chavez, when he was around (although I wonder where he stands on the current Venezuelan unrest)