Proprietary Software is the Driver of Unprecedented Surveillance: Richard Stallman (factor-tech.com)

From a wide-ranging interview of Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, programming legend and recipient of at least 15 honorary doctorates and professorships: "The reason that we are subject now to more surveillance than there was in the Soviet Union is that digital technology made it possible," he says. "And the first disaster of digital technology was proprietary software that people would install and run on their own computers, and they wouldn't know what it was doing. They can't tell what it's doing. And that is the first injustice that I began fighting in 1983: proprietary software, software that is not free, that the users don't control." Here, Stallman is keen to stress, he doesn't mean free in the sense of not costing money -- plenty of free software is paid for -- but free in the sense of freedom to control. Software, after all, instructs your computer to perform actions, and when another company has written and locked down that software, you can't know exactly what it is doing. "You might think your computer is obeying you, when really its obeying the real master first, and it only obeys you when the real master says it's ok. With every program there are two possibilities: either the user controls the program or the program controls the users," he says. "It's free software if users control it. And that's why it respects their freedom. Otherwise it's a non-free, proprietary, user subjugating program."

Comments

Stallman is an idealist but materialists RULEZ

[shanen]

Personal experience (email exchanges) have convinced me that Stallman is a nice guy, but his priorities are warped around ideas. As an idealist, I sympathize, but...

The problem is NOT the tools or even who wrote the tools. Not even the financial models underlying the tools, though one of my crazy ideas involves an alternate financial model for more democratic control over software. (Ancient joke time: Lots of detailed suggestions available upon polite (and sincere) request.)

The problem is that the decisions are made by materialists. You don't have to be super-greedy to become a dominant materialist, but you don't become super-rich unless that is one of your attributes. I actually think the extremely rich bastards have to know something about manipulating people and often know how to play games with ideals (especially to disguise their greed), but it always comes back to the insane greed. In this context "insane" means a willingness to hurt other people.

In summary:
(1) Super-rich bastards are bribing the cheapest politicians (mostly #BolshevikRepublicans these years) to rig the rules of the games to make themselves richer.
(2) It's painful enough just watching mindless morons voting to hurt themselves without watching their fear-filled leader #PresidentTweety hurt the entire nation.