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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."
The Free Software Foundation requirements are so restrictive that no mainstream Linux distribution qualifies. Stallman is living in a fantasy world where he thinks billions of people are going to start learning command lines and troubleshooting their own comparability issues. This is not reality.
Open source MUST be made easy to use or else Average Joe User will never use it. In the real world, rightly or wrongly, people care about EASE OF USE more than abstract philosophical concerns about free software.
The open source movement needs more businesspeople and fewer armchair philosophers. We do not need yet another FOSS project reinventing the wheel and having 3-5 developers trying to drum up support for their spin on something that has been done 50 times already. We need to see more along the likes of RedHat and Canonical if open source is going to take over the mainstream.
For the average person trying to decide whether to run some new support ticketing package on IIS or LAMP is thinking "free" as in beer, not free as in "I can get in and fork this web server library to suit my purposes." Most people have no more sense of whether or not their free-as-in-hackable module or plugin or OS is watching them or recording telemetry for their own good or not. And most them don't care, either. They just want it to work.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Now I think he's just right, and almost all the time.
His previous statements were warnings. This one is an "I told you so."
Also, he's a wealthy and privileged Jew having been raised on the Upper Westside and spent his entire adult life in elite education institutions yet somehow not actually teaching anything or publishing any research.
Why is it that your post makes me feel a sudden surge of affection and respect for wealthy and privileged Jews who spend their entire adult life in elite education institutions?
To say that Stallman has never actually taught anything is an astonishing distortion, given that he has done more than anyone to popularize the benefits of free software. And what do you mean by "publishing research"? What Stallman has done is immensely more useful and practical than any "research" published in some learned journal.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The problem here is not the browser but the user's behavior. Free software is necessary but insufficient for privacy. Pair the software with things like strong legal protections, constant innovation, and the smart use of best practices, and that decreases your surface quite a bit. It may not be perfect but it's *impossible* in principle to have security and privacy with proprietary software; free software makes it *possible* if not inevitable.