Although people are often sloppy about the distinction, strictly speaking, that's rent seeking, not corruption. The difference is important. Corruption suggests a criminal offense, and it suggests that the solution is more laws, regulation, and law enforcement. But if you try to fix rent seeking with additional laws, you're just throwing gasoline on the fire, since people will figure out how to use the new laws to their advantage as well.
Rent seeking grows with the size and power of government. The only way to reduce it is to reduce the size of government.
Static typing helps reduce (but nowhere near eliminate) those problems, but at a much higher initial development cost. Furthermore, unlike dynamic languages, where people eventually figure out that they need to write tests, with static typing, teams often just limp along forever. In the end, static typing probably hurts more than it helps.
I don't like where Python has been going recently, and the C-Python implementation has failed to address its technical shortcomings (like the GIL) while introducing a lot of unnecessary b.s.
I'm hoping Google is working on a new Python implementation from scratch, and Guido left because he didn't want to be part of such an effort.
Well, as a long time Python user, I tend to agree: the language implementation isn't all that great, and a big part of that is that Guido simply is not a particularly experienced or skilled programming language guy. But Python has good libraries, decent syntax, and good tools, and that matters more than whether the guy who started it is particularly skilled.
The "offering" part isn't equivalent to slavery. You can also "offer" to lock someone up and whip them, and even if they take you up on it, that's not slavery. It becomes slavery when the government treats people-who shouldn't be property-as if they were property. RMS's argument is that copyrights and patents have turned something that shouldn't be property, namely ideas, thoughts, and culture, into property. Furthermore, fundamental activities like banking, voting, medical records and disclosure, news, travel, traffic, books, airline security, and many others are controlled by software, so this isn't a side-issue.
Any sane person realizes that there's something wrong with copyrights and patents as they are right now; you have to be an extremist (and you seem to be) to disagree with that view.
Protecting users from corporate abuse is the whole raison d'etre for the FSF: protection against forced upgrades, discontinuation of products and abandonware, deliberate incompatibilities, cryptographic backdoors, and, yes, information leakage to corporations and governments. And the GPL is supporting that effort; but it only works if users also understand the threats and the options the GPL gives them.
Because Unity is under the GPL, people could strip out the privacy invading parts and republish it. (Of course, since Unity is otherwise such a failure, I doubt anybody will bother in this case.)
I didn't question your facts, I called you out for your ridiculous suggestion that someone calling your conduct "immoral" is an infringement on your freedom.
Since you asked, I've produced both proprietary and open source software.
Actually, I didn't ask, and I couldn't care less what you have done or what your opinions are. I don't necessarily agree with Stallman's politics, but he at least manages to put forth a coherent argument. You're just ranting.
RMS has stated on many occasions, including in his writing, that he believes proprietary software is immoral.... So yes, RMS wants everyone to buy into his philosophy, to the point of labelling everyone who doesn't as a bad person doing bad things.
Oh, does it bruise your sensitive little ego when other people tell you that what you're doing is wrong? Well, you'll just have to live with it. RMS is certainly not the only person doing this.
Hard as that may be to grasp for you, talking about the morality of acts is a valid and important part of political and social discourse.
I’m not a fan of ubuntu nor RMS, and I definitely don’t like the sounds of this feature, but since when was "free software" equated with "respects your privacy".
One of the primary drivers behind free software is to put users in control, including control of their privacy.
Also the usual stuff here applies about pragmatism and user choice. RMS states that this feature is "malicious" as a matter of fact, and throws around spooky words like "surveillance" and "spyware" like he's doing a Fox news special report.
Worrying about corporate surveillance sounds more like progressivism to me (i.e., not Fox). And in this case, it's a valid concern.
You have a right to be forgotten, the press has a right to report on you. If laws conflict exceptions can't be avoided.
What makes you think the press has a right to report on you? Although laws generically guarantee "freedom of the press", a specific law like this still takes precedence.
Note that the regulation exempts pretty much anything that actually matters: the EU itself, national security, and police. "Private" information means pretty much anything that is personally identifiable. It also doesn't mention free speech or freedom of the press, and doesn't seem to have exceptions for reporting on politicians.
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Although people are often sloppy about the distinction, strictly speaking, that's rent seeking, not corruption. The difference is important. Corruption suggests a criminal offense, and it suggests that the solution is more laws, regulation, and law enforcement. But if you try to fix rent seeking with additional laws, you're just throwing gasoline on the fire, since people will figure out how to use the new laws to their advantage as well.
Rent seeking grows with the size and power of government. The only way to reduce it is to reduce the size of government.
Static typing helps reduce (but nowhere near eliminate) those problems, but at a much higher initial development cost. Furthermore, unlike dynamic languages, where people eventually figure out that they need to write tests, with static typing, teams often just limp along forever. In the end, static typing probably hurts more than it helps.
I don't like where Python has been going recently, and the C-Python implementation has failed to address its technical shortcomings (like the GIL) while introducing a lot of unnecessary b.s. I'm hoping Google is working on a new Python implementation from scratch, and Guido left because he didn't want to be part of such an effort.
Well, as a long time Python user, I tend to agree: the language implementation isn't all that great, and a big part of that is that Guido simply is not a particularly experienced or skilled programming language guy. But Python has good libraries, decent syntax, and good tools, and that matters more than whether the guy who started it is particularly skilled.
The "offering" part isn't equivalent to slavery. You can also "offer" to lock someone up and whip them, and even if they take you up on it, that's not slavery. It becomes slavery when the government treats people-who shouldn't be property-as if they were property. RMS's argument is that copyrights and patents have turned something that shouldn't be property, namely ideas, thoughts, and culture, into property. Furthermore, fundamental activities like banking, voting, medical records and disclosure, news, travel, traffic, books, airline security, and many others are controlled by software, so this isn't a side-issue. Any sane person realizes that there's something wrong with copyrights and patents as they are right now; you have to be an extremist (and you seem to be) to disagree with that view.
Because Unity is under the GPL, people could strip out the privacy invading parts and republish it. (Of course, since Unity is otherwise such a failure, I doubt anybody will bother in this case.)
I didn't question your facts, I called you out for your ridiculous suggestion that someone calling your conduct "immoral" is an infringement on your freedom.
Actually, I didn't ask, and I couldn't care less what you have done or what your opinions are. I don't necessarily agree with Stallman's politics, but he at least manages to put forth a coherent argument. You're just ranting.
Oh, does it bruise your sensitive little ego when other people tell you that what you're doing is wrong? Well, you'll just have to live with it. RMS is certainly not the only person doing this. Hard as that may be to grasp for you, talking about the morality of acts is a valid and important part of political and social discourse.
There may be a "craptonne of free-as-in-beer" software that does that, but the FSF is about free-as-in-freedom software.
One of the primary drivers behind free software is to put users in control, including control of their privacy.
Worrying about corporate surveillance sounds more like progressivism to me (i.e., not Fox). And in this case, it's a valid concern.
What makes you think the press has a right to report on you? Although laws generically guarantee "freedom of the press", a specific law like this still takes precedence.
That's not theoretical, it's an explicit goal of such legislation in Europe.
http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/document/review2012/com_2012_11_en.pdf
Note that the regulation exempts pretty much anything that actually matters: the EU itself, national security, and police. "Private" information means pretty much anything that is personally identifiable. It also doesn't mention free speech or freedom of the press, and doesn't seem to have exceptions for reporting on politicians.