Stallman Crashes Talk, Fights 'War On Sharing' 309
schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"
Re:Note to Richard (Score:1, Interesting)
As someone who was suffering with 21st century tools until I found Emacs, I do wonder which parts you would change. I use Emacs 7-10 hours every working day. The latest version (23) does have antialiased fonts, so what are the other hangups you speak of? And it's worth using for org-mode alone.
Well (Score:3, Interesting)
Censorship, DRM, and surveillance are all very dangerous and annoying things that only hurt the average person. It's hardly going to affect the pirates and will likely only affect 'normal' people, robbing them of some of their rights in the process. These corporations must be stopped, that much is clear.
GNU/Stallman (Score:5, Interesting)
I admire the sort of things he's doing, but the way he does them is troublesome. He shouldn't for example be blocking access to an Apple store despite their terribly non-free products. Nobody likes an asshole and would tend to ignore it. Now, if he were to stand outside, offering leaflets on why Apple is wrong, but disguising it as something like "Bad Computer Practises", or "Why Software Freedom is Important" instead of "Apple is crap! Don't buy from them!" which no one will pay attention to, I think he'd get a lot further.
Good luck, rms.
stallman rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
He secured his place in history a long time ago and is STILL at it, and most impressive, still relevant.
Re:Note to Richard (Score:3, Interesting)
Try Jedit. It was built with the same philosophy.
The thing I like the most about it, is that I didn't had to learn a new language to script it (like elisp), it can be scripted with beanshell, which is pretty much like java, you just don't have to declare the type of everything (but it accepts vanilla Java too).
It can record macros in Beanshell while clicking around, you can assign them to custom buttons, to custom hotkeys, it has a nice plugin api as well (but you can do everything in beanshell macro too, but plugins make them faster and easier to manage).
It has syntax support for a lot languges. (For some it has function list and additional goodies too. But syntax files are dead-easy to write.)
It has a nice XML plugin too, which will offer auto-complete according to DTD.
I think it has everything that emacs has*, but uses the usual user interface coventions (ctrl-insert, ctrl-shift etc. )
* I guess emacs has some esoteric plugins that Jedit not; I'm speaking here about the core application
Re:I don't care what anyone says (Score:1, Interesting)
If there were no extremists on your side, then by definition you would be the extremist and people would label you as such. Say what you will about liberal extremists, conservative extremists, environmental extremists, animal rights extremists and so on and so fourth. The fact is that without these people you and me would be labeled and written off as extremists.
I'm a big fan of extremism, as long as nobody gets injured or killed and no property gets destroyed.
Devil's Advocate (Score:3, Interesting)
Company X spends $1B developing a new idea, be it a physical widget or an algorithm. Said company sells widgets or software licenses at $A to recoup the invested money (first) and then to make a profit. Company Y sees the widget or software and can cheaply reverse engineer it, skipping 70% of the development costs. Company Y can sell their product at 0.4*$A and still make profit. Company X only gets $0.2B revenue for the item, and is out $0.8B.
How would we prevent this situation without IP? If the above happens, no one will want to invest in research, because they'd lose money, even if they "invented" the next IPod.
Maybe if all research funding came from the public, then all development successes (and failures) would be public knowledge.
Re:the printing press (Score:2, Interesting)
"The thought of spending a lot of money and time inventing something only to have someone else just come by and copy it and profit from it"
What harm have the pirates done? Have they taken profit that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist made more money?
"No, we need IP laws and the lack of them will bring innovation to a standstill."
We don't need illogical laws, we need an end to our capitalistic society (that will be far in the future, if it happens at all).
i need a clarification, apologies (Score:3, Interesting)
see this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1796976&cid=33675310 [slashdot.org]
Re:I don't care what anyone says (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that it would not be taken as the same and acceptable, but that is because most people don't think that what is good for the rape survivor is good for the rapist. You are basically asserting there is something wrong with finding it OK for a rape survivor to speak out about rape while simultaneously not finding it OK for a rapist to show up and speak about the wonderful benefits of raping people. Yes, my example is extreme, but it seems some people can't see a difference unless it is painted with a very large paintbrush dipped in fluorescent paint.
bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
because what you are saying is completely unenforceable
the future is the death of content producers. and by that i mean old school distributors. artists will produce directly, with financial outlays coming from passion. if it ignites in popularity, ancillary revenues: personalized content, concert gigs, cinema houses: these will provide a return on investment. and this does not mean we are forced to watch amateur youtube videos in the future. one of the most most expensive, and most profitable movie, ever made, avatar, made it all in cinema houses. this is a non-internet, controlled environment where you have to buy a ticket. this is never going away because no one enjoys watching movies by yourself in your basement. nothing is threatened except the dvd market. and why do we need constraints on our freedoms for the sake of propping up a dying media format and a dying business model?
there is no guarantee that an investment in the production of movies, music, or books will result in a financial return. nor should there ever be. most artists were starving, are starving, and will forever more starve. they make art out of passion, and that's all you ever need, and that's all that ever matters, and that's much more powerful than intellectual property law
Indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, in my mind, a government that locks non-violent human beings in cages for engaging in recreational drug use is incredibly extremist. The reason the majority doesn't see it that way is because they've spent their entire lives knowing nothing but the status quo, and therefore can't imagine it being any different.
Re:Humans who own stock benefit when... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a problem currently with laws that were written with humans in mind, being interpreted to cover corporations.
For example; California's property tax reform a few decades back, was written to protect older citizen's from being taxed out of their family homes. It limits the amount your property tax can go up, unless you sell your property or perform a major upgrade. Now, however, there is a problem. Corporations also own property, but quite often they never sell it or transfer it... and they don't die of old age. There is simply no mechanism in place to allow Corporations to have the value of their property reassessed on a periodic basis to adjust their property tax to reflect current value.
Whether this is good or bad is not the point. The point I am making is that corporations are not human beings and thus laws written for human beings might not work as intended when applied to corporations.
Re:I don't care what anyone says (Score:4, Interesting)
while in fact majority always represents just the most marketed, the most advertised, the most imposed position.
[emphasis mine]
OK, as a first approximation, you are right, but to say "always" is to overstate the case. There is no question that people who invest in propaganda don't do so out of naiveté... they expect a return on their investment. They expect to wield public sentiment like a tool, but it is a treacherous tool.
I think propaganda works best when it is directs people's attention away from their day to day lives, as opposed to changing their assessment of those lives. You can say, "your life is hell because of the Jews" or "you are insecure because of the homosexual agenda." You can't say, "your life is actually pretty good so far as the world standard of living is concerned," even if that is true. You can't say "it's actually quite easy to get a job; people who don't have jobs are just lazy," unless you are talking to somebody with a secure job.
If you could simply manufacture the opinions you wanted, then the public would have continued to favor the Iraq war in the run up to the 2008 elections, but the war had gone on so long that people were touched by it in some way, by a family member, friend or colleague who was deployed and maybe didn't come back. Likewise the Democrats are going to pay in 2010 because they can't credibly claim to have improved peoples' lives in the twenty months they've had power. That's common in mid-term elections.
In such cases, propaganda has a way of turning on its masters.
Perhaps we should evaluate people's political sanity not on their absolute position on some political axis, but on their open or narrow mindedness. A political position becomes pernicious fantasy, no matter where it is on your favorite philosophical axis, when it willfully ignores the probable outcomes of the actions it advocates.
For example, other people with me on the left favored single payer health insurance or even a socialized medical system during the recent debates on health insurance reform. While I am philosophically well disposed to these things, I did not favor them at that time. I thought if they were enacted that existing businesses would immediately collapse, and that working public replacements could not be conjured into existence quickly enough to take their place. Now I realize many who prefer socialized medicine or single payer (not the same things at all by the way) might disagree with that assessment. They may even be right. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. I moderated my position based on a critical examination of the likely outcomes of my *ideal* solution. That examination might be faulty, but I did not twist my evaluation of the facts in order to justify my a priori position.
It's tricky to evaluate the political sanity of a figure like Stallman. He is very, very bright,and bright people have a way of finding credible sounding rationalizations for really ill considered opinions. That said, I think that Stallman's positions on the viability of free software sound a lot more credible today than they did twenty years ago. True, free software projects haven't produced viable competition in a number of important niches; but after two decades of experience with free software success, it isn't so hard to believe that a free software ecosystem could meet all the software needs of an individual or enterprise.
It's great that you're such an expert, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
meanwhile i can give you copy of the movie avatar. the simple pattern of bits that make up the movie rquires no real world involvement, the bits can be enjoyed in and of themselves on a computer monitor. this is a different kind of "intellectual property" because the idea itself is also the product
Suppose it weren't an actual copy of the film "Avatar" - let's say it was just the script.
Now, as people seem to be very fond of pointing out - there's not a lot to it. Basic premise, rehashed story, Mulan/Ferngully/yada yada. What makes the movie is its presentation... The quality of the graphics and how well they're animated, the voice, sound, and music work, and so on. All of these things together represent a tremendous amount of "real world" work, and it's that real world work that's made this "simple" pattern of bits valuable. That sequence of bits could have been pounded out on the keyboard by monkeys, by random chance - but the point is, it wasn't.
There are other ways the same story could be presented - a talented storyteller could make it into a good campfire story, people could perform it onstage, it could be a musical - whatever - but the point is that in any case, that basic idea isn't good for much without all that work that goes into the presentation.
In other words, it isn't the idea that's the product, it's the product that's the product. The only difference is how convenient it is to replicate the product.
Put it the other way: ripping off someone else's motor design requires a bit of effort, expertise, and money. Not as much as making a new motor design, but enough to fit your argument that this is a fundamentally "real world" thing. So why should that idea then get extra protection that other ideas don't? What's the justification?