Free Software Advocate Richard Stallman Spoke at Microsoft Research This Week (zdnet.com) 94
Garabito writes: Free Software advocate Richard M. Stallman gave a talk at Microsoft Campus yesterday. Stallman was invited by Microsoft Research. Stallman's talk was related -- as most of his talks -- with Free Software, Privacy and the GPLv3. He also had a list of small requests to Microsoft: "make Github push users to better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers to publish their hardware specs, make it easier to workaround Secure Boot." While Microsoft has changed its attitude toward Open Source Software in the last years, this does not mean RMS has made peace with Microsoft: "If you're wondering whether Stallman's distaste for Microsoft has lessened over the years, his personal home page makes it clear that it has not".
whoa (Score:1)
Re: whoa (Score:1)
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It makes sense though. Who more than Microsoft's muppets needs an education in security/privacy, ethics, the importance of open source core system software components and that not everything needs to be connected to the internet?
Not as bad as it once was on a relative scale (Score:3)
While MS may have improved in RMS's terms it's mostly that the perceived (and real) evil of Google, FB et al has far surpassed MS or Apple.
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The service providers are clearly what he should have been focusing on, with the hardware companies on deck for round two.
Does it matter if software is open source if the services are monopolized and the hardware at best untrustworthy?
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Agree, especially since all software is really a service, whether on your desktop/device or on someone else's.
Re:OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IS EVIL!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I didn't read your comment, but I would like to know about your HOSTS file.
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Nice copypasta. Definitely stealing this one.
What is “better license hygiene”? (Score:3)
Is that actually a thing, or is he just insisting people need to use GPLv3 instead of BSD, Apache, etc.?
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is “better license hygiene”? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which I think is the wrong policy. Don't have a default. Force the user to choose a license, be it closed or open source.
Exactly this. By allowing a default of no license which makes default copyright law apply, this gives the impression that because the author put the code there, it isn't a copyright violation to click a link to it.
Legally speaking, if you follow a direct link to a source file, you have committed a copyright violation at the same time as just finding out what you did was a copyright violation.
You can't know before, and the moment you know it is too late you have already broken the law.
It's akin to silently handing you a dollar bill with a note on the back stating "I do not give permission to transfer of ownership of this dollar, you are now guilty of petty theft"
Because the vast majority of people who do this never intended that and quite possibly don't realize they just enticed thousands of people to break the law - Stallmans hope is to try and fix the ignorance before this type of thing ever becomes a problem.
We already have musicians giving our their music for free and trying to sue listeners.
There was one lawsuit against a firm doing that with their own videos.
Github may not seem like a viable target for such intentional abuse, hell maybe it actually isn't, but there is no harm in nipping the problem in the bud before it becomes a problem.
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Legally speaking, if you follow a direct link to a source file, you have committed a copyright violation
Uh, think about what you just said there for a minute. If that were even remotely true, the Internet would not exist as we know it.
We already have musicians giving our their music for free and trying to sue listeners.
I don't entirely doubt you, but *citation needed*.
People can bring lawsuits for any reason. That doesn't mean they won't get immediately thrown out due to insufficient legal grounding.
Re: What is “better license hygiene”? (Score:2)
Actually this is the case. Per default unless explicitly stated otherwise on the target site, clicking a link breaks copyright law.
Pretty much no one on the internet choose to enforce this for non-media files, so in practice it does not matter much, but internet and current copyright law is fundamentally incompatible. This is why Lessig and the Pirate Party want to change the laws.
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It may seem that way to technical person who sees clicking a link as an act of copying, because technically it is. But the field of legal interpretation is not strictly technical. Life would come to a screeching halt if we were forced to adhere to a strict literal interpretation of every statute in law (that or statues and case law would increase in size by orders of magnitude to cover every possible corner case and 50% of the population would have to be lawyers to sift through it all). So, until this subje
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Strange that they enable the "fork" button even if you don't have a licence then, given that copyright does not give anyone else the right to do that.
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Its not someone elses job to screen those that want to fork something for their right to do so. A lack of a licensed doesnt mean that nobody has rights, that nobody can fork it.
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There's likely a LOT of projects that don't explicitly choose an OSS license on Github, even though they perfectly well intended it to be OSS.
If they make people choose one, then they have to be the license police, or it's meaningless anyway.
If you want to know what license someone intended their project to be under, ask them.
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Lots of code on public repos like github has no specified license. That makes that code risky to reuse as the legality of that reuse is unspecified. github should force project owners to pick at least one license for each of their projects to remove that ambiguity.
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Better license hygiene? It's when you put off bathing for so long, even the cards in your license start to stink, so you wash them, but now your license smells better than you do.
Re:What is “better license hygiene”? (Score:5, Informative)
I was at the talk. His main point was that each source file needs to have a copyright indicating a license, not just a license attribute of the project, which he believed did not provide sufficient protection for the license. He mentioned the risk of code being taken from one project to another and being re-licensed accidentally in ways the author of that code had not intended, because the source file failed to explicitly state its own license. I presume he was looking for ways that GitHub could encourage this type of behavior.
I'm sure he's also not happy about not requiring projects to explicitly specify a license. Obviously he's intimately familiar with software copyright and licensing, and mentioned in the talk about how without a license copyright means nobody could copy that code for almost any purpose, including to execute it. But I don't recall him explicitly commenting on GitHub not forcing people to choose a license, despite clearly seeing how nonsensical it is to fail to specify one.
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Thank you for the additional information. It seems like a valid point.
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Did he eat anything he pulled off his integument?
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There is a huge amount of code sitting on GitHub and open to the public (open source) that does not have a license attached to it. Is it free? Is it public domain? Is it GPL?
I confess I'm guilty of this too. I have at least two projects with unclear license terms.
You can see some propietary code too (Score:3)
There is a huge amount of code sitting on GitHub and open to the public (open source) that does not have a license attached to it. Is it free? Is it public domain? Is it GPL?
By default it is copyrighted by the author and only the author has the right to distribute. This is how US copyright law works, you write it, you have an implicit copyright.
And no, open to the public is not open source. Proprietary software source code can be open to the public too. It might document the API by which that software can be called. It might allow customers of the owner to debug and fix things themselves. However these customers do not have the right to distribute the source code to anyone e
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And no, open to the public is not open source. Proprietary software source code can be open to the public too.
The first commercial use of the phrase "Open Source" was when Caldera used it to describe their release of OpenDOS sources in 1995, before the OSI existed, and before any of its members claims to have coined the phrase. That license did not permit redistribution, or conceivably even to compile the code and run it, even on OpenDOS. The fact that "Open Source" (A phrase which was in use around the silly valley Unix community by the early nineties) did not clarify the point you're discussing is the specific re
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It probably doesn't have anything to do with picking dead skin off your feet and eating it, right?
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Eh, underrated even if sarcastic.
Re: No Need For GitHub (Score:1)
Situation in USA and Myanmar (Score:2)
Where do you live ? Pyongyang? Here in Germany we only need to work around changing IP address every 24 hours.
In the USA, running a server from home violates the typical residential ISP's terms of service. ISPs in Myanmar reportedly go further [slashdot.org], putting business class customers behind NAT until they pay extra to lease a static IP on top of what they pay for business class service. And many business ISPs aren't willing to take residential customers' money.
free dyndns
I thought Oracle bought the DynDNS company [slashdot.org] years ago and has since shut down not only the free tier [slashdot.org] but the whole business [slashdot.org]. What did I miss?
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Myanmar does that not to prevent running of servers, but simply because there are not enough ipv4 addresses allocated to the country to give everyone their own. They have to be strictly rationed, and are thus very costly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Many other countries are the same, simply out of necessity.
It also causes lots of other problems, with thousands of users behind the same address it's common to find yourself blacklisted from online services or forced to complete captchas to gain access. Con
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Myanmar does that not to prevent running of servers, but simply because there are not enough ipv4 addresses allocated to the country to give everyone their own.
Then why don't countries like this accelerate deployment of IPv6, so that only IPv4 traffic needs to go through a NAT?
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Chicken and egg..
Myanmar is very far behind on ipv6, only one of the big 4 providers supports it at all, and not for consumers.
Most of the sites they access are abroad with very little hosted in the country, so long as everything is reachable via ipv4 and users aren't demanding ipv6 the isps won't bother. Of the other 3 providers there, one quoted 2 years for ipv6 capability, the others said they had no plans whatsoever.
We won't get widespread deployment of ipv6 until big sites like google and facebook star
MIKKKROSOFT (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Uncomfortable facts (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Microsoft is the largest contributor for open source.
2. The Linux kernel includes code contributed by Microsoft.
3. The Halloween email was twenty years ago. No one on the email chain works at MS, anymore.
4. FOSS beat Microsoft. SCO is dead. The genie cannot be rebottled. Rather than shakes their fists at the sky, MS chose to adapt to the new landscape. This has understandably robbed some people of much-anticipated schadenfreude, as MS seems to be doing quite well.
5. It will never be the year of Linux on the desktop, because the desktop is not important.
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OMG (Score:2)
Carrier-grade NAT (Score:3)
Almost every DSL modem can facilitate a server.
Even if the ISP assigns an IP address in the 100.64.0.0/10 range [wikipedia.org] to the DSL modem pursuant to RFC 6598?
Re:Uncomfortable facts (Score:5, Insightful)
What really hurt Microsoft was the World Wide Web.
Microsoft Strangle Hold on its customer base was the fact that 99% of all software available worked on Windows. And it had nearly 95% of the computer user market. However as the Web Evolved from a document delivery system, to an Application Thick Client Solution. More and more "Applications" became websites. Windows 95, was designed around the idea that people would use MSN as their ISP, to compete against AOL and Prodigy. Where AOL at the time, wasn't as much as an ISP but a large BBS with an internet gateway. However more and more people Useing windows 95 didn't use MSN, so Microsoft needed to get into the browser game, otherwise these slowly emerging Web Applications will be running on Netscape. So IE Development was pushed into high gear, and with Windows Only Features such as ActiveX plugins were added to force the Web to be Windows Only.
However while Microsoft Won the browser War against Netscape, it failed its objectives of dominance of web technology to be Windows Only. Primarily adding support for HTML tag features was more or less an easy add to the next version of browsers. And the fact the Windows Only ActiveX has shown to be a security nightmare limiting its scope especially on public websites. With this we had Firefox, Safari, and Chrome coming out, while Microsoft was Lagging to get Vista and IE7 out. Giving more of a foot hold and making web developers more apt to follow official web standards.
Now we for the most part will not buy off the shelf software, but run a website to do much of our stuff.
Because of this when Mobile Came out with blackberry then the iPhone and Android smartphones. They were given rather complete Web Browsers meaning most of these Web Apps will work on different architectures and Operating Systems.
The Risk factor of not choosing Microsoft for your consumer device has lowed greatly.
Now Microsoft is still king in some areas, but it needs to fight for its position. FOSS is part of this, as FOSS has a lot of work on a lot of great projects, that Microsoft may want to implement to keep current and competitive. So being a major contributor makes sure their needs are met.
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Re:Uncomfortable facts (Score:4, Funny)
The desktop has been dead for a long time.
I haven't had a desktop computer since the early 1990s. Ever since then, only mini-towers.
Re:Uncomfortable facts (Score:5, Insightful)
5. It will never be the year of Linux on the desktop, because the desktop is not important.
Agreed with you right up until this one. The desktop is still very important, but it's not as important as it used to be, especially to consumers. Smartphones, tablets, and lightweight laptops or Chromebooks are the new "personal computers", and higher-end laptops and PC desktops are now where work gets done, content gets created, and games are played.
Sure (Score:1)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
"...because the desktop is not important" (Score:3)
5. It will never be the year of Linux on the desktop, because the desktop is not important.
Of course it is. If you want to play games without a console, you need a PC. If you want to do productive work with your device, and not just use it for texting and pizza ordering apps, you need a PC. If you want to print and scan in a manner that isn't short-bus crippled, you need a PC.
It'll never be the year of the Linux desktop, because there's too many different kinds, with too many different GUI's, with too many different libraries.. A problem Apple and Microsoft don't have.
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Depends how you define "productive work"...
Most end users don't do "productive work" by any definition, they send text messages, browse facebook and order pizza.
I have a scanner which sends the output to email, i can receive the scanned documents on my phone and i can print from my phone. The phone detects the presence of the printer on the network and i didn't need to install drivers or the gigabytes of garbage that are typically bundled with drivers these days. I wouldn't say that was "short-bus crippled"
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The desktop is extremely important because there's a lot of software, especially mission-critical business software, that should created as serious desktop software, not done in the style of a video game you play on a phone. Businesses that are victims of lock-in and forced to buy mission-critical business software that's browser-based will be ready to pay when the desktop makes a comeback.
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Software like what?
For a lot of applications i've seen extremely shoddy and insecure desktop software, which is much better replaced with a webapp... For instance we used to have a desktop application for entering employee timesheets, it used a file share to access a database (ie the database was a file, not a proper database server). It was extremely flakey and insecure, since you had read/write access to the file you could modify it at will.
You need to keep separation of client and server for security pur
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Thin client may be a great solution in a lot of situations. That doesn't mean a browser is a good platform.
Dev and ops without desktop (Score:2)
It will never be the year of Linux on the desktop, because the desktop is not important.
Then what is important? If Android and servers, then what do people use to develop applications for Android and servers and operate servers other than a desktop (or mini-tower) PC or a laptop PC running a desktop OS?
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4. FOSS beat Microsoft. SCO is dead.
Only on the server and in appliances. Microsoft beat FOSS on the desktop.
The "Unix" part of SCO lives on as the SCO Group.
5. It will never be the year of Linux on the desktop, because the desktop is not important.
LOL. What revisionism. Linux advocates never wanted the desktop, that's a good one.
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I'd love to hear why you think #1. Last I knew RedHat is the largest contributor by far. If you're going by some recent articles I have a feeling that's wrong. All you have to do to be a contributor is sign up and check something in. Not that it's useful stuff. Could be 2000 copies of hello_world.c and Makefile. Still doesn't ring true to me.
Two - there's Unix and Linux code in Windows. Shows up sometimes when there's a vulnerability and they've had to admit it over the years. Happen to know of what code th
Software freedom vs. popularity: a chump's contest (Score:2)
I'm not sure what standard is being used to justify that claim. The power of proprietary software over the user remains a threat and Microsoft remains a chiefly proprietary software distributor. Sure, any serious analysis of the server-side computing would conclude that GNU/Linux is widely used over Microsoft Windows, but many tech people still buy into the points Ziff-Davis started and ended their pro-corporate coverage [zdnet.com] with (a list of proprietary programs Microsoft now offers to run on
Microsoft is like.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is like the ex-boy friend that used to hit you 15 years ago.
You left him, and haven't looked back.
But, since then he hit bottom, went to AA, has been sober for 7 years, is holding a steady respectable job, has a new wife his own age (a woman who is intelligent and respectable in her own right), and is a deacon at a local Methodist Church.
But he did abuse you 15 years ago.
So, the question is, how much change does MS have to go through before they lose the stigma of being the company they were 15 years ago? (It's a hard question, and I'm not sure what I think the answer should be.)
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Microsoft is like the ex-boy friend that used to hit you 15 years ago.
You left him, and haven't looked back.
But, since then he hit bottom, went to AA, has been sober for 7 years, is holding a steady respectable job, has a new wife his own age (a woman who is intelligent and respectable in her own right), and is a deacon at a local Methodist Church.
You're assuming Microsoft hasn't done all those things, just to get the girl back. And you're assuming once if he does, he won't be back to being an abusive a-hole in time.
They are still creeps on the desktop. They've shaven and gotten a haircut in the server space, where they were at huge risk to losing even more to Linux, IMHO.
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You're assuming Microsoft hasn't done all those things, just to get the girl back.
So the ex got a new wife in order to get the original girl back??
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You're assuming Microsoft hasn't done all those things, just to get the girl back.
So the ex got a new wife in order to get the original girl back??
To establish trust. To show that the ex is no longer a threat. The logical end of "By any means necessary."
To wit; there are those that trust Microsoft now, even among those old enough to remember the wife beating Microsoft of yore.
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You're assuming Microsoft hasn't done all those things, just to get the girl back.
So the ex got a new wife in order to get the original girl back??
To establish trust. To show that the ex is no longer a threat. The logical end of "By any means necessary."
Or because they moved on / improved themselves.
Re:Microsoft is like.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, i wondered such myself. Microsoft had my reasonable trust in 1993, hell, i'd even liked to work at their campus. From there on, stuff went downhill. For almost 2 decades they shown to be a wannabe evil overlord, needing all kind of superheroes to fight them.
So, what has changed since then? They embraced open source. No big deal, half the world does so.
They contributed to the Linux kernel. Sure, but only for stuff they care about, read: mostly virtual machine integration. There's no thing as, say, a Linux Kinect driver or even Microsoft mouse driver authored by Microsoft.
Then, about gaining trust, it's not as if going 'open source' suddenly earns trust. Well, open-sourcing the Windows source code itself certainly would be an interesting move, but they won't do that anytime soon, if ever.
Meanwhile, as user, we're put up with annoying telemetry. With 'Bing search engine' pushed with every software product they install. With random settings changed at each Windows update, in particular stuff like default browser and privacy settings. And unasked-for, unwanted and some uninstallable software like candy crush games, xbox stuff, 'local' weather and news services that are mostly advertisement stuff, on my paid-for OS. Only to remove 'paint' from the default install to.. make space?
So, to be short, as user, i still get treated by MS as a piece of shit. Why would i trust them. Just because they release some code i'll never use or care for as open source? Because they bought github to show themselves as the big defenders of OS? If any, that last move only adds to my distrust.
They may have fired Ballmer. Billy Gates may have given enough interviews to be seen as nerd again instead of businessman. I will give him credits for creating gwbasic. I do think of their main product 'Windows' as being reasonable stable and predictable. But MS as company has a reputation they will probably never get rid of again, at least not to any nerd born in the last decennium. Maybe they can try selling themselves to Oracle for some upward goodwill momentum.
I mostly prefer to remember them as the company that made very good mice and keyboards, not for how their software enlightened my life.
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Not a mouse driver ? Maybe so, but I do remember that Joliet driver for cdroms. Its message tainted every boot. A cdrom, that's a silver disc with data, like a USB drive, from the previous milennium.
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> There's no thing as, say, a Linux Kinect driver or even Microsoft mouse driver authored by Microsoft.
The current version of Kinect has official support for Linux in their Microsoft-provided open-source drivers. The Microsoft Mouse is a product from three decades ago that is completely irrelevant, and all modern mice (including Microsoft's) work with standard USB HID drivers that are already built in to the Windows kernel.
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Uh... built-in to the Linux kernel.
Microsoft of yore... (Score:3)
Microsoft had my reasonable trust in 1993, hell, i'd even liked to work at their campus. From there on, stuff went downhill.
From *there* on? Only?
That's because you weren't paying attention to how they were already busy killing Stac Technologies at that time.
Or how they already started to try to leverage Windows compatibility (AARD code) to try to lock out competitor DR-DOS before.
etc.
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I don't think it's really fair to expect them to make Windows free or open source. I'd suspect a lot of code is probably licensed from other people or companies, some of who may be unreachable or not want to play nice. Even if they just wanted to release the parts they do own, they'd still need to audit their code and determine which parts those are and if relicensing them
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I don't think it's really fair to expect them to make Windows free or open source. I'd suspect a lot of code is probably licensed from other people or companies, some of who may be unreachable or not want to play nice.
I doubt it. Microsoft has always been the type to acquire companies before using their components. As the leading lights of vendor lock-in, they knew well what lies down that road.
Re: Microsoft is like.... (Score:1)
Re:Microsoft is like.... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget that Microsoft also spies on his new wife, relatives and friends. Microsoft also constantly tells them what they should and shouldn't be doing with their lives and regularly comes over to their homes to change everything to the way he wants it, which includes placing adverts.
Or (Score:1)
Bingo (Score:2)
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Microsoft is like the ex-boy friend that used to hit you 15 years ago. You left him, and haven't looked back.
But, since then he hit bottom, went to AA, has been sober for 7 years, is holding a steady respectable job, has a new wife his own age (a woman who is intelligent and respectable in her own right), and is a deacon at a local Methodist Church.
But he did abuse you 15 years ago.
So, the question is, how much change does MS have to go through before they lose the stigma of being the company they were 15 years ago? (It's a hard question, and I'm not sure what I think the answer should be.)
I think a lot of people would disagree with what you have posted here. https://www.gnu.org/proprietar... [gnu.org]
Telemetry (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft is like.... (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile, the ex-cool kid named Apple got a job as an investment banker and swindles pension money from little old ladies for a living.
Most people who've known him for awhile haven't notice that he's changed, because he still drives a cool car and plays in a band.
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No-one cares about 15 years ago. Windows 10 is an ongoing abusive relationship.
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You left him, and haven't looked back.
I get the impression that you have indeed looked back. And looked around too to find that the abusive ex is not more, not less, but just different kind of abusive compared with others you've dated since. So now you're not committing to anyone, but still coming over the /. to comment on how MS used to be mean to you while claiming you never looked back.
It makes sense, /. has always been great for dating advice. Or bad analogies, one of the two, I can't remember.
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Shut up. JUST SHUT UP, OKAY!
*sobs.*
You read me.
Thing (Score:2)
"Software license hygiene"? (Score:1)
This man needs to be concerned more about his own personal hygiene. Or mental hygiene, because he has literally argued for the legalization of the possession of child pornography [stallman.org]. I stopped taking him seriously years ago. Maybe this is his strategy to dethrone Microsoft: Get himself associated with them, so that consumers boycott Microsoft for being associated for a pedophile supporter.
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Those are some fine pieces of Ad Hominem, but it's not clear what they have to do with the price of tea in China — or the relevance of RMS speaking at MS.
Only Nixon could go to China (Score:3)
Richard speaking onsite at Microsoft is similar to Richard Nixon's visit to China in the 1970's. A very strong warror against the abuses of a nation, or a company, can be in a good position to offer sane suggestions about how they can step _out_ of being such a clear enemy.
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A very strong warror against the abuses of a nation, or a company, can be in a good position to offer sane suggestions about how they can step _out_ of being such a clear enemy.
Too bad Nixon was abusive to people back here in this country. Still a better president than Trump, though. I miss having a working EPA.
MS Good Marketing (Score:2)
NEWS FLASH! (Score:2)
The Galactic Empire's research department as directed by the admirals the Galactic Empire are looking for ways to, 'improve their image', and get, 'pointers', on how to better communicate and understand the rebel's aims, goals, and desires. We asked one rebel fighter his thoughts...
"Well, It's never really sit right with me that the Galactic Empire wants to rule the