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Old 17th March 2014
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IdOp IdOp is offline
Too dumb for a smartphone
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
Posts: 1,027
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In my view ...

Richard Stallman is highly intelligent and I respect his knowledge and find his opinions interesting to compare with others. That doesn't mean that I agree with him about everything (I don't). Like all of us, his opinions are shaped not only by reason, but also by personal circumstances, values and deeply held beliefs.

Stallman is very good with the one-dimensional sound bite, e.g., "Cloud computing is worse than stupidity!" (the general thrust of which I happen to agree with). We often seem to live in a world of sound bites, so maybe this is a necessary tactic of his. But if you read some of his longer discussions (on some topic of interest) they're much more balanced, thoughtful and reasoned than the sound bites. Again, not to say that all conclusions he reaches are "right" because there's lots more than raw logic going into them.

His vision of "software freedom", the GPL, I'm not particularly taken with, despite its relative benefits. Then again, I'm not a lawyer and don't much like licenses, copyrights, and legal stuff in general. It almost seems like he's argued himself into a corner when you look at the FSF approved Linux distributions. But maybe that's a case of theory vs. practice.

Is Stallman too paranoid? I don't know, but even if he is, I don't think that's a real problem. The problem is the large number of people who aren't paranoid enough, and have thereby made Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple (etc.) into what they are today. If Stallman can give a counterpoint to that, it's to the good, but I don't know that it will change much. Security in a networked world is incredibly complex, no-one is born with any knowledge of it, most people have other priorities/interests and want easy convenience. The world is how it is. Wasn't there a famous Pogo comic about "I have seen the enemy, and it is us" ?
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