RMS is a nice counterweight to Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer.

But that's not to say that any of these people are particularly multidimensional, or particularly sane.

The ideas themselves are bizarrely non-sequitur in nature, and often attempt to circumvent basic norms of colloquial language use.

When asked about the issues of the day, say cloud computing and the mobile ecosystem, he pretends to argue that both don't exist instead of addressing the question directly in the terms that are presumed.

The same with "freedom," which lies at the heart of the FSF movement. His definition of freedom (as others have routinely argued, including some very prominent people) does not coincide with the connotations that most people hold.

It's a language game in the Lyotardian sense. RMS isn't talking about ideas, or about systems, or about industries. He's talking about how we ought to define these things in the first place as a matter of the practice of language and conceptualization.

They're normative positions—value statements—and thus can't be "refuted," only debated with respect to value orientations. But these, as Weber most famously argued over a century ago, aren't subject to empirical testing. They're personal matters, matters of preference. The debate is neverending and, in fact, probably pointless.

And by making value statements in terms that he explicitly acknowledges are not the terms in common use—with the actual statements at issue beneath this running largely contrary to social norms once decoded according to his arcade language—he comes off, yes, as crazy.

That is to say, disconnected from social reality and social norms. Like the cat lady.

been done outside of free software.

I'm with you—his brand of activism isn't helping. It also isn't hurting. It's just irrelevant at this point.

That's sad because there's definitely room for forces to be aligned against DRM and proprietary-ness, and the FSF ought to be on the front lines of making important contributions in this regard.

But FSF advocates often simply write off most of what regular people actually care about. It's not "let's create a society in which you can watch your Hollywood blockbusters in a more free and equitable way," it's just "we won't watch this Hollywood blockbuster and if you care about your freedom, neither will you."

There is no recognition of the fact that the freedom that the user seeks is *precisely* the freedom to watch *this Hollywood blockbuster,* and that as a result, the FSF position comes off as nonsensical to most people:

"We would like you not to be able to do the things that you want to do. After all, if you do them, you'll lose your freedom!"

For the average person, this is paradoxical at best—after all, the freedom that they seek is *precisely* the freedom to do the things that they want to do. What other freedom could these FSF people be referencing?

The argument is often framed as a kind of "big picture" calculation, i.e. short-term gratification vs. long-term thinking. But in practice, the desires at issue aren't addressed in the long-term frame; they're simply dismissed (Why would you want to do that anyway?), undermined (There is no such thing, you'd actually be doing something else, you've been lied to!) or mocked (Oh, I see, we're dealing with the sorts of people that watch Hollywood blockbusters. We don't talk to people like you or care to hear anything that you have to say, and with good reason!)

I was once an FSF fan (back when it was Emacs under SunOS and the GNU tools seemed so powerful in comparison to vendor-supplied equivalents) but the political dimension of the project has overshadowed—and not in a good way—all the coding that the FSF has ever done, and that code is now simply obsolete.

It doesn't matter if Emacs is a great. The best Emacs ever is, at this point, still an anachronism. The world is busy innovating in the mobile computing and networked services/informatics space. RMS is busy building the best hand-cranked butter churn the world has ever seen.

He's got decades of this under his belt. Ask him about whether red sauce or green sauce is better for drive-through tacos, he'll talk about freedom and oppression the same confounding ways.

As for myself, I'm much more in the Torvalds camp. Substantive freedom is a practical freedom as well as a prophylactic one; it's the freedom not just *from* things but *to do and participate in* things.

Sure, I want the freedom to protect my data or change my software. But I also want the freedom to buy and use a device that I think is great, or to participate in the mobile ecosystem (sorry, RMS) because I find it to be useful.

RMS can't distinguish between the two, or between the different kinds of restrictiveness at issue—the commercial software restrictiveness that is certainly annoying and terrible for our world, but also the FSF-styled restrictiveness that shoots itself in the foot and ends up being exactly the same.

In both cases, the end result is that I can't do what I want with my software/hardware. The commercial interests are at least open about it: we don't want you to do that because it would hurt our profits. The FSF is less open about it: we're not responsible for this, it's their fault—you're free to do your own thing.

Yes, maybe in theory I could rewrite the entire GNU codebase from scratch or get a world of developers together myself to do my own thing, but substantively speaking, in terms of actual opportunity structures available to me right now, today, or next week, or indeed for most people *as themselves, during their regular lives*, there is about the same amount of substantive freedom and restriction involved.

If I want to do X with my tech, and company X won't allow it with their toolchain, and the open computing world won't support it for ideological reasons, the net result is still that *I* am *practically* unable to do X with my tech.

Part of the FSF problem is that they often delegitimize X. RMS's answers about, say, "cloud" computing or the mobile ecosystem are instructive here, and mirror common answers in free software developments from techs. "That is not a real thing, it's just marketingspeak, you are a victim of ideology, and no, we won't help you."

Operating under the Thomas theorem and using the well-respected argument made by Rawls, I'd say that RMS fails to distinguish between summary rules and rules of practice. For RMS, there are only summary rules—things that we decide or don't decide to do, and espouse for utilitarian reasons. All of his arguments are utilitarian in nature (though often convolutedly so). Even when they involve other people or "society," his arguments boil down to rational self-interest calculated according to a very narrow range of values and goods, discounting the rest.

He ignores the dimension of rules and practices that are oriented toward social life—toward behaving in ways that others understand and that enable one to substantively participate in public and group life by virtue of conceding them as ordering principles for "how the world works right now."

The FSF vision of computing is, ironically, radically individualist and lonely in this regard—it is all about "what I can accomplish on my own." The only "we" that it acknowledges is one that is made up entirely of people that have precisely the same ideological outlook, goals, desires, and summary rules as the self. All other forms of "we" are reimagined as secretly selfish people that *claim* to be a public, but are in fact actually seeking to dominate one another. For RMS, "we" hasn't happened yet and he is trying to bring it about through summary means—as a rational self-interest calculation.

But a world of identical "free-people" in which the "we" finally comes about by virtue of the universal embrace of FSF values simply doesn't and won't exist—people are different, desires are different, and that which is in one person's self-interest is never necessarily in everyone's self-interest.

To believe in the existence of the group and participate with the group on group terms as an end in and of itself—to acknowledge and concede that different people have different forms of self-interest, but that we can all establish norms of practice and collaborate nonetheless in intelligible and useful ways, while *at the same time* also taking care, in a different way, to nurture our own self-interests within this framework—is beyond RMS.

I don't think he's just willfully antisocial, I think he actually doesn't get it. Everyone, to him, is purely a rational utility maximizer in a very simplistic way—it's about money and control, not values, not social life, not interests, not identity, and not long-term planning or life balance.

As for me, I'm happy to "allow" the phone networks to surveil me so that I can receive calls from my daughter more often, and when I do this, I see myself as participating in a very real, normal thing—communication, as it is normally done today, with understood concessions that (if and when the time is right) may have to be adjusted. This simple understanding is totally beyond RMS as far as I can tell.

of the crazy hippie cat lady who quotes randomly from every eastern religion, is afraid of the aura vibrations of electricity, and won't cook broccoli because "letting the soul out of the vegetable means that it can't protect you any longer, and that's the first step toward THEM getting YOUR soul, and that is the first step toward them getting Gaia's soul, and that's their plan to rule the Astral plane like STALIN did." [pets cat]

"Supported platforms: KDE was primarily developed under the GNU/Linux variant of the Unix operating system. However it is known to compile without, or with very few, problems on most Unix variants. At the moment we explicitely support GNU/Linux (Intel , Alpha, Sparc) and Solaris (Sparc) and we have success reports for..."

There are a lot of people here that clearly weren't deeply involved either in serious (non-home) computing or Linux during the era in which Linux was introduced and had its biggest impact.

Lots of "but GNU..." or "but all of these things aren't Linux-only..."

This commentary on KDE is an example. Sure, it eventually supported more platforms. But that doesn't change the fact that as an early OSS project, it was possible—that is to say, the developers that became involved were able to become involved in the first place—only because Linux had become available and broadly accessible.

Without Linux—if people wanting to do GUI development had been limited to DOS/Win3 or Mac OS on the low end, or SunOS/AIX/HPUX/etc. on the high end, in other words—KDE would simply not have happened. First, all of these systems came with their own DE that was vendor-supported and "good enough" while Linux users were stuck with TWM/FVWM or commercial CDE ports, and next, GUI development was either prohibitively complex and specialized or prohibitively expensive on these other platforms.

Saying that the developers at the start used whatever free OS they could find does not change the fact that the free OS that they did, in fact, find was Linux and that's how many of them came into the flow. *BSD had been around for a very long time prior to Linux, yet the Unix world had remained the rarefied and very expensive Unix world with very little of note going on in the middleware level—it was all vendors building systems and departments (academic or enterprise) implementing specific application flows. It was highly vertical and highly proprietary.

Linux enters the scene and in half a decade we have multiple entirely new integrated DEs for Unices, rapidly expanding driver support for almost all commodity hardware, and businesses and schools in every direction running Unix instead of DOS/MacOS. The barriers to entry in computing, information systems, and research design and development of all kinds went from extremely high to almost none, almost overnight—in one cohort of college students, essentially.

Linux opened Unix and networking up and turned them into the global ecosystems that they are today. Saying that this would have been *technically* possible without Linux is not at all good support for the claim that it would have been *likely* at the social (i.e. in actual society) level. Linux changed the game entirely, brought TCP/IP, OSS, and what was once called "high performance computing" (now it's just basic "computing" to raytrace a widget, compress a data stream, or manage multi-gigabyte database) to the public. Before Linux, all of these were exotic and expensive and economies of scale not only didn't apply but in fact couldn't. Now, decades after Linux, they clearly seem very pedestrian to many and economies of scale mean that you can carry them around in your pocket.

It's an eye-opener to read this Slashdot discussion and see so many that don't actually understand or know this.

It makes me think that the time may be ripe for a historical work or historical wiki on Linux/OSS history and its relationship to the broader Internet and information society of the present.

You can tell whether or not someone was actually there by whether or not they mention things like "Minix" in a list of viable operating systems.

I was part of a project at the time that needed real networking and a real Unix development environment. We spent four months working to find an alternative, then shelled out for a series of early Sparc pizza boxes. SS2 boxes maybe? As I recall, we got four at nearly $15k each that ate up a huge chunk of our budget.

Two years later, we had liquidated them and were doing all of the same stuff on Linux with cheap 486 boxes and commodity hardware, and using the GNU userland and toolchain. People here talk about GNU as predating Linux while forgetting that prior to Linux, the only place to run it was on your freaking Sparcstation (or equivalent—but certainly not under Minix), which already came with a vendor-supported userland. GNU starts to be interesting exactly when Linux becomes viable.

All in all, the change was bizarrely cool and amazing. We were like kids in a candy store—computing was suddenly so cheap as to almost be free, rather than the single most expensive non-labor cost in a project.

than the desktop computing userlands you're thinking of. (With apologies to Shakespeare.)

just far less visibility.

The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.

Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.

On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.

But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."

there _was_ no free operating system for industry standard hardware, much less a Unix-like one, and the commercial offerings were all platform-specific.

If you wanted a real computer that could do real stuff (as opposed to a DOS box, which wasn't even network aware in any substantive way, and even in non-substantive ways required $$$ for bare-bones, single-function software tools that were cobbled together out of batch files and nonsense), you had to:

- Get your hands on dedicated Unix workstation hardware, which was often poorly documented/supported outside of a corporate sales account

- This meant either $tens of thousands for current workstation hardware or $thousands for last-cycle hardware if it was even available at all (university and government surplus lots were the primary suspects)

- Phone up the one or two providers that offered OSes for the system

- Shell out $many thousands for a license (and often $thousands more for media)

- In many cases, because non-current hardware was tied to non-current OSes no longer for sale, port the current tree yourself to the non-current hardware after spending the $thousands you spent for a license

In short, it was substantively impossible for—say—a small company, a startup, or a CS/CE student to get their hands on anything beyond a DOS box with Windows 3 on it. With money and time, they MIGHT get web BROWSING working on Windows 3—in unstable ways. Developing software was a nightmare on these DOS/Win3 boxes as well—compilers were expensive, proprietary, and often required runtimes that had to be licensed on a per-user basis (i.e. you spent $200 on the compiler that spoke a non-standard dialect, then if you wanted to sell what you created, you spent another $some amount per copy sold) and that had no hooks for anything network-ish, because there were no standards in the DOS ecosystem for that.

Linux changed everything. Suddenly, you could pick up commodity i386 hardware and actually do network stuff with it in Unix-y ways. Even in the early days when Linux was unstable, incomplete, and a bear to install/configure, it made things possible for small shops or independent developers/creators that had simply been prohibitive in every practical way just a year earlier.

As a result, the Unix networking ways—thanks in many ways directly to Linux—would eventually become the industry standard form of networking (TCP/IP over ethernet) that we take for granted today—but in no way was history certain to end up this way. We could just have well been tossing the equivalent of glorified FidoNet payloads today.

Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize, and certainly Linux has been the most visible and most widely distributed amongst the three.

Much more than the work by Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds invented the future that we live in.

and there's workload and on hours and all of that stuff to consider, too. So of course it's not scientific by any stretch of the imagination.

But we've been very happy with our Intel SSDs and will continue to buy them.

Two Seagate 2TB, upon which we switched loyalties, then two WD Green 2TB.

The Seagates both hand spindle/motor problems of some kind—they didn't come back up one day after a shutdown for a hardware upgrade. The WD Green 2TB both developed data integrity issues while spinning and ultimately suffered SMART-reported failures and lost data (we had backups). One was still partially readable, the other couldn't be mounted at all.

Is there some kind of curse surrounding 2TB drives?

Anecdotal and small sample size caveats aside, I've had 4 (of 15) mechanical drives fail in my small business over the last two years and 0 (of 8) SSDs over the same time period fail on me.

The oldest mechanical drive that failed was around 2 years old. The oldest SSD currently in service is over 4 years old.

More to the point, the SSDs are all in laptops, getting jostled, bumped around, used at odd angles, and subject to routine temperature fluctuations. The mechanical drives were all case-mounted, stationary, and with adequate cooling.

This isn't enough to base an industry report on, but certainly my experience doesn't bear out the common idea that SSDs are catastrophically unreliable in comparison to mechanical drives.

The "freedom brigade" these days has gone around the bend. What, I can't fly unmanned payloads into a building? I can't drop heavy solid objects from the air over pedestrians? BIG BROTHER! BIG BROTHER!

What's next? "You mean I can't bludgeon you to death with my garden shovel? This is all Obama's fault, the damned communist!"

problem of "other peoples' code" is an actual problem?

Because if so, I think you may be the script kiddy in a minimum-wage cubicle farm.