What more would you need?

In case you didn't get to the bottom of the Guardian essay, that essay comes from "Snowden and the Future", a 4-part talk series Eben Moglen gave on October 9, October 30, November 13 and December 4 2013. It is highly recommended reading, watching, and/or listening. Audio, video, and transcripts are available at his website.

Which just means that he can be tried, again, in the proper venue.

And when you get indicted for saying something which is perfectly legal to say where you are, but a capital offense in some other country?

Let's not also forget two other particularly powerful points made in the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) essay:

• "We understand that Mozilla is afraid of losing users. Cory Doctorow points out that they have produced no evidence to substantiate this fear or made any effort to study the situation."
• "More importantly, popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission. In the past, Mozilla has distinguished itself and achieved success by protecting the freedom of its users and explaining the importance of that freedom: including publishing Firefox's source code, allowing others to make modifications to it, and sticking to Web standards in the face of attempts to impose proprietary extensions."

Brad Kuhn builds on these points in his essay discussing Mozilla's announcement: "Theoretically speaking, though, the Mozilla Foundation is supposed to be a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity which told the IRS its charitable purpose was: to "keep the Internet a universal platform that is accessible by anyone from anywhere, using any computer, and ... develop open-source Internet applications". Baker fails to explain how switching Firefox to include proprietary software fits that mission. In fact, with a bit of revisionist history, she says that open source was merely an "approach" that Mozilla Foundation was using, not their mission."

Speaking of how people criticize the FSF without reading what they say, the FSF is not an "open source advocate" despite /.'s insistence to the contrary such as is stated in this story's headline. The FSF and the free software movement predate the developmental methodology known as open source, and the FSF fights for values the open source movement sets out to deny, namely software freedom. The FSF has published more than one essay on this topic (1, 2) and RMS includes a clear and cogent explanation of this point in virtually every talk you'll hear him give. Archives of these talks are readily available online in formats that favor free software. Mozilla's choice here is another example of reaching radically different conclusions given different philosophies: Mozilla's open source choice versus a free software activist's choice to reject DRM for many valid reasons the FSF points out.

With the number of times /. posters point out how RMS arrived at some conclusion well before so many other people, and wrote something illustrating the point and his rationale, I would hope /. posters would recall that.

More DRM isn't going to play out well for the public as it has already failed for those who enjoy leveraging their fair-use rights, reading/viewing something in another way, and more. RMS's ethics-backed rationale against DRM and nonfree software (as opposed to a developmental methodology that accepts practical convenience at the cost of our civil liberties) is simply invaluable. Snowden's revelations bring RMS's long-held objections to nonfree software into sharp focus all the more.

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Addressing both your comment and the grandparent comment: this distinction of allowing non-free software is part of what distinguishes the older free software movement from the younger open source movement. RMS has been talking and writing about this critical distinction for years.

Consider the following from "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software":

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

In other words, open source won't endorse software freedom for its own sake. That movement was designed to never raise the issue of software freedom in order to promote a developmental methodology thought to lead to more reliable, more powerful programs. That methodology is fine as far as it goes (everyone likes powerful robust programs) but as we're seeing with the Snowden revelations, that methodology doesn't go far enough. RMS realized this very early on and has been providing ethical counterarguments since the open source movement began (older essay, newer essay).

This difference explains what we're seeing in the very different approaches taken in Linus Torvalds' fork of the Linux kernel versus the GNU Linux-libre fork of the Linux kernel. Linux-libre's distinction is that this fork removes the blobs that come with the Torvalds fork of the Linux kernel. Torvalds includes nonfree code meant to make the kernel run on more hardware which places a high value on convenience at the cost of software freedom. Linux-libre values software freedom instead. As a result, Linux-libre doesn't run on as much hardware and might not take advantage of everything modern hardware can do, but one gains a system they are allowed to fully inspect, share, and modify—software freedom. Linux-libre lets users make sure the software does only what that user wants that program to do. RMS, as recently as his recent responses to /. questions, encouraged readers to reverse engineer hardware in order to fully document hardware ("The parts of Linux we need to replace are the nonfree parts, the "binary blobs". [...] The main work necessary to replace the blobs is reverse engineering to determine the specs of the peripherals those blobs are used in. That's a tremendously important job -- please join in if you can."). This work leads to increased support for fully free operating systems, including fully free support in Linux-libre.

Increased security is one of the things you get with the pursuit of software freedom for its own sake. I think RMS very much recognizes the security enhancements that come along with Linux-libre and why his organization won't recommend a system with nonfree blobs in it. I'd expect that Stallman would say security isn't a goal unto itself, but a feature of a more important concern: software freedom.

Yeah, that is odd. Mods here are an odd bunch.

</hipster> I remember listening to NWA when I was in the Army in the mid 80's. Never thought any of those guys would end up anywhere other than San Quentin. And now Dre's a billionaire.

Dre's gonna be the first hip-hop billionaire.

The objection you seem to have missed is that proprietors treat users badly without the user's ability to effectively improve the program for their own needs (even by hiring someone to do this work on their behalf). So better to rejecting non-free software on ethical grounds. Whether spies have used the power of a proprietary Angry Birds is a weak response compared to asking whether anybody should have to choose a potential loss of privacy to play a videogame. Tracking users (no matter how) without their explicit knowledge is something people don't know about and, when they learn about it, don't like. It's a shame you have such personal anger toward Stallman that you refuse to convey understanding his points. Your namecalling ("bearded zealot", "mooching") and lame counterarguments like "There's more effective ways for snoops to get info than through angry birds" run the risk of reading as tacit acceptance of RMS's points without giving him due credit for bringing those points to the public.

We don't know who can get data from RMS's Loonsong MIPS machine but paying attention to these issues and using what's available to practical effect is leading by example; a far more respectful approach which complaining and namecalling just can't beat.

It's so convenient to argue against yourself isn't it? No need to ask him what he actually thinks (his email address is readily available) or read any of his many essays. You might be particularly interested in a list of surveillance examples found in proprietary software including one pertinant description for a program you just mentioned—"Angry Birds spies for companies, and the NSA takes advantage to spy through it too.".

how absolutely boring it is to read essentially the same message ("all software should be free and you should refuse to use any software that isn't free") repeated about 15 times with 15 minor variations. Surely RMS isn't this one-dimensional. I wish there had been some more interesting questions that weren't just prompts to repeat the free software mantra over and over again.

It's not RMS's fault that he was asked similarly un"interesting" questions that each came with the repetitive prejudices (asking about the younger movement he didn't start instead of the older movement he did start, framing issues in terms of amorality and not questioning what non-free software entails). Looking at the questions, it's clear that they were asked by people who didn't bother to read the essays linked to in the original /. story soliciting questions for him. I remember when /. used to criticize behavior like that. A lot of what people bump into are issues where software freedom has a practical response that can liberate users from dependency on untrustworthy programmers, but thanks to an amoral stance on these issues the public is never taught to see how a technocratic/developmental stance (open source, focus on features and price, focus on slick interfaces) can run contrary to their interests (preserving their privacy, retaining and exercising their civil liberties, not being beaten or killed). It's convenient to see a movie when you wish, but certainly not as important as avoiding being spied upon everywhere you go.

Now 15 years later I read his responses to these questions and it all feels very much the same. He's apparently super paranoid (worried about the government eavesdropping on your cell phone calls and tracking you? Wishing for a pager so that you could perfectly control how much tracking information you give when you answer your phone? Jesus christ, get over yourself!) and thinks everyone else should be too.

That's probably because you haven't been paying much attention to what Edward Snowden has been telling us, nor have you been thinking deeply about the consequences of those revelations. I suggest watching Eben Moglen's insightful talks on this topic for some historical perspective on how "one-dimensional" your take is and how much under threat the entire world is these days. That is, if you're not too busy dismissing Moglen for being an FSF lawyer and former FSF board member who deeply appreciates software freedom for its own sake.

I never learned exactly his feelings on the matter because when I tried to ask for some clarification I was immediately shouted down by his cronies who thought I was trying to hassle him or something (I assure you, I wasn't; I just wanted to understand his position better since I had never heard of someone refusing to use passwords and didn't understand why).

I'd be more likely to believe you on this claim if the rest of your opinions were better defended. But it's awfully hard to take someone too seriously when they're so easily dissuaded by stylistic matters over substantive examination of pertinant issues.

Just ou of curiosity, how is using a drone to attack an individual target somehow illegal, where carpet-bombing with a B-52 is not illegal? Or is your contention that any use of force against al-Qaeda illegal?

Are you some sort of Christianist racist?