It's worse than that. I have a Capital One credit card and a Capital One 360 (nee ING) savings account. They have seemingly completely separate logins, but changing the password for one changes the password for the other.
I think it is important for free software to provide free graphical user interface software, which is why the GNU Project arranged to launch three projects to develop that. The third, GNOME, was successful, so we never needed a fourth one.
Does anybody know what the first two GNU windowing systems were? Is he talking about GNUstep?
A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever. These streaming dis-services are malicious technology designed to make people antisocial.
Right, Richard, it's the Netflix users who are antisocial, not the people who get irate when their "friend" tries to load a website.
This really irked me too. Sounds like he would be great fun to be friends with. I guess if I made it my full time job to avoid every modern product or service possible I wouldn't have much time to be social or have fun either.
I'm a bit incredulous at the existence of these knuckle-draggers. There's a big difference between boxing out the sides of a 40+" screen to 4:3 and boxing out the top and bottom of a smaller screen to 16:9 (or 2.35:1). You really had to be a dedicated film buff to watch Lawrence of Arabia letterboxed on a 32" TV. I watch 4:3 content on my TV all the time (e.g., I've been watching poorly deinterlaced Star Trek: TNG via Netflix) and I hardly even notice.
"I'm a bit incredulous at the existence of these knuckle-draggers. "
I've met many people who will not watch any film - no matter how good its reputation -- if it's in black and white. The first time I heard someone say "I can't watch this - it's in black and white" I thought it was a joke. That was 22 years ago, and he was a post-grad student. He was utterly serious. Since then I've met others like that.
Many films originally printed in color for theaters had their delicate color internegatives lost or destroyed or decayed. Often only archive mono prints manages to survive, because of better or more stable chemistry.
Ted Turner wasn't all crazy. He had history on his side, for some movies. But then he also got a huge upsurge in viewing, of the films he colorized. I think there's fair argument that more distribution, more viewing, of a art form, is a good thing.
Also, what's dismissed as SD is so often truly awful SD, not clean and heavily compressed.
Like the commented above, I often wish for just a decent SD copy. Really well transferred DVDs are pretty good to watch.
Stallman is basically saying that it's unethical to outsource a software function that it's possible to run on-premises, which is just... a losing argument. Any given user can decide whether the (almost purely abstract) "freedom" of running free software one's own server outweighs the convenience of, say, not having to administer a mail server. I'm not sure what free software buys you versus hosted software with good data export features.
Making that decision in an informed way starts with having some idea of what you're giving up.
In the case of SaaSS, you're often not sure what you're giving up precisely because the operation of the server is so opaque to you. E.g. is the server copying all your email to a hostile foreign government? The operator /says/ it isn't.
Indeed, it can be a bit abstract-- but many other important tradeoffs we weigh also involve abstract implications or effects at a distance.
I have huge respect for Stallman and I understand his argument, but he's still stuck in a 1980s mentality where everyone on a computer had to have some level of expertise with actually running software.
The fact is that many people today are incapable of even installing an application on a proprietary desktop OS, much less utilizing the freedom of software they control. 10 years ago I was building websites for people at $1000-$5000 a pop, all with open source software. They have all the benefits of free software available to them, but you know what they don't have? Anyone to maintain their software for a reasonable price. I've been directing them to SaaS providers for a long time because frankly it makes no sense to pay me 100 times as much to a software professional in order to realize this freedom.
Obviously Stallman would say that there's no inherent reason that you can't have a reasonably priced service based on free software, just like there's no reason you can't charge for shrinkwrapped free software. However the mechanics and cost savings of SaaS make this much much more difficult to conceive, and frankly I don't see how it will ever make sense for the laymen who make up the vast vast majority of computer users today.
Stallman is a gem of the computing world, and I would never say anything bad about his ideology, but the primary battle that needs to be fought today is about data ownership, not software freedom. The latter still matters, but only for the computing elites (ie. programmers, sysadmins, etc), the former is what is increasingly going to affect everyone going forward.
Arguing that paying someone to run the software for you is unethical is like arguing that paying for a well-prepared meal in a restaurant is unethical. You should source all the ingredients and prepare them in your own kitchen.
Except we're paying for the expertise of the chef. In the case of SaaS we're paying for not maintaining our own data center, system administration costs, operations costs, monitoring and security.
But the chef might not use clean food! People will get sick, the chef's reputation will suffer, and he'll go out of business.
As you say, the question is data ownership. Turning that toward the analogy, how do we verify data security such that reputation is affected? Make ethical behavior valuable (reputation) and businesses will behave ethically.
Freedom means having control over your own life. If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. Nonfree software encourages users to surrender control over their computing to someone else and this is the exact same situation in SAAS. SAAS is not controlled by the user but some other person. This is unethical because this causes an unjust form of power over the user. Users who partake in SAAS or proprietary software do not get all four freedoms of free software that all users need to have freedom. Now if you feel that you don't need all four freedoms of free software, then so be it but beware, your computing will not belong to your hands but it will belong to the hands of other people (who don't necessarily have your best interest in mind).
In a restaurant, there is no unjust power over the customer. In a restaurant, a customer can order some dishes and order the dishes to be prepared a particular way. When the customer gets the meal, the customer is free to do things such as add more things to the food, take the food away for later eating or share the food with friends or even resell the food to anybody. In the case of SAAS, similar freedoms are not available to the user. Users are forbidden to study and modify how the service operates, and users are forbidden to share the computing service with other people. Control over the service belongs to the SAAS company and not the user.
I repeat the mantra because I thought it engaged the ideas of the ethics of SAAS and in food service. Would you care to present a counterargument to what I've presented.
If I understand your position, and that of the FSF, rightly then you believe it is both unethical to provide, and unethical to use hosted software that does not carry the AGPL.
I would submit that a SaaS provider could not ethically allow modifications to their running software. So let's exclude that from the discussion.
What if a provider only ran software licensed with the AGPL? It wouldn't fix anything. The license requires accessing a download of the source. How can a customer verify the version of the software is the same as the version of the download, i.e. check for a violation of the license? Short of having access to the operating system on the servers, the customer cannot. No reasonable service provider would allow such access, and no reasonable customer would accept that other customers, including, possibly, competitors, had such access.
You can push the problem around all you like (every customer has their own server with OS-level access, but what about the DB?). It will always end up being cost prohibitive to run a service.
Also, under the AGPL the point is for any user of the system to be able to host and run their own instance. Meaning that any innovations must be given away. Conversely, if the software can only run in the context of the provider's data store, the problem of data ownership is not resolved.
Do I want the keys to the OS on my home computer. Darn right. At work, do I want the keys to Amazon's virtualization layer? Heck no, I don't want those headaches. It's what I'm paying them for.
Stallman's position also fails to address the ethics of contract law. What makes Free Software ethics superior to ethics of contracts?
Anyway, to be clear: Stallman actually says that breaking your promise, i.e. breaking a contract is not cool, so you shouldn't ever accept a contract that requires you to give up essential freedoms. He does not advocate breaking contracts, he argues about which contract terms are ethical or unethical. He doesn't say break the unethical ones, he says don't accept them in the first place.
And you could run hosted software that does something that involves networking fundamentally, such as a chat service, and it would not be SaaSS. And you could run any software under a permissive license and still provide the code as though it were AGPL. AGPL isn't a requirement for being ethical, it just helps stop people from being unethical (but they could choose to be ethical regardless).
> but he's still stuck in a 1980s mentality where everyone on a computer had to have some level of expertise with actually running software
I don't think he is: The challenge for excellent free software today is to build software which can be used maintenance free (and, of course, be compatible with maintenance if the user wants to provide some).
Of course, it's _easer_ to build software that runs remotely and can be fixed silently for the user at any time, than software which has to be complete and correct when it goes out the door...
Freedom that costs to much can't deliver on its promise. The response shouldn't be to abandon improved freedom as a goal, but to apply our intellect to lowering the cost.
I was very careful in the way I worded my argument to avoid this strawman rebuttal (see the part about computing elites).
Of course you are right that we should rise to the challenge of shipping excellent free software, but experience tells me that it doesn't matter how good we get at this, we will still be undone by the transient nature of software stacks. Patches will be necessary unless people never upgrade, which of course they will because sooner or later they will desire new features or it's necessitated by security. At best we can asymptotically approach the amortized cost of having someone else manage your software for you, and even that is dreamland until free OSes finds a way to approach the UX provided by Apple/Microsoft/Google.
You're welcome to devote your life to proving me wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's a little more than that. As I understand it, he's OK with people choosing to do business with a company along the lines of Facebook or Twitter as long as the customers have the freedom to get all the source code for all relevant web services (and, I believe, the user's own data) if desired. He understands why you might pay to have somebody do something you aren't willing to do yourself, but he believes you should always have the ability to get and modify the source code for all software you use, even if you aren't using it on your own computer.
No, he's bascially saying your SaaS provider owns your data in a very specific way. If you are to compete with Salesforce, would you really keep your customer data in their CRM?
The way I heard it, the SV office only existed in the first place because Lamport didn't want to move to Seattle. I kind of doubt they didn't offer him relocation, and I kind of doubt he accepted it.
