Free speech is a about whether a society values and protects free speech or not.
If a society values and protects free speech, we would observe institutions, businesses, and individuals being very permissive and polite to speech they find objectionable.
If it doesn't, we would observe that its government doesn't care much about free speech either.
Free speech involves making sometimes uncomfortable sacrifices for a principle. Why would anyone support a government making such sacrifices if they don't believe in making such sacrifices at an individual level?
> Free speech is a about whether a society values and protects free speech or not.
That is a recursive and meaningless definition. Free speech is widely understood, and codified, as being able to say stuff without having the government send you to jail for it.
That is a pretty basic requirement for a functional democracy. Altough, depending on where you live, even free speech does not mean fully free. In the U.S it is mostly limited by libel/defamation, but in a lot of country hate speech is not allowed. Whether you think it is a good thing or not that is up to you, but this is actual free speech.
Freedom of speech, in the other hand, is part of a moral code that believes in inalienable rights, that humans implicitly have the right to express themselves. The government does not grant the right to freedom of speech, because we already have it. The first amendment says that the government must respect that right, but creating the right.
Perhaps but it's because you two are talking past each other. The free speech some people refer to are that devised under the concept of classical liberalism which spawned the bill of rights, under which the right to free speech is a right to not have your speech interfered with by government. Not a right to compel others to display your speech, as under that system you would be violating their right to free speech by making them say that was actually what was just your speech.
I don't think we need any major government intervention.
What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.
Europe and Brazil already have such laws, though they could go farther.
> What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.
My favorite discovery about Amazon civilization is that the incidence of human-edible fruit trees is much higher in any area near navigable water. They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans.
That didn’t just happen in the Amazon. The Pacific Northwest had something like that. My understanding is that the Eastern American forests were curated like that too, before it was cut down.
I have heard of an oasis in North Africa that was curated this way, and it still survived despite being abandoned by humans.
The modern version of this is called a perennial food forest.
In Hell's Canyon Oregon, there were mining camps up and down it and you still see a ton of fruit trees dotting the canyon because of it. Many are intentional, by homes, rows etc, but sometimes you see the odd copse of fruit trees off by itself and well, that's probably where the outhouse as ;)
Only about 100-150 years old, but given how well they've done over that time and how popular they are with the wildlife, I'd bet they stick around.
It happens unintentionally too, if you've ever been to a state park in North America and seen an apple tree off of a trail, it's because someone once threw away an apple core.
A slice of my property I leave to grow naturally. I threw out apple cores into it frequently, hoping one will sprout. They never did. I finally just bought an apple tree and planted it there, it now produces delicious apples once a year.
Yes, much of early cultivation is theorized to have looked like this, particularly before sedentary agriculture. If you have a fairly stable seasonal migration pattern plants you eat or use will naturally "follow" you around and will tend towards forms that make them more attractive to human attention.
I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily. Our ancestors may not have the scientific knowledge we have now, but they were just as smart as we are.
> I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily.
I don't see this minimization (after all, we currently do this unintentionally today and nobody sees this as lack of intelligence and I certainly hope I never implied that people in the past were in any way less capable than ourselves) but I do affirm that people were just as capable of understanding the causes and effects of plant reproduction as they are today.
I'm just freely speculating on how to find the most minimal path to explanation and it's easier to explain the differences in the rise of civilization in the middle east vs the new world with other factors rather than something cultural or genetic or otherwise abstractly geographically-bound factors. And besides, I like the idea that people in the past wouldn't have just sat around ruminating how to maximize crop yields but had more fruitful activities to attend to. I don't celebrate the egyptian engineer who figured out how to haul a multi-ton brick up a high slope, I mourn for him (or her)!
I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity. Looking through the history, I found out the Renaissance was not what I thought it was. The history of the Silk Roads were not what I thought it was. And I haven't revisited the history of the industrial revolution, but it looks so far, that is where the obsession with maximizing productivity, gains, and work all come from. It is very likely when I look at it again, it is not what I thought it was either.
The significance of perennial food forests is that it's a practice that comes from a very different world view than our normative one that came from the industrial revolution. Yet there's a tendency to evaluate something like a perennial food forest from the world view of maximizing productivity. Maybe we're talking past each other a bit -- I have not put a lot of thought into the difference in how civilizations arose in the old world vs the new world. The patterns of design for something like the perennial food forests in the Americas have shown up in the Old World as well.
I haven't found Occam's Razor very effective in explanatory powers. Treating the minimum path as the floor is one thing; treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly. Just my personal opinion; I'm aware I don't hold a popular opinion.
> treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly.
Sure, but your tools reasoning about the past are quite limited. Occam's Razor helps us identify where narrative elements are unnecessary for an explanation, and in that it's quite useful. For most of history we must rely on Occam's Razor to even construct any sort of probability model. After all what's easier to believe—acting like the historical record was fabricated with the intent of deceiving us, or acting like the people who wrote the historical records generally had rational reasons to do so? The basis for preferring the latter is inherently an application of Occam's Razor.
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest actively encouraged the formation of geological structures in order to increase shellfish yield and sustainability. You seem to think that the simplest explanation is that people just copied happy accidents, when the level of sophistication of these systems combined with the documented propensity of humans to actively engineer their way out of problems leads to the simplest explanation being that what we see with both the food forests and mariculture is such active engineering.
The only way to come to a different conclusion is to assume that something is fundamentally different between Old World and New World populations just because one group's processes are relatively well-documented and the other's isn't. However, that conclusion would be colored by your relative inexperience with the shape of New World solutions. We're just discovering these phenomena because we didn't have the vision to see that they existed, biased as we are to the Eurasian perspective. If all you know are wheels, you won't recognize llama tracks, as it were.
It's been my experience with myself and observing people that beliefs can form in both reasonable and unreasonable ways. While people often times have reasons of their own, I've learned not to take it for granted, or even assume that my reconstruction of those reasoning is correct.
> I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity.
The late bronze age collapse. Humanity fucked up so bad we don't even know what happened. Everything since then has been meh. Future humans might still see us as in some form of iron age.
It can and humans (like birds) do disperse genetic material. However we are talking about deliberately curated food forests.
The European forests, in contrast were not like that. I remember reading about accounts from settlers in North America noting the park like quality of some of the forests.
As another example, here where I live in the Sonoran (Phoenix), there are a lot of chollas. Those have nasty barbed thorns, but they also produce fruits. There is another native plant that has sticky leaves and can be used to brush off the thorns so that the fruits can be harvested. I learned this from one of Brad Landcaster’s videos on this; Landcaster said he learned it from one of the native elders. They would deliberately plant the plant with sticky leaves near chollas.
The city where I live in the PNW has had a huge influx of immigrants from red and blue states who either don't respect the dignity of nonhuman life or want to gentrify communities to their liking. It seems like the first thing they do when they get here is cut down the biggest tree(s) in their yard to live out their pioneer fantasies. I'd say we've lost around 25 trees 75 years or older in just my immediate neighborhood. Then they plant ornamental pears and similar that smell like rotten garbage/death/sex.
Heaven forbid they plant a plumb, walnut or anything they have to (gasp) clean up after. Bumblebees, butterflies and small birds have all but disappeared compared to when we moved in around 2010.
With housing prices going from $100,000 to $500,000 since 2000, while wages haven't even doubled, I'm starting to not recognize this place anymore. It's heartbreaking because it didn't have to be this way. It's not a supply and demand problem, it's a cultural issue. What we value as a society, what we prioritize, how we fund institutions for checks and balances against predatory private equity firms that can't be stopped by the private sector, etc.
Not that this is a new idea - when was the term "rat race" coined? - but I imagine that part of the issue is people who are so caught up in their unexamined expectations that they don't have the wherewithal to question them. You then factor in that the examining and decision-making is taken up by people with a lot more money or political influence. Such is the genesis of, say, white flight (and maybe even "manifest destiny"). Doesn't absolve participants of culpability, but helps us to understand the how and a bit of the why.
> or want to gentrify communities to their liking.
I think you've bent this word beyond breaking.
> I'd say we've lost around 25 trees 75 years or older in just my immediate neighborhood.
What kind of trees? Red Alder which are native to the area for example don't live much more than 70 years.
> while wages haven't even doubled,
Median household income in current dollars has more than doubled in Portland since 2000[1].
> It's not a supply and demand problem
Yes it is. Housing prices increase when demand increases. Portland has an arbitrary growth boundary around the city and a lot of restrictions on height.
Median household income in current dollars has more than doubled in Portland since 2000[1].
> It's not a supply and demand problem
Yes it is. Housing prices increase when demand increases. Portland has an arbitrary growth boundary around the city and a lot of restrictions on height.
From 2000-2023, yours shows $42,499-$88,740, but that shows $70,870-$88,740 in 2023 C-CPI-U Dollars.
Apparently cumulative inflation has about doubled nationally since 2000, making the consumer price index (CPI) about double, so $1 in 2000 was worth the same as about $2 today:
So real inflation-adjusted wages in Oregon have risen about ($88,740 - $70,870)/$70,870 = 25% from 2000-2023.
If household incomes had actually doubled and also kept up with inflation, they would be ($70,870 * 2) = $141,740 in today's dollars. Or by your graph, year 2000 wages that doubled and also kept up with inflation (so two doublings) would be ($42,499 * 2 * 2) = $169,996.
Admittedly, I don't know where the $28,256 discrepancy comes from, so expected wages would probably be somewhere between $141,740 and $169,996. Maybe someone more studied in economics can tell us.
From Jan 2000 to Jan 2023 and not adjusting for inflation, housing prices in Oregon have risen from $102,749 to $338,927:
So a $100,000 home in 2000 would cost $200,000 by inflation and $250,000 if housing prices matched the 25% wage increase. But they cost $338,927, so are about 1.36 times more expensive than expected, even accounting for higher wages.
After writing this out, I question what a wage increase means if housing prices just match it. Is it really a raise if it's eaten up by rising housing costs?
Had people invested in things besides housing bubbles, say medical breakthroughs or renewable energy, then today's housing costs vs inflationary costs would be $338,927/$200,000 = 1.69. So homes today are 69% more expensive/overengineered than in 2000.
To me, this doesn't represent supply and demand. It shows that people have put their wage gains into more expensive homes, which reduced the supply of building materials and raised housing costs for everyone else. It also shows that a larger segment of the population today isn't working, because our economy has been moving from manufacturing to finance. Meaning that young working people are carrying a higher load to support the retirements of older people who have invested in real estate, mostly through private equity firms.
You bring up a good point about aging and sick trees though. Most in our neighborhood were cut down due to neglect and disease. The 2008 housing bubble crash left lots empty for a year or two and the banks didn't bother paying the water bill, so the trees died. We've also had unusually mild winters where I live in Idaho, allowing invasive pests and diseases to survive and harm trees. There's no talk of any of this in the local media or messaging from our city council though, so there's no consensus on saving the trees. I sympathize that trees must be cut down sometimes for safety, but it's been hard to watch.
My point about income is that it has doubled in the same way housing prices have. If you inflation adjusted the housing prices they aren’t so out of line with median household income.
If your theory about housing prices is building materials, you’re just flatly wrong. The underlying land values have had very large increases in value, and materials are a small portion of the court of a frame built house. Land and labor costs dominate.
> They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans.
My understanding is that the rainforest as we know it exists where it does in part because humans spent such effort cultivating edible plants in the area. Many of the most edible crops are not native to the regions in which they now grow, there's not much evidence of ancient-grown forest before ~5kya, and there's good evidence of burn-based plant and soil management.
Where did you read this? I’ve read in multiple places that the jungle there is quite inhospitable to humans because there is little easily accessible food. The source that comes to mind is the book The Lost City of Z.
There's now a consensus of evidence that large areas of the Amazon were planted and cultivated. Bear in mind this an enormous area, and multiple civilisations would have been active simultaneously over thousands of years.
you mean "large" relative to human populations or large relative to the entire Amazon rain forest? Your sources indicate that there was cultivation widespread around the amazon but not that the /entire/ amazon is as it is due to cultivation. Maybe i misinterpret the intended message of your comment.
I meant that the Amazon basin and Amazonia are enormous geographic regions. It's highly unlikely that the rainforest itself is the result of cultivation. It does seem to be proven at this point that wide areas were cultivated multiple times in distinct eras of human habitation.
If you're smart you regularly walk through life seeing people hurt each other by letting screwed-up systems fester.
Even if you're really callous and rational about opportunity cost, you can only walk by so many systemic-equivalents of burning buildings before you're eventually like, "damn it, okay I'm going to save this kid but just this once".
Being smart and systems-aware in today's world is like walking by a burning building every day with very long, fireproof arms. "Noblesse" is the wrong word but something like this is a thing. Mathiness oblige?
The trouble is, if you think in abstract terms at all you'll start seeing the patterns in the reasons many people are suffering, and the patterns in your relationship to them.
Then you'll have to ratchet up boundaries to address the relational patterns with people who are having a hard time, so that you're not a participant in their suffering.
And you'll have to start working on the patterns underneath the problems, which when you get into it starts to look more and more like the kind of megalomaniacal moonshot ("give computers arms and legs" / "fix the government now!") that the author ran out of gas on.
I think where you end up if you think about this is just recognizing that a) you probably should try to do some ambitious, high-leverage project to make the world better and b) reflecting about the world and about life in a thorough way is emotionally difficult for most people, so you also have to deal with those emotions.
The author's original somewhat manic intentions were probably right, and maybe he needed a bit more of a rest but was plowing forward out of fear that he'd lose his nerve. Now he's getting some rest and will probably figure out something big, important, and hard to work on in the next few years.
The barriers/boundaries thing I think is interesting.
I've never really been able to identify with this sort of "make money and then fix the world" stuff because I feel that everyone hugely simplifies every issue and looks only at first or maybe second order effects.
You fix malaria/give to the poor/raise the minimum wage/etc. Cool, now we have a wealthier population with more people doing more stuff to modify the environment. We accelerate biosphere collapse and global warming. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I think that if you're being truly logical about these things you could just as easily come up with a grand solution that's something like drawing a graph of social connections from you, go out a few layers, and then press the button to delete everyone else on the planet and rewild most of it. Or go back in time and don't discover oil (or was the suffering of the pre-industrial era worse? maybe it was, probably it was...!).
I don't think I'd be chosen to go to Elysium but I can't really see the logical flaw in the argument either. Why should the super rich care about the rest? Move forward a few years/decades; why should superintelligent AI care about humans? We don't care about mosquitoes.
Making a company that makes a prettier table or a faster car or whatever feels like it's directly solving a problem. Making a company that aims to "improve the world" just seems like a fool's errand to me, second law of thermo, that sort of thing.
Raising the standard of living for the poorest people in the world does very little to increase the rate of climate change since these people have very little impact on the environment and consume so little in the first place. I'd argue that we also owe it to them because the poor are also least capable to handle the consequences of climate change and the other issues facing developing nations. I don't know why this needs to be said but those are real issues.
The flaw in Elysium is moral and practical. You have to accept that humans by virtue of being human deserve some consideration, and the well being of society deserves consideration. If a rich person don't believe this then they are irresponsible. Too much inequality in society makes it shittier for everybody for plenty of reasons.
"Having wealth makes you responsible to others, therefore you should do arson."
If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff and whatever responsibility you have to others includes using that alongside the liquid value.
And worse, it's not just on you to do what people say they want. You're also actually responsible for trying to figure out what they would find most valuable. ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)
You're making a strong implication that the companies that make money are the things that people need. The correlation seems to be growing weaker every year as far as I've seen.
Is your point that the money should go to companies that make things that people need as opposed to want? Or is your point that the money somehow flows to companies that make things that people neither need nor want?
Try to think about it in less capitalist terms. Say you built the world's first bicycle and can now move faster / more efficiently than anyone else.
What is the most likely thing that will happen if you give the bicycle away to the person who appears to need it the most and go do something else? (One broken bicycle.)
On the flip side, isn't the most important thing you can work on something like, "figure out how to make a bicycle—and maintenance supply chain—for everyone who wants one"?
The OP's whole point is that he has money, not ideas. Plus, in your example, you could literally do both. Plus, money is not the same thing as IP or creativity. Plus, the post you were responding to was literally advocating giving the money to the people with ideas of how to do good for the world.
There may or may not be a moral imperative to give away excess wealth, but there damn sure isn't any moral imperative to keep it.
If we take the post at face value, OP is saying that he has too many ideas (robots! DOGE!) to have conviction around any, which is a pretty normal predicament for founders.
He also has a track record of having an idea, figuring out how to make the idea useful to others, and turning that into a self-sustaining machine.
All of these are much more important than an idea alone.
As everybody here knows, just having an idea for, say, an app is of very limited value. The trick is being able to mold the idea into what people actually want it to be, and find some model that lets you and them split the value, so the work can continue. The same is true in any kind of political or social activity. Ideas are almost worthless.
As in software, people who are capable of actually executing on their ideas for making the world better are almost always also capable of getting the funding they need, one way or another. People are always the bottleneck, not funding. (Ask anyone who runs a grant program about how hard it is to find effective people to give to.)
Sure, if OP runs into an extremely skilled world-changer with a great track record he should donate 10-50k and introduce the person to some other post-exit friends. But will that skilled and effective person find funding whether he donates or not? Definitely.
The post I was responding to was advocating for giving money to people with an idea for how to make the world better who would otherwise never be able to do it.
The existence of such people is almost a myth.
They do exist, but they're impossible to find in the haystack of people who are guaranteed to fail at executing their idea. If you look for people with ideas for making the world better who aren't doing them because they don't have the money, and give them money, nothing will happen. That's arson.
Also, in my example, you can't really do both. The most efficient system for getting a bicycle to everyone who needs one will involve selling the bicycles. Without capturing some of the value of the bicycles you're making, you'll never be able to make as many.
> If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff
Not at all. Nobody is "good at stuff" in general. People have particular areas of competence at best. Disasters arise when someone who has achieved success off the back of one particular skill set assumes they have general competence at everything and then makes leadership decisions from a position of blind arrogance.
If you manage to help make a powerful machine, you are probably a good machinist. This does not mean you should become a CEO or a venture capitalist or some other sort of "value decider." Your skill is in making powerful machines. If you want to move into a new field, you have to do so as a beginner.
My organization Fight for the Future was targeted by the same hacking-for-hire operation while working on net neutrality protections.
It was really interesting because at the time the conclusion of our security consultants was that the attack was just random commercially-motivated prospecting. Then the Citizen Lab Dark Basin report came out years later and it was clear they were after our internal comms, so they could milk a decade of emails for anything that looked bad when taken out of context. Yikes.
After the attack we put a 3 month retention limit on most emails and messages. I recommend this to anyone doing sensitive work! You miss the old emails sometimes but it's worth it.
I think it's possible we'll learn more soon about who hired our hackers, which is exciting! It was almost certainly a major American ISP, or the lobbying umbrella group they created. It's my optimistic read that blowback from this case has already eroded the practice of dirty tricks like these. More lobbyists and companies getting caught would strengthen the effect.
Since I left Fight for the Future I've been working on a Signal alternative that feels more like Slack, for teams facing similar threats. Hopefully something comes of that too!
That's a common response these days and while I empathize, I think it's wrong. The right response IMHO is, essentially, 'fuck them; they can't stop us'.
A Soviet dissident (I don't recall the name atm) advised not talking about your arrest, torture, detention - the horrors, the fear, etc. That's what the oppressors want you to do, to spread fear and intimidation to all the people they didn't arrest; that's half the point of their actions - they don't have the resources to arrest everyone. If you don't talk about it, it's a forgotten moment of one small point in time and space. It's the echoes of it, of people repeating the story, that spread across orders of magnitude more time and space. Don't spread it around and you've disarmed your oppressors.
Also, look at contemporary political movements: The overwhelmingly successful one is barely slowed by attacks, never expresses any fear or intimidation, is always on the offensive. The flailing one is regularly talking about its terror, despair, whether or not there is any hope at all, and quitting.
There's a time and place to talk about your fears - privately, to your trusted confidants (and not to those who depend on you for leadership). Everyone has them; that's fine. Out in public is not the place; that's where you show that you can manage your fears and are resolute, undeterred, unshaken. Think of great leaders - Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, etc. - who ever said 'Yikes'? On social media, we all are leaders.
Nah, the value of having access to 3-month-old e-mails is that they're indexed in gmail, so if someone asks how much we paid for that widget 18 months ago you can get the original quotes in an instant.
Whereas if the data is in a bank vault, you ask the same question and the reply is "IDK, I think it was about $50-100?"
The value in old data isn't just in pulling up a single piece of information like a magician pulls a rabbit out of their hat, it's tremendously useful for looking back and seeing how an organization and its methodology has changed and how that information can be applied to future project.
It was a pleasure! We lost nominally in the end (except in California and outside the US) but we built enough awareness to give the ISPs a fear that blatant violations would rock the boat and lead to worse outcomes for them, like more state laws or tougher agency rules when Democrats regained power. I do regret not pushing harder for federal legislation though!
On airgapped email archives, yes, the subpoena threat model is real too. That also happened to us because of some other dirty tricks by ISPs in the same campaign! Fake FCC submissions opposing net neutrality were being created with blatantly stolen user data; like, not people being tricked into singing a petition but just straight up identity theft. We documented all of this and pitched some state AGs on looking into it. New York did, which was awesome, but they ended up subpoenaing everyone including us! We were psyched about this overall of course since it was our idea, and they did end up finding out who did it which was awesome (Broadband for America, the umbrella lobbying group for the telcos) but it was a huge amount of work to comply with the subpoena. The retention limits reduced that burden. Another reason to have them!
I would also say that, if you do create an airgapped archive and store it in an appropriately paranoid way, you are likely to never ever bother to dig it out of storage before the SSD melts into uselessness. You'll miss the ocassional old email but not enough to go digging for it.
If you really don't need old email, then don't bother, but for the chance that you do need them sometimes, but don't want to store everything in an internet connected place - it would be an option setting up a old laptop for this(maybe with Thunderbird), where you can remove the wifi chip for this air gapped use case. (In most older laptops they are easy to remove and not soldered on.)
Then regulary exporting all the needed files, either just copy them with a USB stick and more secure would be burning CD-R's for each data transfer. And it likely helps having an exotic linux system on the laptop, so a windows USB worm won't replicate there if you use the pragmatic USB data transfer variant.
> After the attack we put a 3 month retention limit on most emails and messages. I recommend this to anyone doing sensitive work! You miss the old emails sometimes but it's worth it.
How are pro-delete policies like these impacted by the discovery-process in law? Or even Sarbanes-Oxley?
Great question. IANAL but my understanding is that outside of some specific regulatory requirements in specific industries you're free to put these policies in place as long as you do it before you have any expectation that you're going to be sued.
That's another reason to bite the bullet and put these policies in place now: once you actually have a specific fear of being sued it's maybe too late, because at that point changes to your retention policy could be construed as interfering with the legal process.
You can also have your policy exempt certain categories of documents (like financial records) and that's okay too as long as you're consistent about it.
Having read this, I don't think there is any accusation of criminal behavior in this report.
The accusation is that he made people uncomfortable, didn't do enough to change that when it was raised, and defended criminal behavior by insisting on distinctions that the authors of the report consider immaterial or harmful.
I worked for RMS/FSF briefly and I think there is something about his radical refusal to compromise on anything conceptual (to avoid conflict or misunderstanding, e.g.) that is fundamentally incompatible with running an organization. This is on display here.
So I think it's probably right for FSF and RMS to part ways, but I also think it's positive for the world for him to keep on insisting on moral clarity in his terms.
At the same time, everybody should read the whole report and decide whether they think RMS's insistence on the distinctions rejected by the authors is helpful or unhelpful. I think some of RMS's distinctions could be helpful to the cause of reducing the incidence of sexual abuse.
> there is something about his radical refusal to compromise on anything conceptual (to avoid conflict or misunderstanding, e.g.) that is fundamentally incompatible with running an organization.
But its fundamentally compatible with keeping free software free. That is what is important - an unwavering adherance to the core mission.
And this is kind of key to the whole argument. It's not just about his behavior and questionable views on consent and age (though those are the disqualifying issues). Beyond that... The movement is stagnating because its leadership can't compromise and the computing world is moving beyond the era of personal computers and one-org mainframes that Stallman concocted the Four Freedoms in.
How do the Four Freedoms apply when it's not your computer, but a cloud service instead? FSF has struggled to find an answer because it's a philosophically different arrangement than the simpler "I should be able to control my own hardware" argument. Their dominant advice is "Don't use cloud," which is so out-of-touch it's laughable. You might as well tell people in the late 1800s to not use lightbulbs because it gives the electric company too much power over their lives.
> The movement is stagnating because its leadership can't compromise
If you want compromises, join the so-called "open-source" community, full of proprietary blobs. Thanks to Stallman, we have an example of true freedom and a compass showing where to move for it.
Copyleft is a compromise, and one of the most clever, honestly: ideally, the law should compel everyone to have the ability to change the devices they own and directly tell the authors of software that if they try to interfere with that, they can pound sand; their intellectual property rights don't extend to telling other people what to do.
It does not. But it does allow for the author to set the terms of the protection of their intellectual property.
That's the kind of compromise I'm talking about. And the FS movement hasn't figured out how to recapture that lightning in a bottle for the new Cloud era. Cloud is somewhat incompatible with the hardware-ownership-based philosophy of the Four Freedoms; something new and more fundamental is needed and the calcified, old movement can't seem to find it.
And they certainly don't seem to be trying, keeping the old leadership at the cost of turning away new members (with the implication that they value historical accomplishment more than new people). I've seen multiple people suggest that the right solution is to just abandon the FS movement qua the people running it and embrace new approaches; I think there's meat on those bones. It's a longer, harder fight if the old guard is left behind, but if they won't change they can't help.
Nothing actually prevents those corporations from using AGPLv3. The are only afraid that they can't create a walled garden with it. So users are protected from that, as designed.
This particular way of creating a walled garden, which relies on free work of free software volunteers, doesn't work thanks to AGPLv3. Whenever this license is involved, it works.
It unfortunately does nothing to prevent creation of a walled garden via creation of proprietary content in a proprietary network fabric on proprietary infrastructure, which... Seems to be all you need, given the popularity of Facebook, X, YouTube, and the multiple cloud service providers supporting something like (depending on who's crunching the numbers) 74% of enterprises.
If the goal was to change behavior... Behavior refuses to change.
What’s your point, exactly? How does the “open source” approach solve this? Surely you’re not putting down the AGPLv3 without also recognizing that “open source” software only strengthens proprietary *wares?
On the contrary, I think open source strengthens everything. Where copyleft leaves users of other people's software looking over their shoulder to confirm they haven't broken the license, with open source licenses I can release some work and not worry about how it's used, and I can use somebody's work without fear that they will come after me later.
It does strengthen proprietary software. It also strengthens everyone else's software. It's the rising tide that floats all boats.
What you're referring to is actually permissive licensing (or as I like to call it... /s). It's a scam.
It works fine for trivial pieces of code that no one cares about. But for bigger pieces of software, you're donating your time to Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir. You're volunteering for them. Why would you do that? If they want you to work for them they should pay you. If not for your wallet's sake then for the sake of hurting bad companies.
Copyleft is easy to comply with. Being scared of copyleft is like being scared of servers (which most programmers are according to DHH!).
Well, perhaps I layered in too much sarcasm, but the idea is that it's not a free speech violation for the government to say someone can't post on social media. That person is still free to say it, just not to have it broadcast to everyone.
If a society values and protects free speech, we would observe institutions, businesses, and individuals being very permissive and polite to speech they find objectionable.
If it doesn't, we would observe that its government doesn't care much about free speech either.
Free speech involves making sometimes uncomfortable sacrifices for a principle. Why would anyone support a government making such sacrifices if they don't believe in making such sacrifices at an individual level?