Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org

@mcp_ https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/106059135517585621

Very interesting perspective, @shusha.

I think that looking at the #FreeSoftware Manifest as a feminist document is a slightly projective of your own culture, but your criticism is very clever and I think that @ondiz and @mcp_ might like it a lot.

In fact, I think that #RMS missed the point of Free Software (🤦‍♂️ 🤷‍♂️ ), but not because of his condition (and btw it's well known he is autistic since he was a kid) but because of the influence of his mother-culture: he grown up in the USA in the middle of Cold War.

So he slightly misinterpreted the nascent #hacker movement (and his misunderstanding got spread in a powerful global feedback loop).

He founded Free Software on the value of #freedom instead of the value of #curiosity, which is in fact more fundamental: the reason while freedom alone is not enough, and you need #communion (protection from enclosures) and #candour (honest sharing of one's perspective).

Hackers are ALL about acquiring more knowledge.
A sort of modern #philosophers... but more hungry.
As such we NEED to share what we learn or create, so that other can build on top of it, and teach us what they learn in exchange.
And OBVIOUSLY, you need freedom to explore and hack (even because, it's since Icarus that people of power are scared by hackers http://www.tesio.it/2020/09/03/not_all_hackers_are_americans.html )

Hackers are weird but they are not born weird: we become weird (one way or another) because we are too curious and we slowly move outside the mainstream.

But the reason we do so, is not because we are evil, just because we want to learn more, more deeply, we struggle for (some kind of) knowledge, we care about aspects most people do not give a shit and so on.

Thus, by design, we are interested in EVERY perspective we do not have access to, the farthest from the mainstream, the better.

That's why an autistic like Stallman might feel at home.
And why no hacker would attack other people for what they think or say (as long as they do not lie), just for what they do.
More likely, we are going to engage in endless debates, trying to understand the others' perspective and trying to explain the other our own, different, perspective on the matter (something that to non-hackers looks like people trying to outsmart each other, while we are just trying to understand in a very direct and effective communication protocol).

But you are very correct on this: "it is all about protecting a social practice (of programming). But the solution it takes, in form of the GPL, is acting on the level of the product of that social practice, not the social practice itself"

I think I could not explain it better than this.

In fact, one of the limit of #GPL (and any other #copyleft I know) is that it only protects the software artefact, NOT the hacking community.

Even with a strong copyleft, there are way to NOT give back to the community the knowledge they ought to obtain (think of the cloud and software as a service).

Also, the Free Software movement never cared about EXTENDING the hacking community (in part, due to the elitism and focus on product and meritocracy that #ESR spread thanks to O'Reilly, that poisoned what was not elitist at all)

Indeed another criticism I have over Stallman is that he didn't focus on teaching people how to program and kept Free Software simple enough to be readable for everybody.

So this is something that, IMO, we should fix in Free Software.

And for sure, this is NOT the direction that corporations want the Free Software to take.

@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

Out of curiosity, in your opinion and experience, what are the advantages of Oberon-2 over Oberon-07?

(I don't think it's a matter of worth: that page explicitly states that "It does not document variants, e.g. Component Pascal, Oberon-2, unless those are treated as extensions", that in fact looks reasonable to reduce confusion, given the site name...)

@dthompson

Yeah, #softwarefreedomconservancy.

Donate to them if you want that #Google employees can safely violate #GPL: https://medium.com/@giacomo_59737/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-contributing-to-open-source-dd63acd20696

@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

No, I didn't new Vishaps's #Oberon compiler. Pretty interesting!

Maybe they should add it to http://oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml

My favourite one is #OBNC https://miasap.se/obnc/

@DeveloperMemes

This is totally unfair. 🤣

@nanook

I used #GCC too.
And liked it. A lot.
I spent a huge amount of my free time in the last 2.5 years to port it to #Jehanne, a #Plan9 fork.

But since they removed #RMS from the Steering Committee I realized that relying on it is an hazard for anybody outside the US.

https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235285.html

@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

Yes. It's one of my source of inspiration. In particular the language.

Sorry @pluralistic but this "mind-control ray" framing is a bit of a strawman.

You don't need mind control to statistically orient a population if you control a sufficient amout of the informations that each of its members receives and also monitor their behaviour 24x7.

Such influence is not individual: no single person changes her mind just because of what #Google, #Facebook and so on... show them.

BUT they can raise or reduce the probability of a certain behaviour among a population by influencing those more inclined to it, and cohordinating the positive/negative feedbacks among the rest of the population.

Thus the problem is not economic, put geo-political.

The money they get from #AdTech is a tiny tiny fraction of the power the get from the personal data they collect.

Data that do NOT come only from #Analytics, CDNs or Apps and services like #GMail, #GoogleMaps or #WhatsApp: they also come from any third party application run on their #cloud services!

And the vast maiority of people influenced by Google (and friends) are not US citizens.

So ultimately these corporations are #US weapons, like mines capillarly spread all over the world.

As such they should not be simply broken as monopolies, but disarmed!

Breaking them into smaller companies is not only much needed but NOT ENOUGH!

Personal data collection and exchange should be out-lawed and prohibited world wide and the distribution of software that technically allow it, likewise forbidden.

All the data collected so far should be destroyed.

And in the long run, we should cap corporate dimensions (number of employees, number of customers, total #energy consumption and so on...) so that something similar cannot happen again.