Richard Stallman agrees to do an AMA on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/gnu/comments/c8rrk/rms_ama/

by obsaysditto • 16 years ago

131 70 16 years ago

whimsy• 16 years ago

Reddit has managed to arrange some pretty cool interviews. I've enjoyed many of them.

pyre11• 16 years ago

  > As the cloud is moving in (gmail, google docs, etc) and
  > slowly replacing more and more of our traditional applications.
  > What can we do in order to free the web from closed source
  > systems which we can't just use, share and adapt as we like.
  > Can free software compete with this or are we forced to live
  > in the last century where everything is hosted on out own
  > computers?

I know it might go against the grain here on HN (with all the Web 2.0 buzz that goes around), but why is running applications on your local computer now considered 'old fashioned?' While things like Google Maps/Earth are really awesome, I'm not about to say that we get rid of locally stored maps (or turn-by-turn directions). What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?

daleharvey• 16 years ago

there is a million and one reasons that have gone over the benefits of web applications.

as for "What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?" that seems like a solvable problem to me. (and web application can work offline these days)

pyre11• 16 years ago

You can retain a subset of the functionality of the webapp while offline, but that doesn't really cut it all the time.

* Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic.

* It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline.

* If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless.

* If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline?

I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

My other point is this:

As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?

gamache• 16 years ago

It's considered old-fashioned because in the olden days, you didn't really have a choice. Programs started on mainframe systems (client/server with a very dumb client) then moved to PCs once they had enough horsepower. For most applications, a network architecture was just not feasible.

About the same time the Web was spinning up, network bandwidth and computer performance both started to drop in price, giving software designers the option of retaining a portion of the processing on their end. While it does not replace the standalone desktop app, a "cloud" app affords many advantages which are too great to ignore. (Compare Google Maps to the Road Atlas CD-ROM.)

You make a good point about "what happens when we're offline". We suddenly can't use those awesome cloud apps, but that's the nature of the game -- these apps do things which are just impossible for a standalone app to do. Networking is the price of admission.

I hope we'll see a popularization (commercialization?) of mesh networking in the not-too-distant future. Pervasive mesh networking becomes more and more feasible as we have more and more wireless devices around us, and while it comes with its own set of unique technical constraints, it would go a long way to achieve a self-healing network at its outer edges.

count• 16 years ago

WIth 3G GSM and Wifi, there is hardly a time when a modern American would not be able to be 'online' but be able to use a phone/pad/laptop/whatever. The only time in recent memory I can recall NOT having on-demand, relatively high speed internet access (or cloud access if you will) is during takeoff/landing on a flight. I wasn't allowed to use my gear then ANYWAYS.

pyre11• 16 years ago

> Networking is the price of admission.

Obviously it is, but there are way too many people that seem to assume that networking is a given.

I have an internet connection at home and at work, but I do not pay for 3G on my cellphone or just for my laptop. Where do I fit into the world where all our computing happens 'in the cloud?' Will I be forced to start shelling out money for 3G in addition to the other costs that I incur to access the internet already? What happens when my carrier has a dispute with me over billing and they cut my 'everywhere' wireless access? Am I now powerless to get any work done on a computer, until I patch things up with them? Should this be considered some sort of blackmail since they are threatening my ability to use my computer when they threaten to take my internet connection away from me?

motters2• 16 years ago

> What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?

This is a good point, and you can be certain that in any future wars/conflicts disabling "the cloud" will be a primary objective. My advice would be to by all means make use of cloud based services, but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.

pyre11• 16 years ago

> but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.

One of my points is that operating on this local data becomes impossible if we make it so that all of our computers are thin-clients to the cloud (which is what I think a lot of people are pining for).

coderdude• 16 years ago

IMO a better question is why does every Web app now qualify as being "in the cloud?" Cloud computing started off (if I remember correctly) as being related to on-demand servers (coined around the time Amazon EC2 was released?). Now it's like everything is the cloud. Like the Web turned into the sky.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

As soon as being "in the cloud" became progressive and good, everyone who could spin it began billing their services as "cloud-based". Use as a marketing buzzword transformed it's colloquial meaning.

djb_hackernews• 16 years ago

I've caught one of our sales guys during a pitch describe our webapp (which is our product) that "we use cloud computing, so there is no software that you need to download to use our service"

sp3322• 16 years ago

"The cloud" was originally a metaphor for the Internet between you and the server you were actually talking to. You know, routers, various ISP's backbones, DNS servers, BGP etc, basically the part of the Internet that you don't have to care about to get your work done. There was some talk, at least a decade ago, that data and/or computation could be extended into the "cloud" as well. For example, instead of asking a specific server for a specific file, you just ask "the cloud" for some information. It's an extension of "the part of the internet you don't have to care about to get your work done" to include location and ownership of disks and CPUs. It's pretty much come true, with distributed computing and peer-to-peer networks.

scorpion032• 16 years ago

Diehard4

JadeNB• 16 years ago

I think that there's another important point, which wasn't directly addressed in your post, and doesn't seem to have cropped up at all in the follow-up: Relying on web-based services involves trust in a much more serious way than any desktop application. (This occurred to me when I read someone else's comments below about relying on web-based back-up for a photo collection.)

First, I have to trust companies not to be nefarious; second, I have to ‘trust’ them not to fold, or simply decide to stop providing their SaaS. I think it's clear that it's naïve to expect companies not to act nefariously, or, even if we impute to them endless goodwill, not to make mistakes that expose our personal information (cough Facebook cough); and, even if we trust both intention and ability, if everything is on someone else's servers, then there's not a lot you can do if you show up one day to find those servers are no longer serving.

This, more than problems with connectivity (which presumably will be resolved after some growth pains), is what really frightens me about the whole-sale rush to online applications. I want to have my resources on my computer—preferably only on my computer; and, while most current services offer some way to do this, it's clear that it's regarded as less and less important, and I fear that it won't be long before it goes away entirely.

Devilboy2• 16 years ago

Why are candles old fashioned? Sure electric lights are convenient but what do you do if there's a power failure?

staunch• 16 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00...

An LED Lantern. Superior in almost every way.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

You light a candle. What's the back up plan when all your applications are online and your internet cuts out. Even if you have the data backed up on your computer what use is it if you have no way of interacting with it.

yason• 16 years ago

This isn't exactly on topic but wow, having now used to HN, I can see that Reddit really has bad commentary!

Reddit was the best thing in the world when it happened but I'm not missing it at all since I left around two years ago.

hachiya• 16 years ago

Perhaps that is how Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth feel about the web, particulary the (un)social web. Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit.

ubernostrum• 16 years ago

Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit.

Me, for one.

So, for most of the past decade I've been involved in building online communities. I've been participating in them for longer than that. And I've seen the same pattern occur over and over again: as a community grows, the members become more and more concerned with what's appropriate and less and less concerned with whatever actually brought them together in the first place.

You can see this happening here, now, on a regular basis: "is this really appropriate for HN" is almost at meme status, and occasionally we see waves of blunt enforcement through downvoting of comments, or through posts designed to shame people.

There are basically two ways this can end:

1. The community becomes extremely rigid and insular, developing rules and conventions to protect itself at the cost of new members who get run off or never join in the first place. Wikipedia seems to be at this stage right now, if you'd like an example.

2. The "old guard" (who aren't necessarily original or even early members) either migrate away or get over it, and the community adapts and keeps on growing. Places like Fark, where stupidity and outright trolls just get mocked mercilessly, provide useful examples of this.

Reddit, I think, is either at or approaching the second option. Yes, there's dumb stuff posted, yes, there are comments making fun of people, but the community there seem to have realized that's not the end of the world. And because they're much less rigid and much less concerned with "is this appropriate for reddit", there's a lot more room for creativity, for humor, and for lots of other stuff that just couldn't happen on HN. And I'll take that any day, which is why I spend most of my time reading reddit instead of HN.

Raphael_Amiard• 16 years ago

I totally disagree. Your very comment is the proof that even on Hacker news you can have unfounded inflammatory comments that have no substance and no purpose.

Also even if the comment style is much more harsher on reddit, and hence reduces the possibility of civil discussion, I find the number of comments that stand out by themselves as being particularly interesting to be approximately the same on both sites.

And finally the hacker news style of discussion, while much more tame, and often bringing more interesting discussions, can be just as consensual, or even more on certain topics, the person standing out as being the more 'reasonnable' being often the most upvoted, with little regard to the soundness of arguments.

mattmaroon• 16 years ago

Is he going to email a daemon that answers the questions?

puredemo• 16 years ago

Pretty much. The interview will be text based and not video based.

ciupicri• 16 years ago

I wonder if the license of the video codecs used by most cameras have anything to do with it.

run4yourlives• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure he said demon. I took it literally.

Makes sense.

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

This makes me think there is room for a service that does nothing but AMA with famous people only.

philjackson• 16 years ago

So that'll be ten questions about the flavour of the stuff between his toes then...

axod3• 16 years ago

Has he answered any of them yet? :/

flipper• 16 years ago

No. Have a look at the posting on reddit to see why.

axod3• 16 years ago

oh ok, that's pretty boring then. No real point having it on Reddit in that case, may as well send in letters :/

barmstrong• 16 years ago

I saw him speak at Rice University a few years back and he really left a bad impression on me.

At the heart of his message there are some good ideas - but his insistence on people saying GNU with Linux made him seem childish and bitter. He also went over the time and didn't take any questions. By about the 1.5 hour mark large number of people were walking out during the talk. He mocked one of them. There appeared to be no end in sight. Around the hour 45 minute mark it was just getting rambling and incoherent and I also walked out.

There is a place for free software, but I certainly wouldn't want Richard Stallman as a spokesman for my cause.

starnix17• 16 years ago

Not much to my comment, but I saw him speak in 2009 at Temple University and I was left feeling the exact same way.

Sukotto• 16 years ago

My impression of him is that he's so extreme and scary that he makes the more moderate people look good. I have not hear him speak ... I'm only going by this sort of second-hand anecdote of which yours is fairly typical.

Bjoern• 16 years ago

While I agree that his tone is wrong and he has problems of getting his message across, try to see it from his perspective.

I have the feeling that he is very bitter about this because he cares so (or too) deeply. Free Software is his pet project and he put so much effort into it. Every time people misuse the terms "Linux" and "GNU" it is a reminder for him what went wrong in the past and that people in his view seem to take GNU for granted.

rwl• 16 years ago

I don't think this is a fair assessment. RMS's insistence on "GNU/Linux" isn't about bitter or wistful emotions. It's about the fact that people accept names very easily as names, but then have a tendency to accept the meanings and values those names imply just as uncritically. GNU is a project specifically aimed at creating a free operating system. So if you call it GNU, you will associate the idea of that operating system with freedom. Linux is not a project that gives the idea of software freedom top priority; it ships non-free code.

Yes, some of the reasoning behind "GNU/Linux" is to give credit where credit is due. But I think it's mostly about the power of a name in getting people to accept ideas, which is why the FSF also campaigns to re-label DRM ("digital restrictions management"), the Kindle ("Swindle"), the iPod ("iScrod" -- I heard RMS say this at a talk at Berkeley), and so on. These names may sound silly, but that's just the point: the fact that they sound silly highlights the assumptions and expectations people have about the things they refer to.

The FSF is out to change the forces which maintain the status quo. You can't do that without getting people to reflect on the assumptions they're making about the current situation. And one of the best ways to incite that reflection is to insist that people use names that present different values.

sp3322• 16 years ago

GNU is Stallman's life work. Linux is headed up by Linus Torvalds. They're different things, with different communities of developers, different leaders, different goals. I'm not completely defending Stallman's overreaction, but it must be hard to see your magnum opus drop to 0% mindshare under the shadow of a smaller project.

crux• 16 years ago

And yet anybody who has spent any time learning about or working with Linux understands how fundamentally important the GNU tools are. If, a long time ago, he had been more gracious and not essentially made a joke out of the fact that the OS is called Linux much more than it's called GNU, I could easily imagine a present where he is seen as one of the fundamental co-creators of the operating system most commonly called 'Linux'—or, to be honest, Ubuntu—rather than a crank who will hunt you down if you don't say the word 'slash' out loud. GNU's mindshare is only so lousy because they're so famous for a silly insistence on an inconvenient and irrelevant nomenclature.

chanux• 16 years ago

I saw him talking at Sri Lanka Institute of Technology (SLIIT), Sri Lanka in 1997 and he was a lot different than what you say your experience is. He answered the questions from audience and it was really a fun event. He was steady about his views about "GNU" and "Linux" but he wasn't harsh by any means.

Anyway I always expect him to be the way I saw him because the moment he start to be sloppy about his ideas, the same people who name him as an extremist will say "see, even the president of FSF, the oh-so-holy leader of `free software thing` is sloppy about his own idea".

gonzo• 16 years ago

"Why do you eat the split-ends our of your beard?"

"Why do you eat your toenails?"

(both live, on stage)

elblanco• 16 years ago

It's too bad that he can't just login to reddit and answer the questions directly.

pellicle• 16 years ago

I saw him speak a few years ago. The impressions I got were:

* nice guy, but a bit awkward socially

* very smart and good memory too

* has written a lot of free software, and would like others to consider making theirs free as well

Also, I wished that he would've included more technical topics in the talk.

kevinelliott• 16 years ago

If it wasn't for this article pointing to the reedit post, I would have never discovered this juicy, delicious, and distasteful video of Stallman eating his foot pickings.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

That literally brightened my day. Brilliance is questionable if it means this is the end result!

Richard Stallman agrees to do an AMA on reddit

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