Richard Stallman on his experience in Cuba

http://blogs.computerworld.com/stallman_on_cuba

by mapleoin • 17 years ago

39 65 17 years ago

blogs.computerworld.com

hendler2• 17 years ago

Good article. RMS has an honest take on Cuba. Open source can lead to other freedoms - some good discussion of software freedom.

"DT: I've editorialized that U.S. companies should be allowed to compete in Cuba. What's your position on that?

RMS: I really don't care. From my point of view, business issues are minor in comparison with issues of human rights and general well-being. "

biohacker424• 17 years ago

Depends on what he means by business issues.

A very good argument can be easily made that a fiat currency is a necessary but not sufficient element in modern well-being.

Prior to fiat currencies there was a fixed amount of gold, and every coin in your pocket was a coin out of someone else's pocket.

Imagine a fixed number of software copies, a gold based currency is a lot like DRM for money.

Further more you can easily argue that making health care part of employer compensation (as is common in the US) leads to less well-being then making it a separate (in Europe often nationalized) good.

Those are two business issues with a direct impact on general well-being, and that's just off the top of my head.

hendler2• 17 years ago

Good point - business issues and quality of life are not mutually exclusive.

But for me, I interpreted the statement as "When business issues and quality of life issues are in conflict and you have to choose one over the other, I choose quality of life issues". Maybe I misread.

jacoblyles8• 17 years ago

You're wrong on the fiat-money/gold standard point. You're forgetting about the price level. Any given economy can be run on any given supply of money, the prices and currency denominations just need to adjust. A gold standard doesn't transform an economy into a zero-sum game.

Pure fiat money has been functioning in the West since only 1971 when Nixon suspended the dollar's conversion to gold as a prelude to a rather shitty decade in terms of economic performance. Fiat currency has been tried plenty of times over the last few centuries; it was never a stable monetary regime. Our experiment with fiat is new and bold, and as yet unproven. If it turns out to be successful, it would be the first time.

jacoblyles8• 17 years ago

Business freedoms lead to human rights and general well-being. Having a thriving private economy gives people choice over their profession. Increased wealth means people have more choice over their lives. Cuba legalized the private purchase of cell phones and computers in 2008, but most people are far too poor to buy one. If that were to change, it would be a clear improvement in Cubans' lives.

Let us not forget the legions of Cubans who have risked their lives on makeshift rafts to find a better life in the United States.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

"Business freedoms lead to human rights and general well-being"

Business freedoms are also a consequence of other rights, like the right to property. They are nice, but not required.

kragen10• 17 years ago

While it is true that increased wealth means that people have more choice in their lives, it does not necessarily follow that business freedoms lead to general well-being or to what is normally understood as human rights. As a matter of history, there have been very many places and times where business was relatively unrestricted, while labor and political activity were tightly regulated, and where the wealth from business failed to improve the lots of most of the population.

Current examples of some of these tendencies might include Dubai, Singapore, and some parts of mainland China. Examples in the past include Chile under Pinochet, Nazi Germany, and at times, ancient Rome. Places at risk include London.

narag2• 17 years ago

From the article:

So I said, "Cuba has an important resource - lots of people who have never learned to use Windows. And here you are, destroying that resource, gratuitously. If you are not ready yet to switch these clubs so that they teach people free software, at least you should shut them down until they can."

Does he say this seriously? I've seen people using this kind of hyperbole when in a partisan environment to have a laughs. But I have no clue from the article that this is humorous.

corentin6• 17 years ago

He certainly is serious. But as long as his ridiculous totalitarian/communist ideas only apply to software, he's mostly harmless.

gaius3• 17 years ago

I think Stallman's $1M grant from the MacArthur Foundation has given him a rather skewed idea about how economics works for most people even in the US, let alone the rest of the world.

alecco2• 17 years ago

HN, wtf. Stallman is many things but would never, ever be "totalitarian/communist." Who is voting this troll up? Come on, this is supposed to be a hacker site.

He even talks about regime change in Cuba to open up.

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

If the cost of using Linux is less than the cost of using Windows, but the cost of ripping out existing Windows and re-training users is large enough to overwhelm the gain, then a population that uses neither but could learn Linux is at an advantage.

gaius3• 17 years ago

You're assuming that learning a PC operating system is an end in and of itself. It isn't. People in the real world use computers to get stuff done. For a Linux-using population to have an "advantage" you first need to know what they want to accomplish, then you need show how it can be done more quickly and easily on Linux, which is where the Linux house of cards comes tumbling down. This is not "year zero" of the Linux desktop.

marksutherland• 17 years ago

I thought it was a surprisingly good interview until I got to that bit. The unnecessary 4 Freedoms rant should have tipped me off I suppose.

kragen10• 17 years ago

It's completely serious. Stallman thinks the social harm done by proprietary software licenses is greater than the good done by the ability to use the software. Do you think that's an unreasonable or laughable position?

The consequence that it is better to close down the clubs than to let them encourage proprietary software usage is almost inescapable given the above premise.

corentin6• 17 years ago

Like most of us, I discovered programming using proprietary software (namely MS-DOS and QBASIC), and if an intolerant idiot tried to prevent me from using those tools, he would have been hit by a (then) heavy keyboard.

(by the way, the case against using BASIC is certainly stronger than the case against using proprietary software.)

narag2• 17 years ago

The consequence that it is better to close down the clubs than to let them encourage proprietary software usage is almost inescapable given the above premise.

1) cuban boys discovering hacking in computer clubs

2) something I'm too stupid to understand

3) clubs should be shut

Good work!

nandemo• 17 years ago

It is unreasonable.

Just imagine the amount of wealth that has been created in the past couple of decades by using proprietary software.

Though one could argue the same could have been done with free software, he's saying (as you paraphrase) that it's better to have no progress at all than to have progress at the cost of using proprietary.

wallflower2• 17 years ago

"One of the things we see when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs, and we see this in the U.S. all the time. The U.S. government has ceased to effectively monitor the market to make sure it works well. Instead, it is a tool in the hands of big business."

I think Stallman's views tend towards the extreme but I have to agree with this one.

tjic• 17 years ago

> when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs

It's called Regulatory Capture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

It happens all the time. The vast majority of regulation ends up doing nothing more than giving the existing large competitors in a space a tool to keep out new entrants and smaller, scrappier competitors.

One of the reasons that the software industry is do dynamic is because it's not regulated.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

An illustration of this point is that in the UK the regulations for electricians, and building contractors in general, actually promotes small companies. They're usually either a two-man team or a father-son op. In fact the largest I ever saw was a three man team, which was a two-man team with one of their sons.

The point is, is that the regulations actually keep the income evenly disbursed. Essentially everyone is earning between £60,000 and £100,000 a year depending on what you do and how well you do it. However, when you work for a company (companies seem to exclusively do large businesses like factories and the few that don't have very bad reps) you earn much less, some get paid between £40,000 and £60,000. You, of course, get you tools paid for but they're a one time purchase, I mean our most expensive piece of equipment was a £1,000 tester and it has a 10 year warranty on it, so there is literally no incentive to go with one of those companies.

The companies actually run a scam, they hire people who aren't certified electricians, which is perfectly acceptable and legal. However they'll never train them to be certified, they just use already-certified electricians to certify everyone's work is done correctly. Again this is unfair on the certified electricians because if anyone screws up and he doesn't catch it, he's liable and that can include a prison sentence if someone dies from shoddy work.

My point is that regulation can be used in many ways. Big business takes over the regulators, but when used effectively a regulator can actually promote smaller business and stop economic pyramid schemes forming (AKA big business, people work for minimum wage so that the people at the top can earn over a million a year).

The fact that software isn't regulated is a good thing right now. There's lots of competition and there's self-regulation going on. There's lots of virus' out there, but if you stick to the sites certified by Microsoft and don't go on any sites that google suggests may be harmful to your computer, then you're largely to be fine. However, if companies like Google and Microsoft weren't providing some form of assistance to users, then I believe the software industry would need regulation, which would probably kill millions of blogs and social websites.

Hexstream2• 17 years ago

"Well, they were probably a bit surprised, because they never thought about these things in these terms. But now I'm in touch with somebody who has converted one youth club to use free software, and he's now talking with the people who run the other youth clubs in his region, trying to convert them. So something's finally getting done."

Notice the religious terminology. The Church of Emacs, eh.

edit: Is it possible to use bold here?

blasdel• 17 years ago

No, you no can has bold.

Italics are allowed because they allow you to annotate emphasis without making the text stand out more than normal -- you only notice it inline. Allowing bold would lead to asshats writing like Jeff Atwood.

Hexstream2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't mind if there was a limit (maybe as few as 3) on the number of words you can make bold. Or a percentage of your post, or something. Now that I think about it the same solution could be used to support blockquote (ex: max 2 blockquotes in a post + other restrictions). After all the argument against implementing it was that excessive use of quoting is often bad style.

I think it's pretty ridiculous not to support useful features just because 1% of people might misuse it.

Richard Stallman on his experience in Cuba

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