Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beijing, China)

http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140517-beijing

by drydot • 12 years ago

84 49 12 years ago

fsf.org

matt__rose2• 12 years ago

RMS, once again, missing the forest for the trees.

jimktrains2• 12 years ago

I believe your statement needs to be flushed out. It's very unclear and uninformative.

matt__rose2• 12 years ago

deignan's comment says it best here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760080

If I were Chinese, the license of the software I was using would be far, far down my list of "Freedoms" that I was concerned about.

DonHopkins• 12 years ago

RMS is NOT a fan of trees.

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

Can anyone who attended this comment on the content and, particularly, the reaction and questions from the audience?

(It's already 9pm here in Beijing; the event was scheduled for 2pm-5pm.)

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

Ya, it ended 4 hours ago, a bit late to post an invitation.

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

He's talking at FUDCon (Fedora Users' and Developers' Conference) on the same topic next weekend:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Beijing_2014#Schedule

mark_l_watson4• 12 years ago

This is one of Richard's recurring topics, and I agree with matt__rose and higherpurpose that there is some irony since China, along with a few other countries like the USA, Iran, Russia, could do with a more free and open internet. The Internet should be basic infrastructure, inexpensive, and very secure. That is the goal.

I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages.

Edit: typo

mark_l_watson4• 12 years ago

BTW, by "all kinds of open source" I meant to say that there are good use cases for GPL, Apache, etc. licenses, depending on the projects and the desires of the creators.

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

The USA has a great firewall like china, Russia, and Iran? Well, til (or you could be exaggerating a connection between the USA and Chinese Internet, which would be very much BS).

rockymeza• 12 years ago

Please try using the Internet from China before you put it in the same sentence as the Internet in the USA.

dengnan2• 12 years ago

free/open Internet in China? No way!

- You do not have choice of service providers. All providers are government department and there's nearly no competition.

- Try to use Google in China, lots of fun!

- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc. Good luck.

- If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)

Specific to RMS: I'm the translator of Free as in Freedom (Chinese edition.) Until now, I have no idea if the word "free" (自由) could appear in the title when we publish it.

Edit 1: grammar

mark_l_watson4• 12 years ago

Thanks for your comment. I did overstep in making my comparison, and I appreciate the feedback.

I desire a highly secure and unfettered Internet, and I just get frustrated by countries, and companies, that get in the way of achieving this goal.

est• 12 years ago

Yes because the interwebz is all about the Web.

Like one said, the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

tiatia• 12 years ago

"- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc. Good luck."

Try to access the internet in China. Good luck! (But Baidu always works)

schoen• 12 years ago

I think the parent commenter was agreeing with you. The English idiom "could do with" (which I think is somewhat uncommon in California, where I live) means something like "could benefit from", "still needs", or "would like". It suggests that someone doesn't yet have the thing that they "could do with", but that it would be good if they did, at least from the speaker's perspective.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/could_do_with

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)

Would you elaborate? This is very interesting. How did they get out of that situation?

gavinpc• 12 years ago

I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source

Yes, only FSF doesn't use the term "open source," except to disavow it.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...

Another explanation of this is included in the "rider" that someone linked earlier this week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754412

mark_l_watson4• 12 years ago

Gavin, I understand the FSF's position. Even though I am actually wearing a FSF thirty today, I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful. Really, it is up to creators to license code the way they want to.

sam11• 12 years ago

I know I have the minority opinion

Is that really the case on Hacker News? I often feel like a rebel outcast here for thinking that technology being proprietary is a desirable thing.

loup-vaillant4• 12 years ago

Now that's interesting. Could you lay out, or point to, some arguments?

gbog• 12 years ago

I regret I missed the event. It should be noted that rms came to China already quite a few times. I hope his message goes thru and reaches a wide audience here, because keeping full control on ones digital life is as important in China as in other places, or even more. (And I think the main threat for laymen is not from government, but from companies who would sell their users' souls for a short-term increase of their market shares.)

zhte415• 12 years ago

I regret so too.

Having just checked the FSF website, there will be a similar function on May 19th, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Admission open to the public, with or without registration. http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou

For readers unfamiliar with Chinese academic institutions, both UCAS (May 17th) and Zhejiang (May 19th) are institutions noted nationally and internationally for graduate and research programs especially in sciences and engineering.

bbody• 12 years ago

I went but there were so many people that the lecture hall was overflowing so I left.

danford3• 12 years ago

Unfortunately too many people just give you a blank stare when you mention that 100 years from now we'll be printing up everything we can't augment. We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? Just go with whatever laws the corporations come up with? Are we going to continue to deprive children of software knowledge so that they're dependent on downloading worthless digital copies of closed source code with who knows what coded into it? Thing is once everyone can code, free and open-source digital goods will undoubtedly prevail.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future?

That's easy. DRM for machine-to-brain interfaces. Who's going to stop that from happening? Mozilla?

The scary part will begin when they'll be able to delete our memories remotely, because we "stole" their media, or perhaps the content owner simply withdrew the license from the distributor, and now you're not allowed to "own" it anymore and keep it inside your brain.

Or think about what happened inside the DoD when the Snowden leaks or the Wikileaks ones came out, and banned all employees from reading the articles about it. If you think that in the future we won't need "computers" anymore, because our brains will act as the computers of today, I could see the government setting up "infrastructure" to ban such leaks from getting accessed by people, or also deleting them remotely.

loup-vaillant4• 12 years ago

Or, we could rise up and demand total control of our own minds. Freedom of thought, things like that. We need to educate the general public before they surrender their mind to proprietary software, though.

And if people have no choice, there is still jail-breaking. And if jail-breaking is forbidden, I'll do it anyway. And possibly start a career as a runner. That would probably get me killed, but if I don't, I may not be able to look at my reflection in a mirror.

general_failure2• 12 years ago

Everyone can code is a pipe dream. It requires high skill and specialization.

It's like saying all of us can at some point make cars, houses, electricity and so on.

lwhalen• 12 years ago

I disagree. Others have said (much more eloquently than I) that software is the new literacy. In a hundred years, I believe someone who can't at least read code will be at a disadvantage similar to someone who can't read English today.

loup-vaillant4• 12 years ago

This is only true at our current level of intelligence. And we're not finished climbing this ladder. If we get to build serious brain-computer interfaces, those will help with many tasks, including computing.

Working memory for instance is closely associated to fluid intelligence, which is kinda required to program seriously. What if we stick a chip in your brain that doubles it?

Finally, programming is not a specialized skill like making cars. It can help you do anything, provided you understand whatever you are doing. This is as general as it gets. Anyone who can learn programming should learn it, eventually.

danford3• 12 years ago

I disagree. I believe everyone could learn to code if we taught it from around the age of six or seven. We can read and do basic math can't we?

tzs• 12 years ago

We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future?

We can memorize copyrighted media now, without needing brain-machine-interfaces. I have hundreds (probably thousands) of copyrighted works memorized. My memory is not perfect, but it retains enough of these works that if I were to recall them and write down my recollections and distribute that, I would be infringing their copyrights.

I don't foresee copyright law needing to be or actually being changed in response to the development of more efficient ways to get copyrighted media into our brains, such as brain-machine-interfaces.

sieisteinmodel• 12 years ago

You cannot distribute it with 100% accuracy right now. Given the BMI assumption proves true, you will be.

Thus, you can spread copyrighted material. Big difference.

EGreg• 12 years ago

Do I even have t read this article? I bet I know what it will say. It's by Richard Stallman.

judk2• 12 years ago

RMS's ideas don't quite square with Chinese law, and Chinese law doesn't take kindly to that sort of thing, which makes this interesting.

LiweiZ• 12 years ago

Just let you guys know that China is keeping increasing control of online content. And the new leader has his plan to push it to another extent. Not a nice outlook.

xuesj• 12 years ago

I do agree with freedom of individual,and free software is ok if it's authors want to free.

octref• 12 years ago

I found two relevant pictures: http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhbj4ymj20xc18g1... http://ww4.sinaimg.cn/bmiddle/50ccfb23jw1egexhf9xe0j20xc18g4... Does this custome has any culture-specific connotation? As a Chinese student I don't quite understand why RMS's dressing like this.

Below is my comment on this news:

Two years ago, when I left China for US college, I feel most people around me don't care about FOSS, or respect originality & copyright. - They use cracked software. You can buy a disk that installs cracked Windows for less than 1 dollar. Cracked Photoshop & MS Office & whatever licensed software are all over the internet. - They download music & movie for free. - China's internet is full of copycats because the original websites aren't available due to censorship. (Like FB & Twitter). One of the largest IT Company, Tencent, is full of copied products.

But now I feel China is making some progress. Like: - Online streaming companies are paying for copyrighted material, and you can't easily download movie/anime for free as you do in the past. - As Apple becomes more popular, many people start paying for music in iTunes. To my delight, websites like http://mou.li/ even let people buy Sublime Text & Alfred & 1Password easily in China. I really can't believe people would pay over $50 for a text editor two years ago, but now some of them do. - A recent example. A very large company in China named Guokr launched a website: http://www.15yan.com/ . It's a blatant copy of medium. And in their about page, they are literally saying something like "Our product is currently a copycat of Medium, and we'll adpat it to Chinese market to make it better". Shortly after the website went public, someone asked a question in a Chinese Q&A website: "Can we tolerate such blatant plagiarism?" Take a look at it: http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 . I know you can't read Chinese but take a look at the pictures in the highest upvoted(2130)[1] and third highest(756)[2] answers. Two Chinese Web-Devs compared the CSS and HTML of these two sites, expressed their anger, and described the copycat as "humiliating" and "disgusting". Nearly all the answerers requested this copycat going down immediately and said they'd never use it.

I'm really happy China is really making some progress on this matter.

[1] http://p3.zhimg.com/69/e3/69e3f847236c2257d925ff11cbb14cc4_m... [2]: http://p3.zhimg.com/2f/6b/2f6b6e698413e0db745efdcb8be73867_m...

Richard Stallman – "Free Software and Your Freedom" (Beijing, China)

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