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9 months agoI didn’t say that I’m never going to install any firmware updates. I just don’t want to put it in my system if it’s proprietary.
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023
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The world won’t change itself. If people did nothing 40 years ago, there wouldn’t be a Free Software movement.
It sounds like you are not using a fully free distro anyway. Most of the popular distros contain proprietary firmware, so what’s the problem?
I am forced to keep proprietary firmware in my OS to use the hardware and that’s what you are advocating for. You want everyone to be forced to do that. But I don’t want anything proprietary in my system. I see no reason why I should have a proprietary firmware package installed for my GPU to work. The firmware could be just on the device itself and if someone wants to change it, then they can install the package in their OS. But maybe there could also be some other way.
You don’t know what the proprietary update contains. It can be a security fix, but also a backdoor. People can decide on their own if they want to update, but I see no reason why I must be forced to have proprietary stuff in my system. I want a fully libre distro. I can’t switch to one, because I would have to give up on using AMD GPUs, because people like you say that this is fine.
But nobody is saying that there shouldn’t be a way to update firmware. Firmware just shouldn’t a be part of the OS, unless it’s free. Adding proprietary components to our systems will only make it harder for us to keep our freedom.
The FSF’s stance is just based on our current capabilities. Most people still use proprietary operating systems. We are capable of developing free alternatives of non-free programs, even very complicated ones. But it’s not realistic to think that we can currently replace all firmware for any device if we don’t know how it works. The amount of products that have the RYF certificate is already very small. Even Librem 5 didn’t manage to get it. When it becomes easier, I’m sure they will change the requirements or add more levels.
I’m pretty sure Libreboot contains proprietary firmware now and GNU is planning to develop an actually libre fork. So it’s silly for the developer to criticize the FSF for not being radical enough. It makes me think that the person doesn’t really believe in what they are saying.
But then the author says they want us to have proprietary firmware packages in our systems. So they want our OSes to be less libre… They even compare not including proprietary firmware to burning books… I stopped reading after that.
Ah, interesting. I didn’t realise that it was slow.
It took me a while to realise this, but 2 of the quotes that this person has posted were not full quotes. I will post them here in case you are curious.
The one from 2003:
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia” also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
Some rules might be called for when these acts directly affect other people’s interests. For incest, contraception could be mandatory to avoid risk of inbreeding. For prostitution, a license should be required to ensure prostitutes get regular medical check-ups, and they should have training and support in insisting on use of condoms. This will be an advance in public health, compared with the situation today.
For necrophilia, it might be necessary to ask the next of kin for permission if the decedent’s will did not authorize it. Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. Besides, I often enjoy rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants).
Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2003-mar-jun.html
The one from 2013:
There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue.
Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2013-jan-apr.html#04_January_2013_(Pedophilia)
The one from 2006 was a full quote, but that post contains a note now:
[Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it.]
I used it last year on Windows 10 (I was forced to use Windows by my employer). I didn’t use it with WSL, just with Git Bash.
1·9 months agoI’ve read it, but I don’t really understand the legal issue. I’m also not sure what could be illegal about VSCodium. It uses the Open VSX store for downloading extensions (but not every extension is on there).
It would certainly be better if VSCode was under a Copyleft license, so that it couldn’t be turned into proprietary software and maybe that way addons would also have to be Free Software, like in Blender. But Microsoft clearly doesn’t want that.
I’m not much against having repositories with plugins, extensions or whatever BUT they should be like Debian, you can just pack everything into images / a folder and use offline for ever when required.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. They could also just be added to Debian, which would solve this problem, but there also would be another benefit for me. Most people don’t care about that, but I want to only use Free Software. When I install something from Debian’s free repository, I don’t have to worry that it might be proprietary, because they only allow Free Software there. I don’t have this certainty when installing software from most other places.
Same goes for modern Docker powered solutions and JavaScript frameworks.
Some JavaScript frameworks and libraries seem to be packaged in Debian. But most people use NPM, of course.
Yeah, when I used it, every command had like a second of delay. It was also buggy. But it has tabs and you can even split the window into multiple panes. So big improvement over cmd.
Free Software gives you the 4 essential freedoms. One of them is the freedom to distribute the program. So anyone could legally give you a copy for free. Sounds like what you want, no?
Even if the authors implement some kind of DRM, any programmer can modify the program to remove that feature and share the modified version with everyone. Technically that is also possible with non-free software, but it’s illegal, pretty difficult and requires special skills.
I think they want to compete with GNU/Linux and attract its users. They made WSL for probably the same reason. They even have a terminal now that almost doesn’t suck.
We’ve had a way forward for 40 years and it’s called Free Software: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM
It’s super weird to me that pirates aren’t advocating for the Free Software movement. Being able to control their own devices should be like one of their main goals.
No, that would be too soon. It took them over 20 years to make a package manager, 15 years to add tabs to Windows Explorer. Maybe in 10-20 years they will do it.
Speaking about VSCode it is also open-source until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).
I’m opposed to having repositories for plugins. I don’t want my code editor to connect to the internet at all. If I need some popular plugin, it should already be available in the repository of the distro that I’m using. Some distributions of VIM and Emacs download a bunch of plugins on launch from who knows where. I don’t get why people are fine with that.
It’s similar with Flatpak and Snap. Oh and each programming language has its own package manager too, of course (NPM belongs to Microsoft too, btw). Everyone and everything wants its own package manager or a separate distribution system.
For now I use VSCodium in firejail to prevent it from accessing the network and I don’t install new plugins. I haven’t heard of any better editor, unfortunately.
I think it’s important to have boundaries. If we keep our operating systems fully free, it will be harder for anyone to pressure us to add proprietary components to them. But if our OSes already contain non-free components, it’s not that hard to add more. We not only want freedom, we also want to keep it.
It also needs to be clear for the people in our community that our main goal is freedom and getting rid of proprietary software. Convenience is less important.