Stallman doesn’t seem to get that pedophilia is wrong because of the hierarchy of power, and the power imbalances between older/younger people, not because of some inherent wrongness about being attracted to a prepubescent person. This is shown by how he condemns some pedophilia, but is accepting of 12+/past puberty. (I despise this logic, because it would also make gay sex and sodomy wrong, as well).
I find this deeply ironic, because his primary issue with proprietary software is the way that it gives developers levels of power over users. From his article Why Open Source Misses the Point
But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove.
You would expect someone who is so in tune with the hierarchies that appear with software developers, publishers, and users, to also see those same hierarchies echoed in relationships between people of vastly different ages, but instead, we get this. I’m extremely disappointed.
These failures to understand hierarchy and power, are exactly why Stallman shouldn’t be in a position of power. Leaders should continually prove that they understand hierarchy and the effects of their actions on those below them. Someone who doesn’t understand how their power could affect another, shouldn’t be a leader.
I hate that this happens, because he’s a goddamned prophet when it comes to software freedom, the harms of proprietary dev models and related stuff, he’s also in mastodon and regularly posts about international news i see no one else mention, but damn there’s just no coming back from all this shit, how the hell would you share stuff he has said with all this gross stuff staining him? Goddammit, Stallman, you were supposed to be at least an OK person!
There is a very real discussion of the way that we have conflated “minor” (a legal status) and “child” (a developmental state), and used that to infantilize adolescents who are very much not children…
but that discussion is not about sex, it’s about the way that people abuse that legal status in order to deny adolescents normal choices that they are developed enough to make, such as what books to read, medical decisions, what they do with their property (or even the ability to own property), etc.
Stallman is using that very legitimate discussion as cover to argue about whether children (i.e. pre-adolescents) should be able to have sex with adults.
He is, at best, the worst kind of provocateur, doing this because he knows it riles people up, so that he can feign some position of superiority about not being upset about his very intellectual /s take, and at worst, desiring to enable or normalize pedophilia and hebephilia.
Stallman pushed false propaganda about BSD for ideological reasons because the BSD developers allow freedom of choice to let people do what they want with their own computers and BSD developers don’t fight proprietary software, they simply don’t allow it as part of each BSD base operating system. Stallman and his followers think they know better than UNIX developers which software everybody in the world should use.
It’s because of his kind that I only support open source software and comdemn free software and the politics of free software. A whole complete BSD operating system is 100% open source compared to the generic Linux kernel. Why doesn’t the Linux-libre develop their own drivers like BSD develop drivers and commision hardware companies for specs for the BSD’s to write their own drivers?
I catch a lot of shit for my distaste of GPL. I don’t think I should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with my source code. I’ve released it into the wild. If I put caveats on it it’s not really free.
While I understand where you’re coming from, I believe that it distracts from a massive positive effect that the GPL has: the way it ensures collaboration. Lots of contributors to GPL software do so in the knowledge that they are working on something great together. I myself have felt discouraged to contribute to MIT licensed software, because I know that others might just take all the hard work, make something proprietary of it and give nothing back.
I see GPL as some sort of public transaction, it is indeed more limiting than MIT and offers less pure freedom in that sense. But I just love how it uses copyright not for enforcing licensing payment for some private entity, but enforces a contribution to the community as a whole. I find this quite beautiful.
I agree with you 100%, no exceptions. Strongly agree. I say the GPL is socialist. What those people don’t consider is that there are many countries in the world where no court will take a case over a software license.
The ISC license is a libertarian license.
Tell me your opinion on one thing. I’ve considered that if Torvalds changes the license to AGPLv3, meaning servers have to publish their source code, it would an extremely quick collapse and abandonment of Linux. The GPLv2 Linux kernel can have binary code in it, but a AGPLv3 must be 100% open source, and Google would ban Linux on all corporate systems, Microsoft would ban it, CISCO would ban it, IBM would ban it, a complete implosion. What do you say?
But if all those corporations adopt one of the BSD’s operating systems, due to the BSD and ISC license, the corporations can ignore those licenses and develop on more complete, stable, secure, long term reliable system. Linux is a collection of various parts forced together. BSD is a complete operating system from a single couple of developers who all have commit access to every part of the system.
I’ve considered that if Torvalds changes the license to AGPLv3, meaning servers have to publish their source code, it would an extremely quick collapse and abandonment of Linux.
AGPL evolved out of people saying, “my SaaS application isn’t being distributed at all, it’s just living on my server, so I can use your copy-left software without releasing my source alterations, and not violate the (GPLv2) license, because the license is based on distribution”. If the Linux kernel itself went AGPL (which isn’t what AGPL is even for), it would mean that modifications of the kernel would have to be published by whoever is doing the modifications, even if that kernel was only being used in a SaaS capacity, but most companies aren’t modifying the kernel and then offering that modified software over the network, they’re just running software on top of the upstream kernel, and AGPL higher up in the chain doesn’t touch that software, just like the current Linux kernel GPL doesn’t automatically apply to some python code you run on your Linux server.
Android, Amazon Linux, and IOS (the Cisco one) would just not move to the AGPL kernel (since you can’t retroactively apply it to already-released kernels), and probably continue their own forks as totally separate as they already do.
But the 99% of companies who are just using stock Linux distros e.g. stock Ubuntu to run their SaaS applications wouldn’t be affected. It definitely would not see the use collapse overnight.
But if each corporation forked their own kernel, after a few years of customizing the code to their needs, they would each be developing their own operaging system so all software would only run on company systems and would not be compatible with customer’s systems.
No, their derivatives are not running on top of another person’s OS, they are themselves the OS. Hardware doesn’t make itself compatible with Linux, Linux makes itself compatible with hardware (by using or creating drivers). Those other companies do as well (or own the hardware stack as well, like Cisco).
My argument is if Linux goes AGPL3 which causes each company to fork the last GPL2 release, than after a few years of each company maintaining their own forked version, they will each evolve into their own operating system designed for their corporate software rather than all coporations using a single operating system that each develop their software to run on that OS.
But if they choose to develop on top of BSD then they will never be constricted by meaningless pointless software license.
I am an ISC supremaist for the sake of individual liberty.
