@xianc78 I love the free software movement and I have a lot of respect for Mr. Stallman and his valuable contribution to computer science, despite his eccentricities.
However I will never be able to justify the "everything must be FOSS or you're a stupid normie" mindset. Diehard FOSS advocates are some of the most toxic elitists and I don't think they understand that they're only hurting their cause. RMS knows this and tries his darn best to not blame individuals for being abused by bad software companies.
A normal person is not going to think "I should drop everything I rely on to do my work because this guy on the internet told me I'm a retard." They're going to think free software is lame and continue to delay the inevitable M$ bullshit by using old Windows and then eventually just accept the malpractice.
I think a lot of the evil of proprietary software is overblown too, yes it is inherently anti-user in some ways, but the whole point of concern is that it's *easier* to abuse, not that it's always worse or better. Not all proprietary software is malware. Part of education on Free Software should be helping people understand how FOSS is more trustworthy and make it a selling point, distinct from the faux-privacy-focused corporations that lie to people using black boxes. Telling someone they need to go schizo and change their computing habits overnight to become some copyleft protestor to their own detriment will do nothing.
When I found out about the FOSS movement I did not drop all of my proprietary software. Especially since I'm a gamer so that makes up 99.9% of what I do. But I did learn a valuable lesson about trust and was able to selectively choose some free software alternatives for my work so that I could control my computer a little more. Software freedom is all about making good choices for yourself.
@djsumdog @bonkmaykr The worst part is that they only care if the JS in question has an FSF approved license, which honestly means jackshit because the web admins can still do whatever the fuck they want with your data, if it is sent back to the server.
@pesekcuy @bonkmaykr Sui literally takes everything the FSF and GNU project says as gospel. He will even scold you if you use the word "Linux" to mean the whole GNU+Linux operating system or if you use the word "FOSS".
That's a point that I forgot to bring up: the FSF's insistence on using certain words. I agree that using "Google" or "Photoshop" as verbs for searching and photo editing respectively does re-enforce their monopolies, but I never understood why Stallman insisted that you don't use the word "hacker" to refer to security breakers. That has nothing to do with software freedom. That's just him defending some subculture that doesn't even exist anymore.
@bonkmaykr
>However I will never be able to justify the "everything must be FOSS or you're a stupid normie" mindset. Diehard FOSS advocates are some of the most toxic elitists and I don't think they understand that they're only hurting their cause.
I like the Free Software Movement, but I have always been skeptical about it sense I first heard about it. It was around the time of the Snowden leaks that I was aware of it, but it was just a coincidence because I just so happened to be using a Chromebook at the time and the only option other than ChromeOS was to install some modified version of Ubuntu that ran parallel to it. I learned a lot about GNU+Linux, why people like it, and the philosophy behind both free software and open-source. But when listening to the then-recent interviews with Stallman, he was talking about privacy and saying that free software was the only solution. I knew that was false because I know for sure that something like an old NES ROM wasn't going to spy on me, but Stallman would say that was bad anyway.
And before the privacy issues were even relevant, Stallman's main talking point was about "sharing is caring", saying that proprietary software developers keep people divided and isolated by prohibiting people to share. Except it doesn't. Never in my life have I lost friends because I couldn't copy a piece of software and give it to them. I'm not a fan of "intellectual property", but muh sharing isn't the most important thing in the world. That's probably why most people didn't care before 2013.
>I think a lot of the evil of proprietary software is overblown too, yes it is inherently anti-user in some ways, but the whole point of concern is that it's *easier* to abuse, not that it's always worse or better. Not all proprietary software is malware.
EXACTLY! Like I already said earlier, there are plenty of examples of proprietary software that has proven not to be malware. We also have decompilations of old games now and we can see for a fact that they never included any backdoors, even some of those that were released more recently. And I don't like how Stallman paints everyone who releases proprietary software as evil. Was Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya evil for releasing Cave Story as proprietary freeware? Of course not. He was making something that he loved and probably never even heard of the FSF. Even if he released it under a more restrictive shareware license, I wouldn't label him as evil.
> deeply insulting
Wtf are you on about
> I have never written to do that once.
Yeah because I wasn't talking about you. Unless you did say that? You are not the only user on your instance.
> name a
Like 98% of software produced before the internet made monetizing user abuse so easy.
Not going to bother reading the rest of your toot because it just comes off to me as overly pedantic autism meant to be "correct" and not to be helpful.
@xianc78 Regarding the FreeSoftwareExtremist fedi instance: the last time I interacted with someone from there, they straight up told me to commit suicide because my website had JavaScript on it.
The funny part was, the part that got them upset was a page asking for their consent.