Well, having seen what they've done to Skype since acquiring it, might not work out well at all. On June 1, 2018 10:12:35 PM HST, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com Sent from my Android device with F/LOSS K-9 Mail.

I am not sure I understand. What's wrong with Skype or LinkedIn? I don't see them becoming worse after Microsoft acquired them. If anything, Skype for Linux finally got some love. As for Nokia, I worked at Nokia at the time the acquisition was happening. I can tell you that Nokia's downfall has nothing to do with Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft tried to save the brand and created the beautiful Windows Phone. It eventually failed because they were not able to convince 3rd party developers to port apps for a 3rd ecosystem. But I assure you, being bought by Microsoft gave Nokia one more chance and saved the jobs of many-many people at the time. So, I still don't understand what's disturbing about Microsoft buying anything. Acquisitions happen, and Microsoft is just a large company.

David, Thank you for the answers, I will research these points, especially about Skype.

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018, Will Godfrey wrote: Just so. I am not even sure what the company in question does, but reading Microsoft might buy it automatically brought examples to mind of the pending disaster. I had forgotten they bought LInkedin...explains much. Karen

I cannot speak to LInkedin spam. However I could use my linkedin account inclusively prior to the buyout. I cannot now, with inclusion improvements far from certain, according to the LInkedin employee involved. As a result, I look like a spammer in return because I can neither communicate with contacts there, let alone accept invitations from professional associates. Had I known Microsoft would someday own the company I would never have created an account at all. But this is me, Karen On Sat, 2 Jun 2018, David Kastrup wrote:

Oh before it was terrific. I work as a media producer, and before there were on line discussions with professionals in my field all over the world in ways that I found no where else. Personally I feel about Facebook as you feel about Linkedin, perhaps worse. What frustrates me now is that I joined linkedin having no reason to feel that someday I would have no access to my account. For me meaning individuals with whom I connected now wonder at my professionalism..plus those with whom I was able to connect that I have not come across in years. I dare say it depends on your industry and the like. Kare On Sat, 2 Jun 2018, jonetsu wrote:

Max <abonnements(a)revolwear.com> writes: "Already"? GitLab is the only remaining Git-based development/tracking platform system with some visibility and an Open Source "community edition" version of the proprietary system they are running on. Gitorious was acquired and buried by GitLab. Names like "Kallithea" and "FusionForge" are really in the far fringe. -- David Kastrup

* David Kastrup <dak(a)gnu.org> [2018-06-02 10:49]: I am surprised people saw something different in github than it being a buisness. If you want independence set up your own gitlab servers. Linuxaudio.org would be a cool spot for it.

According to Wikipedia, Skype was thinking of making its traffic available to the NSA before the acquisition. So, I am making two points right now: 1. All large IT companies are approached at some point by governments all over the world. So it is not Microsoft which is specifically evil, it is the way the society is structured now. I see no reason to single out Microsoft as a problem. You don't know what GitHub is doing now either. 2. As a separate point - large businesses are not "evil". They are comprised of normal people who want to do good. I know many people who work in Microsoft, Apple and Google, including some pretty high in management. None of them are evil. And I doubt the founders of these companies are evil too. The behavior of these companies is explained by an interaction of their business success and the current structure of society. In authoritarian societies this is much worse news than in the democratic societies. The reason I bring these points up is because I feel that Microsoft is singled out unfairly. It is not a bad company and it has a lot of pretty good products, and its behavior is not governed by evil intent, but rather by a complex interaction of business incentives, government regulation and corporate structure that is necessary to manage a large company. That does not mean this mix of incentives does not create negative results - it does sometimes - but I feel that in the FLOSS community many see it as almost a conspiracy by someone in Microsoft to destroy the world. Which is just untrue. Louigi. On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 1:09 PM, Peter P. <peterparker(a)fastmail.com> wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

The Pulse audio API was never intended to be used by applications. They were supposed to continue using the ALSA API, so that Skype would work with or without Pulse audio. If Pulse is present, a correctly written ALSA-using application (mostly) can use it. If Pulse is absent, an ALSA-using app is happy. By contrast, a Pulse-using app can only work if Pulse is present & working. I don't know who within the Skype team made this decision, but it was the wrong decision. Skype could use Pulse just like any other desktop Linux audio app if they had used ALSA; instead they made it so that Skype cannot be used on systems without Pulse. On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 7:41 AM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jun 02, 2018 at 07:44:39AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: Then why does it exist ? :-) The API doesn't look worse than ALSA's user space 'plug' mess which never worked well except in some simple cases (try stacking a few 'plugs' and keep the result stable). BTW, Firefox seems to have gone the same way as Skype. What I *do* find disturbing re. the way Linux seems to be going is all those 'kits' and other stuff meant to replace existing system functionality. Who needs rtkit if we have limits.conf, or policykit if we have sudo ? And the worst of all is systemd. It was a nice idea originally. Meanwhile there are something like 60 binaries, many of them replacing things that have nothing at all to do with system init or service management, and hundreds of entangled unit files all over the place, plus 'builtin' and 'generated' ones and what else is happening behind your back. It has become near impossible to find out what your system is actually up to. A few weeks ago I installed Devuan (Debian fork wihout systemd) on two laptops. A very refreshing experience. Some orders of magnitude simpler. As a user you don't notice any difference and it start up faster than systemd. And for me, as admin of those systems, things have become a lot more transparent. Ciao, -- FA

On June 2, 2018 2:32:13 PM HST, Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote: [snips] Really? Where? The Firefox I have on Debian is exclusively Pulse. -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com Sent from my Android device with F/LOSS K-9 Mail.

On 06/02/2018 06:54 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote: I tried that. Didn't work here. But I use JACK, not ALSA. Stupid Firefox. -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com

"I have received many 'add' requests from people who left the company in one way or the other, people that I have spoken briefly with once, maybe twice. Which I haven't obliged to, of course. First, I do not have a linkedin account and if I did, why would I add people I do not know ? It means nothing at all at best, and in the worse cases can be detrimental." jonetsu, I think there is a misunderstanding here on what LinkedIn users are trying to achieve when adding connections. The point is to grow a network and utilize the networking effect on your career. This is a big numbers game. And it makes sense to add people even if you are not best buddies. LinkedIn is not Facebook and serves a different purpose. Imagine you are a software development, a person you barely spoke to adds you on LinkedIn and you accept. Later on in this guy's company they are searching for a software developer. This person thinks of you because they sometimes see automated LinkedIn events mentioning you (like you having a birthday or a work anniversary, which happens automatically). They then write you on LinkedIn about this job opportunity. And you may find it actually interesting and go to that job. Of course, it really matters who you are adding, but generally it is a good bet that people you've worked with in the past could be your network, potentially useful in the future. Will it always work? Of course not. But will the increase in your professional network generally increase your chances to hear about interesting projects, jobs or professional events? You bet. I have been helped by LinkedIn contacts in the past quite considerably. Having said that, LinkedIn has specific functionality that allows you to decline an invitation and also mark it with "I don't know this person". So, it's very different from Facebook and LinkedIn allows you to tak your connections seriously and filter who you want in your professional network. "As a result, I look like a spammer in return because I can neither communicate with contacts there, let alone accept invitations from professional associates." Karen, I don't understand. What keeps you from communicating with contacts or accepting invitations from associates? And why would communication with contacts there should make you look like a spammer?

On Sun, 3 Jun 2018 00:25:18 -1000, david wrote: If the binary isn't compiled with alsa or jack support, compile from source. I always used an Arch Linux PKGBUILD to compile firefox, if you don't want to use the package management tools of your distro to build from source, get in contact with upstream support, see $ wget -q https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/60.0.1/source/firefox-60.0… [snip] $ cat README.txt An explanation of the Mozilla Source Code Directory Structure and links to project pages with documentation can be found at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla_Source_Code_Directory_Structure For information on how to build Mozilla from the source code, see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Build_Documentation To have your bug fix / feature added to Mozilla, you should create a patch and submit it to Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org). Instructions are at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Creating_a_patch https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Getting_your_patch_in_the_tree If you have a question about developing Mozilla, and can't find the solution on https://developer.mozilla.org, you can try asking your question in a mozilla.* Usenet group, or on IRC at irc.mozilla.org. [The Mozilla news groups are accessible on Google Groups, or news.mozilla.org with a NNTP reader.] You can download nightly development builds from the Mozilla FTP server. Keep in mind that nightly builds, which are used by Mozilla developers for testing, may be buggy. Firefox nightlies, for example, can be found at: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/ - or - https://nightly.mozilla.org/ -- pacman -Q linux{,-rt{-securityink,-cornflower,,-pussytoes}}|cut -d\ -f2 4.16.13-1 4.16.12_rt5-1 4.16.8_rt3-1 4.16.7_rt1-1 4.14.34_rt27-1

Le Sun, 3 Jun 2018 02:17:04 +0200, Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)linuxaudio.org> a écrit : I fully agree. I am very happy with gentoo because I can choose how I want my system to be managed and I just don't have those *kit stuffs. The *webkit* are very interesting. It begun with qtwebkit which take more time to compile on my gentoo than a monster like libreoffice. lol After that, we have now kdewebkit and webkit-gtk which also take an eternity to compile. I just removed all the software depending on them. I can understand they are easy to use for a developer, but on a system like gentoo that compile everything during the installation, I just don't want them because they just take too long time to compile. Also on the long run, I don't think it is a good move for a developer to use them because it will have a lot of maintenance to do. qtwebkit is marked deprecated, and I think it is just a question of time before the other webkits become deprecated. ... When it became possible to easily install it on gentoo, I took a fast look on systemd's bugzilla. The list of bugs was so huge that I never installed it on my system. It work fine with openrc from day 1, and I don't want to take the risk to break a so central part of the system. How I see it is than several leading commercial linux distributions like redhat have huge corporations as paid customers, and these corps need these kits stuffs and systemd, or at least they was convinced they need it... But into a dedicated or home computer, they are just "usines à gaz" (gas plant - these manufactures full with pipes everywhere and going in all possible directions at the same time) and a complete pain in the ass to manage as a result. Cheers, Dominique -- If you have a problem and you are not doing anything to fix it, you are at the heart of the problem.

Le Wed, 6 Jun 2018 07:01:01 +0200, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net> a écrit : ... I was not talking about conspiracy. Corps have other needs regarding security than a home computer or a dedicated workstation. *kits and systemd offer a way to implement these needs. And maybe it is other reasons I don't know. I already explained them. And it is one more: I just have other things to do with my free time than to rtfm the huge systemd documentation. Which also pose the question of the management cost of systemd for a corporation - they must have peoples which can manage it, or they will have to pay some other company to manage it. -- If you have a problem and you are not doing anything to fix it, you are at the heart of the problem.

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 13:40:31 +0200 Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> I'm sorry but I completely disagree. Microsoft is a company founded on theft, and has used every dirty trick in the book ever since. It provided an api to Wordperfect, that was slow and buggy, but used something much quicker for MSword. It also waited till the last minute then changed the official api, leaving WP high and dry. I'm not saying WP was all innocence and unicorns, but certainly didn't deserve that. What about the 200 or so patents that Microsoft claimed Linux infringed, yet when anyone asked what they were so they could code round them, it refused to say. Why? How about the way it funded SCO, volunteering to 'buy' Unix licenses, a fairly tranparent attempt to both fund the campaign as well as legitimise SCOs claims. And now with their apparent change of heart it seems they've added a new 'E' to the classic three. Embrace *Encapsulate* Extend Extinguish www.groklaw.net atchive is still up - but sadly no longer functioning, and is a (heavy going) wealth of information about dodgy practices, and Microsoft seems to appear there more than any other company - part from SCO. If it walks like a duck... -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: Well, isn't that the point Free Software has been making from times reaching back further than Linux? When Germany surrendered at the end of WWII, there were a few dozen trials and executions. A modern democracy was built from the dozen millions of remaining Germans, including some pretty high in management. Apparently none of them were evil. The point of creating evil empires is creating decision structures that do not engage the individuals' conscience more than other driving factors to a degree where the construct as such is collapsing. Corporations have one binding imperative: serving their shareholders. Due to the structure of stock market and financial markets, the concept of tangible shareholders is diluted to a degree where "serving their shareholders" is reduced to "make more money than the competition". The simplest forms of ethics are expressible in behaving in manners that work as universal governors of behavior. "make more money than the competition" can by its nature not be effective as a universal governor. Google retired the company motto "Don't be evil" when reorganizing as "Alphabet". The overexpensive clown show the U.S. puts up in order to consider itself part of "democratic societies" is pretty distasteful but most of the power is routed around the purportive democratic structures and controls anyway. Have you read a EULA recently? How is wresting the power to decide what to do with the computer you pay for from you not evil? How is killing off all competition you can, sabotaging democratic structures with lobbying and bribing, disowning your customers not evil? How is "we did it for money" more ethical than "we did it for racial purity" or whatever other justification evil travels under? Microsoft is not singled out here: it's just one of the most ruthless and consequently one of the most successful corporations since that is what the reward system of capitalism is about. This rationalization would hold equally well for managing a concentration camp, you know. If you want to stress "not evil", more than "works under the given parameters of operation" is required. Why would Microsoft be out to destroy the world? It is out to shape the world in its image, not destroy it. And a strawman, to boot. -- David Kastrup

On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 8:10 AM, jonetsu &lt;jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com&gt; wrote: Looks like we hit Godwin's law. Time for me to make some music and tune out of this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

I think my argument was misconstrued as saying "they are just doing their job". This is not what I am saying (and I agree that "just doing their job" is not an excuse). What I am saying is that in large organizations it is difficult to see what the sum of all actions would ultimately be. And it is possible to try to do your job in the best manner possible and still end up with a damaging result. In other words, I am talking about generally focusing on the system rather than individuals. I am quite confident many would agree. On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 4:27 PM, David Kastrup &lt;dak(a)gnu.org&gt; wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

I don't know what is a "restriction maximalist system", but I am definitely not saying that Microsoft is an unwitting victim of capitalism. And I am not implying that either. I am saying no more than I did. And the purpose of my point was not to exonerate Microsoft or any other company, but to underline that it is important to understand why bad things sometimes happen within complex systems. Since understanding the cause can help fix the situation. Going as far as saying that capitalism is a problem or corporations in general are a problem or money are a problem - these are the type of statements I find unhelpful and stemming from a very superficial analysis of the problem. (Not saying anyone in this thread had implied any of those statements, just explaining the context I am coming from). On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 6:04 PM, David Kastrup &lt;dak(a)gnu.org&gt; wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 18:48:10 +0200 Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well, sometimes they just don't simply "happen", as if some natural law/cause was in effect. There's already some facts about their business decisions and actions being reported in this thread which are not "natural" happenings and were probably not decisions out of a dept. of the company, but rather from the head. Cheers.

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 17:52:48 +0200 Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It is difficult up to a certain level where crucial decisions and directions are made by people who do not really have to work to assure their future and the future of their families. Most others though do have to work and at that level, even if one "sees something" in the larger sense there's always the call of the job ringing in. Nothing bad about that, most people need to work and keep their jobs, although it is a factor to take into consideration. Cheers.

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 08:15:21 -0600 robertlazarski &lt;robertlazarski(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well, if you insist on having a wikipedia link, how about "Operation Paperclip" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip As David mentioned, saying that they're just doing their jobs does not cut it. This was an "extreme" example but sometimes people need harsh contrasts. That is, when they consider at all the topic, the examples, instead of reaching out for their dose of soma (eg. Aldous Huxley). This said, I like "Soma" ... Or was it "Sofa" ? "One Size Fits All" ? Cheers.

On Sat, 02 Jun 2018 20:10:13 +0200 David Kastrup &lt;dak(a)gnu.org&gt; wrote: "Once ze rockets go up, who cares vhere zey come down? Zat's not my department," said Wernher von Braun -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

Robin Gareus &lt;robin(a)gareus.org&gt; writes: You don't know GitHub, right? You can clone a Git repository from GitHub, but the normal workflow is to create merge requests and accept them, either of which require a GitHub account. And while you can readily clone a Github repository and work without GitHub on it, you lose access to the discussions around merge requests, the issue trackers and everything else regarding the project management. It sounds like being based off Git makes you avoid lock-in, but that only concerns the repository and there is a whole lot more. -- David Kastrup

On 06/03/2018 09:29 AM, David Kastrup wrote: sending me a request to pull vs. any other git hosting site to do the same. Except GH's plain-text email is a lot more convoluted. Since github is only a *mirror* for all the projects that I'm involved with, we can not use nor rely any of GH's features, but no matter. You can review or comment on github issues using email, with a MUA of your choice. You actually can use all of github without any browser/website interaction at all, just like if you were not using github. I am indeed somewhat worried that Github may try for some vendor lock in, regardless of any potential acquisition by M$. Thankfully there is also gitlab (and bitbucket and alioth and ...) Assuming you already have an account, what difference does it make who owns the site? Github accounts only require name & email. The somewhat sneaky part is that I can git push commits from 3rd party developers who don't have an account on github to github. Now GH now has a very easy way to analyze all the meta-data. Do you? At least currently there is a very nice API for all this. The issue tracker is indeed nice, but you can also migrate its content easily. As for code-review, compared to git before github, the main change is that review discussions are now public instead of private between reviewer(s) and author. I'm not convinced that GH workflow is an improvement. I suppose github can be addictive to some users, but pretty much all major projects use GH only as a mirror. It is not like there are no alternatives to GH, is it? The main thing that github offers is project visibility and market presence. It's indeed popular and for better or worse allows newbies to quickly make drive-by contributions. For most everything else, including CI, there are better options. Assuming the deal goes though... with some luck M$ will drive github into the ground and we'll get something better to supersede GH. tl;dr: I'm still not disturbed and neither should you be :) 2c, robin

They didn't kill Unix or Netscape, not in any way that matters to anyone who actually cared about them. To return to robin's point: GitHub is a very nicely done web interface to a git repository and the workflows around it. They could certainly mess that in up various ways. But .. you don't "kill" web interfaces to open source technology. Anyone considering their options for git management still has several choices, some of which are self-hosted, some are hosted, some are both. MS might destroy GH or they might make it even more awesome, but there's basically nothing they can do in this domain to "kill" alternatives - just as with Linux, where their efforts to "kill" it (along with most/all of the applications that run on it) have completely failed. And if they do kill GH (which frankly seems unlikely - more likely is transformation into the steaming pile of mediocrity that is sourceforge), then so what? It's a negative for the world, certainly. But it would no big deal to most projects that use git. On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 11:07 AM, David Kastrup &lt;dak(a)gnu.org&gt; wrote:

On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 11:24 AM, David Kastrup &lt;dak(a)gnu.org&gt; wrote: ​There's never going to be a year of Linux on the desktop. ​ ​The point remains: MS has been almost totally unsuccessful in any of its attempts to kill off open source​ en masse or per project. ​Whether it is google or github, it remains the case that if you are receiving a service for free, you should understand that you are probably not the customer, but rather the product. There are alternatives to GH, and I believe there will always be alternatives to GH. Just as many of us jumped ship when sourceforge jumped the shark, people will migrate away from GH towards the new alternatives that show up if and when MS leads it off the cliff.​

It is rare that an acquisition by a larger company doesn't screw a smaller one. And this happens not because the parent company has a goal of destroying what they buy, but because merging two different companies is really hard, from basically any point of view. I have worked in at least two companies right after their acquisition by a larger company, and have witnessed all the growing pains. One company of the two did not survive. And nobody in the parent company wanted them to fail, quite the contrary. So, if someone at Skype is complaining that it became worse after Microsoft has acquired them, the important bit here is not Microsoft, but the acquisition.

Proprietary software is not immoral, it simply belongs to someone, that's all. If you make it open source under certain licenses like GPL - it stops belonging to anyone. There are no simple answers. Saying that proprietary software is immoral is baseless. If they signed their software off, nobody owes them anything at that point. I wouldn't want to live in a society where I am obliged to sell my property to other people when they suddenly want it back.

Le 03/06/2018 à 20:27, Hermann Meyer a écrit : Thank you Hermann, that comparison is just relevant! -- ORL AMMD - Freak & Free Arts Coo[r]p www.ammd.net - 0962539719

Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: You are confusing "closed" and "proprietary". Patented algorithms are proprietary but open. To be subject to copyright, something must be published in the first place. Closed source is covered by trade secrets, not copyright. It's the distributed binaries which are covered by copyright. Nobody is entitled to your work. On the other hand the question is why you are entitled to a state-controlled monopoly over any followup work in excess of 70 years beyond your death. The copyright act spells out that you are granted a time-limited monopoly over the proceeds of your work in order promote science and the arts. This is not a natural right but a social contract. However, 70 years beyond your death clearly shifts the main benefit of your work out of your own hands. This is also not "time-limited" since any mathematician will tell you a "limit" does not grow but is fixed in relation to other variables. Furthermore, posthumous extensions of copyright clearly rob you of your impact on future generations without giving you anything in return. They are a violation of the terms that you agreed to let a publisher handle your copyright under. When we compare Shakespeare's works with daily sitcoms, it is not infrequent to see a dramatic difference in quality, either. In spite of the latter having 95 years of copyright after the authors' death. -- David Kastrup

On 03.06.2018 19:52, Louigi Verona wrote: That you either never read or just failed to understand Stallman's arguments doesn't make it baseless. Though even he has no problem with proprietary (nonfree) software, as long as the authors keep it to themselves. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html The problem starts once you do anything that encourages another person to use non-free software, because in doing so, they will give up the 4 freedoms. In turn, the entity controlling the non-free software gains influence. Calling that immoral in itself may sound over the top at first, but it should be seen in the context of all the dark incentives and actual practices connected to it: - Asking users to pay for licenses at costs way in excess of making a living. - Bothering paying customers with license management. - Pushing others to buy licenses to the same software for being able to work with closed file formats. - Newer program versions that write files that can't be read by older versions (even if no new feature was used), to force all collaborators to update. - Making and keeping things incompatible to potential competition in order to attain a larger piece of the cake and to maximise user dependency. - Keeping deficiencies around that users may hope to be addressed in a costly update. - Injecting spyware or other malware. - DRM schemes. - Incentive to create addictive software. That said, there is no justice in how hard it is to earn a living working on Free Software and in how developers are treated by users at times, either. -- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/

Hey Thorsten! Thank you for your comment. I have not only read Stallman, I have studied his writings very closely and wrote a large work on his philosophy which can be found here: https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&… Note, the work is largely critical of Stallman's philosophy. And also note that I am a huge supporter of FLOSS, I just disagree with the moralistic philosophy behind it. "The problem starts once you do anything that encourages another person to use non-free software, because in doing so, they will give up the 4 freedoms." This is not a convincing argument, because you first need to prove that these 4 freedoms matter. What problems are they solving? And if these problems are real - is introducing these specific 4 freedoms the best solution available? Stallman does not provide evidence and instead engages in circular reasoning. A quote from my article on Stallman's writings: *"In his examples he often seems to define "mistreatment" as software not respecting the principles of "free" software. But if his goal is to show that proprietary software is unjust and THUS we need "free" software, saying that proprietary software is unjust, because it is not "free", does not prove any injustice. Instead, this is classical circular reasoning - "free" software is just, because proprietary software is unjust, and it is unjust, because it is not "free" software."* I can introduce any number of arbitrary "freedoms" and then say that someone is immoral because they prevent me from having these freedoms. This would sound insane. A good example of arguing for freedoms is the debate on euthanasia. Instead of just introducing a "freedom to die how one wishes", proponents of euthanasia demonstrate reasoning, talking about a problem and how euthanasia can help solve that problem, and what conditions should allow euthanasia. They are not just saying that anyone who currently disagrees is immoral. I don't see Stallman's philosophy give a convincing outline of the problem, and I don't see him proving that free software can help solve this, and that there are no other solutions, when there are - regulation. Regulation that works, I even bring up scientific studies which analyze the impact of regulation on human right in the software realm. Recent privacy laws in Europe are a recent example. But even before GDPR Europe's privacy laws have been much stronger than anything US ever had. As for your list... I agree with some points, and I will talk about it below. But some of the things you listed don't make much sense to me, at least not in the way you've briefly put it. For instance, you basically say that products that have prices which extend beyond "making a living" are somehow problematic. Yet, you don't explain on what basis should we consider high prices to be a problem. Do you find any expensive product that you cannot immediately buy immoral or pushing "dark incentives"? If yes - why? If no - then why is it a problem for software, but not for all other products? Also, does it mean that proprietary software that has affordable cost would not be subject to this particular criticism? You also make a number of intention focused claims, like: "Newer program versions that write files that can't be read by older versions (even if no new feature was used), to force all collaborators to update." "Keeping deficiencies around that users may hope to be addressed in a costly update" "Injecting spyware or other malware" Is there a statistics-based evidence of that? For instance, do you have evidence that proprietary vendors specifically keep a deficiency around so that users are charged for an upgrade later on? Can you provide examples with evidence that the company building the software did this on purpose? This statement is unintelligible to me: "Incentive to create addictive software." Maybe I don't understand what it means. I am definitely addicted to my FL Studio, because it allows me to write music easily, does not require me to constantly think about bugs that I have to report to developers as if I am a professional tester, and does not crash or freeze. But to me this is a good thing. So if you can clear it up for me, I would be grateful - no sarcasm intended. I really don't understand what you are saying. Some examples would be nice. I do agree with a number of things you list, namely: "Making and keeping things incompatible to potential competition in order to attain a larger piece of the cake and to maximize user dependency." This is partially true, although I have both worked for proprietary software development and also took part in freeware software development that ended up with proprietary formats. User dependency is not always a focus of that, there are purely technical reasons to introduce a format and pure technical reasons to keep it closed, not the least of which is to avoid the cost of working with an open format, being forced to update the specs and also be a prisoner to the open format in the face of a desire to rewrite your software or add significant changes. But sure, in many cases using a closed format is a vehicle to, say, give away the service, but keep your IP protected. Is it good? Is it bad? I think that as long as software development requires limited resources - effort and time - there needs to be some mechanism that allows people to monetize software development. Would I want all software to be completely free, all-inclusive, at no cost and yet of high quality? You bet. But I currently don't see a way to get there, and simply making things FLOSS is not a panacea, as it is now clear after decades of FLOSS. Some things work out, most - don't. I specifically talk in my article that making things go FLOSS does not solve the problems of the proprietary world, it just changes the world of software development to a completely new universe with its own unique problems. Read about it here: https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&… This is a large section, but it should explain where I'm coming from in this debate. "Bothering paying customers with license management." Sure. This is a very recognized economic problem. Since software can be described as a "club good", which means it is available to a subset of a population - those who have paid for it, licensing is a mechanism to exclude free riders and thus solve the free rider problem. But this involves a cost. The cost falls on the shoulders of both the producer and the consumer. Obviously, at least some of it makes the prices higher. Nowadays most software license management is a much smoother experience than in the past. Anyway, this is a huge topic. And it is completely fine if you disagree with me, even if dramatically. But I just want to make sure that it is clear that my opinion is nuanced and is not based on ignorance of Stallman's philosophy. And the only reason why reading my arguments might feel like a defense of corporation is only because Stallman's accusations are so dramatic. Trying to reduce them to something actually corresponding to reality immediately creates an impression that if someone does not consider all IT corporations completely evil, therefore they must be arguing that they are good or victims or whatever has already been thrown at my views in this very thread. But no. Corporations are not victims. But they are not evil either. Definitely not to the extent that Stallman paints them to be. And that simply creates an environment which makes it more difficult to enact measures and regulation that will help. Instead, you get all those "get completely rid of copyright" or "get completely rid of DRM" or "*all* proprietary software is *completely* immoral". And nobody can take any of that seriously. Louigi.

Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: This is the lynch pin of your diatribe. You pretend that the 4 software freedoms were picked out of thin air and made up arbitrarily. They weren't. They were the result of an analysis of Stallman's experiences with companies disenfranchising programmers and users from control of their devices and him creating a framework of views and terminology, a philosophy, that captured the distinction between moral and immoral practices and empowering and disenfranchising practices to a good degree, basically a philosophy focused around Software Freedom. It's not like he doesn't describe this process in the GNU Manifesto. Starting from that perspective and considering current laws and tendencies (and after getting fscked over by Gosling with Emacs), he then crafted the GPL because he figured that philosophy would not keep others from misappropriating his work for purposes in direct contradiction with his persuasions. If you take a look at Stallman's own web page you'll find that he is politically active and opinionated in a whole lot more areas than just software freedom, but he has kept his take on "software freedom" remarkably isolated and well-defined. Also, the GPL as a legal document is quite restrained in what it tries to do and not to do, again being remarkably constrained and well-defined in light of its inspiration. All of this is a very cleanly focused way of making the bulk of his intent survive without requiring people to share his views and policies. This layered approach means that Free Software depends only to the necessary degree on Free Software philosophy, and Free Software philosophy depends only to the necessary degree on Stallman as a person. That makes it comparatively cheap endeavor to feel self-important by attacking Stallman personally. It also achieves less than you might think it does. -- David Kastrup

Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: I don't see that you have a more convincing basis for your own decry of abstracting a moral position into the definition of software freedoms. Go ahead. Create a philosophy around that, then create a license serving those goals without forcing its adoptees to do likewise, then write a seminal body of software people feel enthusiastic about to seed a movement, like Emacs and GCC. Well, so do others. Which is why there is an FSF promoting goals and a philosophy that can be adopted by more people than those adoring Stallman, and a license like the GPL that does not even require you adopting its philosophy for using it and enjoying its benefits. You don't agree with the principles Stallman put forward: that is within the nature of principles. You either adopt them or not. You cannot prove them. You refuse to adopt them personally. That does not free you from following the conditions of the GPL for software licensed under it. What is your goal? Apparently not improving the world as much as proving yourself smarter than people who do. Where's the point? Why should people bother? What's in it for them? You can argue as much as you want that Stallman has not been addressing a real problem, but it still turns out that Free Software happens to be a real solution. Or why would Microsoft want to acquire the largest web service focused around the most influential Free Software version control system used for development of maintenance of the most commonly deployed operating system kernel (the Linux kernel is running a whole lot more than GNU/Linux desktop systems) in the world? -- David Kastrup

David, "I don't see that you have a more convincing basis for your own decry of abstracting a moral position into the definition of software freedoms." Not entirely sure I understand what you're saying here, but I have written a 70 page basis for disagreeing with Stallman. I know it is an investment, especially if you feel strongly about the issue. But at the very least you can appreciate that I tried to offer a convincing basis. You also say that the principles have either to be agreed with or not and that they cannot be proven. I completely disagree with that. I don't view ethics as dogma. I am a proponent of ethics derived from reason. This could be the biggest disagreement, and, in fact, a key disagreement we might have. As for the rest of the things that you've written, like that I don't want to improve the world and so on, you have made it very clear throughout this discussion that you don't want to treat me in a charitable way and instead just strawman most if not all I write. So, excuse me if I will not reply to your comments from now on. I am not offended or anything, I just don't see our conversations exploring interesting directions. On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 1:50 PM, Thorsten Wilms &lt;self(a)thorstenwilms.com&gt; wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

Hey Thorsten! You bring up an interesting point: if I understood correctly you say that we should start with the 4 freedoms and then show that not having them is bad. First of all, I actually do explore that in my work. The whole of Chapter 3 assumes that proprietary software is a problem, and explores the freedoms through that lens. https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&… So, this is a fine way to analyze a problem. However, to answer you question more generally, the reason why anything we postulate must be proven somehow is that if we do not do that, we are then open to postulating whatever and then acting on it, waiting for people to disprove the idea. This is a form of an argument from ignorance, which asserts that a proposition is either true or false because of lack or absence of evidence or proof to the contrary. So, we definitely cannot start by postulating the 4 freedoms, and consider them to be right until the point someone proves otherwise. This is just invalid reasoning. I, for one, very seriously don't see why anyone should be entitled to, say, change a program as they wish by having direct access to source code. Why should that be a basic freedom everyone has to have? On what grounds? And remember - a freedom's other side is obligation. That means that the basic obligation should be to provide source code to anyone. Why? The response that it might be convenient to some people is too generic. Convenient in what way? I now have access to GIMP's source code. I want it to do something different. How do I make that change in real life? Whereas you suggest a scenario when there is no source code available. To which someone might respond - look, if there is no obligation to give away source code, that means people can build businesses with software development and I wouldn't need to change very much about the program because it will be of very high quality due to people being paid for it full time and the business catering to the needs of the customers. The goal of discussing this is to outline why access to source code is critical. You don't start by positing this as a dogma and then telling other people to argue against it - and meanwhile we will be calling those who disagree immoral and tell them that they don't want to change the world for the good. This is not a discussion if ethics, this is ideological warfare at this point. What I am trying to do is make it into a discussion and demonstrate that one can be a FLOSS supporter, a decent person who wants good in the world, and yet disagree with what Stallman says. On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 2:10 PM, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

ouch! the deal figures are out: 7.5bn ?! there are countries in (real) World which GDP's is dang lower.. forget GH, move along, nothing to see in there, just lousy mo(n|k)ey business... none of us won't get any of it anyway :) cheers -- rncbc aka. Rui Nuno Capela rncbc(a)rncbc.org

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is watching all of you, it will rain meatballs and tomato purée soon. The Flood of meatballs and tomato purée will wash away all sinners and after that they will be buried under grated Parmesan.

Hey Victor! Thank you very much for your points, really enjoy the direction of your questions because I think they allow me to explain my position from very important angles. "The postulate is not about 4 freedoms. It’s about absolute freedom as a starting point." I agree that this is a good starting point. I don't know if Stallman specifically views the world this way, but I definitely subscribe to this approach. In fact, I am not against Stallman's 4 freedoms at all. My position is not that these 4 freedoms are unimportant or not good to have. My position is that giving up these freedoms is completely fine in many situations. And making people give up these freedoms by virtue of providing a service is also fine. (will clarify below) This is very important, because due to Stallman's dramatic narrative and binary positions on ethics, anyone disagreeing with him automatically ends up in Stallman's bucket of "evil". But I am rejecting this binary view and assert that one can agree that FLOSS is good, that the 4 freedoms are good, but not believe that proprietary is inherently evil or wrong or an unacceptable trade-off. In fact, the 4 freedoms formulated by Stallman are not unique. You can basically formulate similar types of freedoms for almost any human activity. In the article I talk about the restaurant business. You can have basically the same 4 freedoms there. And when you go to eat out, you are giving these freedoms up: you no longer have control of where to buy ingredients, or to watch how the food is prepared, or to understand how clean everything is. (Sure, there are restaurants where the kitchen is open or where you prepare your own dish, but you get the idea) And allegedly food is very important. If you eat something spoiled, things can become very bad, even fatal. And yet - we find it ok to give up control of how we prepare food and trade it for the service of being serviced and fed by a professional. And yes, sometimes professionals will commit fraud or perform malpractice. It does not mean that if you got poisoned at a restaurant that the whole restaurant business is evil and should be completely rejected. What you need is tighter regulation and higher standards. So why is software any different in this regard? Of course, restaurant industry and IT have enough differences, but the main principle is the same - you give up a portion of your control over the process of creating the product and even over the product itself in order to enjoy a higher quality of service, to save your time and be able to focus on something else. Standard division of labor. And the IT world has regulation being developed around it. And today nobody actually prevents people from exercising these 4 freedoms. You want to completely own your computing? Sure, go ahead. And Stallman is someone to thank for that, because probably without his push for free computing it would've been born much later. (Although I don't doubt it would've been born eventually even if Stallman was not there) And while in the 80s exercising these freedoms was probably very difficult and even impossible, and one had to really push for a project to build a system available to the public to tinker with, today this is no longer the case. We have many FLOSS systems that allow the public to do their own computing, build their own stuff, or choose in many cases to do the work themselves rather than hire a professional. "I can’t see why it’s "invalid reasoning" to think that human beings are free to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social conventions." Because this is not what I am saying. I am not arguing that humans are not free to begin with to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social conventions. But neither does Stallman argue for freedoms to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social conventions. He argues *against* permitted laws, norms and social conventions: software patents are bad, using credit cards is wrong, any form of online presence that is not technologically anonymous is wrong, using proprietary software is wrong, using web services that do computation is wrong, using software offered as a subscription is wrong, etc, etc. In other words, Stallman wants to change how the world works. And this is fine. But in order for me to agree that what what he sees as a problem is really a problem - because currently it is the norm - and that what he proposes is actually a change that will provide a solution to this problem and in general make the world a better place - I would like to understand on what basis does he believe all of that. And this is the justification I am asking for. As for the Popper principle, of course I know it, I was a science communicator for many years and ran an organization that promoted science and public knowledge about things like controlled experiments, etc. In case of social sciences experiments are more difficult to run, but you can more easily do controlled data experiments, proper A/B analysis, etc. At the very least, you should base your conclusion on statistics, not on cherry picked blog posts and news items, like Stallman does it in his "proprietary abuses" section, littered with errors, falsehoods, overstatements and loaded language. In conclusion to this email, I'd like to say that this conversation has been very helpful and I will think if I should rename the article, so that it does not create an impression that I say one has to prove that freedom is a default position. I will carefully think about rewriting several opening sections as well, since I believe thanks to this conversation I came up with better ways to say what I mean. Louigi.

Wow! I never expected this thread to develop like this :o Still... I have no issue with commercial software. If a company provides a service and want's to be paid for it that quite reasonable. However, when that company then take measures who's only purpose is to make it as difficult as possible to use any other service, that is totally unacceptable. This applies to all fields not just software. The poster-child being the John Derre tractor company, and I can give you an example of the extremes they go to. The small engineering company I do part time work for was approached by a local farmer with a combine harverst control panel. The unit worked without problems, but they were unable to tell what state it was in as some of the filament lamps had failed. When they approached Dere they were told these were not replaceable and the whole unit would have to be sent to America for a service replacement costing thousands, and taking several weeks. On investigation we found the lamps were set unusually deep in the housing so no normal tools would reach them. However, we were able to extract them using a powerful vacuum pump and stiff rubber hose. The bulbs initially looked like standard 24V all-glass bi-pin ones. However, close examination revealed the pins were very slightly thinner than normal, and spaced closer together. Not only would a standard one not fit, but it would probably break if you tried to insert it. In the event, we gained the farmer's undying gratitude, by making up LED + resistor modules that were an exact fit - and were long enough to be easily removed. That's it for me. I'll be packing things away soon, as I'm travelling tomorrow for LAC :) P.S. Preparing for this revealed some bugs in Yoshimi, so V1.5.8.2 is out there now. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

I think it is wrong to constantly think about large companies like Microsoft. Most proprietary software is not made by Microsoft, but by smaller companies. If Stallman would talk only about large companies - sure, that would be a different conversation. But he is talking about proprietary software as a class. I don't see him making this distinction anywhere. On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 8:28 PM, Ralf Mardorf &lt;ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net&gt; wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

Max &lt;abonnements(a)revolwear.com&gt; writes: But only because Bayer decided to retire it as it's not exactly coming with a great image. Note that Caldera, a Linux distribution company, renamed itself into "SCO Group" after having acquired the SCO brand in order to sue Novell, IBM and others on behalf of UNIX copyrights and put up a sob story before court and jury. Part of the sage was that it turned out they did not actually even acquire the respective copyrights, but before the courts could rule on that, they went into receivership. So if we are talking about reputation management, Microsoft could now rename itself to GitHub and offer GitHub Windows, GitHub Office, GitHub cloud services, GitHub certified engineering certificates and what not. Let's hope that this remains a barfbag fantasy. -- David Kastrup

On Tue, 5 Jun 2018 12:02:38 -0700 (PDT) Len Ovens &lt;len(a)ovenwerks.net&gt; wrote: But... but, it's the right side of the brain that's responsible for creativity :) -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

On Tue, 5 Jun 2018, David W. Jones wrote: I shall try to be mindful of all these things... (maybe if I turn backwards) -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

Le Tue, 5 Jun 2018 12:02:38 -0700 (PDT), Len Ovens &lt;len(a)ovenwerks.net&gt; a écrit : Most peoples are using windows or eventually max, and they know so nothing about github than they don't even know such web services exist. Most peoples just use the same system they have at work because they are complete illiterate peoples which get sick when they read more documentation than "To launch a software you must click on the corresponding icon". And they know they can ask a colleague which can fix it in case of trouble. Most computer users are complete illiterate peoples regarding to computer science, which imply they will not do it but buy some coffee machine or drink a beer instead. -- If you have a problem and you are not doing anything to fix it, you are at the heart of the problem.

On Tue, 5 Jun 2018 20:33:58 +0200, Max wrote: If the name does change, the business model still is Monsanto. On Tue, 2018-06-05 at 20:32 +0200, Louigi Verona wrote: That's true, it's also true that most software in the iPad and iPohne store are not from Apple, but Apple makes the rules. "JACK iOS has been discontinued. Find out why ..." https://www.crudebyte.com/jack-ios/ios7/ See also Christian Schoenebeck mails at the jack-devel mailing list archive. Microsoft, Monsanto and Co are making the rules. IOW if you pay for Oriental Strings and iSymphonic Orchestra, the bad that you can't use this proprietary software with JACK iOS, isn't caused by Christian Schoenebeck. The cause for the issue actually is a not that friendly big company.

On 5 June 2018 10:29:23 CEST, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: (...) Thanks for this elaboration Louigi, you got me really confused up until this point: I couldn't get what you were trying to explain. In fact you got me thinking you held a stand diametrically different from the one I understand after reading this. Not that me or my perception of others matter for anything, but I have a relationship with your music and therefore it became somewhat important to me to read you. I might have a different POV to yours on how Stallman communicates his ideas, but your craving for nuances where things tend to be approached with binary means of good vs. bad really resonates with me. Wishing everyone a good day, Set

I missed the discussion in the last days and was on the one hand surprised how lively it was conducted, on the other hand I am missing one point completely (or I did not notice it): If we leave aside the discussion about Open Source versus Closed Source, the question of choice remains. Because if good ideas are always bought up by the same companies without problems - regardless of whether they want to make a profit or eliminate a competitor, this restricts our options. That's a point I don't like - no matter if Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP or whoever buys other innovative companies, in the end it results in a fight between two or three companies and not only many innovative ideas are crushed, but often enough also the portability between systems.

Two things. First, this is what Ardour does (self-hosted on gitlab, mirrored (for now) to github). Second: it is important to get over a basic misconception that some people have about git repositories. The really important thing to understand is that no single instance of a git repository for a project is priviledged or special in any way except for one: an agreement by developers to use it to easily push/pull commits to each other. There's nothing to stop a project from suddenly switching the location of the repository considered to be "canonical", because all it really means is "we all agree to push/pull to/from there". Now to be sure, github (and gitlab) provide hosting services that go well beyond those provided by a basic git server+repository. Those things are nice (for some purposes, anyway), but they are less important add-ons for developers actually involved in a project, for the most part. If we decided to switch away from the repository on git.ardour.org to one on another network-connected system, it would be essentially trivial. There is nothing special at the git level about that repository other than it being marked as the "origin" for developers' initial clone operations. There's no reason to be concerned about what happens at the repository level at github (or anywhere else). What might be lost are cool web-enabled services. But a repository is a repository is a repository. One small exception to this (and the reason why you need gitlab or some equivalent to self-host) is managing access to the repository. Git itself provides no such mechanisms for controlling this, which is at once both sensible and a nuisance. For Ardour, this is really the only value-added that comes from having gitlab wrap our git server instance. On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 5:07 PM, Christopher Obbard &lt;chris(a)64studio.com&gt; wrote:

Le Fri, 8 Jun 2018 11:55:17 +0200, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; a écrit : snip cinelerra is a very good video editor with a very active community. The developers are very open and encourage users participation, criticism and ideas. You cannot generalize it. The star office story is an example of the inverse situation. Star Office was an outstanding office suite with unique features. It was so good it begin to make concurrence to commercial software. As a result, Sun buy it, rename it to Open Office and in its first Sun release removed some features. On the other hand, Sun made good thinks with it, as example the oofice file format is now an open standard than anyone can use. But with time, as Sun was very conservative and unable to update features like the html output compatibilities, the free software community said stop to that bullshit, and we now have Libre Office. It took time but it is a benefit to every body because Libre Office use the good things Sun made possible like a standardized file format and new and exciting features are added on a regular basis. Which give you liberty of choice. You can use existing software or make your own and choose any criterium of choice you want or can. And sure, for big project, it is more complicated, but with time the solution will arise in most cases. -- If you have a problem and you are not doing anything to fix it, you are at the heart of the problem.

Thorsten Wilms &lt;self(a)thorstenwilms.com&gt; writes: Well, there is <https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html> if you want to see the order of things. First Stallman describes the old state of things, then how it got eroded and he decided not to play along. The formal definition of software freedom that tries capturing what was being eroded comes later on. Frankly, the kind of history and reasoning Stallman gives that he was at first disturbed at how things were going, and later pissed off (the idea of the GNU project was inspired by the initial MIT events, the GPL is basically his answer to getting pissed off by Gosling turning Gosling Emacs proprietary after Stallman had already invested considerable work into it). It's really much more a practical philosophy in reaction to events he could not condone than some theoretical construct. Just a bit overengineered. Turns out that overengineering pessimism is actually hard to do in our world. -- David Kastrup

I've read all of Louigi's long piece on free software, Stallman etc. I even gave him some editorial feedback on parts of that I felt were factually incorrect. It is frustrating to see people arguing with him about specific points in this (very large) debate without apparently having read and digested his entire writing on this. There's still room to argue with his positions, but it seems really dumb to me do try to keep forcing him to address things point by point when he's already done so. So do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, different ways to think about things. I don't entirely agree with him on everything, but I think that it is important for supporters/believers/proclaimers of free software philosophy to be aware of his entire argument/presentation. On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 7:50 AM, Thorsten Wilms &lt;self(a)thorstenwilms.com&gt; wrote:

Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: See, that's the problem. Stallman has not set out to _describe_ reality but to _shape_ reality. That's why he has formulated principles that he then focuses his actions about. The purpose is to make his own actions more effective rather than excuse his own ineffectiveness. Moral principles are a personal choice. You don't get to make his choices for him, he does not get to make your choices. The consequences of his actions governed by his morals have an effect on my world that I have a lot more respect for than the consequences of your actions governed by your morals. You want to be more correct than Stallman but that's not the category he is competing in. -- David Kastrup

On Sun, 3 Jun 2018, at 18:45, David Kastrup wrote: There's an interesting practical (if not moral) sequel to this, in that many of the active Sibelius team were then hired by Steinberg to make a program to replace Sibelius, called Dorico. I don't know how well it's doing commercially, but it's a phenomenally impressive application technically. I can imagine (from the developers' perspective) that being hired to surpass your own work, in a context in which that felt like the just thing to do, could be very motivating. Chris

On June 3, 2018 8:57:49 AM HST, Will Godfrey &lt;willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk&gt; wrote: Checked their site. Couldn't find any system requirements. Price is very high. -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com Sent from my Android device with F/LOSS K-9 Mail.

Robin Gareus &lt;robin(a)gareus.org&gt; writes: That's not how Microsoft operates. They don't lead their projects off the cliff but bulldoze the cliff until it's indistinguishable from sea level. But that's a gradual process that has no particular point of time for inspiring alternatives. -- David Kastrup

Chris Cannam &lt;cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com&gt; writes: Because there is a difference between warning people of a danger and rejoicing when your predictions come true and the damage sets in. I bet Stallman could perfectly well make do with a whole lot fewer opportunities of saying "told you so". -- David Kastrup

Chris Cannam &lt;cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com&gt; writes: In the same sense that a collapsed roof is not a damage but an opportunity for building a new roof. You are confusing "danger" with "damage". The danger is people investing into an infrastructure not under their control. The damage is when they have to write off part of their investment because of that decision. The longer you keep investing, the larger the damage will be in the end. -- David Kastrup

Hey David! I don't find your response fair. You have accused me of using strawman arguments without demonstrating it, but then seem to proceed to enact strawman arguments that are easy to demonstrate. 1. You claim that I argue that the lack of a sane copyright regulation is the fault of Stallman because of arguing for freedom, not the fault of the billions of dollars poured into lobbyism in order to not make it so. But I have not argued that anywhere. 2. You claim that I am "picking Microsoft as your champion on this list". I have specifically said that I am not doing that many times already. So, David, I feel you are arguing with someone else. I don't see you addressing my position at all, to be honest. And I have already told you in no uncertain terms that I am an opponent of the current copyright regime. And you don't need to respond to me if you are not interested in a friendly discussion. The whole point of a conversation is to understand other people's points of view. At least this is my goal here, which is why I am engaging with everybody. On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 12:13 PM, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Louigi Verona https://www.patreon.com/droning https://louigiverona.com/

On 05.06.2018 03:42, Tim wrote: I just went to download a Guitarix tarball from SourceForge. I had to allow Javascript, 1 XHR and 1 frame, then was greeted by a "We value your privacy" overlay. Well, at least the download worked even after clicking "I do not accept". It's a free service, but that kind of bullshit doesn't help anyone.