Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation in the field of Information Technology, has been awarded nine honorary doctorates from various international educational institutions from 1996 through 2011 including the North American Lakehead University in 2009, and now refers to himself as "Dr. Richard Stallman" in speeches, talks, videos and email.
It's a pain to see "Dr" next to bullshit like this:
> "Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software."
You don't like skype, fine. I am prety sure what it enables millions of people to do: freely communicate no matter the distance, but I don't really get what freedoms it denies. Do I lose som freedom just but installing it, or must I use it for that to take an effect?
Freedom, in Stallmans words, is not meant to be 'free as in beer' (like free skype calls). Instead he refers to the freedom to read, modify, understand, and ultimately choose everything about the software that you use. I.e. be able to answer these questions (say about Skype):
- Is any communication not properly encrypted
- Is your communication being spied on / being recorded
- Is there a way to add feature "x" to the application
- Is there a way to remove feature "x" from the application
- Is there a way to use the application on your specific hard / software
With Skype, none of that is possible. You can't see what's happening with your Skype calls internally, you can't see if there's somebody else listening. If Skype comes out with a new interface, and you really don't like it, you can't change it, if Skype removes support for older operating systems that you just happen to have to use because your IT department still wants to run Windows XP, then you can't support, change or fix any of it.
Of course, Skype is a free product, so you may say the proverbial never look a gift horse in the mouth, but Emacs is also a free product, and provides all these benefits I listed above.
You have to understand Stallman as someone who is concerned about the future, not so much about the now. Right now using Skype is all fine, but imagine the world in 20 years time, when everything is connected to software, and every movement you make is tracked. Wouldn't it be nice if all the software then would be fully transparent, allowing you to see every detail that is happening, and change it all to your liking, without being afraid of what happens if you do this or that.
Sounds like an utopist dream right? And Stallman is the guy who tries to fight for it, however unwinnable the fight may seem.
Let's go over your list for an ordinary phone call. Here the 'client app' is your phone terminal, and the 'server' is the phone operator.
> - Is any communication not properly encrypted
Yes, it's not encrypted at all.
> - Is your communication being spied on / being recorded
I would say yes, at a similar level of probability as a skype call.
> - Is there a way to add feature "x" to the application
> - Is there a way to remove feature "x" from the application
The specs for the phone terminal are not open-source, so you can only do that with some hacking. The same is true for skype, even though there it might be more complicated technically.
> - Is there a way to use the application on your specific hard / software
Irrelevant for a physical phone.
The main difference between the skype client and a phone, is that a phone follows an open protocol, and therefore you can build your own. This is the only reason I can think of why using a phone is 'free' while using skype is not. But I think that if the skype protocol was made open, Stallman would still argue that it is not free and therefore should not be used, and therefore I do not understand his argument.
Right, but at least you can tell. No-one knows whether the encryption Skype claims to be applying actually works. And you can integrate an encryption system into a phone if you want to, whereas if you try and do that with skype they'll change the client so that your thing doesn't work any more.
> The specs for the phone terminal are not open-source, so you can only do that with some hacking.
Speak for yourself. There are open source phones available if you want them. There are no open-source skype clients.
> Irrelevant for a physical phone.
Sure. But I don't have to use a physical phone. I can run a virtual phone on my freebsd box, whereas I can't run skype.
> The main difference between the skype client and a phone, is that a phone follows an open protocol, and therefore you can build your own. This is the only reason I can think of why using a phone is 'free' while using skype is not.
That's not a small difference; I'd say it's the most important difference.
Stallman (and FSF) uses Asterisk, and assumingly a free phone stack when using their physical phones.
Stallman has always refused to use unfree software in devices he own or are directly using. Skype is within that criteria, while an Asterisk powered free software device is not.
"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price." - Richard Stallman
So to understand the word freedom in the context of free software, I tend to lean back towards liberty as a philosophy question. What freedom means, is a question famous people have pondered over for ages. So to ask a single simple question if Skype gives freedom, here is a quote from John Locke:
"Persons have a right or liberty to not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others."
Since the developers of skype can subject their users to any number of inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary decisions, like including the NSA as secret listeners to private communications, Skype can not be defined as providing liberty.
It's not a software problem. Or at least, it's not purely a software problem. For the vast majority that freedom would make no difference. They don't know how to change things anyway. I remember a few months back on here when we were going 'Why don't people use PGP more? Oh yeah, the interface sucks.' And did anyone change the interface? Nope, not to my knowledge at least.
Did any of us make better encryption tools, despite there being available encryption libraries? Not to my knowledge.
That sort of freedom is tied to your capabilities as much as it is your tools. If your understanding of a computer goes something along the line of 'that magical glowing box under the desk.' it makes no difference either way.
To get to real freedom, in the sense that Stallman seems to mean, requires more than a change to open source software, it requires a system be built from the ground up to not just enable but also encourage co-evolutionary mastery. And it's not clear how that would work. Having the source code of the system available is probably a part of it, but you also need people to be able to start off with simple changes using the same language that the system is described in - preferably they'd use that language at least to some degree to instruct the system to do basic operations.
A lot of that probably has to do with how modular you can make a program - when you make changes how much of the program do you have to hold in your head to understand their effects? And I think that's probably, ultimately, a processor architecture level decision if you want it to be how most things on the system work.
Looking at it from the software side: at the moment, even with open source software, sure you can theoretically go in and learn about the program and make alterations and ... but that is not a trivial thing to do. Even for people with deep knowledge of computing it's not a trivial thing to go and learn about how the program works, and if they don't already know the language it's even worse. There are loads of open source projects out there at the moment where what needs to be done is essentially obvious but there's such a lack of people with the abilities and interest to do it.
"I remember a few months back on here when we were going 'Why don't people use PGP more? Oh yeah, the interface sucks.' And did anyone change the interface? Nope, not to my knowledge at least."
Some people do use PGP, but they pay for it or it's an internal component in a larger system. GPG, the OSS version does have a sucky interface, but that's not the real issue people don't use it, there's three others:
1) Most people don't give a shit about encryption
2) Most people are too fucking lazy to understand/use encryption (Not being cynical, this is reality.)
3) Writing good encryption software is thankless and discouraging. There's a ton of commercial companies that use SSH and GPG that haven't donated squat to the developers.
"Did any of us make better encryption tools, despite there being available encryption libraries? Not to my knowledge."
You don't work where I do. I wrap GPG in another layer of software to make it more usable to the above average folks at my job. It's mainly limited to automated processes.
That's just stupid dream not utopist.
Having access to source code would me absolutely nothing, unless you are willing to check the actual code installed on the each system involved in communication chain.
Back to the point: Skype does not give me some freedom, fine. But it denies zero freedoms too.
By their philosophy, it does. If that feels hand-wavey to you I would agree; I find the whole "define 'freedom' as 'things I want'" thing more than a little sneaky--but it is consistent with the rest of their philosophy.
Would you be against defining freedom as synonym with liberty, and thus see the FSF philosophy as one that adapts the philosophy of liberty of old to the digital age?
Your post doesn't quite parse for me; while I am fairly conversant in political philosophy I'm having trouble connecting "philosophy of liberty" to anything the FSF does.
My annoyance is simpler, though: I dislike propaganda. That the FSF seeks to re-define the word to the exclusion of all else is bothersome, much as, for another example, the American Republican Party seeks to redefine "socialist" to mean "center-right". It's the poor debate tactic of the extremist who can't accept the validity of opposing positions.
You can choose to be denied a freedom, quite obviously. If you choose to use Skype you are granted the ability to make free Skype calls. You are denied the freedom to:
* Freely distribute
* Modify
* Read the source code.
Among others, so it's a trade off. One that Stallman disagrees with and believes denies you too many freedoms.
Stallman is a weird guy, and hardly a pragmatist. But I don't think the things he says can be described as Bullshit, they are largely internally consistant. And to be frank, given the NSA revelations, I think we need rather more weird idealists than less.
You don't, mostly[1], lose freedom by installing Skype. You lose freedom by becoming reliant on Skype, and by installing (and using) Skype you are putting yourself at significant risk of that.
[1] You also may lose some control over your system, which may limit your freedom. At the extreme, consider malware. Recent, relevant Dilbert comic that I assume is an exaggeration: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-11-06
It's extremely hard to agree with Stallman, but you have to admire the fact that he lives by his principles.
He truly believes the world would be a better place if all software was free, and he lives his life in support of that. People rarely devote their lives to a single principle like that.
Skype might be convenient and wonderful in the short term, Stallman believes that supporting it is not the right step for society in the long term.
It made me wonder what's free-er about an ordinary phone call.
You can use any phone that you like to place a call. You can even build your own phone. (Depending on your choice of phone you might have to rely on non-free parts like GSM voice codecs.)
You have the freedom of choosing between multiple service providers, all of which are interoperable. If you want, you can even get access to the underlying SS7 phone network and be your own provider.
Until something like Ekiga does multipart conference calls, a minimum of 10 nodes and more voice only, then it is hard for me to switch from something like Skype.
Me and my buddies recently switched from Skype to Mumble+IRC. Works great, I like this setup way better. The big downside is of course that it requires a server.
there is no relation between "Dr" and his rant about Skype.
You would not believe the number of PHD who are not that intelligent (to be nice). Also Stallman is a master in its profession and "Dr", who is just acquired by doing a Phd, seems to me like it's not doing him enough justice.
It denies freedom to the software more than freedom to the person. For copyleft licences the software is most important; for permissive licences people are most important.
