Richard Stallman Talks About Ubuntu

I don't agree with everything he says and usually, ain't a fan of idealism, but I have to respect how much stallman is dedicated to foss

Yes, they treat people like trash, or their food, at best.

Non-"free" programs are not inherently unethical. Software is nothing more than a digital tool to get (usually) digital work done (but also digital play). There are many tools that we use on a daily basis that we are not able to open up and look at and study to determine how they work. Some we can, many we can't, and in most cases it doesn't matter anyway. Software is no different. If I want to create a program and I want to keep the source code to myself, for whatever reason, that's my prerogative. The person who installs the binary on their hardware is not being inherently unethical by doing so, and neither am I by providing them that binary. If my software spies on them, and that is found out, I should face heavy penalties. Proprietary software isn't the problem. The real problem is surveillance capitalism.

I can just tell from the way he speaks about Closed Source and Spyware that this is the man behind GPL 😃

I would really like to see Stallman talking about distros with busybox. You can't name those GNU/Linux as they're not GNU

I didn't know he pronounced Linux like that

Hey Mr. Stallman, if you are reading this, I want to say thank you. Every day that passes, I become more and more convinced that copyleft licenses are a necessity for maintaining a healthy and exploitation-free software ecosystem.

If anyone doubts that: Take a look at the Android ecosystem. It's an absolute hellscape of shitty apps infested with tracking, unwanted ads, and all sorts of performance and stability issues that nobody can solve or debug because they are proprietary. Even worse, the OS itself comes with spyware baked in, does not give the user the ability to uninstall them, and the user is often not even capable of replacing the operating system with a free one, because some indispensable components like drivers are always kept proprietary.

This is exactly the tyranny that copyleft proponents like Stallman have been warning about for decades. Merely making your operating system partly "open source" is not enough. Almost the entire operating system needs to be open-source inside out. (The only thing I think would be excused to be proprietary is some non-core end-user apps that are highly expensive to produce, such as video games, though even those must not come with abusive components like "anti-cheat" rootkits.) And this requires having a lot of copyleft-licensed core components.

So copyleft licenses aren't merely a nuisance. They were the very thing that enabled the creation of this foundation, that is, operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSDs, in which you enjoy a nearly 100% free software stack, both in the gratis and liberty senses. Android will never have that, because it was never developed to be libre. It was only developed to be "open-source", and specifically only "open-source" to the degree that allows huge corporates to jump on the bandwagon and make their own Android phone, but the final product that the end-user will receive will always have enough proprietary components to make it a tyrannical system.

Some of the comments are saying that Stallman lived in a generation where he had to fight back against corporates, while we are not living in such a time. Well, take look at our time again: Corporates like Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and everything in between are wiping the floor with users' privacy all the time, with the users typically not being able to do much about it. The software freedom war never ended. If anything, it's becoming deeper, broader and more evasive everyday. And many of those evil greedy corporates are slowly "embracing" GNU/Linux now, which is bad news for anyone who understands the greed and tyranny these corporates are made of. If we do not want Linux to gradually turn into a half-proprietary, privacy-abusive hellscape like Android, we must embrace copyleft with the same vigilance as Richard Stallman and other copyleft proponents of his generation if we do not want GNU/Linux to be corrupted, subverted and turned into another Android.

tl;dr We need more people like Stallman.

As you gain more convenience you lose privacy and security.

privacy is the most important thing and people are learning no to care, pretty sad and scary thing

I stopped using Ubuntu years ago when I noticed it was becoming more and more a sort of MSWindows. No regrets.

No one:

RMS: GNU + Linux

legend

I so wanna see him without a beard. Is it just me or is his face is just unnaturally wide.

yeah I'm sorry but I don't care.

I think him insisting of using "GNU/Linux" is ridiculous. They are just a very small part of a distro nowadays and sometimes not at all as in the case of Android.
Besides, what makes the naming of an operating system? In the case of Windows it isn't the kernal. It isn't some extra tools or some thing in between the kernel and the GUI.
It is the GUI, the Windowing system. For others, like OSX or NeXT Step it is just some generic name that either has something to do with the system or nothing at all (just sounds good).
I mean, if we are going to name a system after the important parts it would be a long list for a distro.
Like "Linux Gnu Wayland Xfce Aptitude".

Whats this non free software he speaks of? I haven't paid for anything lol.

I run Ubuntu but am admittedly ignorant to these security/privacy issues he's mentioning. I like Ubuntu because I don't want to work that hard to set up OS's anymore frankly, but I don't want to run Windows for obvious reasons. What are some of these Ubuntu alternatives that he's talking about? Anyone have any recommendations?

I can only imagine what he would say about the Android system today.

I burst into laughing every time he unironically says gahnu plus leenucks

GNU SLASH LINUX

All you need to know is you are wrong and dick is right

So glad Unity is gone

Ubuntu lost a lot more users in the past year. In desperation, they offered up a variety with the Cinnamon desktop, as though that would make it the same as Linux Mint. Of course, unlike Linux Mint, Ubuntu still takes telemetry from your machine. Ubuntu's lure is essentially that it is so popular that it has the best documentation, now. Any bad thing that happens to Ubuntu at this point though is fully deserved. That said, Stallman is an absolutist and not a role model. He stands on "ethics", though there is no objective morality. It would be trivially easy to demonstrate how Stallman is no one's moral superior, but knowing that is enough, and he's earned enough respect such that we needn't embarrass him so much as ignore him. He's an awkward uncle whom you love and whom you wouldn't want to spend more than five minutes with at a time.

There is no doubting his contribution to society with the FSF and Apache Server, to say nothing of GNU/Linux.

It is also endlessly fascinating to me that he pronounces Linux as "Linn-Ox".

Richard Stallman, you're the boss of free software movement

A good, honest man, but he's shouting in the darkness.It's already over...

Haha, opens a browser thats supposed to be privacy forcused or open... makes between 50 - 1k connections to google with unquie ip's that won't show unless I type lsof | grep "browsername"

Be funny if it was just fonts, feels spooky though given its not showing in the established connections but is connecting in the background even when there is no activity on blank white page on all the browsers I tried...

Worst part is the company they use as a middle man 😮‍💨 it might as well be called the GDCAMA

Source Software

Free or not... Ubuntu was the first distro that made Linux actually approachable. You can either have an OS that no one uses or one that is not 100% freedom but is useful at least. Ubuntu made Linux successful, no doubts about that. The rest which came later benefitted from this success.

rms is an absolute ledge. a true visionary and outstanding leader.

the impact on humanity of gnu & oss in general can not be overstated.

Nothing is free. Ultimately someone is getting rewarded somehow to actually do the work, monetry or other.

convenience, got it

This spyware thing also applies to distributions based on Ubuntu, like Kubuntu?

Oh ok

Can we teach the government & big tech not to spy on its citizens

I only use Linux for work, at work everyone uses google and windblows. I love Open-source and the freedoms of Linux even though I’m not a programmer. The reality no one if free and has privacy once your connected to the internet. I’m still going to use Ubuntu FTW. I also use Arch Btw 🤓

Watching on Ubuntu. BTW This was removed in 16.04.

a very enlightening video

How is his skin so smooth? How old was he when this was recorded?

If more than a fraction of a percent really cared about Stallman's kind of freedom, the computer world would not be dominated by Windows and Apple. PEOPLE WANT CONVENIENCE because their lives are taken up by life, not geekiness.

I think it's ok for a developer to ask for payment in return for a piece of software they created or to give it away for free. That is not immoral.
Spying and excessive data collection is though. It's near impossible to trade privacy as a currency without hurting people so just don't do it. I'm very pro upfront pricing over data sharing agreements.

So, what is a good alternative to Ubuntu?

Stallman was right, Canonical got even worse since. Snap, motd, Ubuntu pro making security patches paid..
I'm switching distros

Mans super paranoid about privacy and anonimity (more about privacy) that he became more of an opposite icon xD

Bati o olho e pensei que fosse o Caio Fábio

Been using Ubuntu for a while, never once seen an ad. Kinda sounds like bullshit.

And non-free software? Oh, the horror! Paying for quality products? Insane! I never! Gonna have to disable my Jetbrains license and go back to notepad.

get a grip.

Richard Stallman is more of communism in software but we need more the capitalist of Apple,Microsoft, Alphabet etc
- who is going to employ the data scientists for building recommeder systems
- who is going to employ the developers & designers for enhanching the user convenience

Any correction, addition will be welcomed

This nigga crazy but i love him

Its LINUX, gnu is optional

Stallman is just like Arch Linux...He Sucks