Elias @eliasr@librem.one

@jrballesteros05 I think I understand you here, but my view is a little different.

Nowadays I have come to think of it more like this: we cannot expect companies to "do the right thing". Their purpose is to make money, that is what they will do. It is not so meaningful for us to be angry with them. Like a tiger in the jungle, it wants to hunt me and eat me, but there is no point for me to be angry at the tiger for that. It's a tiger, it does what tigers always do.

(To be continued)

@ehashman I'm trying to understand your thinking here.

The appendix of the open letter directly links to something false. This is a fact, it is not a matter of opinion.

Look at the reference "2" in the appendix. It is the Vice article with title "Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'". That is false.

Do you understand that the statement in the title of that Vice article is false?

@ehashman Look at the appendix of the open letter, the very first link there, the link called "0". That leads directly to the false accusations.

Again, please read https://edsantos.eu/on-stalman/ where the problems are explained in some detail.

I think when you have signed such a thing, you cannot reasonably look away and pretend like nothing when it turns out that you have contributed to the spread of severe false accusations. Please read and think about it, it's important.

@ehashman

I see that you signed the open letter to "remove RMS". Are you aware that the open letter spreads some severe accusations that are known to be false?

Please read here: https://edsantos.eu/on-stalman/

For me it is hard to understand how people could sign that. Whatever your goal is, spreading false accusations is not an acceptable method. How do you justify signing something like that?

In case anyone wants to try out receiving MMS messages on their #librem5 I just wrote down the steps needed for that here, still unofficial and hacky but it does work: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/issues/30#note_151962 #GNU #Linux #ModemManager #libqmi #mmsd #chatty #freesoftware

@schattenspringer Sounds like FairPhone 3 could be good then. Especially since you don't care so much about camera, as I understand it the camera is not super-good.

Had a bit of an identity crisis this morning. Luckily there was a command that helped resolve it. I know who I am. #freesoftware #freedom #librem5

@kyle As someone who has used the possibility of having my own (forks of) repos at source.puri.sm I would like to say: please don't remove that completely, it really helps a lot for someone who wants to contribute. Maybe forks of existing repos there could still be allowed, just say it's not allowed to have repos for completely separate projects there? It's a shame if it becomes harder to contribute.

@luke I missed the live stream. Will it be possible to view/listen to it later?

A Critique of the Open Letter Calling for the Removal of #RMS: https://meribold.org/2021/04/07/critique-of-rms-open-letter/

"Suggesting that RMS is intolerant is strange. If anything, he seems to be too tolerant. Implying that RMS is hateful is just ridiculous."

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/arkebiskopen-loggar-ut-pa-grund-av-nathat

Pictures from my morning walk the other day, down by the water along Edsviken north of Stockholm. I didn't meet it in person, but something tells me there is a #beaver living around here.

@jfred @zwol @brainwane

I was thinking that, regarding Signal, maybe it does not matter so much that there are no commits since April 2020 because we anyway don't know what software they have been running on the server side. We don't know that neither before or after April 2020.

They could run something quite different, that just seems the same from the outside. Or they could just add some secret patches on top of the open-source code.

Or is there some way to verify what the server runs?

@brainwane Don't know, but I always wondered if it makes sense to talk about the server side of anything being open-source.

I mean, on my own computer it makes sense to want open-source software because I can verify it and I can modify it as I want.

But on someone else's server, if they say things are "open-source", I can anyway never verify that, and I can't change anything. In the server case "open-source" is just something they say, sounds good, but I don't know if it is true.

> brutality

Bullying tactics used to throw RMS out of the organization he founded while portraying him as a terrible person.

> the elite

Big Tech firms rejoice as RMS and FSF suffer, with Microsoft most clearly involved via Github.

Anyway, I recommend listening to the song, it's really good.

"What? The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!"

The whole album is good. It was a big deal when I was in high school. Still good stuff today. 🙂

> Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission

A stubborn person like RMS must compromise his beliefs and conform to the norms, it is not acceptable for him to be different.

> ignorance

People attacking RMS without knowing what they are talking about.

> hypocrisy

Excluding a person in the name of inclusiveness, in a letter preaching "digital autonomy" while hosted on Github, owned by Microsoft.

(to be continued)

Just listened to the great Rage Against the Machine song "Know Your Enemy", it struck me how it relates to the #RMS debate.

Here is how it ends:

"Yes, I know my enemies"

"They're the teachers who taught me to fight me"

"Compromise,
conformity,
assimilation,
submission,
ignorance,
hypocrisy,
brutality,
the elite"

"All of which are American dreams"

Thinking about those "enemies" in the context of the RMS debate and the infamous open letter:

(to be continued)

@xiroux We, human beings, need to control our technology instead of being enslaved by it. Free software allows us to take back control.

@cwebber@octodon.social @fossandcrafts@octodon.social

I did not mean this to become such a long rant, but anyway, there is is.

To summarize: the open letter, supposedly meant to fight for inclusion, itself has a fundamentally flawed approach to inclusion.

Therefore, signing the open letter is not a good thing to do. Note that this issue is bigger than RMS, and bigger than FOSS.

Do you see what I mean?

I have a couple of other comments as well, would you like to hear them?