Comments by "Anony Mousse" (@anon_y_mousse) on "Stallman's Bizarre Take On Flatpaks u0026 Snaps" video.

@justinmalcolm6287 Interesting list of acknowledgements which I think illustrate that Stallman wasn't as integral to pushing the movement forward as everyone likes to think. It's not as though other languages couldn't have replaced C as the language of choice for developers at the time, and there have been multiple operating systems that were written in Pascal from that time. However, if one of the BSD variants had won that particular popularity contest instead of Linux, we might actually have a better open source landscape as the BSD licensing is significantly more free than the GPL.
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I'll say it again, Stallman has been a hindrance on the free software movement, not a driver of it. It's his stringency towards what qualifies as free software that really holds everything back. However, he's right in this particular instance, but he's also not criticizing the technology itself either. He's basically just criticizing binary distributions of packages, which is a general complaint that'll be valid for any method of binary distribution as not every source will show you the build instructions and point you to the source used to build the package. That's not to say that I agree with his stance because while I wish everything was open source I'll use closed source without a problem. One final note, which I've mentioned before in various places but maybe neglected to say here, is that open source was pretty much the norm before software companies started taking over. We had source code printed in manuals and in magazines and posted on bulletin boards, and not the electronic variety. It's the greedy corporations that screwed things up, but they were enabled by governments that didn't understand the technology nor what was going wrong.
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@FreeSalesTips You're both right, but he's more right as we don't live in an ideal world. People are lazy and generally stupid, so they're less likely to be able and willing to do anything about the restrictions imposed upon them by people ruling over them. So people balance things as they see fit to give them as much freedom as they can handle. Can you imagine if no one was willing to do the work for free to give you a working computer system and you were required to do it yourself? There are a number of components that aren't open and without reverse engineering the hardware you've got no choice but to spend more money to buy another piece of hardware or live with what you've got. And sometimes you can't even choose a different piece of hardware lest you prevent using something you desire to use. So you either have to temper your desires for using something which is closed source and unavailable otherwise or suck it up. I'm assuming you choose deprivation, but I doubt it. Exceedingly few do.
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@FreeSalesTips Striving for free software, as in open source and completely user modifiable, is an admirable goal, but it shouldn't be the only thing to be focused on. Popularity is important if you wish for people to adopt this way of life. You can't merely espouse doom and gloom and say you're a prisoner or some such because they choose to settle for what they can get that still allows them to do most of the things they want to do. And you certainly can't lie to them and say that everything will work and be better because that kind of thing is only valid on a case by case basis and not for the whole. If everyone adopted free software, including the companies making money from software, then the world would indeed be a better place, but it's not something that's going to happen overnight and companies need to be taught that they can still make a profit by releasing the source code to their software. Once they believe that truth, things will change for the better.
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@FreeSalesTips While I can agree with and admire your idealism, the way you get the message out seems counterproductive to me. You know the old saying, you can catch more flies with honey. Oddly, I think a company that's heavily invested in proprietary software, Valve, may actually increase adoption better than anyone that came before them because of how they're promoting the concept. Maybe you disagree with that viewpoint?
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@FreeSalesTips It's not about convenience, though. It's about making it more appealing. This is why people keep using Adobe products despite them being no better than the alternatives. Well, that and the propaganda that they spread and their supporters believe without question and spread further. So realistically it'll take fighting them on two fronts, but it starts with enticing them and naturally leads into the education... eventually.
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@FreeSalesTips Normal people don't find it appealing to customize their software by writing code. They're the ones that have to be convinced that open source is the way to go. That also applies to the people funding the projects, as they're mostly normal people.
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@FreeSalesTips I suppose that depends on whether you mean free as in beer or free as in speech. If the latter, then there's no confusion because they are synonyms. Although, you likely mean that they confuse it with the former, which is definitely not equivalent.
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