> "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman
> Essential reading [...] People with similar ideas: [...] Vaguely related: [...]
I'd guess nobody sat down and said "Here's the target demographic profile for the new UI, so let's rework our messaging, people!" It's just a funny accident of maintenance over time that the result looks like that.
Each subreddit's mod team gets to style the subreddit (within some limitations). There's presumably a separate set of style rules for the main and "old" sites; and the latter is legacy that most mods (and most users) have not even thought about for years. (Probably most current users have joined the site after the switch and never seen the "old" domain. I'm honestly surprised it still works at all.)
Pretty much. And that seems to reflect changing sentiment of the mods over time (e.g., no information, no inspiration, no trying to emulate, only emoting).
But what I thought was funny was, if you didn't know that, it would look like the two "experiences" were tailored separately: OG redditors get the constructive messaging in the spirit of RMS's mission, but modern social media redditors get the modern social media simplified passive consumption.
On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?
I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.
They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.
RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.
That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)
I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.
I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.
Inside Macintosh was great documentation (I’d argue that the second generation in the 1990s, split up by topics, was the peak of Apple’s documentation writing), but I would not classify it as “Internals” in the sense of how a 1970s computer would be documented. There was a clearly delineated API boundary beyond which it was discouraged to venture.
Yes, Apple was/is mostly about computing as an appliance (realized fully in iOS), but there was occasional dabbling with User computing, especially with HyperCard, and to some extent with AppleScript. It seems that ultimately these did not have enough uptake to warrant investing more into them.
The more time I spend getting elderly people’s entertainment systems back into a state where they can watch their 3 favorite TV channels in peace without getting lured into the paywalls of their Android TVs or cable providers, the more sympathetic I’m getting to the “appliance” view.
> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.
One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.
In a parallel universe RMS read Ayn Rand, joined her cult of selfish greed and the world is running a closed source UNIX clone developed by JLU (Just Like Unix), the $5T corporation funded by him.
All of this to say, it's amazing how this man's personality had such a profoundly positive effect on the computing landscape of today and how different things might have been otherwise, especially because he's more the exception than the rule in terms of personalities in the hacker space.
Point taken, but as an aside, I'm just guessing that RMS was way too smart and knowledgeable to fall for Ayn Rand, for long.
Some people with no other frame (e.g., very insulated teenagers) might accept the given values she proposes (because, why not), but if you read when she tries to make a direct argument, it's clearly shoddy and manipulative, with confident big leaps of logic that she's trying to sneak past the listener.
I think if Richard Stallman had no qualms about proprietary software, he would have remained in the Lisp machine world, either working for Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc., or perhaps starting his own thing. Stallman was a Lisp hacker before starting GNU, and even when deciding on cloning Unix instead of creating a free Lisp-based OS, one of his first projects was GNU Emacs.
An interesting thought experiment is what Stallman would’ve done in that alternate timeline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lisp machines were killed off by advances in commodity hardware and compiler technology, the end of the Cold War (the US military was a large customer of Lisp machines), and the AI winter (Lisp used to be synonymous with AI).
So you're saying time travelers came back in time, and caused the end of lisp architecture, solely to prevent an AI singularity years before we could possibly cope with it.
1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses the 4-clause (GPL incompatible) BSD license was 1988, 3-clause (the one everyone uses now) was 1990. It got rid of the advertising clause at RMS's behest. RMS spent a long time wrangling for that change.
GPL1 was 1989. I'm not sure if RMS was involved with BSD3. The MIT license as used in MIT Athena and X windows was somewhat earlier, like 1986, and is similar to BSD3.
GNU Emacs as released around 1984 had its own license similar to GPL1, called the Emacs General Public License (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft). The term "copyleft" per that article originated in 1984 or 1985.
I semi-remember that GPL1 was mostly ported from the Emacs GPL, basically substituting "The Program" for "Emacs". I don't remember if the Emacs GPL used the term "Copyleft".
The informal distribution terms for PDP-10 Emacs in the 1970's were an antecedent of copyleft that RMS called the "Emacs Commune". Distribute freely but you were (informally) required to send in changes and improvements. See: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_(2002)/Cha... The GPL's were somewhat a codification of the Emacs Commune.
It wasn't like the MIT and BSD stuff happened with with RMS in a state of ignorance either. He obviously wasn't in control of anything outside the GNU project, but he was involved in lots of discussions with MIT and Berkeley about licensing and other issues.
> "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman
> Essential reading [...] People with similar ideas: [...] Vaguely related: [...]
> Rules:
> 1. Memes and shitposts allowed only on Mondays
> 2. Try to flair your posts
> 3. WWRMSD?
But if I go to https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (new-style Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:
> Stallman was Right
> Nobody listens to him. But he was right all along.*
> r/StallmanWasRight Rules
> 1 Memes only on Mondays
> 2 no-spam-brigading
Is the first UI for hackers, and the second one for mindless doomscrolling?
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