I LUB GNU

[Digit]

~{ k, since this forum doesnt have a general catch-all forum to pick up all the threads that dont fit into any of the other subforums/sections, i'll just post this here. }~

so.  gnu's almost 30!

great!  none of us would be here without it.

i've just watched: GNµ 19 - Gnunet - Teil 2: Richard Stallman ...and think it one of the best.  he hits a lot of major points in a fairly expedient and concise way to convey the principle.

so...

i lub gnu...

... but... i'm still a lazy convenience trapped fool in many regards.

let me just run vrms in command line (a virtual richard matthew stallman for your computer!) and see how far off the mark i am on my main two local machines...

ok, i'll just share the output of

Code Select Expand

vrms | tail -n 2, because frankly, the rest is embarrassing.

the laptop's main OS (still the age old crunchbang long since up'd to sid):
  8 non-free packages, 0.3% of 2484 installed packages.
  13 contrib packages, 0.5% of 2484 installed packages.

the big main workstation/server's main OS (vsido from... back whenever that was i installed it around the start of 2013):
  9 non-free packages, 0.5% of 1855 installed packages.
  2 contrib packages, 0.1% of 1855 installed packages.

i've had that as low as 4 non free packages in the past.

why do i do it?

i want stuff, i want...

it's that paradoxical self-contradictory position of being free to be not free. 

is this cognitive dissonance?   surely at least a little.   maybe some schism between perceived values, and actual values.  ... like wanting to have a higher self image of one's own ideals, principles and values than one actually has.   ... still, that's got to be a good thing in a way, right?  that one is wanting/striving for better.  that they affirm that kind of better progression in themselves, holding that vibe, so the rest will follow and entrain to it.

maybe i'm just flexing some smarts to excuse it, or distance myself from the reality of ~ a thousand vulnerabilities, or idk.

i just wanna say, i lub gnu, but i know my practice lags behind my ideal.


many times of recent, both in this regard, and in others, i've been reminded of some old story (i dont recall if it was from jains, buddhists, or whoever)...

this monk is going along one day, and he takes a long path around a pond to avoid a lion in a cave at the other side of the pond.  another day the monk's going along, the lion attempts to lure him over with some gold, the monk goes for the gold, gets eaten.

~ there's certainly a longer more eloquent and poignant version of the story that drives it home better.  but yeah, that's the gist... lion offering gold. 

i lub the fsf too y'see.   even managed to give em some money during that brief time i had some.

so... when i watch rms vids like the one above, i cant help but feel like ... idk... a fool?  a hypocrite?  a charlatan?  no, maybe they're all a bit too harsh.  ... makes me feel like i CAN do better.   (... and having looked at some security advisories recently, stuff elaborating on specific package vulnerabilities to remote, all the more feeling the very valid real need to gut out the proprietary stuff, which typically has at least an order of magnitude higher number of issues and frequency of issues.)

like Gandhi say:

you have to be the change you want to see in the world.

(which also is the favorite quote of my ex) 


ok, so i'm going to presume it's a given that you love gnu, or at least foss in general to some large extent, or at the very least like your freedom...
... do you love it enough to appease vrms?

Code Select Expand

sudo apt-get install vrms

Code Select Expand

vrms


ps, who was it was asking about how to youtube without flash recently?  ... ~ i should go find that thread wherever that was...
pps, just saw mention of apt-rdepends in http://vsido.org/index.php/topic,501.msg6174.html#msg6174 and think, what a lovely little tool to help check all the things vrms lists, to help get a clue of what's not needed.

[VastOne]

~{ k, since this forum doesnt have a general catch-all forum to pick up all the threads that dont fit into any of the other subforums/sections, i'll just post this here. }~

so.  gnu's almost 30!

great!  none of us would be here without it.

snip

like Gandhi say:

you have to be the change you want to see in the world.


ok, so i'm going to presume it's a given that you love gnu, or at least foss in general to some large extent, or at the very least like your freedom...
... do you love it enough to appease vrms?

Code Select Expand

sudo apt-get install vrms

Code Select Expand

vrms

snip

Great post and also happy 30 to gnu! RMS is often wrong and completely misunderstood but a legend none the less

That Gandhi quote has been one of my all time favorites forever

vrms is now stock in VSIDO as of the next ISO release

[valroadie]

HAPPY 30TH BDAY GNU! I LUB YOUUUUUU!

[Digit]

I can't relate with that "bite off yer nose to spite your face" idealism.

it feels like a really strained walk back into plato's cave for me to see that that^'s what's happening here.

As a counterpoint example:
I'm forced to spend much of my computing time in a Windows environment.
One of my dearly-loved programs is "BeyondCompare", a commercial dir/file diff-n-sync GUI.
I'm fairly sure the windows version came first... then they created a port for linux.
What's it worth, time or $wise, to search out a foss equivalent
(then jump through hoops, signing up for some f'ing listserv or traq, in order to report a glaring bug
...a bug existing "in a six-year-mature and heralded as the defacto foss diff app")
THEN waste time trying to decipher cryptic "documentation" and learn/remember a new set of keybinds...
I'm thankful the commercial app exists.
I certainly cannot understand the mentality behind faulting an author for providing an alternative.

commercial, or proprietary? 

oh:  http://www.scootersoftware.com/index.php?zz=kb_license

XD  are you trolling?  come to a "i lub gnu" thread, celebrating it's birthday, with some proprietary software...  hrmm.

i wouldnt have minded if just "commercial". lol.

so, say i have, and use, this piece of software... am i free to adapt it to my needs?  ~ like if there were a feature i wanted to add...

or do i just have to hope to stay within the confines of it, as-is, fitting my needs?

because that's exactly the sort of limitation that drove me to GNU|Linux, and kept me here  (and bsd, and aros, and other foss).

trajectory, and guarantee of availability into perpetuity were, and are, ongoing concerns for the tools i use.   i spent about a decade with windoze, never touching the sides, never realising the importance of the freedom i didnt have, because the box seemed big enough.   and when i hit the edge, i realised what a waste of my time it had been, to get my eye in with doze for so long.  i got out to the alternative as early as possible, with as much dedication as i could manage, recognising the sooner, the better.   [edit](hindsight has me often wish i had greater dedication to more empowering paths, such that my first 4 years would have been with slackware (or even just gentoo), not suse, which was the path of least resistence for me then)[/edit]... i knew it was something i could happily grow into, and spend my life on computers with (and much thanks to sites like fuckmicrosoft / microsuck for highlighting the many woes and intolerable irritations i'd experienced at the manipulative hands).

but hey, that's me, gladly quixotic... with the cynicism as my drop of yang in my quixotic yin,  (or other way around, lol):  aim very high, and you might hit high.  aim high, n you might get what you already had.  aim for the level you're on, n you'll end up with worse.

[statmonkey]

i spent about a decade with windoze, never touching the sides, never realising the importance of the freedom i didnt have, because the box seemed big enough.   and when i hit the edge, i realised what a waste of my time it had been,

extremely well said, apt, philosophical and picturesque.  I wish I could have conceptualized the point as well as you have said it.  Trade Mandrake/Ubuntu for Suse and could tell the same story.  I don't think this is tilting at windmills though and I don't think I push myself nearly hard enough in this direction. Just some quick thoughts.  Nice convo here.

[VastOne]

^ Agreed...

Well said Savant, you continue to impress me in a zillion different ways

[Digit]

hooboy, re-reading what I typed a day later... it really DOES sound like a company rep advocating their own product !

oh phew!  you had me wondering. ^_^

youbetcha, I love foss, but I see that the foss (and shareware) ideals aren't working well.

two quite different things, foss and shareware.   ... and i see it working very well.   room for improvement of course though, as always.   if it wasnt working well...  um... we likely wouldnt be here, and nor would the internet be as nice as it is, nor super computing.

Because all babies Must Eat...

yep.  that is an issue.  an issue much broader than the likes of whether the workings of the software is secret to the user or made available.  i'll try to avoid a big long ramble on radical economic notions tho, and compare some ideas with some ideals.

whether you find yourself leaning more to the shorter-term pragmatic gains camp of open source, or to the deep, far reaching principles of Free Software, there are ideas even within our existing economic paradigm, which fit both ideals...  ...implementation does seem to be somewhat lagging though.

the practical gains from the freedom, may not seem reward enough to some, particularly if they have no other aptitude, and no other source of financial-wealth/nourishment&necessities.   so, a payment system to reward contributors to/of foss would be nice (wouldnt it?*).

a donation button on the projects website, seems all too far out of the way, like the user has to go out of their way to pay.

the idea of little anonymous donation buttons dotted around, has been espoused as the way to go by many... and indeed, in foss, such a button can be removed if the user finds even that distasteful.

i like to think about what's behind those little buttons...

rms has suggested for artists, a couple of methods.  one involving the tax-pool, the other using such a payment system that rewards popularity on a cube root scale.

i think for software, since it is largely built standing on the shoulders of those who came before, we could make excellent use of what i interchangeably call tree pay, and/or trickle pay...

i'll try to explain clearly and concisely, with a real world example.

so say you want to donate to a project that contains loads and loads of diverse software, developed by lots of people, like, a distro, say, vsido.   so presuming it has a treepay button... you click that, what happens?  is that like a regular donate button, and you've just given all that money to VastOne?  no.   (well, maybe, if you have configured it like that ~ i'll get to that later).

instead, when you click that button, whatever amount of money you've sent, it splits up, and portions of it trickle back to all the projects that have comprised VSIDO, thus supporting all the upstream work, not just the last guy to come along bundle it all up, nice n polished for you.

but wont everyone get such measly amounts?  from that one payment, yes, there's so many projects, the amounts would split as it trickles down to the merest drops. 

but since this idea is building off the easy one click effortless "why not" sort of donate button, this wont matter so much (and most assuredly would be providing a higher income for many, than they currently get with existing systems).   also, there's no need to have this be dependent on some middle man system where a fixed rate is being skimmed off the top, making the system completely untenable, no.  this could all be done via software, as it is a trivial matter to calculate such simple arithmetic with a computer.  tiny fractions of pennies are viable...  and hey, why not something like bitcoin... ~  ok, i'm getting ahead of myself.

how is it to be determined who gets how much?  there seems to be two parties who should have a say in this.  the user, of course, and the developer(s).  a developer could just set it to some effortless calculation, based on some criteria a computer can fathom, or intervene, and proclaim their project relies heavily on project x, and only a little on project y, and set a proposed split.   the user can then accept the developer's suggestion (because presumably this is all transparent, and trustworthy), or intervene (on the fly, by global config, or more specific configs) to pick their own payment splits, even to the level where it is like a classic donation, truncating at whoever they directly donated to.  or even set it to that initial blind systemic method from before the developer's suggestion.

this way, everyone who's work is being used and promulgated gets payed.   everyone who wants to support the great software they love and rely on, doesnt have to go out of their way to bankrupt themselves of both time and money attempting to pay every developer individually.

also this opens up lots more options too, crowd sourcing for example, and who knows what other innovations can be built upon it.

*(arguably, it may introduce a source of coercion that corrupts the "good science" of foss development, where then things are made/changed for sake of making money, rather than because such a creation or change is inherently worthwhile in and of itself. ~ but like i hear said quite often, the currency of this century is appreciation.  ... like, i appreciate the freedom and openness, so i've put money towards that.)

progress in foss projects, with rare exception, occurs at a snail's pace.

is there something specific you want developed faster?   i tend to think things get made the way user-developers want, and has no need to change just because a developer needs to be seen to be doing something in order to validate their pay.   ... and other stuff (likely those "rare exception"s you mention) develop very quick.  though more than speed, it's the breadth of development with foss that impresses me most.   

there could likely do with more to facilitate contributions though.  i often find there's some strange obfuscations, and even ideas encouraging obfuscation to contributions.  this can lead to far too much scratching-own-itches only.

one of the ideas that had great attraction to me when i was a fresh windows refugee, was that a couple hundred developers in an office couldnt possibly have a chance to compete on a level playing feild with a potential 6 billion (i suppose i should say 7 billion now), and so i dearly wanted to be in on that, despite my experience and aptitudes laying elsewhere.

but yeah... economic coercion rules the day.  :/
[/quote]
I would hope to see more "bounty" -type incentivization (is that a word? spellchecker doesn't think so)...

Maybe I was just lucky, or blessed, in my interactions with Windows commercial app developers.
Funny (to me) that someone would mention "can you change the program however you want" because, yeah, that was often the case AND without lifting a finger. On many occasions, both prior to and after the sale, my requests for feature additions, changes... were surprising often implemented (and quickly). Nooooo, I'm not talking about Symantec -- I'm talking about my experience with hole-inthe-wall commercial and shareware authors. [/quote]

y'know there's ways to do that with free software too, right?   and you're still not permitted the feature of being able to learn it for yourself with proprietary software.  the model is to maintain dependence.

oh, and i never got the changes i wanted in proprietary software.  but it has happened countless times with free software.  (no doubt in part due to the much higher level of interaction i have with free software developers... they pretty much never seem to be in an ivory tower.)

... do you love it enough to appease vrms?

vrms
bullying / guilting a user into compliance,

lmao.  you dont REALLY feel bullied by that do you?  XD  rotflmao.   wasnt my intent to "guilt" anyone with that either.  lol.   guilted into freedom.  that's too funny.  it's just a tool to let you know.  nothing wrong with being informed.  dont let the whimsy confuse it's purpose.

attempting to compel him to "...spite yer face"
(uninstall it. We might not have a foss alternative to suggest and, if we do, adjusting to
a different app will sap your productivity... but you want to be Holy, don't you?)

indeed, switching software is something each of us has to decide for ourselves whether it's worthwhile.  i very often accept that pay-off, of short term disruption to productivity while learning something new, for the long term augment to my capabilities  (or sometimes without a perceived augment due, just out of curiosity, and it ends up leading to other great things).  things like trying to learn more bash, or when i switched to tiling window management... sure, there's some initial productivity drag, but the boon i've had since, pays for itself many times over, and just keeps getting better.
(like i said... knowing i was going to be using computers for the rest of my life, i knew gnu was something i could grow with, for the rest of my life.)

but just to show i'm not delusionally one-sided on this, there are some areas where it's not so rosy (or at least, "yet").

going from softimage|XSI to blender... OUCH.
going from after effects to... nothing!*... double OUCH.

but yeah, this is the path i chose for myself.  i still have my nose.  and the work out it's given me... i have WAY more strings to my bow now, than had i just stayed with windoze and those other proprietary professional tools.   ... not to mention it feels much better. 

*ok, so there's some features in some of the editors, and there's synfig, and there's gimpgap, cinepaint, and some other bits and bobs around the place, even the compositing features in blender... but it's just not a close approximation at all.   the big effects guys may indeed use nix machines (particularly for render farms), but they still use the top-end professional proprietary software on top~  and they (at least the top of the industry's social hierarchy) have the pockets and public stature to get the ear of the developers for the changes they want.  heh, like that line goes: "is like saying capitalism is a little bit unfair to the poor".  (i forget where that's from)

it's that paradoxical self-contradictory position of being free to be not free.

Cool.

heh, i coined that phrase amidst discussions regarding GNU GPL vs (various clause) BSD license.  free to be not free.   ~ later refined to be else-wise to better fit the initial application, but has since been transposed here n there as-is. ^_^



oh, one other thing, of a rather political bent...

such ideals of freedom, are great, but only until they become hypocritically imposed.   someone can suggest freedom is a better path, but no one can force anyone to it, because the moment they do, it's no longer freedom.

... same thing that happened to leftist ideology.  from the likes of bakunin, to marx, to lenin to stalin.  the passionate fervency of the ideals corrupted the ideals.

tis why "commercial" is not a problem.  that's still freedom respecting.  it's when it goes proprietary, closed, restricted in those ways, that freedom gets pissed on.

to quote JFK:

fully informed public

[statmonkey]

Not to step on Digit's toes here but ...

youbetcha, I love foss, but I see that the foss (and shareware) ideals aren't working well.

What exactly isn't working?  Foss? Shareware? User-contributed open-source? I am a little unclear what you are saying here and before.  Perhaps if it was a little more exacting I might agree with you (I could say the same about "working well".  Really can see how they could be working better, for their own ends, but I think it is working as well as any anarchic, obtuse, chaotic system could be expected to work. 

As an analogy to that I would suggest looking at the problem Jefferson Davis had as president of the south.  He needed rules to enforce state compliance but he could not make them since his government was based on states rights and independence.  It's really the same catch 22.  I have seen pages of arguments of what foss really is and what makes something foss and even seen the suggestion that if you have to defend something as foss it isn't.  Likewise you really can't have someone defining foss since you are then setting limits on what is or isn't but in the absence of barriers how can you define the barriers of something that has no barriers.

Without getting too philosophical, nothing - ever - is totally free nor does anyone have real freedom.  It doesn't exist.  In any choice there are costs whether they are the cost of your time, your money or your nose to spite your face.  Forgetting that for a moment I am somewhat Kantian (that real piss-ant) in my outlook - "sapare aude" in it's original form - and why I love gnu has more to do with philosophy than freedom.  Proprietary and commercial software too often means that you can't look under the hood and either understand or see what is going on and why.  Since more and more software has become open-source and more and more "commercial" developers have embraced the concept of user contributions/hacks/development I would argue that this is possibly the more important development of the "Stallman" concept.  Without RMS this would not be happening.

RMS other true gift has been to show that trust in your fellow man for contributions and support works for the most part and though it has been bastardized to be almost unrecognizable the open-source/free concepts are I believe doing better than ever.  I could cite thousands of little items you use everyday that may not show up in vrms but that were developed under the foss conceptual umbrella.  I can also say that more trickles back already than most realize and can cite a personal example.

A long, long time ago, on a planet far away I stumbled into the development of a method to package and transport data very securely and reliably.  The details don't matter but it was feasible and paradigm shifting.  I used it to develop a package that I was working on when the "accident" happened and then released it into the wild (my original client was po'd).  I wrote it from scratch, it relied on a very obscure library but was extremely portable.  People ported it, used it in everything from commercial to free as in beer to etc. I never ever wanted anything for it and never expected anything for it and it still lives to this day.  On occasion I have received  emails offering donations (I accepted ) and not once did I ever ask for a dime, post a link, etc. only the comments in the original code.  I am perfectly happy with this but suspect that it probably goes on more than anyone realizes. 

I believe that despite my numbers being lower than I would like, my acceptance of the vrms concept or of being a stallmanite by proxy, I feel that I have embraced it philosophically at the least.  When I say I feel I need to do more, what I really mean is that I need to find time to learn more, to experiment more, to create more and to push the barriers more.  Gnu is a great concept, it pushes the envelope, it's existence and future are secure because it is just that a concept or ideal not a measurable goal.  Not everything that works is quantifiable nor should it be.  My lone objection to the vrms package is that I don't think it really gets to the crux of what makes gnu great as I have stated.  I apologize for not having digit's eloquence.

Besides my love for gnu, I also love dissent.  Without it there is no freedom or any hope of it. 

We all see things differently but I think we would all agree that a world without gnu/RMS would be a much duller and more limited one. And since I have already ranted incoherently using more time than I really have to add to the sturm and drang without contributing one iota I will add something of value.  I know it is of value because I never said it, Rosa Luxemburg did:

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter. Not because of the fanaticism of "justice", but rather because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effects cease to work when "freedom" becomes a privilege.

[Digit]

my toes are quite happy, thnx. 

As an analogy to that I would suggest looking at the problem Jefferson Davis had as president of the south.  He needed rules to enforce state compliance but he could not make them since his government was based on states rights and independence.  It's really the same catch 22.  I have seen pages of arguments of what foss really is and what makes something foss and even seen the suggestion that if you have to defend something as foss it isn't.  Likewise you really can't have someone defining foss since you are then setting limits on what is or isn't but in the absence of barriers how can you define the barriers of something that has no barriers.

well depicted.   that is precisely the same issue as i had when trying to explain or define witch, which tries to re-emphasise the freedom of foss in its own little edgeless microcosm. 

the looseness and freedom afforded, that ya want enshrined, by definition makes it hard to define.   
(even finding the words to say that^ is difficult. lol)


excellent post.  ... with more than ample eloquence. 

i really enjoyed that read.

ps, had to look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapere_aude#Kant.27s_use and very glad i did.