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Critical support for the Lemmy world peeps in their fight against pro-intellectual property nerds
(hexbear.net)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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its actually amazing how internet culture went from this anarcho-utopianism where information just wants to be free, maaan to reddit style races to the normie bottom. who gives a shit about intellectual property other than bowtie spinning economist dickheads and the beltway lanyard class?
In fairness, I think it's because the tech barrier of entry went down, WAYYY down. "Free Data" is an easy sell to people who were dialing into usenet in the 90's, and us stupid ameteur hackers who would break into systems like they were puzzles because we thought it was cool and the maximum penalty was a fine and community service (the good old days, we all did it at least once and thought we were Zero Cool... unless we thought Zero Cool was lame, whatever). A lot of the people who think IP jives well with the internet were the ones who looked at me weird when I said I had online friends circa 2000, and who couldn't understand how I couldn't make some party because I "had to spend Saturday hanging out on IRC for my D&D campaign"
Even more technical folks now, they just never lived what made the internet beautiful when it was smaller. Back when "FOSS" was "Free as in Beer" and fuck that Richard Stallman with his "free as in speech" bullshit. They don't remember how this dark storm of people's hobbies turning into other people's IP, people like Bill Gates stealing the foundations of technology to build his empire (for all the good he does now, he was truly evil to his core).
Ok, old-fart rant over.
FOSS has always been about "free as in speech", and Stallman has said that it's more ethical to illegally download closed-source software than to pay for it.
FOSS vs. proprietary is tangential to the discussion over filesharing, anyway, because it addresses different issues. FOSS isn't good because it's zero-cost, it's good because it respects user freedoms.
If you're being pedantic, then yes, because Stallman coined "Free Software" as a term and that rolled into the acronym "FOSS". If you're talking about what we actually thought, then no.
From a totally different angle, it's good because it does more to empower innovation and creative expression than IP ever did, yet innovation and creative expression were always the stated goals of IP. Because of that, it's a lot less tengential a discussion than things like filesharing, which also empowers creative expression. Cost-free, unlimited access to art is the best way to get art in the hands of everyone. And that is "free as in Beer".
It's funny, I've never met anybody who'd have that kind of experience and use the word "hacker" in this meaning simultaneously.
This checks out.
I remember exactly the opposite, people being much more acutely aware of the difference, and Stallman being much more popular than now.
Clarification? Movies about Steve Jobs excluded.
I'm slightly too young to use "hacker" the traditional old-MIT way. Maybe only by 2-3 years. I was a stupid kid playing with linux in the mid-90's and I hacked into a stupid municipal dialup BBS and got root, then neither did nor changed anything because it was "cool" to prove I could figure it out. Then "Hackers" came out and I ran that movie on repeat for a few weeks and then moved on to actually learning to code.
There's those of us who were avoiding Redhat for shittier distros (like Slackware back then imo) because we didn't want to buy anyone else's beer for us to contribute for free. Maybe we were fewer than it seemed. I was that ugy giving out Ubuntu Warty CD's having this weird pipe-dream of the tech world all going free-as-in-beer (yeah, I know they're a for-profit. A lot of people didn't get that back then and just saw a better Debian). Maybe again it relates to the exact date?
Mr. Gates started back when "hacker" didn't mean "hacker" (as you point out). He would pick up freely-given tech early on, and was then one of the first to start crying IP complaints and asserting his ownership of his product. Wherever you stand on the opinion, Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists started his really terrible reputation, since many hobbyests accurately alleged he built his business on tech they were using/granting for free. I never knew the facts of the 1977 BASIC case where he was sued over ownership of BASIC and won, but then in the 80's he notoriously started his attitude of embrace, extend, extinguish. Everything from his behavior related to DOS, his ripping off Lotus Notes, etc. One could simply say "he was a good businessman" and they're allowed to feel that way. If you say "hey, you can have as much of my water as you want for free" and I drain your lake so you have to buy water back from me, technically what I'm doing is legal. That's basically what many people felt Gates did.
EDIT: And I don't have good references, but I remember some quotes from him as his reputation got bad, that the hobbyists shouldn't have been giving software out for free anyway. That the real problem was that they should have been demanding money for their work and/or keeping their ownership. One could argue his behavior was some of what spearheaded the carefully-crafted OSS licensing in the 80's.
It is unspeakably bizarre to me that people who know how to turn on a computer forgot that Gates is Satan's personal programmer at some point during the 21st century. I take it as an article of faith and my younger Millennial and Zoomer friends think I'm bullying a nice old man.
None of what he does is good. The only thing he does is lie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag5zQeXC-TY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH4uh8cHuto
Fair enough. I wasn't trying to pass explicit judgement. His reputation is just a lot better now than it used to be, whether earned or not.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=ag5zQeXC-TY
https://piped.video/watch?v=OH4uh8cHuto
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot, but Piped is broken right now
for real! I just noticed a show I wanted to watch Star Trek: Prodigy has been removed from Paramount+ for no fucking reason. The only reason I have that shit is because i'm a huge trekkie and I want them to make more and I think that Paramount+ is the only way they make any money for Trek and my roommate pays for it. Thank for for torrents. The show isn't even watchable from any streaming service atm so I HAVE to pirate it. Normally I don't for Star Trek simply because of how many episodes all the shows are combined but fuck it.
If I'd want to rewatch Babylon V, I'd pirate it. Same for Star Wars (not even talking about despecialized editions, I just don't want to give a dime to Disney).
for sure