I feel like it's a long list of fairly standard complaints about Google, when really the objection could just be "the server-side code is non-free".
For example, He spends a lot of time talking about the You Tube JavaScript code, while not talking about the You Tube server code. Which seems backwards to me. It seems to me that the JavaScript part, while not licensed, is closer to free software (you can read it etc) than the server side.
The tracking of information, privacy issues and so on seem unrelated to Free Software and are just a laundry list of bad corporate behaviour, which aren't a secret (and can be easily sumarized.)
Frankly there are so many reasons to avoid Google that have nothing to do with the notion of Free Software, that the JavaScript license part is irrelevant. It's like saying that smoking kills you, and the packaging also sux.
So I guess his page covers all the bases, but if bad corporate behaviour is the new Stallman Standard, then I guess pretty much any company is off limits.
> when really the objection could just be "the server-side code is non-free".
That's exactly it. The move to cloud / saas is very convenient as a way to alienate software users from the software. You can use it, but only in pre-approved ways. You can use it but only until the software gets cancelled (when that happens nobody else can use anymore, instantly). You can use it but don't ever think about modifying it for your needs.
Actually Stallman himself talks about this (like rebranding saas as "service as a software substitute" [0] rather than "software as a service") and that's really the crucial point, all the rest follows from Google's utter control of the software.
Maybe. I see a list of "what's bad about <company name>" on the front page of stallman.org, but I have yet to find a "what's good about <company name>" page.
Although this is not necessarily specific to Stallman, there seemed to be an order of magnitude more people complaining about companies than endorsing them. Stallman at least has some positive restaurant reviews.
> “Free” in Stallmans sense is only an issue once the product is distributed.
> Being deployed server-side doesn’t usually count.
It's only an issue if the software has users. Whether those users interact with the software locally or through a remote server makes isn't important for him.
Hard to disagree with any of the points Stallman listed but this stood out as especially egregious and petty.
>Google cuts off accounts for users that resell Pixel phones [0]. They lose access to all of their mail and documents stored in Google servers under that account.
>It should be illegal to put any "terms of service" on a physical product. It should also be illegal to close an account on a service without letting the user download whatever was stored there.
You make it sound like someone sold their used Pixel phone on Craigslist and then had their Gmail account banned - that's not what happened.
The Google customers had all bought the phones from the company’s Project Fi
mobile carrier, and had them shipped directly to a reseller in New Hampshire,
a US state with no sales tax. In return, the reseller split the profit with the customers.
Such an arrangement is against Google’s terms of service, which state that customers
“may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”.
From what I gather, a bunch of users bought heavily-subsidized phones intended for Google-Fi customers, shipped them to a commercial reseller who sold them at regular prices, then split the profit of a couple hundred bucks per phone. Doesn't sound very savory to me.
> “may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”.
If I buy something it's mine and I can do what I want with it.
It's like trying to devise a Will that controls what happens to one's estate after it is distributed to the inheritors. You're dead, and your stuff then belongs to other people.
> It's like trying to devise a Will that controls what happens to one's estate after it is distributed to the inheritors. You're dead, and your stuff then belongs to other people.
You can actually do that, although it is limited somewhat by the rule against perpetuities (RAP). The classic statement of the RAP is that no interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later that 21 years after some life in being at the creation of the interest.
For example, suppose you have three children and you own a small farm but do not live on it. You've got an arrangement with Farmer Bob that lets him and his family live on the farm and run it, and you get 20% of the profits.
In your will you could leave the farm to Bob for the rest of his life and then to your children and that would be fine. Bob's interest, if it vests, does so when you die, and that's within 21 years of your life and you were alive when the interest was created, so no RAP violation. You childrens' interests, if they vest, do so when Bob dies, which is within 21 years of Bob's life, and Bob is alive now so again RAP is satisfied.
So when you die the farm goes to Bob. When Bob dies it goes to your children (or if they are dead then it goes to whoever inherited their interest). (For those wondering what happens if Bob tries to sell the farm after he inherits it--he can, but he can only sell what he has which is an interest that terminates when he dies. That interest still terminates when he dies even if at the time someone else owns that interest).
In a majority of US states they have modified the classic common law RAP, replacing the within 21 years of a life now in existence with a flat 90 years. Some states have gone even longer in some circumstances, such as Florida which for trusts upped it to 360 years and then 1000 years. A handful of states have abolished the RAP.
Leave your stuff in a trust when you die and live in one of those states and you can dictate what happens to your estate for generations after you are gone.
> Leave your stuff in a trust when you die and live in one of those states and you can dictate what happens to your estate for generations after you are gone.
I'm all for crapping on Google, but I think the key term here is:
> may not commercially resell any Device”. (Emphasis mine)
The commercially reselling is probably in reference to buying a product for the sole purpose of reselling that product[0]. Of course, I'm no lawyer so maybe I'm completely misinterpreting that.
“I think Google should have banned them from future purchases, but taking away all Google services seems very draconian to me,” Eleff added. “Not allowing access to past data is even worse.”
I think most Google account owners would agree with the above sentiment.
The next claims is also misleading: "It should be illegal to put any "terms of service" on a physical product."
As you said, the issue is not that Google claimed some sort of ongoing right to block resale of the phone in the ToS, but simply that it refused to sell the phone to resellers to begin with. That's not attaching a ToS to a physical product, but just choosing who to take orders from.
Companies should not be running an internal justice department to sanction, through unrelated business wings, individuals who they have a dispute with, at most they should stop holding up their end of that contract while taking their grievance to the real courts. The only case in which that wouldn't be an option is the one where the resellers breached neither a contract nor a law in which case... why does Google think it can act against them?
> Such an arrangement is against Google’s terms of service, which state that customers “may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”
While you could certainly argue that's a ToS for the use of the store (not for the product itself), it's up to Google to identify resellers and not sell to them. If they fail to identify a customer as a reseller -- or hell, someone buys the phone and only later on decides to commercially resell it, or to sell it to a commercial reseller -- tough luck. That's just the first-sale doctrine at work.
Google taking punitive action against people who get away with this may not literally be "enforcing terms of service on a physical product", but it's muddy enough that I don't think the distinction matters. (Regardless, I think it's a big stretch to connect the ToS for store purchases to an entire Google account.) In any case, it's an incredibly scummy thing to do.
I agree it sounds like a violation of the terms, but the response seems asymmetrical to me. Banning them from using Project Fi in the future would be more appropriate.
Sure, perhaps asymmetrical. It also happened 7 years ago, and there's no similar stories I could readily find since. Perhaps Google also thought it was asymmetrical and scaled things back privately...
I also would easily believe these users probably didn't just buy a phone, and likely were using their personal Gmail account as a defacto business account - Pixel Arbitrage, as it were. In that light, banning the account outright makes some sense, even if it feels heavy-handed.
Google has too many services all linked to one account. Combined with their algorithmic banning of accounts, it is very scary. Having things like your YouTube account, email, business running on GSuite, servers running on Google Cloud, etc all tied to a single Google account that could get accidentally banned is terrifying.
Sure, maybe Google bans you for selling a Pixel phone, but that doesn't just ban you from Pixel. You're locked out of your entire business.
Or maybe Google bans you for making algorithmically determined bad comments on YouTube and now you're locked out of your entire business.
I find that entirely unacceptable.
They should really set up boundaries between various services and/or improve the ability to appeal account bans.
This is an interesting list of reasons. Even if it is long, I'd say it's still somewhat incomplete...
I was motivated by this list to stop depending so much on google. But it's harder than it seems. For example, if you purchase a fastmail account, you still need a google account to install the app in your non-google phone, because fastmail only provides the apk files via the google play store. There's so many such "roadblocks" in de-googlification that you inevitably give up at some point.
Do you have to use the official Fastmail app? I use an app called Fairmail from F-Droid to connect to my email account, but I use Purelymail instead of Fastmail. I understand that IMAP doesn't normally support 2FA, so some folks are wary of it, but if you're concerned about Google it's likely worth it to give it a shot.
PSA: Fairmail is fantastic, IMO, but be aware the settings are a bit of a paradox of choice. You can customize damn near every field, font, card, and style in the app... but that's a bit overwhelming at first.
IMAP doesn’t support all the features the official one does, the most important one being server side filters.
Fastmail has been working on an alternative api called jmap for ages which should modernise 3rd party clients. but as far as I’m aware they haven’t released it for real use and there are no clients.
Its been released & in use for years. (Nearly a decade at this point?).
The problem is all the big email providers - Apple Mail, GMail and Outlook haven't added support. Its a bit of a chicken and egg problem - there's no demand for jmap clients because so few servers support it. And there's no pressure on email servers to implement jmap because so few clients support it.
Does this still work? I recently got a new tablet and tried to avoid creating a new Google account for it. Installed the Aurora store. When you start that you're given three options: anonymous session, another type of anonymous session, or log in with a Google account.
Both types of anonymous session timed out repeatedly over a period of about three days so I eventually caved and made a throwaway Google account for it. In which case I should have just used the Play store.
Thanks! I'm going to try it! But how can you be sure that you are getting the real thing? Fastmail does not publish checksums of their apks. I asked their user support (which is otherwise excellent) if they could publish apks or at least the checksums, and they basically said "thanks for your suggestion".
> If your explicit goal is to have a modern phone without Google specifically, you really should consider Apple.
Apple is much worse, I don't consider it a viable option. I was gifted an ipad recently, but couldn't use it without even entering my phone number (!). This is a ridiculous level of invasion that I'm not willing to put up with.
That's not any better. It's actually worse in many ways. At least with Google, it's possible to side-load an APK from an unofficial source onto an Android device. With Apple, you're completely locked down and at Apple's mercy for everything. No thanks.
Stallman isn't interested in practical/useful technology. I doubt the guy who has a panic attack at the thought of his browser executing javascript without his permission and uses an email client to download raw HTML has a good alternative to suggest. His main concern is shaming technology that isn't free and open source.
I've tried using inkscape on my mac a few years ago. It was a terrible experience.
Inkscape was internally rendering at half of my display's resolution, and then it was upscaled. It looked absolutely awful. And none of the keyboard shortcuts matched the platform defaults. Cmd+S for save? Nope. Cmd+Z for cut? Nope. Cmd+A for select all? Nothing worked the way I expected.
It felt like I was running a program from the 90s in an emulator.
I mean... I'll invoke ImageMagick from the command line before using GIMP... it's that bad. just....bad. What's really sad is how little it's moved in the last, say, 15 years.
It's 2023 and it still doesn't even proper CMYK suppport... that's table stakes in this space.
Also... not from Stallman, that man's view on things is... warped. Hard to take someone serious when he's the same guy yelling at contributors that "children are whatever, emacs is forever, I am disappointed you care for your children!" Among other things.
I am glad that Richard Stallman and Greta Thunberg live according to their principles and maybe their stances will eventually give me more alternatives to choose from. I am just not personally interested in doing the same. Corporations suck, governments suck, people suck. Constant quest for purity will just mean that I spend all my energy on that and not on doing anything productive myself.
They are famous because they're rare. There's only so much room in the economy for that kind of purity. Try getting a tech job almost anywhere and insist on a pure GNU stack running on hardware that has no nonfree firmware and see how far that gets ya.
I think history shows those who seek a very high level of moral purity have had to forge their own paths, rather than get any old job/occupation which corrupts their beliefs. Rare, but inspiring. Such reaching also involves much sacrifice, it must be lonely.
But equally, I think dismissing their concerns as a pursuit of ideological purity undermines them.
Like, I work for a FAANG, I have for a long time. But I also do good within and outside that FAANG. I do habitat restoration, I get involved with political organizations that align with my views (mutual aid, socialism, etc.)
One doesn't have to care 100% or 0%, one can live with the understanding that we are in a system where you gotta pay your bills and have problematic favorites, while still trying to make things better where you can.
I think Stallman's opinions should be regarded no differently from what a random person on the street would say. His contributions in software does not mean his words on arbitrary subjects are more valuable than others. In fact I avoid reading his articles because they don't apply to real world (or at least not how things work for 99.99% developers and companies) and they often turn out to be a complete waste of time. If those articles were presented without his name, you would normally think they come from a mad man ranting on reddit/Twitter.
It's too late to worry about Google having data on everyone. Every major corporation has all that data. The Corporation has it too. At this point, hope that when each of these Corp AIs wakes up...that they like who you've been as a person. They'll know who has been consistent and authentic and who hasn't.
Ah, Stallman. Even when he has a point, the sheer amount of wankery surrounding that point makes sifting through the pretentious bullshit not worth the effort.
Like, no, you should not use AirBnB. But not because it requires you to "identify yourself". So do hotels, my man. And if someone doesn't want to do business with you, they should be allowed that freedom of choice as well. Just because someone provides a service, it doesn't mean they should be forced to provide it to you if they find you to be abusing their service in some fashion.
I make a point out of excluding google out of mg workflow. I don't have any google devices and don't use any google services personally with the exceptions of searching stuff I know ddg isn't being good at or youtube. Haven't had a google account in several years.
I don't hate and despise google like I do companies like fb. Google to me, if it was a person would be someone that is incredibly and impressively smart and capable yet chooses to be a dick a lot because of poor social skills but also because he/she is so rich they can afford to harm you and not worry about their reputation or legal fees if you sue them. I suppose what makes it hard for me to hate them completley is that some of their products are actually impressive and they don't have any usable social media services which makes them less harmful to society at large which isn't the case for any fb or linkedin service.
The only other tech company that is like Google is Microsoft in my opinion.
I really hope laws catch up to address the scumminess of these companies and places like Google get a change in leadership and culture. It's like Google was great for like 2 minutes and then became a really modern and super innovative version of comcast lol.
Idk about Google but this website as a whole is so damn autistic, whoever the author is needs to be locked up in the room and tied to the bed for safety purposes.
It's pretty lame to assume that everyone has the exact same moral views as you. Most people would probably agree that he's said some highly questionable things, but what about the age-old question of separating the art from the artist? It seems that your position is to entirely cancel rms from history, but not everyone is going to agree. He's one of the most important figures in computing history, should we really just throw it all away regardless of any context?
He had a point and a bunch of kneejerkers emoted everywhere. You appear interested in doing that, and so do the commenters, but that’s hardly the only thing that happens on HN.
Obviously.
There are areas where his opinions probably come close to qualifying as facts, and he’s relevant, so he’ll continue to show up.
If that’s “problematic”, I assure you that RMS is not the actual problem.
> Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it.
The position you claim he holds, is the opposite of the opinion he holds.
Do you believe that people should be judged based on the worst opinion they have ever held in their past, or based on the opinions they hold now?
1) You believe people should be judged based on the opinions they hold now rather than their past opinions.
2) You think that the person's current opinion is different than they say it is, and are judging them based on what you imagine their true opinion to be, rather than what they say it is.
Do you have specific basis for thinking he is lying? Stallman tends very much to voice his true opinion regardless of how it may be received, so if he claims to have changed his thinking I would tend to believe it unless there's an actual reason to think otherwise.
You can find some 100 % Stallmanesque, extremely pedantic and tone-deaf quotes from him on pedophilia and rape. Some people are understanding, some are not.
Therefore, his contributions in the field of Open Source and software freedom are null and void, is it. Because, everyone has to be a prophet who we can take as a 'role model'.
...
This obsession with making Jesuses out of everyone to follow as 'role models' in the US is really alien to those of us who live elsewhere in the world.
Its amazing how you people did not 'cancel' literally every. single. prominent figure in near and distant history. All of them had something that would require canceling at this very moment - Washington had dentures made of slaves' teeth, Edison stole inventions and electrocuted elephants, Schweitzer believed that black people were inferior and so on.
...
In this particular topic, what is defined as 'pedophilia' isnt even clear: Is it prepubescent children? Or is it a 16 year old sleeping with an 18 year old? Even as 16 is a legal age for marrying and joining the military and dying in almost everywhere around the world, including various European countries? Or are 25 year olds still 'children' like how some lunatics are trying to popularize?
People seem to have major difficulty separating the person from the message. Look at the current HN "Nuclear Power movie" thread. Most of the comments have devolved into a debate about whether Oliver Stone is a good person or not, totally irrelevant.
Any time a prominent figure is mentioned here, there's always someone who crawls out of the woodwork to comb back through everything the figure wrote just so he can post "bbbbbbut look! On February 12, 2004, he said a racist thing, so obviously nothing else he has said in his entire life should be listened to!"
That's the worst part - the 'good' and 'evil' in such situations are being religiously definded just like how 'the faithful' and 'heretics' were defined back in the earlier ages when religion dominated the society. Everyone is either 'with us' or 'against us', ie, a heretic. And being heretic is so easy - you just need to contradict whatever is the dominant thing at a given moment and you are outcast. Just like how it was in the earlier ages.
Take the Stone case: 80% of the world opposes the American viewpoint on Russia and 'Putin', and 'the West' is isolated in this affair like how various Angloamerican outlets recently noted.
I actually watched Stone's Putin interviews. What Russian leaders and Putin have communicated in those interviews were quite rational arguments, and actually, their statements about American imperialism, NATO etc are how precisely the rest of the world sees 'the West'.
But, in an amazing case study for social sciences, the public in especially the Angloamerican West are !extremely! enthusiastic in whatever 'current thing' and whichever 'current enemy' that their establishment sells them.
A gigantic gap in how this 'West' sees itself, what it believes what the rest of the world thinks, and what the rest of the world actually thinks. But then again, this is not so different from what was observed in the UK during the Brexit process...
From your link: "suggesting that the financier's victims somehow consented to the sex trafficking scheme"
This is incorrect. He said that the victims would have appeared to Minsky to have consented, because the coercion would have been out of sight. That is an awkward statement in several ways and it deserves pushback. But it is a different statement than the assertion that the victims consented, it is in no sense a defense of Epstein, and pretending Stallman said something he did not say is not helpful.
For example, He spends a lot of time talking about the You Tube JavaScript code, while not talking about the You Tube server code. Which seems backwards to me. It seems to me that the JavaScript part, while not licensed, is closer to free software (you can read it etc) than the server side.
The tracking of information, privacy issues and so on seem unrelated to Free Software and are just a laundry list of bad corporate behaviour, which aren't a secret (and can be easily sumarized.)
Frankly there are so many reasons to avoid Google that have nothing to do with the notion of Free Software, that the JavaScript license part is irrelevant. It's like saying that smoking kills you, and the packaging also sux.
So I guess his page covers all the bases, but if bad corporate behaviour is the new Stallman Standard, then I guess pretty much any company is off limits.