Talking to the Mailman – Interview with Richard Stallman
Just a couple of comments as I read through this:<p>> Non-free, proprietary software is also much more likely to be malware—to contain malicious functionalities, of which there are many kinds. Non-free programs can spy on the users, report on them. Many are designed specifically to restrict what users can do—that’s their purpose.<p>I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to <i>free</i> software as well. The difference is that it is usually much easier to detect when such things are happening, and modify the program so that it no longer does these things.<p>> Another form of malicious functionality is tying the program to a specific remote server<p>Again, this doesn’t seem to me to be a “free software” argument. The reason this doesn’t usually happen with free software is that there is no central entity that controls the software, whereas with non-free software one company/server/person can control their products and “backdoor” them.<p>> If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from source code.<p>This is not quite true. I can do the same for a program written in Objective-C as well, and I can still write an app in Swift and send you a compiled binary for you to install. Perhaps Stallman was talking about Swift Playgrounds, but even here there are issues: you cannot necessarily change the code on your device itself, and the environment that your code runs in is much more restrictive.<p>> free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell.<p>I have seen many companies <i>use</i> free software, but very few actually making money off of free software. When I ask, I’m usually pointed to RedHat, which makes money off of providing support. However, the money they’re getting is usually coming from companies that sell non-free software. So I’m really curious how the economy would work if <i>everyone</i> sold free software, since this doesn’t seem like something that would work.<p>Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit childish; I wonder if this actually helps him or it just makes other people feel like I do.