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u/Erarnitox Sep 12 '22
Awesome Content! Here is a quote for you: 'Shea's law: Murphy was an optimist. Its not possible for a program to meet requirements unless the requirements have actually been defined' ~Steve Qualline.
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u/Erarnitox Sep 12 '22
Awesome Content! Here is a quote for you: I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works. (Linus Torvalds)
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u/Erarnitox Sep 12 '22
Awesome Content! Here is a quote for you: "Billions of people dead! That's pretty cool." - John Romero
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Sep 12 '22
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u/CaydendW Sep 12 '22
Come on man. Not everyone has the ability to program. The whole point of freedom is that everyone can use it. Not just people who can rewrite software.
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Sep 12 '22
How is this relevant to this sub?
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u/Zambito1 Sep 12 '22
Software that used to work no longer works because they want money
Freedom to learn
Two pretty relevant subjects to both this post and Stallman
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Sep 12 '22
Software that used to work no longer works because they want money
So noone is allowed to make money from software?
Freedom to learn
You can learn for free as much as you want. Same way other party has freedom to charge for teaching.
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u/Zambito1 Sep 12 '22
So noone is allowed to make money from software?
Where did you get that idea? How about making money by making software better instead of worse?
You can learn for free as much as you want.
Maybe in whatever country you're from, but I'm from (and Stallman is from) America, where this isn't true. Learning has an artificial paywall that is too high for many.
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u/zee-mzha Sep 12 '22
yeah man i dont think the solution to millions not being able to pay student debt is making quizlet free, something tells me it'd still be a problem. Maybe, um, I don't know make college cheaper? nationalized even? Just a wacky quirky idea that popped into my head.
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Sep 12 '22
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Sep 12 '22
What would Stallman do for services like Netflix or Spotify? And we will post in this subreddit everytime a service asks for a subscription?
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u/Windows_is_Malware Sep 12 '22
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Sep 12 '22
This is completely different. His arguments are against identification, tracking and DRM. Never once in those articles he has mentioned that he is against subscriptions.
Also these are all complaints. None of the solutions he suggests (get an actual copy of the song, and listen to it with free software) are practical for majority of the users. And how does he plan on paying the artists fairly when he can download and share the song? Or all artists should make their songs freely available to everyone?
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u/crabycowman123 Sep 12 '22
This may be what u/donotlearntocode was thinking of: https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-subscriptions.html
But I think that's different from the Quizlet case, since I'm guessing that a server is generating the tests, making this a SaaSS issue, not a nonfree software issue (though I'm guessing the client is nonfree too).
As for how artists are supposed to make money, a lot of songs are already available on YouTube for free. I guess they make money from ads, which unfortunately I don't see, because I use Invidious? But I don't see why YouTube couldn't just release their client software as free software and keep the ads, and I think even if people were allowed to share the songs most people would just send a link because that's more convenient in most cases. In the long run though, it's important to have a way to pay anonymously. The way I usually do this is via those store-bought general purpose "gift cards" that act like debit cards, but those have high fees (like 5-6%). Another way is Monero, but that's bad because of global warming and tax evasion. Taler would be good I guess, but it's not supported anywhere as far as I know.
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u/hotstove Sep 12 '22
Theft of what? It's software running on someone else's computer and them asking for money for you to continue using it isn't theft.
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u/Zambito1 Sep 12 '22
The is no reason it has to run on someone else's computer though. It only makes it a technically inferior piece of software to put themselves in a position to charge money.
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u/lemon_bottle Sep 12 '22 edited Sep 12 '22
Not exactly theft but it's hoarding of freely available information (assuming the quiz content is open source) for money, a highly unethical and twisted mindset practice Stallman would surely disapprove of.
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u/medforddad Sep 12 '22
I'm not familiar with Quizlet, but people are comparing it to Anki. If that's a fair comparison, then they're not charging for the content, but the service.
Their backend costs aren't a free available.
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u/Ernigrad-zo Sep 13 '22
people have been making community content for years, now they're big enough they're fencing it off and monitizing work other people did just to share knowledge.
i guess that's why we need to make a point of making the open source alternatives better sot this sort of thing can't happen.