muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### celebrating-half-a-year-of-double-standards-from-muckrights
other pages:
=> the-real-richard-stallman-is-still-not-coming-back.html the-real-richard-stallman-is-still-not-coming-back
*originally posted:* may 2021
i almost feel we should be grateful that muckrights is even bothering to talk about problems in the free software world, since most of those are fsf and/or gnu-related, and ron-thatcher-led muckrights likes to stay tight-lipped (and keep its readers uninformed) about the goings-on that matter most.
so there is at least, some cause for celebration, that muse has given muckrights something to be negative about: muse is already sabotaging audacity. (http://techrights.org/2021/05/07/audacity-and-muse-group/) more about that in a moment.
back when ron pretended to care, it was a very different muckrights indeed: http://techrights.org/2009/08/31/boycott-novell-as-negative/
> In a very recent interview, Richard Stallman explained that he tends to look at the lurking dangers rather than savour too much the victories. Resting on one’s laurels is unwise if the saying "only the paranoid survive" holds true.
i tried to find the interview he was referring to, since he didnt actually quote or cite it (it was still good to mention it at all) and i will also get to that in a moment.
this candidate for bullshit-of-the-week nearly trumped the one that is still planned for sunday:
> schestowitz__ news is slow, we need important topics May 06 00:06 http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-techrights-060521.html
note there is an actual coup going on, but ron has dismissed it, then sat on details that would indeed better inform his readers, then played it up for a story, then dismissed it again, all while avoiding the parts of the story that would actually make it a story! so when he says "news is slow, we need important topics" my response is: "news isnt slow, youre just censoring everything that matters".
alright, not entirely everything, because i dont deny that the muse story is relevant. and i certainly believe he should have published it. but it highlights the double standard that has taken over muckrights:
1. if it makes fsf look bad (or even like theyre in trouble) avoid it or downplay it if possible.
2. if its not about the fsf or gnu, go ahead.
thats what ive seen for months now, and it makes muckrights into a mouthpiece, rather than a news site.
i draw your attention to where i said "fsf and/or gnu-related", and with that phrase i am also calling bullshit.
oliva and i got into another debate (our very last via email, as i refuse to speak with him 1:1 though im sure i will respond to a blog post or something in the future) about the difference(s) between fsf and gnu, where he certainly made a few valid points. he overplayed his hand though, when he tried to make them out to have less to do with each other than they actually do.
now in fairness, thats only my opinion-- if you ask me "what did he say was different than wasnt?" i dont have an example for you. why say this? because its out of fairness and accuracy. but the reason for my opinion is that hes been (for maybe a year, maybe less) on this kick of x != y about a number of things, and i can certainly appreciate (for the sake of clarification and edification) going around and helping people to NOT conflate apples and oranges. i already said he made some valid points in that discussion.
but when i see a pattern of downplaying relationships that factually exist, where x is a variety of things and y is also a variety of things, i wonder if this pattern is not part of a campaign. and from what ive seen of the examples (whether the more than one instance with me, or the ridiculous instance where he was imo misleading tom) i have to comment on the pattern. and though i wont bother to question olivas motives, the whole thing reeks of bullshit no matter who is at fault.
so i agree that x != y, but if oliva says it, then i know hes probably going to exaggerate the value of x - y, and i will not trust his take on these comparisons.
there is another similar pattern, where ibm pretended red hat isnt controlled by ibm. microsoft pretends github isnt controlled by microsoft.
and when we point out that github servers are owned and controlled by microsoft, its important to some of us (maybe not to everybody).
so how about that gnu servers (and the trademark) are controlled by the fsf? oliva acts like gnu is more separate from the fsf than it really is-- he acts like these things are incidental or unimportant, and that imo is misleading.
when stallmans website was maliciously edited, it wasnt to try to make it look like he wasnt president-- it was to try to make it look like he wasnt leading gnu anymore. but who cares if the fsf controls the gnu website? its entirely irrelevant! (or is it?)
who cares that the fsfe controlled or even still controls (most likely) the fsfla website? fsfla was hosting with fsfe, who have sold out stallman. again, its not as if anti-stallman people have not already abused such access.
so if we continue along this line of utter bullshit, github isnt microsoft, red hat isnt ibm, gnu isnt fsf.
but thats really overstating the differences. x != y, but the relationship between x and y matters a fuck of a lot. not if you listen to oliva though, hes on a campaign of understating these things.
and wouldnt you know it, muckrights is part of that campaign. for example, i suggested (actually i encourage) stallman to sue gnu.tools for trademark infringement.
its relevant then, that the fsf controls the trademark that gnu.tools is abusing. that means that they might do whats best for gnu, or they might do whats best for the image of the fsf, which certainly isnt to sue anybody. so even if stallman WANTED to sue gnu.tools (and i presume that would not be his first inclination anyway-- but what if it was best, or even necessary?) its not up to him, is it?
but muckrights wont talk about this, because theyre an fsf mouthpiece now. two days ago they said:
> The coup has very clearly failed and we should prepare for future attempts (they go in cycles)
and i said, its not the coup so much that goes in cycles, its the way muckrights covers it that does. how are we supposed to "prepare" for the next "cycle"-- by coming up with stock excuses why something requiring "preparation" can simultaneously be dismissed as a failure? the latest article (todays) claims victory by looking at what happened a month ago, while leaving out what they already know is happening now.
funnily enough, alex (not oliva, a different one-- id use his handle here except his name IS his handle) is working on what looks like wiki stuff for muckrights (so ron finally has a new wiki guy) and its all about how gnome (ron pretends its just/mostly the gnome foundation, but this is more overstating of x != y again) has long attacked stallman and gnu-- which is true. and the best way to defend gnome is to understate this.
in an honest world, we would have an honest debate about how significant the relationships between x and y are-- not every connection WOULD be important (though ron has certainly made a lot of connections in the past-- even before 2010, before the rebranding) but we wouldnt understate the relationships between these things either. or to quote the 2009 article again:
> Issues that need to be "unspun" or addressed for the risks that they are will usually be turned into posts in order to understand threats to freedom. This is why an impression may be given that the site has an "alarmist" aspect to it.
we dont do ourselves any favours by making actual bad news sound better. but if we do that, it typically is a favour to someone, at least-- just not to the free software movement.
i was already complaining about this before stallman was ousted, and its been a shitshow for years ever since. so if you need justification for me saying things are worse than others think they are, ive been more than a little bit right about this before. will i be wrong this time? i suppose we can hope.
even i had my doubts, when stallman was reinstated to the board. i was happy about that. but i was suspicious. and muckrights isnt talking about the political filtering thats going on, but i can prove he knows about it. its clearly a hot button mouthpiece issue, since hes sitting on this.
but first, lets not get any further away from that (2009) interview i promised, and try to find the line that ron was referring to when he said "In a very recent interview, Richard Stallman explained that he tends to look at the lurking dangers rather than savour too much the victories." the date on that post was august 31, and doing a search for those words brought up little.
but i did find this interview from februrary 2009:
=> https://www.hillaryrettig.com/2009/02/09/interview-with-richard-stallman/
and when i said "the real richard stallman is not coming back", this 2009 stallman is the one i am referring to. let me give you a quote from that interview that accurately portrays the "real richard stallman":
> My biggest advantages, other than my natural ability as a programmer, are persistence and determination, and a brash mocking defiance that enables me to do things that really aren't hard but that others might shrink from trying.
some might attribute such a line to the trappings of youth, and i dont think anybody believes age is not a factor here. even in my "the real richard stallman is not coming back" article, i acknowledged (happily) that he is still fighting. this was only about a decade ago, and stallman is close to 70, which means that he was in his mid-to-late 50s when he was still openly defiant-- its the "openly" part that should be stressed here.
but the "brash mocking defiance"-- i dont think so, people at that fsf and gnu are (imo) just trying to hold shit together while things keep falling apart.
there are two ways to do this, and the most common is to stop paying attention to what really matters (like muckrights and oliva are doing) and to focus on convincing people that things are alright, so they will just step and start fixing everything.
thats a pattern of decline in the business world, its not likely different in the non-profit sector, and in general its how entire empires (let alone nations) fall.
the better way to fix this sort of thing is to reinforce and rebuild all infrastructure, both physical and political. the fsf is not doing this, it is doing nostalgia and bullshit. muckrights is also doing nostalgia and bullshit. i agree very strongly in fact, that covering history more often is a good move-- its a move i have argued passionately for. it was never a substitute for fixing things in the present or tending to the future, which clearly is not happening.
muckrights ignores the future of free software almost entirely now that ive left-- it has no future vision whatsoever, except for one or two things that others have introduced. even i was talking about the need to tame the web a year ago, but i am just as excited about gemini as muckrights is.
not that muckrights needs me to see the future for them. credit where credit is due, the people in irc are looking more towards the future than muckrights. ron is shackled to debian, and debian is shackled to ibm (so is gnu) so instead of talking about this or trying to hack away at his chains, ron just calls them nazis (which is fair, but inadequate). my advice: the next time mincer wants to hack away at his shackles, dont bullshit him and tell him it doesnt need to be a priority, you ian-jackson-blowing coward.
of course its incredibly difficult to get away from this stuff, believe me i know. but if you cant manage it now, at least do not try to stop others from working on it.
where is the brash mocking defiance? if we cannot have that from stallman (how many times have i said i dont blame him?) can we at least have it from his followers? no, because they have no brash mocking defiance either. most are just as shackled to ibm as ron is-- though few know better than he what the real problem is, and fewer still would have the gall to discourage others from trying to fix it if they knew better.
the line i think ron could be referring to (if its even the right interview) is this one:
> Keep your focus on how to change the future. Don't dwell on the past except to learn lessons for how to be more effective in the future. Don't waste time on symbolic gestures, but don't put more than half your effort into actions that are effective but don't convey a message. Ideally every action should make a dent in the problem and inspire others, too
i think i found another line like it (in the same article) yesterday. maybe its worth reading the whole interview:
=> https://www.hillaryrettig.com/2009/02/09/interview-with-richard-stallman/
at any rate, ron was just talking about how great audacity is: http://techrights.org/2021/05/02/audacity-sound-editor/
but at least he seems to admit this was a mistake. (if he disagrees with this assessment, i dont want to put words in his mouth. im simply trying to give credit where credit is due).
still, in a tongue-in-cheek way i have to make fun of this other article, from yesterday: http://techrights.org/2021/05/06/marketing-is-not-journalism/
it is titled: "Disregard Web Sites That Call Themselves ‘News’ and Instead Promote Proprietary Software for Companies Like Microsoft"
alright! so disregard muckrights, it promotes microsoft audacity. (the article didnt even mention that audacity is developed on microsoft github).
im not entirely serious here, its really difficult to get away from github (and thats exactly the problem).
however, the audacity article didnt even mention that its on github, and it should have. i wouldnt likely write a positive article about audacity, BECAUSE it is on github. and i even had the stupid thing installed recently, but i just checked:
```
$ which audacity
$
```
and im happy to say its not there. because its github, i try to avoid using it. i try to avoid everything github possible, with various exceptions that i put real effort into not making. last year or the year before, i tried to do research on what it would take to have a github-free distribution. you would be amazed how close to impossible that is. and thats the problem. however the answer is not to stop trying. if you cant boycott github-developed software 100% (and believe me, you cant-- ive done loads of research on this and the person who proves you can do it should get a nobel prize) you can try to increase the percentage over time. thats what i work on.
oh thats not gnu which, by the way-- because gnu which is github. i have my own one-liner replacement. it probably breaks some things, but it works on the one thing i know of that stopped working when i deleted /usr/local/bin/which.
anyway, audacity isnt gnu, so ron can talk about the problems with muse acquiring it. they have already added telemetry-- its no different than what microsoft did to the raspberry spy, or what mozilla has done to firefox, or what microsoft has done to visual studio.
we used to complain about google spying, and then facebook spying, and now the free software world is busy tweaking all our "offline" applications so theyre acting more like web applications and clown computing.
but theres no spying in gnu applications, at least.
OH WAIT, THERE IS-- BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO BE SPIED ON BY MICROSOFT TO USE GITHUB.
but muckrights is still far more likely to talk about problems like this when its not related to gnu, because muckrights is a fucking mouthpiece whose primary author complains in the middle of a fucking war that theres nothing to write about.
hey! if the welcoming of pr companies into the fsf (but definitely not gnu!) proves anything, its that the non-profit sector needs corporate shills too. next time, i hope the grant just pays muckrights to do pr for the fsf (but definitely not gnu!) because muckrights is clearly willing, and theyve got to be a whole lot cheaper.
at least muckrights is talking about a fork-- but again, only of audacity (p.s. now that theyre owned by muse, microsoft or google or ibm can purchase them-- isnt that awesome?)
you think ron is going to talk about my "fork" of gnu which, that isnt on github? or (much more importantly, because my gnu which fork is just for fun and political activism-- its done to make a point and solve a problem, though in a very small and simple way) is he going to talk about the need to fork parts of gnu?
of course not. because its a double standard. if audacity has trouble, fork it! if gnu has a problem, deny it if at all possible.
thats the muckrights way!
the big picture problem is that more and more projects are adding telemetry-- and if the applications themselves arent phoning home when you dont want them to, then gnu still lets projects move to somewhere that microsoft can spy on you. in 2009, muckrights cared about that sort of thing.
in 2021, it affects gnu itself. but just like oliva says about everything these days--
> You_don't_understand,_this_is_different!
http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-techrights-060521.html
funny isnt it, when a year or more ago olivas anti-fascist slogan was "its not a coup!" (openly mocking the fact that it was indeed, a coup, in brash defiance) and this year his slogan seems to be the (pro-regime) "you dont understand, this is different!"
thanks to xrevan for (inadvertently) pointing this out. i dont think oliva is peddling bullshit intentionally-- i simply think hes peddling bullshit.
if you prefer your bullshit to be deliberate, i still recommend muckrights.
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org