muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### waiting-for-roy-to-scooby-doo-free-hardware
other pages:
=> how-to-do-the-scooby-doo-maneuver.html how-to-do-the-scooby-doo-maneuver
*originally posted:* aug 2021
anything you bring to roy that he can turn into a blog post, he will. this isnt always a good thing, because from then on its going to get the spin he puts on everything.
and this spin isnt just spin, to twist a story or facts and context into whatever bullshit roy thinks is best; if that were true then he would at least let you present the facts the SAME WAY that he does.
oh no, licensing aside, roy will attack you for MONTHS for presenting the same facts (and conclusion) that he does. you have to understand, roy owns reality itself.
but so far we are getting ahead of the story, because as the title suggests, this is about something roy HASNT appropriated yet. and it would be nice if anybody (except roy) took this idea and ran with it-- thats what ideas are for. sadly, roy will first water down the idea and THEN after that he will tell people not to bother with anything beyond it. like it took him half a decade to say hes a systemd "sceptic" but now that so many people have moved on (even away from gnu/linux, which roy admits has problems) he still shills for debian and acts like its ALL IBM and debian is blameless for selling out.
though the other day he did (really, he did) actually say theres a PART of debian that sucks and sells out. but will he think of boycotting systemd? lol, no. hes literally going to wait until systemd is gone-- dont fix it, just spend a decade (maybe longer) weathering the storm. i mean, this is also after lying about it for literally years. with advocacy like this, who needs marketing?
although ive rightfully made this about roy, i need to say that it somewhat reflects a larger problem in the free software movement, and it gets right back to the categorisation the other day on ewwfs:
=> activists---advocates---archetypes-and-armchair-psychology---part-ii.html activists---advocates---archetypes-and-armchair-psychology---part-ii
in that article, the movement is divided into types subtypes based on their relationship to the status quo and to people who view it the opposite way:
* non-reactive non-sceptics aka "boxers" (from animal farm) just want to get work done. they believe things will be alright if we just do what we are "supposed" to.
* reactive non-sceptics (open source breeds these) believe things will be alright, but want to argue with people who take issue with the status quo or see major problems that need to be solved. they arent just about getting work done, they also want to argue that things are perfectly alright when theyre not.
please note that ALL of these types can be useful to the cause at times, but these types are not evenly distributed and the article concludes that over time, an organisation like npr or the fsf will shift from catering more to the sceptics to catering more to the people who favour the status quo at all costs. as the movement gradually becomes happy with the status quo (even when the state of things are worse than before) the movement really shifts towards a marketing gimmick-- picture long-haired hippies putting down their anti-war signs and selling 4-dollar bottles of juice or 5-dollar pints of ice cream, then finally selling the whole thing off to unilever. just saying.
* non-reactive sceptics are less condescending to visionaries than reactive non-sceptics, but they still dont want to talk about it. they already understand the problem and rather than discuss it, they would (like the non-reactive non-sceptics) rather just get back to work. the difference is the work they do is arguably more revolutionary (more helpful to the present list of problems) than the work the non-reactive non-sceptics are doing.
note also that the non-reactive non-sceptics also do work worth doing sometimes, but they are happy to do work that even by itself, would never move anything forward. in fact as the movement starts to lose momentum and is even driven back a bit, the non-reactive non-sceptics just shrug and keep working, even when what theyre doing isnt achieving what it used to. as pointed out, non-reactive sceptics are at least changing what they work on and adapting, while non-reactive non-sceptics will just keep doing the same thing they always do.
reactive sceptics of course, are the real troublemakers-- the stallmans, the people who dont just parrot a leader but actually emulate their zeal for changing the game to work for (rather than against) humanity. reactive sceptics DONT SETTLE. when the fsf says "JOIN US so we can FIGHT for your freedom!" i just laugh, because the fsf offers nothing to reactive sceptics and has turned all of them (including stallman) into a marketing gimmick. please note, i dont blame stallman for this. this is what organisations do after a few decades (if they make it that far) and if the movement is smart it will keep going without the (now defunct) organisation.
and reactive sceptics are truly loved by relatively few, because talking about how to fix the world makes people UNCOMFORTABLE. the comfort of the status quo (oh sure, it has its problems, but nothings perfect) is what marketing and "just work harder" (and eventually youll get what you want, even if its a lie) are all about.
now that ive just summarised an entire article, ill get back to how this is related to whats going on in irc.
theres a fellow who is trying to define FREE HARDWARE. at least thats my take on it, they may not put it in those words.
i think this is very interesting, because hardware largely (and increasingly) does dictate what software does.
roy doesnt know much about hardware (and neither do i) so hes arguing with this person about whether microsoft has an operating system called "azure rtos" on the raspberry spy. and roy searches through his bag of tricks for something he can denounce this with: THERES NO SUCH THING AS AZURE RTOS! he demands a link with more information, and the other person says (lol) "i am not your underling". (applause)
someone else had more information (i havent verified any of this, so technically i suppose it could all be made up): microsoft purchased "threadx" which is some "risc os" that runs on the gpu. i should mention that ive already heard about a gpu blob like this, i simply havent heard it described this way. but im willing to entertain the possibility that this guy knows what hes talking about, hes been going on for days or weeks about the z80 and 6502 and 68k, and how they could be scaled up to a truly free platform while x86 and risc-v will always require "proprietary tooling" and indeed, MOST of the "free hardware" will NEVER be free.
fun fact, when i was (very) little i wanted to do electronics, and fortunately we got some computers (i would have SUCKED at electronics...) but i still find this stuff pretty interesting-- mostly as a voyeur. i mean, i did have a desktop open today (and ive had my laptop open more than once) but i consider myself a software person. i just have a lot of respect and admiration for hardware people.
as to where roy is on the subcategory list, hes a reactive non-sceptic who poses as a reactive sceptic. which is to say that by waffling back and forth on every important issue like a politician (zdnet did this all the time years ago, before they decided "fuck it, lets just sell out completely instead of halfway") he maximises the number of people who can relate to him (and thus the number of people interested in what he has to say, even if its generally bullshit and completely insincere and manipulative-- a lot like zdnet was in the old days). of course this sort of business actually runs interference and misleads people at a cost to the movement, though he doesnt give a shit about that, hes a complete fake and he does it for the pageviews and small amount of "power" (manipulation) over people.
its going to be a while before he figures out how to co-opt this free hardware business, because its actually pretty revolutionary. most of us wont be able to figure out a way to do something with this for a long time. but the non-reactive sceptics already get what this person is saying-- they may not agree on all of it but that doesnt matter, the point is that whats being said about hardware being proprietary isnt just stating the obvious here--
whats really unique is that (the same way i go beyond roys rhetoric and try to figure out HOW MUCH github has taken over, something he was never capable of doing himself) this person is not just saying "hardware is proprietary"-- but HOW MUCH IT WOULD TAKE for hardware to be truly free the way software is.
and the results of course, are not reassuring. because roy wants to be comfortable (you cant blame him for the preference, and i mostly dont, as long as he doesnt lie to everybody about it) and he knows perfectly well, that-- as i said already-- talking about how to fix the world makes people UNCOMFORTABLE. already roy is reacting to this person (granted, theyve said lots of things about how fsf and gnu are missing the point focusing on software, but that doesnt mean it isnt true) and trying to find a way to spin this, which is almost kind of cute.
```
Fri 23:53:10 │ 〖activelow〗 │ not saying X11 is bad, but i do NOT want to
depend on it with anything i do
Fri 23:53:15 │ 〖schestowitz-TR〗 │ that takes us way to far backwards
Fri 23:53:23 │ 〖schestowitz-TR〗 │ technological primitivism
Fri 23:53:30 │ 〖schestowitz-TR〗 │ not even figosdev went this far
```
roy of course, is missing the fucking point.
the goal that this fellow and i have in common is not primitivism for its own sake, but that a person has control over their computing. only you dont have control over your computing if you are at the mercy of technology that is proprietary, microscopic and which you are not allowed to freely use, study, modify and share. and the fact that hardware is physical (and most people dont have semiconductor fabs) certainly makes it easier for the fsf to sidestep this as long as it can find "general purpose" computing hardware to play with.
meanwhile, even software is becoming less "general purpose" and people are being saddled with a dependency hell the likes of which i never thought id need to worry about again after LEAVING microsoft windows and all the shit that came with it.
but they FOUND a WAY. and ive spent years writing about how they found a way, and how we can get control of our computing again. roys shallow and (frankly) idiotic take on this was to suggest that you could go online and make a custom distro on a fucking website. nice try, dumb (lying) fuck-- the point of automated remastering was to make it so ONE PERSON could take control over literally a dozen distros at once and start doing things like removing and replacing init systems AND REMOVING NON-FREE SOFTWARE as well. it was to make it easier for smaller, less technical groups of people to have CONTROL over the distro.
now, which website can you go to for that? idiot. i wouldnt be so hard on him, except hes told so many lies and done so much to co-opt and spin (and yet try to encourage people to disregard) my work, do you know this fucking arsehole acts like hes PROMOTING what you write on top of that? hes worse than the music man, people. the music man wasnt soulless, all he wanted to do was scam people-- until they won his heart. youll never win with this sly, self-serving german piece of shit. because he doesnt play by (any) rules.
anyway, despite the fact that he misses the point deliberately, hes still quite useful as a bad example.
if you want to be free, you have to subvert (or dismantle and remove) the parts of the software (or hardware) that make you NON-FREE. the parts that you have no control over. and i think the world is agreed that until a day when we CAN fab our own semiconductors, the very most we can do is find hardware that has plans that are no longer patented and that we are free to study and use (and dont need to sign an nda or use a blob) i mean, its fucking COMPLICATED but not in the same way that rocket science is. actually, the issue is probably still LESS complicated than patent law, so roy should really stop his whinging.
what i was (still am) doing with the github research is trying to BOYCOTT github. and you cant-- i mean, just like with hardware, if you boycott github completely, you wont have a gui, you wont have png or jpeg support, you PROBABLY wont have a spellchecker (the gnu project has a spellchecker, but, its on microsoft github) and you wont have most programming languages-- the boost c++ libraries are on github, java moved, python (but not pypy) is there, lua isnt there but the libraries are, (so are most 3rd-party python libraries so i mostly just use the standard ones) and im not sure your system would even boot to a prompt at this point.
but its a straw man to say that im not using a gui (i am, right now) or saying that people should go back to a system that is only written in c. YOU SHOULD AT LEAST HAVE THE OPTION, THOUGH! and right now, the OPTION is elusive because nobody cares if i spent years migrating away from windows, mostly to protest MICROSOFT and their horrible treatment of users, ONLY TO HAVE THEM OWN GITHUB and HELLO, everything is fucking microsoft again!
what are we supposed to do? just bend over and say "cmon bill! im READY!"
i mean, thats not what im about. so instead, ive been RESEARCHING and DOCUMENTING just how to remove as much microsoft crap as possible. most window managers foolishly stay there, but dwm does not (a tiling wm takes getting used to, but when you do you HATE to go back to fiddling with fucking window resizing all the fucking time) and i JUST removed i3lock (and replaced it with an alternative from suckless, which is also where i got dwm from although i use very few tools from there) because its from a desktop/wm project that is based on github. and not only did i get rid of i3lock but another github dependency in the process.
what roy OUGHT TO understand (hes the one with a fucking phd, at least he says hes got one and i have no proof to the contrary) is that we are trying to RESIST (remove) things that impose themselves on the user.
its one thing to say "put this back if you like" but to be in a situation where your choices are either:
1. microsoft and ibm,
OR
2. ibm and microsoft
thats just NOT ENOUGH of a change from the days when these two fucks controlled all computing in the same decade the fucking fsf was founded, you know?
oh, but now its under a free license. which means that AFTER i get all of this shit (with microsofts permission) out of the clown, i can do what i want, or at least i could if they werent constantly trying to tie it together into a PRACTICALLY inseparable blob of 500 million fucking lines of code.
i want the fucking option, thank you very much. and roy, sorry, DOCTOR fucking arsehole, is so thick he thinks we just want to go back to the 70s. on top of this, he attacks "newer is better" (because its bullshit, it should be attacked) and doesnt notice (or doesnt care) that when he reduces these things to "primitivism" what hes actually saying is the same bullshit he suppsedly condemns: NEWER IS BETTER! but then when you dont actually mean anything you say, straw man arguments that amount to basically what you were just saying is stupid ("newer is better") arent a problem. when you have a monopoly on reality itself, its true when you say it and its bullshit if anybody else does (unless youre choosing to agree with them today).
we dont want to go back to the 70s, but we would like to at least go back to when we had gotten free of microsoft, if thats alright with you. it may take us around time a bit, because thats what setbacks (which arent ignored or handwaved or bullshitted away) do. a better (more honest) word than "primitivism" would be "regrouping".
we also tried trusting corporations with helping free software out. that was a fuckup-- we trusted them too much and they fucked us. now we cant trust them (nearly) as much, so those of us who WANT TO learn from the mistake will of course try to get farther away. and the corporations will paint that as primitivism. colonialism in fact, has a very long history of justifying exploitation by painting anybody who isnt on board as "primitive" and even (always a favourite) SAVAGE.
hmm, "savage computing" has a sort of nice ring to it. no roy, we arent primitive-- we are fucking SAVAGE!
but again, for this to be possible (ie an option) someone has to do actual research. roy doesnt have to use dwm, but at least he knows if he gets tired of using a window manager that depends on microsoft every-which-way, he has at least one option. maybe if more people decided to boycott github, more people would move. roys solution? pretend more people are moving than there really are. just fake it!
i mean if that worked for the pro-stallman list, we could just make up a few thousand names, and then all of a sudden the pro-stallman petition has twice as many signatures. but the only names that count are the real ones, so its better to just be honest about it the first time.
then the victory is real, and the petition actually means something. and since im not suggesting that anything shady like that happened, what i mean is that THE SAME GOES FOR GITHUB, ARSEHOLE!
in other words, PRETENDING things are getting better faster than they are, is not journalism-- its piss. but roy is into pissing on his readers, he does it all the time.
ive never had a problem with the fact that free software focuses on SOFTWARE. i DO however, have a problem with the fact that free software has been co-opted by open source and now, they dont even care if the entire gnu project is taken over. as long as stallman is "officially" the head of it, ibm can control it, and roy will only blame ibm (we should of course, blame ibm) but IF DEBIAN HELPS THEM, he wont say anything about it.
they ought to call it vichy muckrights, really. its the official broadcasting network (bsbc) of the vichy software foundation, or as i said in a little poem the other day:
```
a tax-free software foundation,
attacks free software
```
without the user having control over their computing, all the fsf can offer is "tax-free software" development.
meanwhile, some people really are still fighting for your freedom.
but finding solutions to modern threats takes RESEARCH.
roy just wants to talk about products, not research.
i get that, i do. but hes a fucking shill.
im glad that the movement has people (i think leah counts too) who are very interested in making hardware more free-- and not just shills who promote microsoft problems (they certainly arent solutions).
but roys new guest has a point, and a method, and some of us are interested (some of the people in irc are interested too, and if theyre not they can just use the ignore feature- thats how irc works).
what does roy say? theres other more solveable problems!
thats true, but when people work on those, he tells people not to bother with that either!
```
schestowitz__ I think this should not be out #1 concern Mar 08 19:20
schestowitz__ we can deal with systemd as vendor lock-in later Mar 08 19:20
schestowitz__ I see migrations away from Red Hat Mar 08 19:21
schestowitz__ the lock-in is not aggressive enough Mar 08 19:21
```
i dont know what he thinks "aggressive enough" would be-- lennart poettering personally snatching your computer from you in an alley, installing debian buster, and keeping a gun pointed at you if you even think about reaching for a bootable usb?
at any rate, roy spends more time telling people not to try to solve things than he does telling them how to solve anything. sure, he loves gemini. and gemini is great. but most of his actual solutions involve manipulating someone else to do work for him. telling people he promotes self-hosting, when everything from his volunteer host (he doesnt host his own irc, thats a pretty flowery take on things) to his raspberry spy running azure rtos he hosts a meagre percentage of things from, were all things other volunteers help him set up.
and thats alright, but then he acts like an authority on these things-- which he uses to discourage people from trying to be more free.
calling that "advocacy", and with so much of it (including everything i ever wrote for him) under false pretenses (he lies to you)-- its less like advocacy, more like using people.
doesnt he know that using people (based on false pretenses) as cheap labour is what "open source" is all about?
so of course he has to stop people from doing anything to be more free-- someone might compare the two, and then notice the difference!
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org