Richard Stallman has cancer

pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 845 points –

From his website stallman.org:

Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.

Recent video of him speaking at GNU 40 Hacker Meeting. Screenshots of video stream.

118

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Is he accepting medical treatments that require non-free software? Serious question, from what I know of him he would rather die. I don't know if that changes when you're actually faced with it though.

Software freedom applies only to hardware you personally own. It wouldn't even apply to machines you interact with but do not own (such as ATMs or kiosks) since you aren't the one who agrees to the proprietary software license.

Stallman himself explains it in his computing FAQ.

If you would like to put my speech on the Internet, or distribute it in digital form, I insist on using the formats of the free software community: Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Speex

Streaming is a kind of Internet distribution, so everything in the previous section applies. In particular, you must use only Ogg format or Matroska VP8 (Webm).

http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/rms_speech_requirement.html

It seems reasonable to wonder if he'll allow an MRI image of his cancer if that image isn't saved in a Free format. I don't know where he draws the line, but his requirements seem to go quite a bit beyond what he owns or interacts with.

He mentioned once that he can use a bank that doesn't use free software because he's not logging in to it to do general purpose computing. I think the same would probably apply to medical treatments.

I believe he does extend it to JavaScript however, so if he were required to run unfree javascript on a webpage relating to his treatment that could be a problem.

It's embedded JavaScript though ... The code is available by design.

The code merely being "available" isn't the same thing as the user having the legal freedom to modify and share it. Besides, that's not always the case; sometimes JavaScript is minified, obfuscated, and packed in ways that make it effectively no different than any other compiled program.

Note that source code is "the preferred form for making modifications" so obfuscated code is by definition not "source."