Opensource

Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Richard Stallman as a visionary prophet of digital freedom while simultaneously abandoning every principle he fought for?

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This is the Stallman Paradox: the growing chasm between our intellectual reverence for genuine free software principles and our practical convergence on venture capital-optimized extraction models that merely cosplay as "open source."

I'm not entirely sure who "we" refers to, but it sounds like they are either very confused, or they are liars. Perhaps they have been bamboozled by corporate interests trying to undermine and co-opt the free software movement and philosophy, or perhaps they are agents of those corporate interests trying to bamboozle you.

That's not new; it's been happening since the moment free software started picking up steam, decades ago. Consider some of these choice quotes from Stallman himself at his speech at a Web3 conference just last year:

I'd like to say more about the difference between Free Software and open source because it's a topic of great confusion. I founded the Free Software movement in 1983 with the announcement. The term Open Source was coined fourteen years later in 1998 when Free Software was becoming widely used and starting to be something people knew about. But not everyone who worked on or used or promoted Free Software agreed with the philosophy of freedom behind it. And the people who didn't agree wanted to get out of connection with it by and many of them were working for businesses or with businesses that didn't care about freedom at all. So, they found a new term, Open Source, which they defined differently but it overlapped a lot... But the biggest difference is that the term Open Source has never had any implications about right and wrong. It was, that idea was launched that way by people who didn't see it as a matter of right and wrong. So that's why I decided I would not start using that term.

And what does Stallman think of cryptocurrency?

I've never used cryptocurrency. There were things I found disappointing and worrisome when I learned about BitCoin. And it's not clear to me that others are much better... I don't want to do currency speculation myself at all.

He prefers GNU Taler as a distributed payment system. Taler is not a cryptocurrency, but it solves a lot of the problems that cryptocurrency pretends to solve.

Now with Taler the payer is anonymous but the payee is always identified, which means that Taler does not help millionaires hide lots of money from taxation. The world has a tremendous problem with wealth that is hidden and cannot be taxed. It's part of the way that billionaires have been transferring more and more of the world's wealth to them leaving less and less for everyone else. And this change is on the order of twenty percent of the world's wealth. It's an enormous change that impoverishes people who are not rich but even worse it gives the rich people the power of oligarchy, the power to buy governments and that threatens democracy. That threatens the rights of all of us but if we insist on payment systems that don't permit the hiding of large amounts of wealth, that problem will get less instead of more.

"How much do you know about Web3?"

Not a tremendous amount, that's not my field.

So again I wonder who this "we" refers to. Who is so confused as to associate Richard Stallman and Free Software with cryptocurrency and web3? I mean, the fact that he was invited to speak at a web3 conference suggests it's a lot of people in the field, but god damn.