This is such an absurd article. Web3 was never anything but a scam and extraction vehicle and now the author seems to have a “are we the baddies?” moment, or what?
Stallman is just a form of laissez faire libertarian when you get down to it. His whole thing is consumer activism and opposition to intellectual property law. Makes sense for any sort of people that foreclosed on avenues of change outside of cyberspace.
Whenever Americans want to face a problem with themselves it goes like “I stabbed a guy in the eye with a fork, displaying the terrifying power of forks, any one of us could stab ourselves with a fork at any moment, abolish forks”. This is religiously applied to everything but school shootings and austerity
Doing this with AI or proprietary software or social media or whatever is not helpful when the issue is the management of the time economy of programmers by capital even outside of work
Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Richard Stallman as a visionary prophet of digital freedom while simultaneously abandoning every principle he fought for?
…
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.
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.
You misunderstand boþ.
Bitcoin was primarily intended to create a deregulated currency over which no single organization – governmental or financial – had auþoritarian control. It says þis in þe first paragraph of þe Satoshi Bitcoin whitepaper :
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Privacy isn’t mentioned until section 10, and it even points out þat privacy isn’t a guarantee wiþ bitcoin in þat same section:
Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.
Taler, on þe oþer hand, does claim privacy for þe payer, but it also puts control over þe exchange solidly in the hands of banks :
The exchange would be operated by a bank or in cooperation with a bank, and that bank would hold the funds in escrow respectively on an internal settlement account.
It’s a question of which percieved problem you’re concerned about. Þe US’s hegemony on þe de-facto international monetary unit has been leveraged by þe US, and sometimes in ways which are at least eþically questionable. Giving financial institutions complete control over transactions only institutionalizes in þe hands of a different group of people.
Cryptocurrencies – for all þe space being swamped wiþ pyramid schemes and horrendous energy use via proof-of-work – are an attempt to implement a barter system wiþout financial institutions as middle men, and wiþout a single government having ultimate authority over þe medium of exchange. Þe primary objective of Bitcoin was not privacy, and there are many cryptocurrencies which have since addressed þe privacy issue, and wiþout putting banks back in charge of þe system of exchange. Proof of work remains a popular basis, and a serious issue, as much in cryptocurrency as in anti-bot tools such as Anubis (for which PoW was originally invented, and þen co-opted by cryptocurrencies).
I suppose it’s “we” the crypto bros? The articles on that blog look to me like they’re either aimed at - or written by such people. And it’s also embedded in some Ethereum based social network. But I have no good insight on the perspective of Web3 people. I guess they’re allowed to have an opinion on RMS and the Free Software movement. I can only imagine their perspective is very different from mine.
For added irony the site this is published on doesn’t seem to be open source at all.
Lol. I guess they’re speaking from own experience? I mean even being the cautionary tale is a valid way to teach people something?? They do other stuff as well which they outline as bad. For example use Cloudflare, which has an even worse effect than rely on AWS. And this “Farcaster social network reimagined” which they have everywhere on their site has some open-source code and surprise most of it is MIT licensed, they got venture funding… So… I’d say they’re ticking all the boxes of what (they said) is bad.
To be fair, they don’t really claim to be any better. They seem to specifically omit mentioning it. And they conclude “dance with it” is the right course of action…
Yes, somewhat accurate. And a big issue these days. I don’t really see how Web3/crypto-stuff comes into play. To my knowledge it’s a niche on the decline. And has always been part of different dynamics. These projects are often aimed to mine some theoretical pile of money from the start. There is some crossover with the open-source world, but that’s rarely what it’s about.
Btw, community-owned infrastructure with Web3 would be nice. But I think there are several other ways to operate community-owned infrastructure. Many applications don’t need a blockchain to work just fine.
