Drew Chadwick DeVault / ddevault / SirCmpwn - Opinionated white-male-guilt-ridden software developer. Cancelled Hyprland and slandered it as "toxic" and transphobic. Hates X11 users and Hacker News. Lolicon.

[Flatline]

Drew's character assassination of Richard Stallman

He and his coterie have considered sending this letter to any organizers allowing RMS to speak at their events.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

The pleasure card thing is such a weird thing to get hung up on. To my surprise, it's not from Drew's hitpiece, which mostly focuses on framing RMS as a pedophile and rapist. Where did it come from?

Here's the explanation I learned: When traveling one is commonly asked if it is for business or pleasure; businessmen also carry business cards; RMS is no businessman, and so he carries pleasure cards. It's a harmless joke.

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Here's the explanation I learned: When traveling one is commonly asked if it is for business or pleasure; businessmen also carry business cards; RMS is no businessman, and so he carries pleasure cards. It's a harmless joke.

That I'm aware of, but why is it constantly mentioned in the Reddit thread? The Epstein and pedophilia stuff is quoted out of context but at least looks bad out of context. In contrast, the pleasure cards are so harmless even when presented like this that they shouldn't be mentioned the way they are in the thread. That suggests to me that they were part of some set of talking points (like Drew's screed) that the posters are using, but I don't remember seeing such.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

That I'm aware of, but why is it constantly mentioned in the Reddit thread?

Oh, it's mentioned for the same reason MicroSoft subreddits aren't flooded with mentions of Bill Gates' visits to Epstein Island: They're useful idiots. I see no need for a better explanation than this.

That suggests to me that they were part of some set of talking points that the posters are using, but I don't remember seeing such.

They were just part of the old playbook and haven't been retired yet.

 

[The Real Slim Shady]

It's been discussed on the forums (I think in the OSS thread) that Stallman is an industrial grade sperg. This in itself is harmless, in fact his obsesiveness over open source software has a net good value. I do not agree with GNU license in general, but I see him as a valuable voice to contradict the software as a service crowd who'd make you sell your own mother for a right to access the software for the next month.
Stallman being a sperg means he has no idea how to interact with people. The pleasure cards are a good example. I know it's a joke, you know it's a joke. The random person who sees an unwashed, scruffy obese man hand them a "pleasure card" is the exact same situation as presented in the "Hello, Human Resources?" meme. This and his various non-software related comments make him an ideal target for the woke crowd. I can easily imagine the rape allegations are because he said something about how rape is sometimes not rape (I vaguely recall him getting canceled over something along those lines). That would be very like him, saying something which can be logically true but in a way that is so coarse it pisses everyone off.
That is not to say I completely agree with him and defend him at all costs. He is a weird person, his computing habits are borderline schizophreniac. He has a lenghty essay on his website about how he uses his computer. It's dated but it shows how he sees the world. The website also has a lot of other more controversial essays on various topics unrelated to computers, which is also a plenty of reasons for the alphabet gang to cancel him. He talks about everything. The article on why paid toilets are bad is right next to a text about why Skype is bad. The bolded section lists some political sperging and concludes with a link to why singular "they" is bad. In fact a large stallman.org website has a whole section for essays about why X is bad.

I do not fully agree with him, I do not hate him either. He is old and he is not going to change his ways. What I am afraid of is that when he dies, there will be no-one to take up his place, because every other option is 100x worse. And I can't help but notice how the attacks agains him have taken up in power when he announced he's got cancer. A lot of people hate him because he preaches things which are not conveinient.

 

[AnOminous]

It's been discussed on the forums (I think in the OSS thread) that Stallman is an industrial grade sperg. This in itself is harmless, in fact his obsesiveness over open source software has a net good value. I do not agree with GNU license in general, but I see him as a valuable voice to contradict the software as a service crowd who'd make you sell your own mother for a right to access the software for the next month.

None of the people viciously attacking Stallman are worth the toejam he eats from his own toes.

They are absolute garbage Microsoft shills who should be put against a wall and then whatever happens to be done to people put against a wall should be done to them. Or they should have what Robespierre would have done to them done to them.

Fucking scumbags. These people are absolutely worthless and should be disposed of as the absolutely worthless garbage they are.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Imagine going onto a forum just to signal to irrelevant others about how you hate and will bully some guy you barely have any connection to which will reward you in no way. Like what do they think they are? The terrorist forum Kiwi Farms?

 

[UNIXLover]

What I am afraid of is that when he dies, there will be no-one to take up his place

Take his place of doing what exactly?

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

This in itself is harmless, in fact his obsesiveness over open source software has a net good value.

Open Source misses the point.

Take his place of doing what exactly?

I license most of my work under the GNU Affero General Public License version three, and no later version. I do this because I don't trust what the FSF will become after Stallman dies. A great deal of software is licensed under any later version, and therefore affected by any future GPLv4. Google, Apple Computer, MicroSoft, and many other corporations salivate at the thought of installing some faggot who can push through a bad version of the license. So, stopping that is one thing Stallman currently does.

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Take his place of doing what exactly?

Not taking rotten compromises. As it stands, Stallman is likely to be replaced by Reasonable™ people to whom it's totally fine if half your driver is binary blobs. Or the entire driver for that matter, because gee, do you REALLY care, it basically makes no difference at this point anyway. Think about how much more palatable the free software movement will become once the autismo is gone and we defang every important aspect of it! Free software can finally take over the world - and be completely ineffectual despite that.

I have no doubts whatsoever that an FSF without Stallman would have been eaten alive by the Open Source Initiative back in the day.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

I'll note this: There's an awful lot of websites and other community projects that accept casual submissions from outsiders, and I usually give up when I'm told to make a pull request on GitHub and can't locate an e-mail address; however, there was one such project that was also hosted on SourceHut, and I very much like the fact that I could simply send an e-mail and let it be that. SourceHut is nice, if only because it doesn't force me to join it to interact with the people on it.

It's truly a shame a creepy little control freak like Drew runs it.

 

[UNIXLover]

So, stopping that is one thing Stallman currently does.

Releasing a GPLv4 requires 66% of the board to vote yes (4 out of the 6 members). Stallman is just 1 member. It's not like an evil GPL license is constantly being suggested and he is holding out against it. It's purely a theoretical situation. If we are talking about a theoretical overtake Stallman can be voted off the board and then it doesn't really matter. I don't see his role of upholding the integrity of the GPL to be hard to find a replacement for.

people to whom it's totally fine if half your driver is binary blobs. Or the entire driver for that matter, because gee, do you REALLY care,

According to Stallman it is fine as long as those binary blobs are not updatable by the OS. If you are looking for someone who has a hard line against binary blobs Stallman is not the person. Drawing arbitrary lines in the sand does not contribute to the freedom of the public's computing. Stallman drew some arbitrary lines years ago, that does not explain why the free software foundation still needs him today. I personally think the FSF's stance on binary blobs is a rotten compromise as it unnecessarily vilifies the ability to apply security updates despite there being no net change in computing freedom when doing so. Stallman already left the FSF for a period of time and the sky didn't fall. The FSF is old and stuck in their ways. Stallman permanently leaving the FSF would not cause any big changes.

 

[UNIXLover]

Following Redis' announcment [A] that they are changing their license going forward to RSALv2+SSPLv1 (a proprietary license and a stronger version of AGPL) Drew has launched https://redict.io/ which plans to be a "conservative continuation" of Redis whose future contributions will be licensed under the LGPL. In the announcement blog post Drew has already said that he wants to adapt the project to the way he thinks the project will work by saying that he is getting rid of vendored dependencies, aka distros are now able to ship the software with incompatible libraries that the database hasn't been tested or designed for, and being "more downstream agnostic" which he says will include removing the integration Redis has with ppstart and systemd, which ironically makes it less agnostic since now it would always act in a cross platform way instead of being able to adapt to the way the host distro is doing things.

https://redict.io/posts/2024-03-22-redict-is-an-independent-fork/ [A]

Will Drew's Redis fork become the defacto "Open" fork that continues to be maintained instead of dying after the hype wears off or will that title be taken by someone else? Stay tuned to find out.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Following Redis' announcment [A] that they are changing their license going forward to RSALv2+SSPLv1 (a proprietary license and a stronger version of AGPL) Drew has launched https://redict.io/ which plans to be a "conservative continuation" of Redis whose future contributions will be licensed under the LGPL. In the announcement blog post Drew has already said that he wants to adapt the project to the way he thinks the project will work by saying that he is getting rid of vendored dependencies, aka distros are now able to ship the software with incompatible libraries that the database hasn't been tested or designed for, and being "more downstream agnostic" which he says will include removing the integration Redis has with ppstart and systemd, which ironically makes it less agnostic since now it would always act in a cross platform way instead of being able to adapt to the way the host distro is doing things.

https://redict.io/posts/2024-03-22-redict-is-an-independent-fork/ [A]

Will Drew's Redis fork become the defacto "Open" fork that continues to be maintained instead of dying after the hype wears off or will that title be taken by someone else? Stay tuned to find out.

>removing vendored dependencies
>removing systemd integration

Stop it, Drew, you're making it very hard for me to hate you.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

RSALv2+SSPLv1 (a proprietary license and a stronger version of AGPL)

I wouldn't really describe it that way, but whatever. It's funny how these companies go straight from BSD to proprietary. I barely even know what Redis is, but I know not nearly so many would've used it if it had been under copyleft this entire time, and figure the company is probably going to enter its death throes. Copyleft would've been the way to go from the beginning, if they cared about what they claim to care, but it's very obviously motivated by money alone.

As @Rusty Metal Skull Gun has written, neither of those changes are bad. Looking at the website for Redict, it seems perfectly reasonable. Honestly, it would be nice if Drew were to stop being an lolcow, which shouldn't be so fucking hard, but I just hate to see a reasonable project that's very obviously going to be destroyed by one particularly political person.

 

[UNIXLover]

As @Rusty Metal Skull Gun has written, neither of those changes are bad.

With 0 arguments. My point is that if he wanted to be conservative with his continuation of Redis he shouldn't be modifying the project to follow his personal preferences.
There is no reason to remove systemd integration as there is practically 0 maintenance burden in keeping what already exists. It's not like systemd integration is hundreds of lines of complex code. All it is doing adding things like calls to sd_notify(0, "READY=1") or sd_notify(0, "Redis is loading...\n"). For people who already have a service file for Redis that uses Type=notify like the example service provided in the repo Redict removing this integration will break it. As a conservative continuation you should be able to just replace redis with redict and have things still work instead of having to go fix service files.
In regards to the vendored dependencies looking into it further redis does not vendor all of their dependencies, but rather ones they have forked. For example jemalloc was forked to customize it for Redis to provide better performance. I don't think regressing performance is appropriate for a conservative continuation.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/112158268895991558, https://archive.is/XqeLc

>hjkl
Is that a vim tattoo...?

 

[Creative Username]

>hjkl
Is that a vim tattoo...?

Manliest vim user btw*
*This post was sponsored by the Emacs Enjoyer Committee.

 

[Sperg Coalition]

>hjkl
Is that a vim tattoo...?

Real men use GNU Nano, it just works!

 

[skunt]

Stop it, Drew, you're making it very hard for me to hate you.