These are notes from a recent talk by Richard Stallman, hosted by the CS dept. at UT Austin

Why is it binary? One or the other—computers controlled by humans, or users controlled by computers? If it isn’t, what is the balance to be had here?

Free software necessitates a collective. the collective does not have to be exclusively programmers, but it may have a programmer who volunteers to make changes that the collective desires… relate to my question at the bottom though.

Proprietary malware—MS gave NSA bugs they know so they have a backdoor to Windows

I should think deeper about the effect that free software has on hardware (because i think it does). specifically hardware markets.

“Don’t ignore the disgust that you feel.” - the disgust of having your data be somewhere other than your own computer…

His first experience with closed software was encountering NDAs for Xerox source code. Makes me think, if HF is signing NDAs to work with model providers in the serving of models, the code to run the models, without documentation of the model architecture, it is almost impossible to put the weights to use. putting the weights to use is an important aspect.

“non-free software divides people, because they deny people’s rights to cooperate” (interesting point)

as computers get more complex, the software needed gets more complex. so the labor needed to write that software increases, and thus the burden increases for the collective.

fine line between safety and surveillance. the 3d printer example, sending the artifact being printed to a server so that they can check whether it’s a gun part or not. of course, this is a safety issue, but i’m assuming you have an automatic distrust against the enforcer of this safety check. who do you trust? is safety possible in free software? how do we, say, trust the free software foundation?