>>12584>lel someone please do a shoop of Stallman and Mao's face like they did with John Cena>>12585>Unfortunately, I don't think the Chinese version of RMS would be allowed (or at least be given the platform) to do what the American Stallman does/did.Oh you two think like a carbon copy of Stallman, except with Chinese ethnic features. Yeah that probably won't work, but the FOSS principles are pretty universal and can be adapted to the conditions in China.
The believe that there are fewer freedoms in China than in the west has more to do with propaganda than actual truth. Their discourse is very different, they don't talk about "freedoms" the way Americans or Europeans do, but if you actually compare how much people are constrained from exercising their will, i doubt your insinuations would prove correct. (to be fair this would need something like a serious academic effort where you follow a large population sample size through their daily lives and count how often they get their personal will blocked or nudged)
Look at the actuality of Foss software, it's more neutral, politically and philosophically than proprietary corporate wares.
Proprietary corporations have taken on aspects of a church, they combine technology with secular religion of one type or another, that's what makes it so irritating to use corporate tech, you have to buy into their visions. FOSS tech isn't entirely free from this, but it's easier to ignore all of that and just get utility from technology without getting harassed. The freedom in free software is used to make software based on technical considerations, to use what method works the best. In reality it's not used to challenge power, even if the rhetoric sounds like it. In free software all the code is published, that makes it less suitable for conspiratorial stuff.
Stallman often frames things in moralistic terms like "ethical software that respects the user". The material reality of this is the abusive elements (malicious features) in proprietary software are superfluous elements that aren't needed to make software function, they often make the functionality worse. Look at the Windows operating system, it has all sorts of malicious features, and you can complain about how immoral that is, but another way of looking at this is to say, an operating system does not need these features to work, it's unnecessary bits that can be removed, that make it cost less mental labor to build and maintain. There are many different ways you can come to the conclusion that FOSS is the better way of doing things. Maybe a Chinese Stallman would adapt the arguments for FOSS so that it makes sense for Chinese conditions.
>>12585>Propietary software has been very, very profitable for China, You're totally ignorant about this, even western capitalists ignore IP-laws alot, and treat it like a legal battlefield to harm competitors with copyright trolling. Chinese capitalists care even less about it then western capitalists. Proprietary technology means that rival capitalists use industrial espionage and reverse engineering to make copies. The only real effect is that nobody releases technical details about their technology to the general public, which means it takes a lot longer for technical know how to become part of the general intellect that makes it available for driving technological advances.
>especially considering it's historically been a lot less shy to ban western software in favor of homegrown alternatives than the other way around. That has nothing to do with software licenses.
>Politics aside for a moment, what incentive does China have to open-source apps like, say, TikTok or WeChat? The incentive to use open-source is because it has advantages for software development. There are less hurdles to get stuff done, to get security fixes patched, to attract talented software engineers that are familiar with the code base . You have to prove that there is an incentive to do all the extra work to keep software code secret.
>What incentive does it have to allow/provide a platform for software activists opposing the propietary monopolies?The benefits of opensource outweigh the downsides a lot, propriety software is just extra work for obscurantism. Open source software doesn't really prevent monopolies, because those are based on network effects, and concentration of capital like server farms, not software exclusivity.
I think offering opensource code is also a form of softpower. And proprietary software might be doomed anyway, eventually somebody will find a way to turn binary files back into easily readable source code. It might even be the next logical step in software development to have the ability to edit binary files on the fly in high level programing languages, even while you run the program, to speed up software devellopment.