Sv: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

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> You cannot know.

Exactly. That was a point I was making. One can not know. But  we have to;know. There
is no way around knowing facts., and that iswhy we can not have blobs​; and that is why
I said RMS is completely correct about that.

There is big difference between a fact and trust. Facts are true because of their
intrinsic nature, regardless of our preferance; wether we like that thruth or not.
Trust is something one choose by preferance. It can (and should) be based on facts, but
it does not have to, it can be based on emotions, wishes and maybe other subjective
opinion.

Facts can be verified; trust does not have to. So no; trust is not good enough.

For the rest your post; I do understand that you value Free and open source software, just
as I do, and I definitely share your opinion about things improving (search the archives).

However I feel that it was misstake to construct the argument I did, I should have known
that people will missunderstand it; I really ment to construct a philosophical argument to
point out how little we really know, not to compare Intel vs Purism per se. I used names as
illustration, I should have used X and Y. I certainly don't mean harm to neither Intel nor Purism,
discussion who is bad guys and who is good guys certainly does not belong to emacs-devel
so I appologize for that.

Furthermore if you are referreing to Prism when you say Intel is known to spy on millions,  then I
am think that  probablyany company approached (ordered) by the goverment would probably do
the same. Lets restrain from using company names here; and yes rms is probably correct, this
discussion is getting out of hand, so maybe better to continue it off  the list.
________________________________
Från: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
Skickat: den 20 oktober 2020 22:11
Till: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
Kopia: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>; eliz@gnu.org <eliz@gnu.org>; Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>; ak@akirakyle.com <ak@akirakyle.com>; emacs-tangents@gnu.org <emacs-tangents@gnu.org>
Ämne: Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

* Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> [2020-10-20 16:50]:
> Consider Intel and Purism. What considers me, they are both US based
> private business (I don't know how much US or private Intel is, but I
> guess). So what we are doing is exchanging a blob for company A for a
> blob of company B. Blob from B should disable blob from A. How do I know
> B is not run secretely by some goverment organisation that likes
> to spy on it's own citizens and foreign ones. Just recently we learned
> there was a supposedly independent Swiss company that sold a
> cryptography machines to goverments all over the world. It turned out it
> was secretely collaborating with CIA that gott keys to decrypt
> everyone's secrets :D. Russians never bought it, but some other
> countries did.

You cannot know.

Difference between Intel and Purism is way too big, Purism is
providing fully free operating system that is somehow verified and
endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. Those are reasons why Purism
gets trust points.

Intel is already known to spy on millions, there are reasons not to
trust Intel.

Trust in the second definition in Wordnet dictionary is following:

2. (3) reliance, trust -- (certainty based on past experience; "he
wrote the paper with considerable reliance on the work of other
scientists"; "he put more trust in his own two legs than in the gun")

What we know about Intel about past experiences? Huge insecurity. By
having MINIX operating system in the CPU, doing what it wants, I do
not know what type of true control I have over my computing.

What we know about Purism about past experiences? They are providing
full free operating system, liberating people, giving them control
over their computing.

You can observe what groups are doing, you can hire independent
security researcher to verify the software, if that is expensive, you
may rely on groups by looking what are they doing.

> Idea of blobs is bad; and Dr. Richard S. is completelycorrect about
> blobs not being acceptable. But then, we need to live in this world
> as it is; so we need a sustianable solution for the future. I don't
> know if limiting what Emacs can do on capabilities of a machine from
> the past is a best strategy; but I am not very wise, and certainly
> did not do enough research and thinking in the area, so this is just
> my ramblings and consideration; unfortunately I have no answers
> myself.

What I can see over last 20 years, there was no free operating system
for phones, today we have several, we have free operating systems for
computers, and many proprietary software liberated, even huge
corporation like Microsoft contributes to free software. Many social
improvements sprung up from free software movement.

Today after 20 years, we do not need to live in this world "as it is",
we know we can improve conditions, even by only promoting set of
principles. And it requires uncompromised stubbornes. Today we are
exposed to spying more than in old times.

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