Reasons not to use Uber

Even where he has good points, Stallman so often undercuts himself through overreach. Like, his decades-long attempt to rename things in a "pejorative" way or call them pejorative names when he doesn't like them is...weird. I mean, weird-for-him, not just weird. "Oh, we shouldn't call it Uber, we should call it Goober!" Are we back in fourth grade now? I mean, it's in the same vein as their redefinition of phrases into particular jargon (like, say, "free"), obviously, but then trying to use it in advocacy? Hasn't twenty years of wet-fart responses to the rhetoric taught him--or the FSF in general, who's usually pretty tin-eared too--anything?

Like much of hckrnews, I&#x27;ve stopped supporting AirBnB. Though we are usually extremely supportive of disruptive startups, the tide is starting to turn [1]<p>AirBnB and Uber are both profiting from &quot;disruptive innovation,&quot; or rather facilitating illegal actions. Both benefit the consumer but damage the community. It&#x27;s like buying a stolen bicycle.<p>AirBnB: Transforms residential housing into (in most jurisdictions) illegal hotels. Ask a local renter in NY or YVR how that&#x27;s working out for them.<p>Uber: Losing crazy amounts of VC cash to [often illegally] compete against traditional companies that must be cashflow positive. It&#x27;s not a level playing field. Laws exist so that drivers could make a livable wage; Uber is devaluing the medallions they&#x27;ve invested in.<p>Is this really how we want the world to see us?<p>Real disruptive innovations already have huge social implications: autonomous vehicle fleets, mobile phones, data collection&#x2F;mining, machine learning, CRISPR, cryptocurrency - the list is very long.<p>Why do we elevate companies like AirBnB and Uber that circumvent laws for profit to be our champions and unicorns?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11930080" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11930080</a>

Stallman is right on many points.<p>Uber, Airbnb, delivery services and the like are nothing more than glorified communication and payment tools.<p>These services can only be called &quot;sharing&quot; economy if they operate at zero profit and their app code is open source.<p>I think they should and pretty soon will be public services, developed by the community and run by local non profit organisations, like Firefighters.<p>Furthermore, these should be local services, catering to the specific circumstances of the city or town they operate in, obeying the local customs and so on.

I respect his views. He&#x27;s been consistently right in the long term. Many of the problems he predicted are currently with us. I recently discovered the StallmanWasRight subreddit as well. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;StallmanWasRight&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;StallmanWasRight&#x2F;</a>

My cousin is an Uber driver and comes from a more troubled past you could say. He drives a more basic type of car and tells me how it isn&#x27;t so great to drive for Uber anymore and how he wants to quit but is having a hard time finding something better. I had similar drivers tell me the same in the more basic type of car rides I had. When I took the more luxury experiences, the drivers seemed much happier and satisfied with Uber, even saying things like &quot;I love my job.&quot; which I never got from the base-model car drivers.<p>So this would lead me to guess the lower model drivers are being marginalized in order to get passengers an easier ramp (cheaper) into the Uber lifestyle. It is addicting once you start doing it, not having to park or worry about your car is pretty awesome, freeing actually as you can abstract transportation like a commodity. The company I consult for bought into Uber pretty deeply and gives some employees accounts to use whenever they need to for perks so Uber has deeply rooted into Business as well as something you should just do. But I do think the reason for this popularity has a lot to do with taking advantage of drivers&#x27; economic situation at the base-level on a thin razor line of it being just enough to be worth it to them. That&#x27;s business I guess and I&#x27;m sure the line will bump up and down in response to the quality of the base-line drivers&#x27; service to keep profits strong.

I would add:<p>It allows foreign corporation (uber) not paying taxes in your country to effectively taxate working people with 20% ubertax.<p>Big one: uber tax is proportional to ride while their cost is fixed.<p>Also these days in sankt petersburg or other cities in europe, uber &quot;driver&quot; is a guy leasing 5 cars and hiring 10.. 15 drivers to drive them 24h. Similar to waht airbnb &quot;shared&quot; economy became: buying bigger flat, remodellibg it to three small &quot; studios&quot; and try to rent 365 days a year. It would be fine if openly told and <i>admitted</i>, but its not what airbnb&#x2F; uber tells what it does. Also normal driver&#x2F;hosts can not compete ( economy of scale) with uber&#x2F;airbnb middlemen.<p>Also airbnb taxate country&#x27;s real estate while avoiding taxes itself. Also on proportional scale while having fixed cost.<p>They (uber&#x2F;airbnb) should be banned.<p>*this would ruin their business model, so they choose to lie instead.

Reasons to use Uber:<p>- I take out my phone, enter an address, and five minutes later a car picks me up.<p>- I take out my phone, enter a time and an address and right at that time a car arrives and picks me up.<p>It isn&#x27;t that complicated. Could taxi companies adopt these innovations? Sure, and now they are. Why didn&#x27;t they before? Because they are government protected and didn&#x27;t need to.<p>If we all just accepted the economic structures the government licenses and supports France&#x27;s minitel would still be the coolest network on the planet.

Also, this:<p>&gt; Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that&#x27;s what every country ought to do, unless&#x2F;until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don&#x27;t need to be employed.<p>This looks like complete Luddite statement - i.e. Uber must employ humans as drivers and government must prohibit driverless cars until there&#x27;s no need to work for anybody at all. For me this sounds insane. Why don&#x27;t ban bulldozers then or ATMs or factory automation or, for that matter, power looms? Until everybody gets basic income and nobody needs to be employed?<p>I mean I know it&#x27;s Stallman, but I didn&#x27;t expect him to also be a technophobe...

As far as privacy goes, I agree.<p>However, I think the context in a country like South Africa is different. Apart from Uber in big cities, we don&#x27;t have any reliable taxis (minibus, shuttle or car). Our taxis are notoriously unroadworthy and cause many accidents and they take part in violent taxi wars.<p>Our car taxis at places like the airport are known to exploit unaware customers. Minibus taxis are a standard way of getting to work for many poor people, but I don&#x27;t see any plans Uber has to compete with them yet.<p>In South Africa, Uber drivers (seemingly) earn quite a bit more money than they would be able to otherwise and they are generally very entrepreneurial people, in stark contrast to the taxi gangs.<p>Finally, I should point out that in many places in SA there simply were not any traditional taxi services (in the US sense), we generally only have minibus taxis. So Uber is performing a very convenient and otherwise unavailable service. Cape Town is perhaps a partial exception, and some other central city areas. But they are nowhere near Uber&#x27;s efficiency.

When I saw the title and author, my first thought was... &quot;Oh golly, another RMS rant about fundamentalism free software&quot;... However, that wasn&#x27;t the case. He presented a reasonable argument, with sources backing up his claims. I agree with many of his arguments..... but i&#x27;m still going to use Uber :(

This is all well and good. However, it doesn&#x27;t matter if every person who is every heard of stallman never sets foot in an uber, because statistically no one has heard of stallman. Regardless, I think it&#x27;s been pretty well shown at this point that as long as people are getting something for their lack of privacy (such a slimy but convenient taxi service) they&#x27;re OK with it. Short term convenience trumps basically anything else.<p>Recently I was stuck outside of Rome with no way to get into the centre city because I made the (understandable) mistake of trying to use public transport on a public holiday, and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with no trains running. Or taxis. Uber, to the rescue.<p>I really feel these days the only way to win is to compete. To build a better product that happens to also not invade your privacy. And I&#x27;m not sure there are market forces that make that possible.

So, why is there no GNUber?<p>Most of what Stallman complains about would go away if there were no profit-seeking corporation sitting in the middle. If no one were trying to collect a 20% tax on taxis, you wouldn&#x27;t need to pay with a credit card and you could have anonymous cash rides. Heck, without the need for a company to have something to take a 20% cut of, you could have actual ride-sharing.<p>A free, open-source app could be written and verified to not track its users, beyond the need to provide location services at the moment a call for a cab is placed.<p>So why haven&#x27;t I ever heard of the free, open-sourced alternative to Uber &amp; Lyft?

&gt; Uber has changed the regulations that cover charging passengers for making cars wait. This decision itself may not be objectionable. Taxis typically charge for making them wait. But that regulation is set by a city agency which is at least somewhat responsible to the people. Uber is a business headquartered somewhere else, which accepts no responsibility to the people of any city.<p>We should not allow a company to privatize the making of the regulations that create our social order.<p>??<p>What is wrong with a company deciding their late arrival penalty?<p>Stallman&#x27;s argument could apply to anything that a company decides.

If you&#x27;re having an affair or doing pretty much anything that you might not want people to know you&#x27;re doing, there are a hundred and one ways for people to find you. Users aren&#x27;t dumb. They know by the email receipt coming into their inbox complete with map that their movements are tracked. And they make a choice either way that suits their requirements or convenience. Having an affair? Get a cab and pay cash. Or take the risk. Personal choice, after all.<p>Uber might be a questionable company with questionable people in charge (referring to &#x27;boob-er&#x27; by Travis Kalanick for one), but they&#x27;re just flawed people, as apparently is the author with his quite childish style and apparent lack of reality or commercials.<p>Near me, Uber has made the previously shitty private hire cab industry up it&#x27;s game, with more drivers and an app experience a bit like Uber. But, let&#x27;s be clear. Uber probably weren&#x27;t the first in this space, they&#x27;re the ones that went out there, got funding, hired some smart people and delivered a good product and platform. And they existed because the industry, globally was pretty shitty, and bits of it still are. The good thing is that the consumer has choice.<p>And the calls in the comments that the platform should be free and open is lovely and idealistic. But do the talented engineers, designers and whoever else that works to make a well put together and scalable platform not deserve good pay for a job well done?<p>As a fair disclosure, I write, admire, build on-top-of free software and platforms when it meets my needs. I write this on a Mac, which also meets my needs. Choice exists and we&#x27;re all leveraging it.

&gt; If you take an ordinary taxi and pay cash, it will generate no records associated with you<p>I think that&#x27;s a foolish assumption. Standard taxis not only remember the phone number &#x2F; name &#x2F; address association, they are likely tracking the cabs as well these days. They also often have CCTV.<p>&gt; With real taxis, you can flag one on the street<p>Or not. Or they&#x27;ll tell you they won&#x27;t go where you want.

I am really disappointed at Stallman using this old canard of &quot;Uber is cheap but then they become a monopoly and will charge you huge sums forever&quot;. There&#x27;s no way for Uber to do with without government&#x27;s help and there&#x27;s no way to anybody to do it without government&#x27;s help really - maybe in very short term, but it would be so ruinous in the long term nobody would do it. It&#x27;s just fear mongering. Uber is not a monopoly, is not close to monopoly and will never be a monopoly, not unless some crazy government regulation suddenly makes it so.

Uber, Airbnb (and more of those modern &quot;community feel good&quot; services) are a slap in the face to all the workers who fought for workers rights and unions.

Well, this might be a locally constrained point of view and doesn&#x27;t have to hold true in other countries. But in my country, people don&#x27;t use Uber because Uber is great, people use Uber because Taxis are awful.<p>- The vehicles are mostly quite old (which is strange in this country where private vehicles on the road are relatively new).<p>- Many of the taxis are in bad hygienic conditions (many times dirty, practically always smelly).<p>- Many taxi drivers, are uneducated and impolite and just won&#x27;t shut up and let you have the ride you paid for in peace, some of them are plainly rude some times.<p>- The taxi drivers will make it difficult or even sometimes outright deny a receipt of the trip at the end.<p>- One of our best journals (i.e. the less sensationalist ones) made a research 2 years ago and found out that 80% of the taxi rides from the airport to the town would overcharge the costumer if he presented himself as a foreigner.

With respect to his point that Uber requires passengers to identify themselves, I think a completely anonymous transportation system is not what is needed. Why do conventional taxi services and public transit systems have cameras? The answer is ostensibly to provide safety not only to the rider but also to the driver and other passengers [1]. But I&#x27;m sure Stallman would say &quot;ban the cameras everywhere, Big Brother has no business tracking us!&quot; If I were a cab driver though, I would feel safer knowing that a video of the transaction was at least being captured. And as a passenger I would feel less violated if I knew that the video was stored offline and took some amount of effort to retrieve, could only by accessed by certain individuals, and even then only with proper oversight.<p>What is needed is a balance between privacy and safety. Uber violates user&#x27;s privacy, but fully anonymous transportation, especially in a one-on-one ridesharing situation, is unsafe for both parties. Law enforcement should be <i>hard</i>, not impossible.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;taxi.vic.gov.au&#x2F;drivers&#x2F;taxi-drivers&#x2F;driver-safety&#x2F;safety-cameras-in-taxis" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;taxi.vic.gov.au&#x2F;drivers&#x2F;taxi-drivers&#x2F;driver-safety&#x2F;sa...</a>

&gt; The US government can get [your trip history], and any lawsuit (such as a divorce lawsuit) can subpoena them<p>This sounds genuinely terrifying. Divorce lawyers will have their day if they can get a hold of that data.

Uber as an experience is nothing new, IIRC eastern Europe had this model for ages: the company accepts client requests, the company posts request to drivers, fastest driver accepts and gets the requests, after the ride client pays drivers directly (usually cash only), driver pays % to the company. This was first implemented with pagers + mobile phones, than with sms, than with j2me apps, and nowadays with android apps usually. So the taxi company is just a proxy, and there are all kinds of flavor available: illegal taxis, virtual companies, etc.<p>The only things Uber did: great UX, wide availability in the world (you use the same app everywhere), possibility of deferred payments (aka ride now, pay at some point before next ride) and driver ratings.<p>As usual with any infrastructural international project: whoever goes first and behaves boldly - will stay for quite some time, see PayPal, Visa, eBay, etc. One can argue that Uber is not perfect ideologically on paper, but any reasoning &quot;why we should make replacement for Uber&quot; are doomed because ROI is simply not there, while struggles to forbid Uber are also doomed - you may block the company, but you cannot forbid better UX, so Uber is already here to stay.<p>In the end would be better to change discussions from &quot;top 100500 reasons not to do something&quot; to &quot;top 100500 ways to make something better&quot;. There are concrete things available how to make Uber better, but instead everyone is just trying to forbid&#x2F;destroy&#x2F;etc.

I find Uber gives me freedom. I recently went from working full-time plus consulting and training on the side, to consulting and training full-time (www.verticalsysadmin.com).<p>My client is across town (Los Angeles) and it can routinely take more than an hour (more than 2 on bad days) to get across town. Driving in traffic wears on my soul. With Uber and my trusty T-mobile hot-spot, I can get an extra 2+ hours of work in per day and arrive fresh! Uber&#x27;s been a life-saver.

&gt; Uber plans to snoop on users&#x27; locations and contacts all the time. Uber has the technical possibility to do this because its app is nonfree: it is controlled by Uber, not by the user. In addition, snooping depends on a nonfree operating system.<p>&gt; Uber requires customers to run a nonfree program (an app).<p>&gt; The Uber app requires running other nonfree software (in the case of Android, Google Play).<p>These points are not strictly true. Uber may be used via the web interface [1] which can of course be used on a free operating system.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.uber.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.uber.com</a>

My objection to both Uber and AirBnB is purely a practical one. The person who provides the service is not obligated to honor a reservation. I have been stiffed twice this year:<p>• An Uber driver agreed to give me a ride to SFO in June 2016 but later cancelled the reservation with no explanation. Fortunately, I was able to hire a taxi and get to the airport on time.<p>• I used AirBnB to request a room in a home in Brooklyn last Spring for one night. The host decided that I &quot;was not a good fit for their family&quot; and decided not to rent the room to me.<p>What a joke.

<i>&quot;Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that&#x27;s what every country ought to do, unless&#x2F;until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don&#x27;t need to be employed.&quot;</i><p>To me this point is extremely valid, call it progress if you like, but to me this is just going to screw a lot of people over for the benefit of a few. Especially since big tech companies don&#x27;t seem to like paying tax to help with matters of welfare.<p>Also, taxi drivers aren&#x27;t always perfect but I&#x27;ve seen them do more than robotically take people from A to B. There can be other value provided by human interaction.

And some of the same arguments can make it safer to ride cabs? If I step into a strangers car (yes that includes cabs) I appreciate if there are some public records of me doing so. Makes it easier for CSI to find me...

He is absolutely right. It seems that in America personal data are not properly protected and corporations can do whatever they want.<p>And making people work long hours is bad too. Isn&#x27;t sleepy driver dangerous for everyone?

&gt; Abuse of Drivers<p>Aren&#x27;t there minimum salary levels that must must guaranteed in US?

I think most of his concerns only matter when Uber is monopolizing the market.<p>As the example in his privacy point, if I have an One Night Stand, I could just get in with Uber and get out with Lyft. My location history is then protected as long as the companies are still rivals and don&#x27;t share info.

Might just be a bit too exaggerated, especially about the comparison with taxi. I don&#x27;t think Uber is great but let&#x27;s be honest, the taxi system is not great in a lot of places either and taxi drivers in a lot of cases are treated even much worse. In China the simple fact is Uber-like companies have allowed people to earn so much more than under monopolized taxi companies, such that huge swarms of taxi drivers just simply quit their jobs already. Most drivers I talked to are very happy with their income and flexible working hours (with many part-timing), so I&#x27;m not sure where the &quot;15-hour-per-day&quot; work applies to. Certainly not what I could see.<p>Of course, this could also be a result of the short-term boom of this industry, where big players are just investing tons of money. The long-term impact remains to be seen. I predict a lot of drivers will be out of job by then since there&#x27;re way too many of them currently. But to say &quot;we must preserve this job done by human beings because we don&#x27;t have universal income yet&quot; is sheer nonsense. I can&#x27;t believe somebody so proficient with technology could say that. I&#x27;m all in for universal income, but for each technological advancement there&#x27;re bound to be old jobs washed out. Artificially holding them does absolutely no good to progress and people&#x27;s well-being. Honestly if that&#x27;s what&#x27;s been happening throughout the history there would be no computer boom, no RMS at all and he&#x27;ll certainly be doing something else.<p>Also, Uber technically doesn&#x27;t even exist any more in China (sold to its competitor in the form of its shares). Anyways, it&#x27;s imaginable that some local government tries to contact such companies for data and certain crowd control, but it was unlikely to be something centralized. I really hate the &quot;repressive China&quot; stereotype being emphasized again and again. Remember even the US federal government bought tons of data from FB&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram etc. to control protesters, so I don&#x27;t see any difference here.

ITT: Lots of people talking about how Stallman is this, Stallman is that, when Stallman is once again 110% right -- this time, about Uber.

The points made in the article are horrifying. I have never used Uber. I walk or take public transit. I expect this pattern to continue anyway, but count me as someone convinced that Uber is a terrible idea.

What is the minimum set of data Uber must collect and store about me in order to know that:<p>* I will pay for the ride<p>* I won&#x27;t assault the driver or commit some other crime against the driver and Uber<p>* I won&#x27;t make a mess in the car<p>* I will be courteous and civil<p>How do we shift the competitive environment so that Uber&#x2F;Lyft et al see minimal privacy invasion as a feature customers value highly?<p>Answer: it&#x27;s bullshit. pretty much nobody cares. that&#x27;s why Stallman felt he had to write that article in the first place. the vast majority of customers don&#x27;t give a crap about these questions.

Only in an echo chamber will you find people who suddenly think taxis are somehow morally superior to Uber.<p>Sure, uber did some things wrong in the past, but Uber in 2016 is nothing like Uber in 2013-2014. The management has grown up and accepted the responsibilities is has towards its drivers and riders and takes it very seriously.<p>You don&#x27;t hear the stories of how Uber pay drivers when they have outages or how happy most drivers actually are. Instead most people appear happy to vilify Uber for some weird reason.

HN is about startups, VCs and using free software to profit. There is nothing remotely wrong with this but the priorities of this forum and users are completely different to someone like Stallman.<p>In this case he raises critical and pertinent points for users to consider, but those vested in building Uber, Google and the entire surveillance economy are going to reject or dilute these points. Just like those who risk losing their livelihood from global warming reject it.

The point about discrimination against minorities seems overblown? I&#x27;ve read that the Uber&#x2F;Lyft model works a lot better for blacks trying to get a cab.

I also felt morally opposed to Uber initially, but after thinking it through; I like having wealthy investors in the US subsidise my rides - So now I use it all the time.<p>For every ride, money comes out of the investor&#x27;s pockets and goes to the driver&#x27;s pockets and also my pockets (in the form of big discounts) - So it&#x27;s great.<p>If they remove the subsidies and raise prices, I&#x27;m gone ;p

&gt; With a free system, the user could tell the system to lie to the Uber app.<p>Stuff like this makes it hard for me to take RMS seriously when he&#x27;s preachy. I have so many issues with this statement that are hard for me to verbalize, but the most notable issue is how not rooted in reality a statement like this is.

Stallman is the man, and you have to admire him, but wow - is there <i>anything</i> that he <i>can</i> actually use&#x2F;buy&#x2F;compile&#x2F;browse? It&#x27;s like his universe of potential activities runs through a filter() which always returns false.

Although I agree with many of Stallman&#x27;s points, it is, unfortunately, true that this post will most likely not change anything at all.<p>What percent of Uber users read Stallman&#x27;s website or even HN? Probably less than 1%.<p>The sad thing is the general populace of the United States (or even, the world) doesn&#x27;t care if their data are being tracked or kept; or if their personal information is being recorded; the work of people like Edward Snowden has done little to change the behavior of most internet consumers.<p>It is enormously difficult to change the behaviors of these users, probably even impossible.

&gt; Uber has changed the regulations that cover charging passengers for making cars wait. This decision itself may not be objectionable. Taxis typically charge for making them wait. But that regulation is set by a city agency which is at least somewhat responsible to the people. Uber is a business headquartered somewhere else, which accepts no responsibility to the people of any city.<p>We should not allow a company to privatize the making of the regulations that create our social order.<p>This is such bullshit. A company can have their headquarters in a single place only!

With uber I pay what I have to. With a real taxi I have to pay 3€ only for entering the taxi. Either the taxi company is changing its offer or I stick with uber.

&quot;Taxis typically charge for making them wait. But that regulation is set by a city agency which is at least somewhat responsible to the people.&quot;<p>I thought the whole reason that Uber gained traction initially was that city agencies often suck, are not responsive, and preside over crappy services such as regulated taxi business, which if you venture outside America&#x27;s major cities tend to be absolutely atrocious.

Co-ops are the more ethical approach: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;platformcoop.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;platformcoop.net&#x2F;</a>

I have seen Uber&#x27;s commission misstated in a few posts: Uber takes $1.55 off the top of each ride for a booking fee and then 28% of the remaining amount. This means for short rides Uber takes 40%+ of the fare, depending on the city.<p>I would love to see a drivers guild get formed, maybe structured as an employee owned company.

This is true we all deep down know this is true the sharing economy uber style is a giant scam.

I&#x27;m regularly reminded of the genial title of an old album by the punk band Dead Kennedys:<p>&quot;Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death&quot;<p>(&quot;Why not both?&quot; has been added lately to the trope repertory as a witty rejoinder ;-)

Which is greater: His desire for us to have a &quot;free&quot; (liberty) society, or his resentment of those are trying to earn a living and simply can&#x27;t afford to stand up for his principles?

Total misunderstanding of economics along with voluntary submission to the State, that&#x27;s just what I could read from this whole shit.

Why are we giving so much attention to this guy?

Hey, I&#x27;ve never used Uber. I&#x27;m in Australia where we don&#x27;t tip taxis, are you supposed to tip Uber drivers?

Does anybody know of an open source uber-like platform that could be used by local communities?

TIL: Uber is the new TCL. [1]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;afs&#x2F;cs&#x2F;academic&#x2F;class&#x2F;15462-f94&#x2F;public&#x2F;other&#x2F;rms.text" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;afs&#x2F;cs&#x2F;academic&#x2F;class&#x2F;15462-f94&#x2F;public...</a>

s&#x2F;Guber&#x2F;GNUber&#x2F;g

I tried to use Uber, but it asked me on registration to provide paypal details<p>Since I do not have Paypal due to being banned (they never told me why) that was that...

We need a free-software distributed p2p replacement for Uber.

&gt; Uber pays drivers peanuts; we should call it &quot;Goober&quot;, or rather &quot;Guber&quot;.<p>Drivers are free to not drive for Uber. Uber operates within a free market. Obviously, the economic incentives are enough for many.<p>Amusing that the godfather of free software has so little understanding of the free market.