Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

The OSI has in recent years been an ardent defender of free software principles, holding fast to the Debian Free Software Guidelines despite corporate pressure to approve various licenses where the source is technically open but fundamental freedoms are gone.

And, importantly, these corporate interests care about labeling their software as "open source" but not about labeling it as "free software." The FSF would say these licenses aren't "free software," but the corporate interests don't want people to think about fundamental freedoms anyway, so they wouldn't mind. It's therefore very important that someone is out there saying that you can't be "open source" either without the fundamental freedoms, and the OSI has been doing exactly that.

The fact that the FSF does not recognize what the OSI is doing for free software and sticks by an essay from roughly 20 years ago consisting of their opinions about users of the term "open source" is evidence of the FSF's continuing leadership failure - the FSF has been completely irrelevant in the discussions about the SSPL etc., which are among the biggest practical threats to free software today, and not only do they not realize that there's a job to be done, they don't realize who's been doing it, either.

But even that decade-old essay has a very clear footnote:

> Lakhani and Wolf's paper on the motivation of free software developers says that a considerable fraction are motivated by the view that software should be free. This is despite the fact that they surveyed the developers on SourceForge, a site that does not support the view that this is an ethical issue.

That is, a lot of people believe in the ethical imperative that the FSF calls "free software," even if they don't themselves phrase it in a way that the FSF approves of.

Red Hat releases most things under free licenses and as far as I know everyone on the GCC steering committee from Red Hat was there pre-acquisition. That said, I don't love the GCC steering committee for many reasons (many of which admittedly were before most of their appointments). You are right, though, that much of the steering committee for GCC isn't pro-freedom as much as it is pro-convenience (and in the case of SiFive, is a very proprietary company).

...also, the GCC steering committee isn't representative of all of GNU.

> Also, if we're going to claim that working for a proprietary-software company means you're not a member of the free software movement, the movement is very small indeed.

This is true! I wouldn't say working for one excludes you (though it kind of does), but I would say working for one is incompatible with leading the free software movement or having moral ground to coup it.

> That may be the case, but the FSF has a long history of saying that you can work on free software for profit, too.

You can! It really is wonderful. Nothing I said conflicts, there.

> Frankly, that's why the FSF exists separate from the GNU project - to be a place that you can order physical media with GNU software from and expense it.

Half-truth, but close enough. Again, this doesn't conflict with anything I said.

> This is untrue of the authors of the open letter - you should look at their stated positions on free and proprietary software. (It might be true of some of the signatories, of course.)

That isn't actually true for all of the authors; one I can recall offhand, Garrett works for a company making proprietary software of the worst kind: the type that can kill people. And that's on top of a long history of opinions far more controversial than anything Stallman has been accused of, let alone done (the guy mocked a man who the UN has admitted was being tortured, for example).

Sigh.