The Free Software Foundation is dying

I really don't understand how people think one weird creep is somehow holding back corporate america from doing anything. The controversy isn't imagined, he's said some really off-putting stuff.

At this point he's become so polarizing it doesn't matter anyway, it's just some weird tech drama no one wants anything to do with. The genie is out of the bottle and if we want this to be about software we need to move on.

I find it fascinating how unsubstantiated the calls can be. There isn't a proposed alternative. People are sure the FSF is dying but do not seem to have the charisma or social gravity to fork it.

The person promoting Free Software is never going to be a billionaire - that limits the quality of candidates. Simple fact. Anyone of outstanding character devoting their life to selfless good isn't going to spend it promoting Free Software to a thankless and ignorant audience of ordinary computer users.

Stallman is a lot better than nothing - honestly he's pretty good, we're probably going to see him replaced by someone less capable - and as you point out the alternatives are probably going to be compromises who dilute the freedom to serve corporate interests.

There's going to be a lot of negativity in these comments. I don't have numbers and this is purely anecdotal observation, but there is a large contingent of supporters of the FSF that base their association to the foundation on their political positions (read: a very large number of communists, democratic socialists, and anarchists support FSF). Any criticism of RMS will be met with at least anti-corporate but most likely anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Full disclosure: I cut off my contributions to the FSF in fall of 2004. It was obvious it outlived its utility even then.

Now I ride to downvote hell...

> if you don't state it as a goal from the beginning then it won't even be considered

I don't think it should be a goal. I think it should be a societal goal to provide equal opportunities to everyone, and we can probably measure the results of those efforts by a statistical sample at the end of the pipeline: what % of engineers are black, white, etc. If we find over-representation of one group in a field which usually requires a college degree, then we can probably intuit that not everyone is getting the same opportunities at the beginning of the pipeline. However, it should not be a goal to solve those problems at the end of the pipeline.

> It is becoming a bigger and bigger red flag for an organization to not have some diversity of gender or race, pointing it out is not inappropriate.

I think that in 2020, the zeitgeist was towards every company doing something for DEI. I also think that this was born out of the BLM protests that summer as well as the flatline-zero interest rates set by the federal reserve. Now that that political fad is over (new president) and the economy has become more strict (higher interest rates), companies have cut DEI programs as investors expect them to be more financially responsible. To sum up my point: I think fewer people care about DEI in the corporate world today than they did 3 years ago

This article could be summed up with "there should be a completely different free software organization that behaves the way I want it to." Ok? Go ahead and start it.