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The Free Software Foundation is dying

drewdevault.com

71–80 of 247 posts

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#71

The Free software foundation needs its Martin Luther and Reformation. Stallman has quite literally become the pope of the Free software foundation and we need to remember that like with the Protestant Reformation, the individual has their own, unmediated relationship with free software. There are other apt analogies between the Protestant Reformation and the Free software foundation but I will leave discovering that…

Well, based on your analogy, people unsatisfied with Stallman, should leave the FSF and found their own "church" instead of trying to destroy his image and legacy, or at least to take FSF by force. (I don't have an opinion about Stallman. My comment is just about your analogy).

This has happened already, look at Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom Conservancy and others.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#72
post #4

>It’s time for Richard Stallman to go I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it. So far many of his predictions have come true and there are a few more that seems to be on their way to happening. What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Lap…

What significant, tangible accomplishments does Stallmann have in the past 15 years? Because even before the controversy, it seems like he:

* Presided over and actively contributed to the decline of GCC and gave up the world of compiler-based-tools and compiler research to LLVM by insisting on making it impossible to use GCC as a library. Pissed off the emacs maintainers in the process.

* Pissed off the glibc maintainers by trying to veto the removal of an abortion joke from the manual, even though he's had no involvement in glibc for years and "veto" is not a reasonable power for him to have nor one that he has ever had. On this basis a lot of other maintainers got pissed off about the level of control he was demanding over details that have nothing to do with software freedom

* Has done absolutely nothing to address any threat to free software since 2005, or otherwise adapt to the changing needs of developers to keep FSF/GNU relevant. RMS has no idea what those needs even are because the man reads his email with curl.

And now he's been back for a while, and nothing continues to happen, and the FSF is increasingly irrelevant year over year without even taking optics into consideration.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#73
>We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others...

That is dangerous mindset, so dangerous that I think the article is just trolling, trying to trigger people. But in case if author was serious, choosing leadership or any position for tha matter, should be based on their vision, skill, the weight of their respect is set community rather that on their sexual orientation, color of their skin, country of origin and ect. Discrimination needs to go. And this writing, suggests discrimination based on race or sexuality and gender.

I'll be honest I stopped reading after that point. From the beginning the ranting was already a salt mine, but kinda wanted to see what direction they were going with it.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#74

>It’s time for Richard Stallman to go. >We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The FSF is dying. What we need is women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos to lead the movement . There is nothing inherently wrong with diversity, but this is an attempt to spread an agenda,…

[flagged]

Richard Stallman was/is a grade A hacker and that's how the free software movement started as.

So, which kind of individuals would now be best suited for leadership positions in the FSF? An MBA? A lawyer? FAANG project manager?

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#77
post #48

>It’s time for Richard Stallman to go. >We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The FSF is dying. What we need is women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos to lead the movement . There is nothing inherently wrong with diversity, but this is an attempt to spread an agenda,…

"but this is an attempt to spread an agenda" yikes. Consider this: asking Saudi Arabia to let women drive and work any job isn't just a woke agenda. There's a strong practical and economic argument too. If you don't know how Stallman is a strong net negative, you haven't been paying attention, and you certainly haven't seen him in person. I write a bit about this here: https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html

It's always a little cringe when people write something on here just to advertise their crap, drab, poorly written blogs...

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#78

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 l…

Copyright is anti-capitalist. It's a state-granted and state-enforced monopoly on intellectual property (which is itself a legal fiction). I'm about as anti-communist and anti-socialist as they come, and I still support the free software movement because I see the current state of software licensing (not to mention issues with hardware ownership etc.) as rent-seeking by those who do not want to have to compete in the…

You are absolutely on to something here. We need an alternative to FSF.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#79
The main problem the FSF runs into, over and over, is that they're barking up the wrong tree if their goal is political change (which it's at least stated to be).

Drew doesn't really address this directly, although many of the things he points at I would say are related to this. RMS is a big reason why the FSF is the way it is ie. its why their site is a disorganized mess of philosophical ramblings, poorly organized (and often badly written, resulting in people believing things about their licenses that aren't accurate[0]) legal FAQs and kinda poorly written predictive fiction attempts from Stallman.

Your average user isn't going to give a shit about this. Your average programmer already knows and builds on top of FOSS - FOSS is the great portfolio establisher of the programming world at this point. You don't need to convince them. Your average user deals with far simpler (and frankly far more dystopian) problems like "my entire workflow broke because Google removed one of their apps and I was completely reliant on it", "Spotify removed all music of my favorite artist and now I don't have access to the music I paid for" and "Microsoft made it so that I can't use my computer without a Microsoft account anymore".

The FSF has an extremely myopic view here that if it's not invented in FOSS land, it's not worth talking about. The GNU Project has an attitude that actively works against bringing people over to FOSS tooling unless they go all-in. Most people don't... do that, they'd rather gradually replace things as they become an issue.

Your average user runs Windows and has an iPhone or an Android. Your average developer needs to target these platforms. What does the FSF provide through the GNU for developers and users? Preachy nonsense about how you should buy a Thinkpad and live like a digital hermit. Sure you can barely participate in modern society, but you're at least free!

FOSS successes come when a project does attempt to bridge the user problem. LineageOS is an extremely useful Apache licensed Custom ROM that's widely used as an Aftermarket OS for Android phones for example. LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice, MPL licensed) only became a household-ish tool because it openly was meant as an alternative word processor that strives to at least be compatible with Office (and most of its layout is basically borrowed from the last version of Office before they introduced the ribbon - aka the most production efficient version of Office). People gradually replace, but the FSF demands a total switch in workflows if you want to play on their turf, which for most people is frankly impossible.

They can call Facebook and Google silly names all they want, but grandma needs them to schedule her bingo club on Friday. And unless you want to take up the effort of teaching 10 octogenarians how to use a FOSS WebDAV calendar app and Matrix, how to set their devices up for it and more importantly, how that works when their tablet is replaced 3 years later. It's basically unreasonable unless the workflow and experience is exactly identical to that of the tools it's replacing. And it basically never is.

The FSF needs to start trying to work for FOSS being a reasonable option for end-users if it wants to live - the developer work is done, it's been done for upwards of 20 years now. Their insistence to keep focusing on the dev side has just let Google et al. create the dystopia they warned about just by ignoring FOSS (ironically the very thing the FSFs proposition claims was easily avoidable if we just build the tools. - We build them. Then Apple and Google just steamrolled the entire relevance of FOSS through either having proper UX design or shoring it up.)

[0]: Anything to do with the AGPL.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#80
I feel like there is a stronger case in saying open source is dying, or at least being corrupted. The vast majority of OSS is served by github, a company owned by Microsoft which already uses it for its own profits. In time the OSS movement may be completely compromised. Perhaps FSF shouldn’t change much and continue functioning as a beacon to guide us rather than a motor to drive us.
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