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The Free Software Foundation is dying

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Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#101

Post by emu7652 »

Ekaros wrote: post #92
emu7652 wrote: post #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, co…

I think main question really should be how effective they would be in the role. And what truly are the goals of FSF and how could right leadership aim at those. Now some might thing diversity and inclusion should be the goals, but I think many disagree and consider that there is enough other organizations being able to do those things. FSF should have unique value proposition if it wants to continue to exist. And lea…

Indeed, choosing right people for right role is important.

Diversity could never be a goal, it creates exclusivity and privilege of one group over others. The diversity will happen in healthy environment naturally overtime. The real goal is to fight discrimination.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#103

Post by shortrounddev »

nicpottier wrote: post #94
shortrounddev wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 usual…

My view is WE are society, change starts at home etc.. Again, my point here was that pointing out lack of diversity is absolutely appropriate. I disagree that we get to just say it's the pipeline's fault and not try to do better in our organizations.

The only thing an organization is obligated to do is:

1. Treat all candidates equally, regardless of race, sex, etc.

2. Hire the most qualified candidate for the job, regardless of race, sex, etc.

3. Not engage in conscious or unconscious selection bias when looking for new applicants. I consider it to be a valid hiring practice to make sure you show up to career fairs at HBCUs or women's universities

Doing anything beyond that is not only a bad solution, it is immoral to press your hand down on the weight of one candidate over another based on his or her identity categories. It is as wrong to prefer a white candidate as it is to prefer a black candidate.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#104

Post by [deleted] »

jmclnx wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#105

Post by jmclnx »

no_time wrote: post #91
jmclnx wrote: 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 FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD. Can you provide an example or article? I have not yet encountered an intel platform that refuses to erase the secure boot keys. That being said, I would not be surprised.

Let me google that for you

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=377054

There was an article on a new lenovo model that you cannot install linux on, but to lazy to look for it.

Quote from a lonk:

>Lenovo says Microsoft requires they block Linux from booting on such PCs.

... ...

>This has nothing to do with better security. It is simply about restricting consumer choice by making it more difficult to install something other than Microsoft Windows

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#107

Post by roenxi »

bo1024 wrote: post #49
GNUfanaticism wrote: post #15

>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,…

This comment implies that only white men have ever played a major part in the free software ethos, which is incorrect and offensive.

The FSF is based in Boston, US. Something like 75% of US programmers are male, around 65% white and a further ~20% Asian [0].

If we want the best advocate, assuming they hire somewhat locally, there is a 75% chance that candidate is male, and an 80% chance they are white or Asian. The FSF movement already struggles to make up numbers of people who actually care about freedom, it can't afford to be picky adding extra requirements on who it is searching for. Maybe the best person is any weird combination of traits, but the post is pretending the FSF has a luxury that it does not.

The original post is not calling for what is best for the Free Software movement, or a sober approach to figuring out what is best. They want to use the FSF as a vehicle for political goals not related to freedom.

And besides, the FSF doesn't appoint leaders. Leaders appoint themselves. The FSF didn't come along and found Stallman.

[0] https://www.zippia.com/programmer-jobs/demographics/

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#108

Post by dale_glass »

tjr wrote: post #45
shortrounddev wrote: post #10

> We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The present leadership, particularly from RMS, creates an exclusionary environment in a place where inclusion and representation are important for the success of the movement. I'm not a fan of RMS, but this is the exact kind of left wing platitude that people think will revive an organization, but really just signals thats the organizat…

I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one…

> Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent.

It works perfectly fine if you own the copyright to all your code. You can't relicense somebody else's code of course, but you can relicense your own. So a company that develops something in-house and then slaps the GPL on the public release can change their mind on the license for future releases all they like.

It only gets tricky if they accepted external contributions. In which case there's often a contributor agreement, in which the contributor agree the company can relicense the contributed code.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#109

Post by [deleted] »

tjr wrote: post #45
shortrounddev wrote: post #10

> We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The present leadership, particularly from RMS, creates an exclusionary environment in a place where inclusion and representation are important for the success of the movement. I'm not a fan of RMS, but this is the exact kind of left wing platitude that people think will revive an organization, but really just signals thats the organizat…

I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one…

[deleted]

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#110

Post by kmeisthax »

jmclnx wrote: 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…

You're referring to this all in the wrong tense. Corporations don't need to replace Richard Stallman because they already got Eric Raymond to replace his entire movement with the "apolitical" version: the Open Source Initiative. This happened decades ago. RMS warned us about it, we didn't care.

The dystopia in Right to Read also happened decades ago: it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System. Less toy-like examples would be embedded systems and cellphones, which have always been locked-down[0] since day one (waaaaay before the iPhone popularized this business model). The FSF isn't positioned to stop this. Microsoft pushed for locked-down PCs back in 2012, with Windows RT[1]. It failed not because Defective by Design made a good protest campaign and got Congress to stop it, but because Microsoft made several key strategic blunders that made their attack on freedom irrelevant.

If Intel fails in pushing Linux or BSD off of people's laptops, it will not be because the FSF stopped it, either.

The problem with RMS is that his area of expertise is several decades old and his activism has taken time away from him maintaining that expertise. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the FSF was purely an activism project; but it also maintains an operating system and several other core utilities. The people actually fighting on the front lines of software freedom these days (e.g. Hector Martin) consider the FSF to be functionally impotent. The diversity concerns raised in the posted article are downstream of this: the FSF is still used to telling a very specific brand of techie why they should care about software freedom, they don't know how to make a convincing argument to the general public.

Now, let's contrast that to right-to-repair. This is a concern downstream of software freedom: you can't meaningfully restrict repair practices if you can modify the software on the device. So it might seem like a side-show we should just ignore. However, it's seen a lot more attention than software freedom. We've gotten right-to-repair legislation in Massachusetts and Colorado. And this is a function of two things:

- This being a more concrete and understandable concern. Nobody cares about being able to modify the software on their Tesla - until they need to break the software locks on their Tesla that keep them from swapping parts.

- Activism from people (e.g. Louis Rossman) who are willing to touch scummy social media platforms.

The last one is important. Social media is how a lot of political activism happens, for better and for worse. But as far as I'm aware the FSF does not have a presence here. Nobody at the FSF is making, say, punchy YouTube video essays or Twitbooktodon posts explaining the through-line between not having source code and corporations doing bad things to you. And as far as I'm aware their lobbying arm is nonexistent.

[0] Or, at least, not intended to be user programmable in ways that make locking them down palatable to consumers.

[1] The ARM port of Windows 8

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