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The Free Software Foundation is dying

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Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#131

Post by ghusto »

hollowturtle wrote: post #89

>We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. I can’t really understand where the US is heading with this agenda. As a EU citizen I’m often puzzled and worried, why can’t the sentence just be “We need more competent leaders”? This should imply diversity per se, and btw who decides a place has enough diversity? There will be a diversity judge on workplaces?

I've given this some thought before. I think it's born from guilt, you know, because of the messed up history they had. They think that if they change the branch names from master to main, everything's fine now.

The irony is that I live in a country where there was also some _very_ messed up history, and the reason things _are_ alright now, is because they don't keep dragging that shit up. Everybody acknowledges that it was unacceptable bullshit, and moved on.

The key difference is acknowledging and facing what your ancestors did, and _then_ moving on.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#132

Post by chriswarbo »

wallmountedtv wrote: post #66
chriswarbo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU Guix (package manager and OS distro) is a pretty big project, that's fairly recent.

Well GNU Guix is publicly against the current structure of the FSF and especially RMS.[1] So Guix as an example is not really a great defense of FSF and the GNU Project's operating structure. 1: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...

Thanks, you're right (I hadn't come across that before)

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#133

Post by kmeisthax »

HideousKojima wrote: post #67
brodouevencode wrote: post #56

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…

> Copyright is anti-capitalist

...uh, what?

Like, if you're referring to, say, some hypothetically limited version of copyright where it's more or less a private right-of-action for artists to sue publishing firms for unpaid work, then sure. That would be anti-capitalist, specifically because the Soviets tried that.

As it currently stands copyright is the foundation of modern capitalism. Yes, it doesn't feel like that if you're, say, a right-libertarian or a hardcore free market guy. However, you have to remember that capitalism and a free market are two different things. Capitalists do not care if the market is free, they care if line goes up. They will happily choke off the free market using monopoly power or government power if it will make them more money.

A large corporation deciding that you will own nothing and be happy does not make them suddenly hardcore pinko commies. This is just the end stage of capitalism: once you run out of legitimate ways to make a profit, you find ways to steal from others. That's why we used to have antitrust laws[0] to keep companies from becoming democratically unaccountable quazi-governments of their own. And in my opinion the greatest own-goal right-libertarians ever made was campaigning against their use.

[0] Antitrust law in the US has been functionally braindead since the "consumer welfare" standard was adopted by a bunch of federal judges litigating from the bench in the 1980s.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#134

Post by vrtx0 »

IMHO, this just seems to be another polarizing piece of clickbait, rehashing the pointless “RMS vs. ESR” diatribes.

The author frequently posts in support of the OSI (applied for a seat, endorses their “we get to define open source” nonsense, etc.). A March 2022 post rants against Elastic and others because of a non-OSI “open source” license change, while glossing over Amazon’s and the OSI’s roles leading to that change. It also makes a strange argument about bias, which almost comically contradicts itself at the end.

IMHO, the OSI, FSF, RMS and ESR have all done more harm than good to the open source community. I’m not saying they’re all equal, or even always bad, but I’m not a fan of bringing one-sided political or philosophical arguments into the hobby and career I’ve truly enjoyed for over 20 years. And no, my contributions don’t somehow mean I get to define what “open source” means for everyone.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#135

Post by rekado »

davexunit wrote: post #117
yarg wrote: post #27

> Reform the leadership. It’s time for Richard Stallman to go. > We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. Stallman is in many ways a problem - but the solution is finding technically and socially competent leadership with a vision that aligns with the core ideologies of the FSF and the ability to lay it out as a coherent long-term plan. Forced diversity has not ever and will not…

Lots of talk about "forced diversity" that ignores the diverse pool of talented people that the FSF has pushed away because they don't think "GNU+Linux" is a hill worth dying on or whatever.

It goes beyond just battles on mole hills: the FSF and the GNU mailing lists are full of extremely time-consuming discussions that are fueled by conspiratorial thinking, feature excessive celebration of nitpicking, with participants that regularly lose themselves in groan-worthy tangents, operate on oversimplified models of society with unjustified arrogance, etc --- they are really bad places for constructive discourse.

There are not many people who are both talented in their fields and have the surplus time and energy to exercise a saint-like restraint to deal with all the draining crap. This environment is the sediment that filters a lot of talent and successfully prevents healthy growth.

This does not necessarily apply to individual GNU packages, but the overarching "project" structure is rotten and resistant to any attempts at reform.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#136

Post by kmeisthax »

yarg wrote: post #128
kmeisthax wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Orthogonal social issues?" So are we just going to pretend that unauditable, proprietary facial recognition software isn't being actively weaponized against minorities? Like, cops using secret rules to determine guilt would be considered dystopian basically anywhere.

Yes, the issues are completely orthogonal to the effective operation of an open source software foundation. If you want to have a talk about the also completely unrelated issue of facial recognition, we can do that too.

The facial recognition software issue is not orthogonal: the biggest problem with it is that it's proprietary software being used to do law enforcement. We don't know how Clearview's software works and it is already generating false arrests and convictions. If this is an orthogonal issue, than software freedom is just a petty tech squabble between programmers with no bearing on the average user, and nobody should care about it.

The way that you get the average user to care about software freedom is by drawing lines between it and seemingly unrelated issues. You don't say "proprietary software means you can't edit the code", you say "proprietary software means more surveillance tech everywhere". And the way that surveillance tech works is that it follows a very specific "shitty technology adoption curve"[0]. It will first be weaponized against socially acceptable targets such as criminals first, and then to social minorities that don't have the leverage to say 'no', and then to poor people at large, and so on and so forth up the chain of oppression.

Of course, because of how this adoption curve works, a foundation staffed entirely with old white guys isn't going to be inherently aware of these sorts of problems. They are going to be fighting them by accident, and losing out on a way to do effective outreach about the problem they want to solve.

[0] Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this one out.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#137

Post by nicpottier »

shortrounddev wrote: post #103
nicpottier wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This is a very convenient position to take for white men in power. Now we insist it must be a perfectly level playing field, never mind the centuries of racism.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#138

Post by tjr »

dale_glass wrote: post #108
tjr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 release…

You are correct, of course. I was writing in the context of the above story, but I failed to clearly express that.

I should have written,

"Updating someone else's GPL code ..."

Thank you.

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#139

Post by leidenfrost »

542458 wrote: post #51
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,…

I’m not sure why putting more women, people of color, and/or minorities on the board would mean they have no qualifications. Do you believe that there are no women, people of color, or minorities that have played a part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos?

"Listen, I'm trying really hard to create a false dichotomy out of thin air so this suddenly becomes an issue. And I need to assume there are literally zero LGBTIQ contributing to Open Source so we can discuss this".

Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying

#140

Post by outsomnia »

shortrounddev wrote: post #82
outsomnia wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a replacement RMS, they too would have to say no on points of principle to things, make enemies of people who want them to say yes, be whispered against, be unpopular. That's what the role is, say what nobody else will say, make people uncomfortable when apathy is comfortable, and when nobody else will act, take action and rally others against things that are bad. It's not a role that will inspire univer…

The goal of FSF is not one which people inherently identify with. You can either die on that hill (and you surely will die), or you can go out of your way to try to be diplomatic and convince people of your mission. If living the FSF moral means being like RMS, you'll never convince anyone. Here is how he browses the internet: > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I hav…

That way of interacting with the Internet wouldn't be that strange at the very beginning... it probably seems like integrating things into emacs from his point of view.

I use noscript and uBlock... my wife thinks about that the same as you think about RMS' 12ft pole browsing. However she is just perfectly fine with Linux as her OS for 20 years now. How Linux came about IS bound up with - is thanks to - RMS and his particular place in the autistic spectrum. If he wants to use email as a frontend to the web instead of wget what's really the problem when his other activities have led to net wins that have affected everyone positively? Can you really sum both things up fairly with one word, "Lunatic", because it's not how you'd browse the web?

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