The Free Software Foundation is dying

For the parts of the world I see I would question the present continuous form of the article. The FSF isn't dying. It is in all practical ways dead and all discussion around it is stuck to RMS. Which is sad, as we need a similar organisation as the "user freedom" is challenged more than ever, as users don't "own" their devices ever less, but also operations depends more and more on closed services, which are partially built around Free Software (in FSF's definition) while offering none of the freedoms anymore (as it is tied to the cloud service vendor)

>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 Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD.

This link is one prediction that seems to be where we are well on our way to heading for:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

If he is removed from the FSF, that will come true.

edit: spelling

If you're right (and I'm not saying you're not), the FSF is already gone. RMS is 70 years old and will not be around forever.

Are they even coming out with any new software? I remember GNU being big in the 1990s and I know a new version of gawk came out recently, but it seems the center of gravity of “free software” (as in beer) has moved in the direction of the Apache foundation (so many data-related projects it is a “big data” problem to keep track of them all), Github, etc.

> 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 organization is more concerned with the appearance of reform, rather than substance. It is the death rattle of an organization which has allowed itself to become ideological rather than pragmatic (which is funny considering how ideological the FSF is)

The problem with FSF is that it either hasn't made its point clear, or has failed to convince people. People are naturally turned off by the GPL because they do not want to give their company's code away; they see it as a risk to their businesses.

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, and we should compete on quality of service and frequency of updates rather than having a monopoly on our code base, but that's simply not an argument that businesses buy.

It is an uphill battle convincing companies to give away their code to an ecosystem that they will, in the long run, potentially benefit from. The FSF fails to do this, and usually only makes ideological arguments presented by a long-haired, bare-footed, libertarian hippie with a history of extremely controversial takes on the topic of child molestation.