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Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

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Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#101

Post by econorew »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #91
nologic01 wrote: post #44

Its easy to drift into lamenting how the vision of the original free software movement was lost. This would be missing the growing forest (the widespread adoption of open and collaborative modes of software production) for a singular tree (a specific ideology about the role of computing). What has been happening in these four decades is that ever more segments of society (whether individuals or private enterprise or…

Yes indeed. The alternative timeline - Windows on nearly all servers and desktops. All software purchased from ISV and closed source. Bugs galore that never get fixed because they have you locked in. Crappy software due to lack of competition.

[flagged]

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#102

Post by Gud »

econorew wrote: post #101
quickthrower2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes indeed. The alternative timeline - Windows on nearly all servers and desktops. All software purchased from ISV and closed source. Bugs galore that never get fixed because they have you locked in. Crappy software due to lack of competition.

[flagged]

What webapps? Can’t really say I use many. I use almost exclusively BSD and GPL licensed software.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#103

Post by rightbyte »

econorew wrote: post #101
quickthrower2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes indeed. The alternative timeline - Windows on nearly all servers and desktops. All software purchased from ISV and closed source. Bugs galore that never get fixed because they have you locked in. Crappy software due to lack of competition.

[flagged]

Webapps are just as bad as a licensed binary blob on your desktop. If not worse since they usually spy on you and you can't firewall them.

Edit: Oh. Read you wrong. Nevermind.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#104

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

sbuk wrote: post #47
psychoslave wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s see. On the one hand you have people motivated by the ideal of software "developed specifically for the sake of users' freedom". On the other hand you have dystopian corporate whose biggest dream is slave labor and locked-in cash cows from which value is drained 'til the last drop. There is no tactic for obtain reconciliation of two world views in direct and systematic opposition. If engaging in a tactic lead t…

> "On the other hand you have dystopian corporate whose biggest dream is slave labor and locked-in cash cows from which value is drained 'til the last drop." An therein is the problem I, and I know many others, have with the FSF and it's followers. This language is just not compelling - in fact, it's a massive turn off, even if you think it's true. This comes off as the ravings of a crackpot! Consider "On the other h…

>> An therein is the problem I, and I know many others, have with the FSF and it's followers. This language is just not compelling - in fact, it's a massive turn off, even if you think it's true. This comes off as the ravings of a crackpot!

I suppose it depends on who is talking and what is being said, but the FSF message can be very direct:

https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#105

Post by roenxi »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #6

My earliest exposure to free software was via. GCC and Emacs. The early debates on Gnu/Linux, OSS vs. Free Software etc. were all things I imbibed back then. The ideological stand of the FSF was appealing to me when I was younger and really affected my outlook. Over the years, I can't help but feeling that while the FSF's core message is still relevant and true, their tactics have more or less pushed them outside of…

Any group that advocates freedom gets pushed outside the mainstream conversation. There is continuous pressure against freedom from any centralised source of power - including the sort of people who set the parameters on what 'mainstream' conversation is. Powerful people rarely see freedom for less powerful people as something that will help them (although the evidence suggests that it is, most people can't handle that sort of indirect and trusting reasoning). Freedom was, is and will be a radical idea.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#106

Post by dale_glass »

mbakke wrote: post #96
dale_glass wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think the FSF and GNU are resting on their laurels and barely relevant. So one of the core things for the FSF has been the GNU tools. Recently it's become trendy to rewrite stuff in Rust, and overall it seems like an excellent idea to have the core tooling of an OS being much harder to exploit, and often much more performant. For instance ripgrep is a nice improvement on the classical grep, nushell is a bette…

I think the FSFE (Europe) is doing a lot better than its American sister foundation, with active involvement in EU politics, running campaigns, etc. Individual GNU projects are doing fairly well on the technical side (toolchain, Emacs, Guix, Mes), but there is little to no coordination across GNU, much less with the FSFs. FSF Asia seems to have fallen off the earth, even though India appears to have a fairly active f…

> I don't think rewrite in Rust is a solution to "modernize" GNU tools. Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.

That IMO is of lesser importance. It's a technical problem that's of little relevance to most end-users. It's still a problem, but one that I think can be solved.

The point though is that the world keeps on moving, and the FSF and GNU should be keeping up. If things are going to Rust, or Java, or Go, or whatever then the FSF should do its best to follow and to assert its influence there. Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position -- taking care of old tools that few need anymore. That may be a valuable thing to do in many contexts, but is not what you want to be doing if you want to influence where the world is going.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#107

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

grumbel wrote: post #28
noufalibrahim wrote: post #6

My earliest exposure to free software was via. GCC and Emacs. The early debates on Gnu/Linux, OSS vs. Free Software etc. were all things I imbibed back then. The ideological stand of the FSF was appealing to me when I was younger and really affected my outlook. Over the years, I can't help but feeling that while the FSF's core message is still relevant and true, their tactics have more or less pushed them outside of…

The issue for me is more that the FSF hasn't kept up with what is happening in technology. Software these days is often a secondary concern, as you aren't the one owning the computer, instead it is all running remotely and it's really about the data and control of said data. The licenses the FSF offers, including the AGPL, are inadequate to address this. Over in Europe we got the GDPR, which does actually address a l…

>> Software these days is often a secondary concern, as you aren't the one owning the computer, instead it is all running remotely and it's really about the data and control of said data. The licenses the FSF offers, including the AGPL, are inadequate to address this.

The irony is that most cloud computing infrastructure is powered by free and open source software.

Linux, bash, docker, Kubernetes, Golang, and so many others make it happen. Even Microsoft has come around to open source with GitHub and many projects released there: https://github.com/microsoft

>> FSF feels stuck in solving 1980s problems, while having little to say about 2020s problems.

What 2020s problems are not being addressed?

Edit: Looking at your comment in another reply concerning users controlling their own data, this essay addresses the topic:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

I think it comes back to trust, transparency, and the laws where you live.

Users should have choice of how their data is handled and what can be done with it. In order for that to work, they must 1) have a way to legally challenge entities who would use their data without their permission and 2) alternative ways to accomplish the work that they want to do with their data.

Laws where users live must address 1). Free software can help with 2).

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#108

Post by d_tr »

safety1st wrote: post #73
red_admiral wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about transphobic, as that allegation did not come up when the original "package" that led to RMS' resignation was published. It could be that new evidence has come to light since, or it could be that the allegation of transphobia is unfounded. Some of the original allegations that I think are proven correct are that RMS: - defended Marvin Minsky on a mailing list when Minsky was accused of sex with an u…

Please read claims 1-5 on this page. I could rehash them but the page does a better job with these issues than I would: https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai... Regarding the "Cult of the Emacs Virgin" issue, here is Stallman's statement about it: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-women-list/2009-Novemb... - this was a reference to the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Along with references to the "…

> Stallman has a long history of advocating for womens' rights ...

I 'd like to add that he regularly posts political notes on his website which make this pretty clear to anyone who cares to take a look.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#109

Post by cdelsolar »

severus_snape wrote: post #25
red_admiral wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is free as in apache/BSD/MIT, and free as in GPL. In many parts of industry, going the "purist" route and putting your library under GPL is a sure way to make sure no-one will use it (the LGPL doesn't completely solve this problem either). Whereas more pragmatic approaches to free software have absolutely taken off. Big names like React, Angular etc. are MIT licensed, for example. It's like the FSF invented "fr…

Let's see 20 years from now which of React, Angular and Linux is still around.

React?

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#110

Post by goodpoint »

red_admiral wrote: post #60
severus_snape wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then others came along GPL came after MIT ( https://nitter.net/humphd/status/1112747178685026304 ) > and it's a genuine improvement How?

Let's say you want to develop software as a job, and make enough money to live. You also have the ethics not to go into the ad-supported track-everything mobile apps business. There is still good money to be made without selling your soul, but most of it is in the B2B not the B2C market. And there, you negotiate the terms of who owns what individually for each contract anyway, at least if you have any sense. The prob…

> don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result

This is not how copyright works. No license can magically turn other code into GPL.

You can choose between using GPL libraries in internal proprietary products, or use LGPL libraries in published products or release your product as FOSS.

The choice is yours. There is no "infection".

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