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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

#111

Post by kouteiheika »

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…

> 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.

It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.

You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#112

Post by red_admiral »

teddyh wrote: post #88
red_admiral wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem with the GPL is that its "infectious" nature does not play nicely with how the B2B world works, where you might link against your client's in-house proprietary libraries, which even though they're never planning to distribute them, they very much don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result. Standard GPL FUD. Firstly, linking against proprietary libraries is fine as long as you don’t distribute t…

Some of the companies I've worked with, and their lawyers especially, have explicitly said that for them anything GPL in the application layer was a no-no (Linux as OS was fine though). This is on code that will never be distributed outside internal systems.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#113

Post by tomrod »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #63
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confident that after GNU generation is gone, everything will fold back as it used to be. We are already living it due to the rise of non-copyleft licenses, return to the shareware model only with another set of marketing names for newer generations, return of timesharing with thin clients only with newer set of nomenclature for newer generations, most relevant FOSS projects are sponsored by big corps for their o…

I hope it doesn't come to that, but some indications are there. The problem is, that nowadays manufacturers and big tech giants can or do lock down their devices much more than when the Free Software movement started out. Also the hardware is way harder to reverse engineer, if possible at all. It is difficult to imagine "a new Software movement" to be initiated in our times. What hardware can they rely on? How would…

Right to Repair just about covers it, IMO. You can't repair something if you can't either have access to the source code or flash the source code, or otherwise access the internals.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#114

Post by teddyh »

red_admiral wrote: post #112
teddyh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with the GPL is that its "infectious" nature does not play nicely with how the B2B world works, where you might link against your client's in-house proprietary libraries, which even though they're never planning to distribute them, they very much don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result. Standard GPL FUD. Firstly, linking against proprietary libraries is fine as long as you don’t distribute t…

Some of the companies I've worked with, and their lawyers especially, have explicitly said that for them anything GPL in the application layer was a no-no (Linux as OS was fine though). This is on code that will never be distributed outside internal systems.

Company lawyers being weird and wrong about GPL, film at 11. The GPL paranoia strikes deep.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#115

Post by cxr »

pipo234 wrote: post #22
orthoxerox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we're moving to "free 3.0" (aka screw you Amazon), which is more restrictive than MIT or GPL.

There are a lot of issues with FSF's perspective and the way they were written down. Running GNU derivative in a proprietary cloud is one of them. RedHat (in)ability to make a fair profit is another. Still Google's Linux "theft" led to more openness in Android than Apple's BSD Unix rip off. Regardless of the license chosen, sustainability of open source is a problem. (I'm still baffled by the absence of government sp…

> I'm still baffled by the absence of government sponsoring; why do governments around the globe continue to spend billions on proprietary IT infrastructure, databases, and desktop computers?

It's not a project that's talked about very much because it's not the trendy flavor of OSS dev that people generally have in mind when they refer to sustainability problems—which I suspect for most people means funding their favorite niche devops packages that are of dubious merit to begin with (and that we might very well be better off for not having in the world)—but it is pretty incredible that there isn't e.g. any well-known effort by at least one US government agency to put a fraction of what they pour into Microsoft into ReactOS instead, especially after the Windows XP crisis—and even if only to the extent that it should be made stable enough for that org's own narrow use e.g. with a particular piece of equipment/application. I never hear of anything like this. Not even a hint of trials or experimentation. Why?

This is the difference between GNU and the modern, GitHub-centric open source movement. For all the criticism about barriers to entry for non-technical audiences that have been leveled at GNU and GNU-adjacent projects, GNU has always been focused on users and the types of things that humans could conceivably actually want to use, and not the sort of devops shovelware that gets chucked into a repo and inexplicably chugs along with much fanfare because it's used by several dozen enterprises on the backend despite being of no real interest to an ordinary person. GNU userspace directly empowers millions of people (including many of those working on the uninteresting flash-in-the-pan shovelware) to do their computing (for work or for play) every day.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#116

Post by mbakke »

kouteiheika wrote: post #111
mbakke wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming. You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc And from then you can go through each version all the way to the cur…

Right, Guix solved that a while back:

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/

I was thinking about the fact that building Rust requires cURL, Python, CMake, and more, which makes the "bootstrapping graph"[0] very complicated if coreutils is rewritten in Rust.

0: https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Full_002dS...

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#117

Post by gglitch »

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…

I'm no zealot or apologist for the FSF, but on a philosophical level, your alternate expression (and the expression above that you're amending) feel like they both miss the point altogether. I don't think the FSF cares at all about corporations, profits, or long-term commitments. Their whole point, as I understand it, has to do with whether a given license leaves the door open for the well to get poisoned. A license is either prophylactically sound or it isn't.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#118

Post by miohtama »

Osmose wrote: post #36

40 years on and they still seem to think giving talks and making free software is a suitable defense of Free Software. It's passive, and has fallen apart in the face of tech companies that actively use their free software tools to make closed source software that routinely violates user's rights. There's so much they _could_ be doing. Where's the grant program for startups working on free software? Where's their shop…

Today there is more relevance to ensure that open source software does not become illegal, and lobbying various parliament members in the EU and in the US

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil...

For the past 40 years all open source license terms have started WITHOUT WARRANTY, but today the governments have the idea that if someone uses your software for something they do not like, you deserve jail time.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#119

Post by cies »

pjmlp wrote: post #19
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…

I am confident that after GNU generation is gone, everything will fold back as it used to be. We are already living it due to the rise of non-copyleft licenses, return to the shareware model only with another set of marketing names for newer generations, return of timesharing with thin clients only with newer set of nomenclature for newer generations, most relevant FOSS projects are sponsored by big corps for their o…

> I am confident that after GNU generation is gone, everything will fold back as it used to be.

Nah. The wheel of enlightenment has been set in motion and is beyond stoppable.

The issue I see is corporate involvement. They (corps) like free stuff too, and has helped enormously in the adoption (most code FLOSS on most servers, AND on most mobiles!). But corps has different agenda's than activist individuals, leading to BSD/Apache/etc over (A)(L)GPL(vX) and hosted opensource-derived services like what the cloud corps offer. Patents, non-copyleft-licensing and hosted are some big obstacles to the GNU/FSF end goals.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#120

Post by cies »

Aleklart wrote: post #71
sbuk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

[flagged]

It's just "new speak".
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