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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

#121

Post by mbakke »

dale_glass wrote: post #106
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…

> 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…

Apologies to anyone who had to endure my display of contempt.

I agree with the parent comment that FSF (and friends) needs to step up their game to have any influence on the tech scene of the future.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#122

Post by cies »

teddyh wrote: post #114
red_admiral wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AGPL though is avoided by the plague by corp lawyers, and for good reasons. Hence I like it for some projects.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#123

Post by rightbyte »

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…

Redhat had been getting a profit for like 10+ years by now. How would that not be enough?

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#125

Post by asddubs »

safety1st wrote: post #27
red_admiral wrote: post #10

I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. RMS is both the reason that the free software movement is where it is today, and the reason that it has so few women involved. If we could turn back the clock, I wish we could keep the good parts but leave out the bad parts.

RMS has been subjected to a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry. While his behavior has been awkward at times he is absolutely none of these things and he deserves respect for his…

RMS has definitely been sympathetic to pedophiles in his writing in the past. I don't know what his stance is now, but saying it was a false accusation is revisionism, IMO.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#126

Post by User23 »

sbuk wrote: post #55
shrubble wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many women don't want to be around nerds. It's really that simple.

And what is the reason for that?

While it may be entertaining to feign hypotheses, really who cares? It's an observable fact and thus it has to be incorporated into any rational phenomenology.

But the glib answer is many women find nerds annoying. In particular, because of their desire to explain and even worse correct perceived errors without any regard for social niceties. As for why many women ultimately find those behavior patterns annoying, well that's where speculation takes over.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#127

Post by jbaber »

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…

This is a very good way of putting this.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#128

Post by eesmith »

didntcheck wrote: post #77
eesmith wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not heard the transphobic claims either. I have come across multiple sources which describe Stallman's creepy behavior towards women, which I listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008835 . One of them worked in the same building as Stallman. She writes software under an open source license and co-organizes an open source conference, so definitely "involved in free software." You can't trust me thoug…

As is usually the case with these "sex pest" witch hunts, these claims require traversing several layers of hyperlinks and "someone told me" just to find a vague claim of "I just find him creepy (in a way that I can't describe!)", which seems to simply mean "dares to exist and talk while awkward and unattractive". Flirting is also not bad behavior, how else would relationships form without someone indicating interest…

Whoa, who said any of this was "sexual harassment"?

The topic was the "reason [free software] has so few women involved", and the claim is that Stallman's behavior towards women was a non-trivial contributing factor.

That does not require sexual harassment.

The counter-claim is that such allegations are "a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry."

I've heard about his creepy behavior towards women since around 2003, from people working in open source software. Thus, that counter-claim cannot be the complete story.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#129

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

The largest challenge the free software movement still faces is philosophical.

The original underpinning of the Four Freedoms is "I own this hardware; how dare someone else dictate how it operates?" That assertion falls flat in the Cloud era, yet Cloud services are way too convenient and useful to just ignore them or try to tell everyone the One True Path is up the mountain to the hermitage of traditional desktop, offline, disconnected software.

I look to the Fediverse as a potential next good model: the idea that if you run a part of the cloud, you have a vested interest in it, it's yours, and how dare someone else dictate etc.

... but it's a fundamentally different challenge than the original pioneers of the movement fought against corporations and monopoly manufacturers and sellers.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#130

Post by foldr »

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 "…

There is more to the weird 'emacs virgin' thing than just the joke itself.

https://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard...

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