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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

#131

Post by cxr »

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…

I agree with your overall position, but where you say:

> Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position

I think we actually need this; somebody should already be doing it. I wrote about this several years ago:

> Maybe in an alternate universe there exists an organization—or some sort of loosely connected movement—that focuses on software comprehensibility as a gift to the world and for future generations. The idea is that once software approaches doneness, the org would pour effort into fastidiously eliminating hacks around the codebase in lieu of rewrites that presents the affected logic in a way that's clearer. This work would extend to getting compiler changes upstream that allows the group to judiciously cull constructs of dubious readability so that they may be replaced with such passages, which may have previously been not as performant but that now work just as well as the sections being replaced, without any penalty at runtime.

> For example, one of the cornerstones of the FSF/GNU philosophy is that it focuses on maximizing benefit to the user. What could be more beneficial to a user of free software than ensuring that its codebase is clean and comprehensible for study and modification?

https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html...>

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#132

Post by sbuk »

gglitch wrote: post #117
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…

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…

While I would agree that was the original purpose, the rhetoric has been closer to anti-corporation for a while. This seemed to change around the time the GPLv3 came out.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#133

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Looking from Apple, Google, Microsoft and IBM ecosystems, and SaaS products, the alternative timeline isn't much different from actual reality.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#134

Post by [deleted] »

User23 wrote: post #126
sbuk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wel…

[deleted]

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#135

Post by pjmlp »

cies wrote: post #119
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 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 t…

I covered that on the rest of my comment as well.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#136

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

rightbyte wrote: post #123
pipo234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Profitable, sure. But businesses that are poised for future success don't sell themselves, particularly to a has-been like IBM.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#137

Post by phkahler »

cies wrote: post #119
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 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 t…

>> 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.

The battle between copyleft and "more permissive" licenses is going to be long and slow. There is a place for MIT/BSD licenses, but there is way too much software moving that direction IMHO. Some big popular projects will need to get consumed and effectively hijacked by commercial interests before anyone sees this as an actual problem rather than a hypothetical. But first there will need to be such a project under one of those licenses.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#138

Post by phkahler »

dale_glass wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Rewrite it in Rust has become "rewrite it without the GPL" and that is a big problem. While there are valid reasons for permissive licenses at times, there is no valid reason to do core utils under a non-free license other than co-opting freedom. One day a new OS and ecosystem will come along and it will all be closed. The hardware will also not allow you to run free software.

Please stop enabling this with thoughtless license choices.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#139

Post by phkahler »

LtWorf wrote: post #87
parasti wrote: post #76

I honestly believe that proliferation of permissive non-copyleft open source licensing is what has harmed the free software movement the most. GPL used to be standard, but it's long been overtaken by short, easy to understand, do what you want licenses.

It doesn't help that you have people like the CEO of github having a keynote saying to use MIT license. It has all been a concerted effort to convince people that to be relevant they needed to use MIT license (so that they could be taken advantage of).

>> It doesn't help that you have people like the CEO of github having a keynote saying to use MIT license.

Really? Github? Owned by Microsoft right? I wonder why they like MIT licenses....

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#140

Post by teddyh »

cies wrote: post #122
teddyh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, not for very good reasons.
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