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Show that this is a gender-specific issue because i have the exact same reasoning. I love the coding and bug hunting, but i don't want to arrange myself with certain people.
How could I do that? I can say the comments and issues were gendered, but I can’t think how to prove what you are asking.
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I think it is fair to say that without the GPL and GNU, there would have been no Linux as we know it today.
I mean that's true and commendable but the OP was speaking towards the future. And on our current trajectory the future is only becoming more and more decoupled from GNU. From the downvotes though I've either come across as combative or sarcastic I suspect.
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I mean that's true and commendable but the OP was speaking towards the future. And on our current trajectory the future is only becoming more and more decoupled from GNU. From the downvotes though I've either come across as combative or sarcastic I suspect.
Fair enough. But does it really matter what all the dumb terminals are running, when most of the infra(servers) is running full blown GNU/Linux?
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.
> and the reason that it has so few women involved It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on. I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
However, the accusation is more specifically that the proportion of women in the FSF and FOSS in general is (or at least was under Stallman) significantly lower than that of women in programming jobs in general, which suggests that there is something more going on.
Following a 2009 FSF women's mini-summit in Boston, Bruce Perens acknowledged this difference, even offering an explanation: "... there are more women who hold technical jobs than there are women who so love the technology that they will work on it whether they get paid or not. That seems to be an especially male thing."
However, that was very much not the conclusion of discussions among women in tech at the time, who were more likely to cite the sexist behaviour of some prominent men as reasons they kept out of parts or all of FOSS/FSF. RMS' name certainly came up a lot.
Rachel Kroll also wrote a post back in 2018 with the title "Choosing to stay out of the community", talking about similar issues.
[1] A legal term that means more or less "plausible so far, but we'd need a full trial to get a definite answer".
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.
Many women don't want to be around nerds. It's really that simple.
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Fair enough. But does it really matter what all the dumb terminals are running, when most of the infra(servers) is running full blown GNU/Linux?
It's a hard question to answer because really it depends on what you consider relevant computing in my opinion as well as how you interpret the post I was replying to. Despite the profit dominance of Apple for example, Android smartphones are the computer of the common man worldwide and so by extension the common man is coming into less and less contact with GNU. From that perspective it's hard to say that GNU will b…
Compared to when? Would the Android experience differ substantially if it included the GNU userland?
I'd argue no : the common man does not compile, write shell scripts or writes it's own software.
Or are you argueing that somehow GNUCash for example would be more popular?
You can look at Windows or OSX to see what is important to the common man. And it is not build tools / infra, and I think that is fine.
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I mean that's true and commendable but the OP was speaking towards the future. And on our current trajectory the future is only becoming more and more decoupled from GNU. From the downvotes though I've either come across as combative or sarcastic I suspect.
Fair enough. But does it really matter what all the dumb terminals are running, when most of the infra(servers) is running full blown GNU/Linux?
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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…
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…
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 though. Stallman said I'm an enemy of free software since I wouldn't say "GNU/Linux" to him.
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Fair enough. But does it really matter what all the dumb terminals are running, when most of the infra(servers) is running full blown GNU/Linux?
Since we're at the limit of what the comment chain permits, I'm not really sure I see what you're driving at in your followup reply to me. I mean yes, GNU's never been thaaat relevant to most people. That doesn't change that in the context of the OPs original point it's hard to see GNU as having done anything but lost ground in contemporary times. Which in turn makes it hard to see a way it'd be a path towards whatev…
To be able to reply without pause, click the timestamp.
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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…
> and then others came along GPL came after MIT ( https://nitter.net/humphd/status/1112747178685026304 ) > and it's a genuine improvement How?
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.
So if you want to bring in a library to make pretty graphs or something, it very much matters what the licence is - MIT is generally fine though.
(How and whether a FOSS library author should be paid for the fact that one corporation used their library to develop software for another corporation, is an entirely separate matter.)