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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

#61

Post by red_admiral »

emilsedgh wrote: post #13
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.

the reason that it has so few women involved Citation needed here. Free Software movement at this point is much, much larger than FSF, GNU and rms. Many of those communities (Like KDE which I've been involved with) have been very very welcoming and inclusive to woman. However, woman have always been under-represented there just like many other areas in Tech. Not saying rms has not made GNU/FSF difficult for woman tho…

> Citation needed

FLOSSPOLS 2004-05 found that "proprietary software" was around 28% female, whereas "free software" was around 1.5% female. A presentatation of the results can be found at [1].

I agree with you that FOSS is much larger than GNU/FSF, and that many places are actively welcoming to women - the linked slides reference Debian's efforts; the python community also seems to be fairly good at this.

[1] https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#62

Post by pipo234 »

froh wrote: post #46
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…

what do you mean by "fair profit"?

In case of Red Hat? Given their substantial contributions to Linux, primarily funded by support contracts, certification and consultancy I think they deserve to be profitable. At the same time, I as a user, also prefer to not pay them and have free access to their software.

For some time this was acceptable to all parties. But then companies not competing in Linux contribution started competing in the support contracts, certification and consultancy business, by giving away RedHat's free beer.

Wouldn't it be great if Oracle, Amazon (and Rocky, Alma) could continue to rely on RedHat's efforts but share / contribute / upstream revenue profits made consulting, certifying, supporting rather than freeloading on commons like RedHat? Forcing a distro fork the way RedHat IBM seems to want seems like an unwanted technical solution to a mere business/money problem.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#63

Post by zelphirkalt »

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 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 they break the shackles of proprietary software and hardware?

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#64

Post by red_admiral »

yvdriess wrote: post #26
blueflow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem with that explanation is that in the past, there were a lot more women in computing. First as operators and programmer/mathematicians, later the gender mix was following the same upward trend as other sciences. I've seen two explanations for the dearth of women in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) and the rise of personal comp…

The interpretation in the book "Programmed Inequality", albeit specific to the UK, is that in the early days programming and adjacent tasks involved a lot of manual labor (punching cards, moving tapes around), for which companies employed women to do it as cheaply as possible.

When tech jobs switched to requiring fewer humans, but ones with much more responsibilities and the ability to make operational/strategic decisions and to contribute to the design of the systems as part of implementing them, then companies moved to hiring men.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#65

Post by dale_glass »

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 better shell, exa is a better ls, and none of those is under the GPL.

There's also a project to do a straightforward rewrite of coreutils in Rust, and that is MIT licensed.

Where's the FSF's effort to modernize things and remain relevant?

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#66

Post by aerhq3h5 »

the-dude wrote: post #56
aerhq3h5 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the common man is coming less and less contact with GNU. 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 no…

I'm not really sure I see what you're driving at. 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 whatever salvation was being opined on. If the primary vehicle for GNU's propagation before was situations that saw it bundled with Linux we're now in a time where there's countless mainstream Linux devices and virtually none of them incorporate GNU.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#67

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

Which concern specifically does AGPL not address?

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#68

Post by pjmlp »

riffraff wrote: post #43
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even the Linux kernel might one day be changed for Zirkon.

didn't google all-but-abandon Fuchsia's development (and thus Zircon)? There was a bunch of lay-offs in January, in July they announced the smart speakers would not use it, and AFAIU the only product using it (the Nest Hub) is supposed to be replaced by the Pixel Tablet.

Not sure, at least officially, Fuschia is still going.

https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#69

Post by blueflow »

red_admiral wrote: post #54
blueflow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree. If the proportion of women in FSF was the same as "tech" in general, then your interpetation would be "colorable" [1]. 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 wo…

Take note that Rachel's post is not making any reference to sex, gender, sexism or discrimination. Its about a toxic community and not about gender issues. Its not backing up your point.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#70

Post by the-dude »

aerhq3h5 wrote: post #66
the-dude wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the common man is coming less and less contact with GNU. 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 no…

I'm not really sure I see what you're driving at. 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 whatever salvation was being opined on. If the primary vehicle for GNU's propagation before was…

> anything but lost ground in contemporary times.

Compared to when? The web is only growing and growing and is 90%+ GNU/Linux.

All/most SaaS'es which are displacing 'conventional' software are running GNU/Linux.

The 'AI revolution' is running GNU/Linux.

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