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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

#81

Post by globular-toast »

red_admiral wrote: post #61
emilsedgh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Do you really think all those women in proprietary software jobs aren't doing free software because of one man? They probably haven't even heard of him.

There are many more obvious reasons for the disparity that don't involve anything malicious let alone singling out one person and attaching the blame.

Anybody can make meaningful contributions to free software. Nobody has to interact with RMS or anybody else. I've made many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions just fine.

Given that there are essentially no barriers to entry to developing free software but there are significant barriers to being paid for it, I wonder why proprietary software is only 72% male when free software is 98.5% male. Are there any other fields that exhibit this disparity? Are there more/less paid male/female car mechanics versus car enthusiasts/hobbyists, for example?

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#82

Post by globular-toast »

CJefferson wrote: post #32
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.

Have you spoken to women who have joined open source groups (I’m thinking GNU / FSF led projects, not just programs that happen to be open source)? I have, and without exception the ones I know well personally have had awful experiences, and the ones who complained were just told “Oh, that’s just how person X is”. (There is not a single X here I am hiding, it’s a pattern).

I develop free/open source software and I've never joined an open source group. I'd say that goes for the majority of contributors.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#83

Post by throw0101b »

severus_snape wrote: post #20
red_admiral wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Origin of the “MIT License”':

* https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9263265

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34636092

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#84

Post by safety1st »

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…

Yes, at this point the current generation of feminism has an awful track record: by conflating online rumors about "creeps" and "sex pests" with actual women's rights concerns, they've ceded cultural ground to conservatives who have promptly used their new influence to do stuff like limit access to abortions. (Stallman is unwaveringly pro choice.)

Nadine Strossen comments on this problem in one of the links I posted:

> So we see the term sexual assault and sexual harrassment used for example, when a guy asks a woman out on a date and she doesn’t find that an appealing invitation. Maybe he used poor judgement in asking her out, maybe he didn’t, but in any case that is NOT sexual assault or harassment. To call it that is to really demean the huge horror and violence and predation that does exist when you are talking about violent sexual assault. People use the term sexual assault / sexual harassment to refer to any comment about gender or sexuality issues that they disagree with or a joke that might not be in the best taste, again is that to be commended? No! But to condemn it and equate it with a violent sexual assault again is really denying and demeaning the actual suffering that people who are victims of sexual assault endure. It trivializes the serious infractions that are committed by people like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. So that is one point that [Stallman] made that I think is very important that I strongly agree with.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#85

Post by grumbel »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #67
grumbel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AGPL is only concerned with source code, it doesn't address how to handle a user's data in any way. Giving you the source, while keeping your data under locks is perfectly fine under AGPL.

Meanwhile the GDPR has the concept of "Data Portability" and requires every service to allow users to export their data, so that they can move it somewhere else. As far as I know, there is no Free Software license with similar requirements. They all stop at the source code, which just isn't enough in a modern SAAS based world.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#86

Post by j-bos »

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…

Been thinking about this, and imagine a solution being force multiplying the power of free hackers with LLMs, faster and faster iteration. But I don't know much.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#87

Post by LtWorf »

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).

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#88

Post by teddyh »

red_admiral wrote: post #60
severus_snape wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then others came along GPL came after MIT ( https://nitter.net/humphd/status/1112747178685026304 ) > and it's a genuine improvement How?

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 the result to any third party. Secondly, no IP can “become GPLed” unless anybody chooses to make it so.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#89

Post by sbuk »

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]

Thanks for proving my point.

Re: Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

#90

Post by teddyh »

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…

See also https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/>.
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