No Radical Changes in GNU Project
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lists.gnu.org
Here is what reporter Edward Ongweso Jr. wrote for Vice [1]:
> Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.
Here is what Stallman actually wrote:
> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
There is literally no way to read the previous sentence as Stallman arguing that Epstein's victims were entirely willing.
People like Edward Ongweso should be the ones losing their jobs, not Richard Stallman.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8b47/two-researchers-re...
The one thing I feel like everyone would have to agree on with RMS is that he was strident in his belief in the Free Software movement and refused to compromise in ways that initially seemed intransigent, and were later revealed to be prescient. I worry that both Gnu and the FSF will move more and more toward being co-opted by the corporate "open source" movement as people less obstinate that RMS take charge and let themselves and the "overton window" of Free Software be dragged further into the realm of captive corporatism.
Of course the counter to this is that retaining RMS as the leader alienates enough people to weaken the movement equally, and that may be true, I don't have a crystal ball. What I do know is that he published The Right to Read in 1997 and a year later we had the DMCA and things have only accelerated from there.
I guess we'll see where the road takes us, but as someone who remembers the excitement and energy that surrounded the web, linux, firefox etc etc, it feels like nowadays open source reigns supreme and it's all just a bunch of free work for corporations to scoop up, stick a web interface on (or containerize), and give back none of the same freedoms they make use of. I just hope we don't look back on this moment (from our locked down walled garden devices) as when the real decline of a true free software commons started.
GNU hasn't had an answer to this besides "boycott it," which feels an awful lot like horse-riders suggesting we deal with the problems with cars by never owning or supporting ownership of them.
My point still stands: I don't personally know a single person who is able to explain AGPL.
I think this proved what I said.
(That said there was a thread on the n8n project where a couple of persons had serious problems understanding the basics of open source, its relation to free software, why commons clause isn't open source etc etc so guess we will have to explain what is and isn't "open source" for the foreseeable future :-/
What's less clear is what defines the boundaries between AGPL-licensed software and the rest of your stuff making up whatever you're offering. This isn't always 100% clear with the GPL either but the GPL meaning of distribution is pretty tightly tied to traditional Unix methods of combining code which are mostly unambiguous.
Agree.
> What's less clear is what defines the boundaries between AGPL-licensed software and the rest of your stuff making up whatever you're offering. This isn't always 100% clear with the GPL either but the GPL meaning of distribution is pretty tightly tied to traditional Unix methods of combining code which are mostly unambiguous.
Agree again.
See my point? I don't say AGPL is bad only that it has a tendency to confuse developers in all directions.
Source: https://twitter.com/binarytemple/status/1172884198912331776
The AGPL requires those who create web applications derived from the AGPL (whether they're distributed as binaries or not) to make the code for their web applications available.
The AGPL does not address the cloud-hosting conundrum at all. This conundrum is where a cloud hosting company (e.g. Amazon AWS) can replicate the original author's service offering using the unmodified open source tool (wrapping it and interacting via API at most), and undercut the original author's business model. I.e., you can imagine a power user of some AGPL software competitively putting the software author's company out of business.
This is the reason for the recent licensing restrictions around ElasticSearch and MongoDB. The originating companies have had their hosted service revenue models undercut by Amazon AWS offerings that simply repackaged the software as part of their cloud offering.
Making the AGPL even stronger by adding in a viral API clause would pigeon hole AGPL software to only the most fringe ideological use-cases as everyone would be afraid to run AGPL software in a business context.
Of course, the desire is to keep AWS from offering even just a fully-compatible competing service. But that would 1.) require APIs to be copyrightable and 2.) would, as you suggest, make that software pretty much unusable for most cases.
You're right that the AGPL largely pre-dated the cloud providers although the direction things were going in was reasonably clear.
The software running on the remote server could even be proprietary software! For the sake of the person running the server, they should not use proprietary software, but if it is running on their machine and not yours, then it is not your responsibility, and (as I understand the GNU position) not wrong for you to access that software.
Now, if the software is actually a combination of server-side software and client-side software, such as servers that deliver Javascript code to be run locally, then that Javascript software should be Free Software.
But moreover, the GNU concern about running software on remote servers (i.e., "in the cloud"), is not just about the software itself, but about what the server maintainers can and do do with user data. Who owns the data? Can you get a copy of it? Can you get a copy of _all_ of it? How about the implications of the data? For example, you could tell Facebook ten things about yourself, and they could extrapolate a hundred more. Is "your data" the ten things only, and not the additional hundred extrapolations? And, if you ask them to delete "your data", will they? If they do, what exactly do they delete?
So it's really more of a privacy issue, I think, than a pure "free software" issue, but important nevertheless.
I'd expect them to prefer you to use free software on the server, licensed under the AGPL.
I firmly refuse to install non-free software or tolerate its installed presence on my computer or on computers set up for me.
However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's license, or make me responsible its being present in the computer, or make me the possessor of a copy of it, so I don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of course, I explain to the local people why they should migrate the machines to free software, but I don't push them hard, because annoying them is not the way to convince them.
Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then. (I do consider what those machines and their owners might do with my personal data, but that's a different issue, which would arise just the same even if they did use free software. My response to that issue is to minimize those activities which give them any data about me.)
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
A kiosk, pay phone, ATM, or someone else's personal computer is indeed not a "cloud" server; I might reasonably extrapolate that Stallman would have the same opinion about software installed on someone else's server, but whether if that is true or not, this may in fact not be an official "GNU" position, as such.
That's my impression as well, but to me that is an area where the FSF/GNU/RMS is fundamentally wrong. Not having control over the software and, even more important, the data that is on the server is the main reason why everything is going to shit. Yet the FSF doesn't seem to care, specifically this reply from RMS on the topic:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/repo-criteria-discuss/201...
All the privacy, censorship and other problems with Facebook, Youtube, smartphones and so on are rooted in somebody else controlling the server, and in turn the software and the data.
If the Javascript is GPL or not is essentially irrelevant, yet that is the main problem the FSF focuses on. I can understand how the FSF would came to that conclusion (by following their philosophy that has been outdated for decades), but it completely misses all the problems people have day to day on the Internet.
How data is managed and controlled on the server should be the main concern of the FSF today, but there has been shockingly little effort in that area. I am not even talking in terms of actual software solutions, but just general philosophy discussions. The few bits of effort we have seen, such as the AGPL, not only don't go anywhere far enough, it wasn't even originally created by the FSF. And their repo-criteria completely miss the point.
Ironically, even the slow moving field of politics went to overtake the FSF here. The GDPR goes far and beyond anything I have ever seen by the FSF when it comes to data freedom.
I really wish the FSF would put more effort into solving and discussing todays problem, instead of solving RMS's printer driver problems from the 80s, since really, that problem has been essentially solved. We have today completely Free Software OSs that everybody can use. The problems that remain are outside the realms of the classic four software freedoms.
(Granted, it will be annoying and painful to find new ways to do things like search the web, manage files/emails, or stream videos, but I think those can all be solved from the technical side.)
About the time the proprietary OS was finally declared dead, new competitors arose with convenient, cheap solutions that made money exactly because "you don't own the hardware the software runs on."
So we have another proprietary "open" operating system and it can capitalize on free software but still be proprietary.
When it becomes inconvenient (or painful) to use the proprietary solutions, there's a flood of new users to the free software world. I plan to just keep polishing the free software offering. That deprives the proprietary versions of oxygen, because it raises the bar for what is Free.
A person can hack away on a free version of an OS for cost of labor and electricity, and making a mistake on one's personal OS build tends to have a "blast radius" limited to the individual user (or perhaps an enterprise relying on whatever software that OS was running).
Running a free (as in speech) cloud service? Much trickier as one deals with cost to run the servers on behalf of other people and administrative costs of users of one's cloud offering abusing one's resources. It shifts responsibility and cost models in a way that doesn't map cleanly to pre-cloud models.
I'm not sure I disagree with you, but I can't visualize the model of replacement that would actually work (everything I've seen so far has significant gaps in security, reliability, and division-of-responsibility in the design itself).
(Reductio ad absurdium) GNU hackers creating an AWS clone? Not gonna happen.
I have paid close attention to conversations that Ed Snowden brought up around his attempts to convince Glen Greenwald to use and trust PGP.
The Free Software movement will someday have an improvement on PGP. When average ordinary people such as Glen Greenwald can use it, that part is done. Part of what?
And... let's argue about what to call it!
Free Cloud? Nah, too conformist.
GNU's Non-Cloud? The acronym GNC is already taken and besides, it's unpronounceable.
Shout out to https://plausible.io/ even though they use the MIT license.
The best thing I did to reduce annoyance and pain in managing files and emails was to move off of hosted garbage like Gmail and Dropbox to offlineimap/mu4e and Unison/git/rsync.
That is a really unfair way to describe things:
https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
The real problem is corporate propaganda to discourage people from licensing their work under the GPLv3+ or AGPLv3+
Same with the Javascript, sure, you get the source in a non-obscured fashion, but that doesn't buy you anything, the data is still on the server and how much or how little you are allowed to access it is controlled by the owner of the server, not that bit of Javascript.
To bring Free Software into the cloud age you would need licenses that go beyond the source code and regulate how the data on the server is stored, manipulated and distributed. The European GDPR does that and there are a tiny few licenses like the Open Data Commons Open Database License that do that. But from the FSF there has been pretty much nothing.
It's a small tragedy.
It's already happening. I saw this posted recently, either here on HN or on Twitter, by someone allegedly from the FSF/GNU camp: https://freesw.org/. The language of that page is worrying.
I think the "overton window" you mentioned really captures the essence of the problem. Principled people like RMS are needed, even when their positions are sometimes impractical, because otherwise the "window" will shift too much to the side of nonfree software, well past the middle point of compromise. I've had people here on HN argue with me that Free Software is "not about users rights" (i.e. the Open Source position) and that it's exactly like Open Source, and that "Free" Software doesn't mean what I -- or the FSF/GNU -- claim it means. Without RMS, this narrative will gain momentum :(
But like you said, we'll see where it goes, it might not be all bad.
It's like saying that the Pope is too religious...
EDIT: I misread, it’s not a letter of support to Stallman. Sorry.
> Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.
> We believe that Richard Stallman cannot represent all of GNU. We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project. The GNU Project we want to build is one that everyone can trust to defend their freedom.
These are not supporters and the page isn't made in support of RMS.
That'd classify as being against RMS. You can argue semantics all you want, but with someone else as I am not interested.
> Support free software.
> Don’t support Stallman.
https://twitter.com/mattl/status/1177355118829854720?s=20
In any case I think it’s clear the letter is against Stallman retaining the leadership role and therefore in a binary supporter/adversary framing, the signers should not be considered “supporters” of RMS.
The second half of that sentence pits you directly against RMS, who has made clear he does not intend to leave his position with GNU.
You should read and understand what you sign, before you do.
> Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.
> We believe that Richard Stallman cannot represent all of GNU. We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project. The GNU Project we want to build is one that everyone can trust to defend their freedom.
This is not a list of people in support of RMS, they are against RMS.
The notion that empowered means shielded from opinions you might disagree with seems odd.
https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/1181395164499070976
Basically, it's okay to be friends with people we disagree with (and really, we ought to).
Ironically, she didn't catch flack for George being president of the Iraqi war, she caught flack for George's stance on LGBT issues when he was president.
Also, isn't this post a copy/paste of one that you just posted? Simply repeating it doesn't make it true, guy.
Ironically, she didn't catch flack for George being president of the Iraqi war, she caught flack for George's stance on LGBT issues when he was president.
Not all of us lied to get Congressional authority to use force with explicit conditions, and not all of us declared those conditions to be met and applied the force so authorized in knowing bad faith.
In fact, exactly one of us did that, and his name is George W. Bush.
Whatever guilt anyone else has in that matter is far less.
Is that something the US should be doing? I think not, and it frequently ends badly, but Presidents keep trying. Like Obama in Libya or the elder Bush and Clinton in Somalia and Bosnia.
Bosnia was different. Clinton was 100% correct (and too slow) to act, because it was genocide. He already Rwandan blood on his hands by his inaction.
Love thy neighbour folks!
(EDIT: this doesn't mean i don't have a problem with GW Bush's needless war, as pointed out by a few sibling comments. It's more like, I think that if people mingled a bit more with people from other camps, then there would be more understanding and, ultimately, less hardship in the world. So much of the shit in the world comes from lack of communication!)
That said, however, with the circumstances surrounding the removal of RMS, the FSF can longer be trusted. This very different than "depending" on a single person.
Basically you post to the list if you have a meta issue and then everyone replies. It can get pretty tough to follow if you're using email, but most of these had (still have?) mail<->news gateways, so you could use a threaded Usenet reader to keep track of all the forks in the threads.
It's sort of a lost art with the news service being mostly gone and with threaded social media.
spam: some run filters on the list, some let it through
banning: some lists are moderated where posts go through moderators, some are not, ban tendency is up to the list administrator
archives: some listserve software has built in archives, other people run add-on web applications, others dont archive at all.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mailing_list_software , etc.
That simple step prevents most bulk spam. For technical lists you can also do things like limit messages to text/plain, reject binary attachments, etc. What little spam remains, if any, can be handled by simple filters. Manual moderation, where posts are queued waiting for approval, is rare but might be necessary if someone is maliciously trying to disrupt the list.
One of the oldest mailing-list archive-to-HTML processors is MHonArc (https://www.mhonarc.org/). Most mailing-list software now supports this feature natively, but the organization of such archives (by date, thread, etc) and the look & feel seem to have been heavily influenced by MHonArc.
God I feel old now.
It just makes me so sad. I'd like to learn the truth about this whole issue, and see justice served, but without an official and thorough situation it all remains hearsay and such.
This is the implication. As an example very, very few CEOs are fired but a great many are sternly asked to voluntarily resign by the board.
[1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-...
IIUC, GNU leadership is somewhat distributed. If people still listen to rms, he has a leadership role. If people cut him out of decisionmaking, he doesn't. I don't think he has veto power over any aspects of the software (and even if he did, forks can be made).
Do you feel the FSF is irresponsible? If not, what are you trying to say?
Can you share any specifics? What evidence do you have to back up your claims?
They are no long relevant to Free Software.
Said handwavey statements are also not libelous, at all. Libel is a high bar.
Please provide any first hand accounts of actual behaviour that justify what you said. I've yet to see any.
> 2. Richard Stallman has been contributing to a negative environment for women at MIT for over thirty years.
From the original article, contains a number of quotes from witnesses and people who felt uncomfortable or harassed due to Stallman's behavior over a span of ~20 years while he was at MIT.
Then there's this[1], this one where he argued about the re-inclusion of an abortion joke in code because his code is inherently political[2][3], Stallman apparently violating the policies at a conference he attended and going unpunished (which is a common occurrence)[4]. People have been complaining about his casual sexism publicly for decades[5].
And I'll remind you that the "charge" here, insofar that there is one, is that "Stallman behaves in a way unbecoming of a leader of the free software movement and other organizations". There's ample evidence here that he repeatedly and continually refuses to communicate with others in common ways, instead he invents his own language (no really, he has a personal dictionary on his website) and when his counterproductive communication methods cause confusion or pain on the part of others, he is generally unapologetic and unwilling to correct them.
[1]: https://twitter.com/bella_velo/status/1172524864193945603
[2]: https://twitter.com/alicegoldfuss/status/993677847280562178 (I remember people complaining about this one at the time), https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-05/msg00001.html for the entire thread
[3]: Remember this one the next time you say code isn't political!
[4]: https://wwahammy.com/on-safety-at-libreplanet/
[5]: https://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard...
There is nothing in what you posted that merits me believing or disbelieving.
I engaged with your defamation in good faith. You provided no evidence of any bad behaviour so there is nothing more to discuss than you apologizing.
I won't be engaging further.
Edit: wow you even reposted the original hit piece.
I went to the work of providing specific examples, it would be polite for you to specifically and precisely explain why you think they're bad. You have repeatedly avoided giving specific reasons that the examples I provided are acceptable, instead you have claimed that these examples aren't evidence, with no accompanying reason. This is not a good faith interaction by you. It's avoidance of actually addressing the evidence provided. Since it's so bad, addressing it should be quick and easy.
Edit:
> Edit: wow you even reposted the original hit piece.
Of course I did! My statement was that the original article referenced firsthand accounts. That's a true statement. There are attributed quotes. Do you deny the existence of those quotes? Like, they're there in the article.
[1]: quoted in this https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...