GNU-FSF Cooperation Update | Hacker News Reader

GNU-FSF Cooperation Update

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48 pointsstargrave9 comments

Sounds like a lot of words amounting to nothing...

Yeah. Some of us GNU hackers submitted concrete proposals to the FSF back in December: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-misc-discuss/2019-12/... . Radio silence.

Is this related to the perception, accurate or otherwise, of rms’s failure as a leader of the free software movement? I have my own opinions about it but it seems that lots of people have their own that either align or oppose mine; things he has done recently have been quite polarizing (whether or not in 50/50 proportion TBD).

A lot of these sorts of press release style posts are more implication than statement, written into a context or situation created by current events that is almost never written about explicitly in a post or statement, leaving one guessing at the implied context to which it is a response. Is this such a response to the rms drama? Is it unrelated?

One thing to consider is that the copyrights for the GNU project, are assigned to (and thus owned by) the FSF. I interpret this "minimizing change in the practical aspects of this cooperation", as implying that the status quo, of the GNU project assigning copyright to FSF hasn't changed, and would probably be in nobody's interest to change.

It's hard to imagine this /not/ being related to the two organizations no longer sharing Stallman as President/Dictator/whatever. It's not really clear to me who actually cares about the GNU project specifically, or even FSF, or how they plan to "cooperate." Developers that like the GPL will continue hacking using it; developers that don't will continue hacking without it. Maybe I'm out of the loop.

GNU is more than a license, there are many important projects that are all under the GNU umbrella that are still governed by the organization.

Examples: gcc, coreutils, glibc, bash, r, ...

True, and gcc is still immensely important. But we used to live or die by gcc. It was imperative that we had it and it was important that it got decent updates.

Now, with LLVM, the world is just a little bit more relaxed on that front.

My impression is that developers are drawn to and associate with these specific projects rather than the GNU umbrella. But I might be mistaken.

> Is this such a response to the rms drama? Is it unrelated?

Could be.

I think the other strong possibility is just that the FSF is confronted with a world that features lots of permissive licenses and lots of software as a service.

I don't think it's controversial to say that the Affero GPL has not garnered much adoption, and that GPL (v2 or v3) licenses have been in slow decline for a sustained period of time.

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