The Future of the Free Software Foundation | Hacker News Reader

The Future of the Free Software Foundation

fsf.org

63 pointsgtsnexp24 comments

Web page title is currently "Moving into the future with the FSF tech team", which is far narrower a scope. (ETA: and it's the link, so this was mis-titled to start with.)

Anyone have any idea of how (and what) Richard Stallman is doing nowadays?

Exchanged emails with him recently. Appears to be alive and well after getting forced out of fsf.

Thanks, that's good to know.

You can check <http://stallman.org/> and/or email him directly to find out.

Unrelated, but I clicked and found this is really good advice up front:

https://stallman.org/articles/dont-watch-covid-tv.html

I know people who cannot move on with their lives or adjust because of overwhelming anxiety due to COVID.

Actually I had a friend who had overwhelming anxiety due to Trump's election too. He thought we were in danger of being killed by North Korea because Trump and the leader were exchanging words a few years ago. It was media saber rattling, but sometimes people can't tell the difference when the they are constantly being shouted at with alarmist "news".

What I do instead is visit the LOCAL newspaper for the COVID guidelines in my area, maybe once a week. Follow the guidelines, but otherwise move on with your life to the degree possible.

Good advice, local newspapers also have a hard time financially, and a small amount of potential customers (who can -and, arguably, should- be interested). It does depend on your interest in a subject (COVID-19 in this specific case). One way to gauge it is asking yourself: "how is this beneficial for me any my loved ones?"

Thing is, that's why I was interested in COVID-19 in the first place. I lost my father 5 years ago. Difficult. My mother is in 3 risk groups for COVID-19. I really, really don't want to lose my mother as well. That's where my COVID-19 anxiety stemmed from.

Pregnant partner? 2 y.o. daughter? Unborn child? None of these are in risk groups. I wasn't worried about them, at all.

And that's a problem with irrational fear. Perhaps it isn't irrational. We are convinced it isn't irrational. How do we know for sure if it is irrational? How can we bring it more in line to reality? [1]

[1] I am not a psychologist, but if you have that with a lot of things in life, you might wanna say hello to GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder).

Not sure about FSF, but FSFE is in deep s* (imo). Sorry. Once upon a time there were at least 1 message per day in the mailing list - now totally dead. Even messages are verified (hope not censored) before posting. In the last 2 years - after whatever election issues, things have become so stale. Very sad. (Note I am not taking sides - just the fact that normal members are very dejected that it seems like between Democrats/Republicans. You cannot be have more than one point from each side.

What are you talking about? I receive mailings from they pretty regularly. They created amazing petition to free publicly funded code: https://publiccode.eu/.

Hello

At what point does FSF loose it’s credibility? After forcing stallman out or after they release video conferencing, like the rest of the open source world after seeing zoom’s explosive growth?

I have nothing against building a conference system. I’ve done so in the past. What strikes me though is that this is coming from FSF, a foundation about privacy and freedom, not software and services. Am I missing something?

The FSF didn't force RMS out; he voluntarily resigned so as not to have external events hurt the FSF. You can email him if you don't believe this. He's been pretty clear about that.

The FSF released free software video conferencing to associate members. This is the exact opposite of proprietary platforms like Zoom and is part of the mission of the FSF, to promote and defend user freedom. The organization isn't solely about writing on privacy and freedom; it also focuses on tangible ways to have privacy and freedom, and a free software solution that isn't Zoom does that.

<quote>The FSF didn't force RMS out</quote>

This is what RMS declared: "I hereby resign ... due to pressure on the Foundation and me..." We know pressure on the foundation came from SFConservancy, GNOME, various groups aligned with SJW, among others. But we are left to wonder who could've possibly pressured _him_. The FSF itself, maybe? Board? ED? Staff?

<quote>The FSF released free software video conferencing to associate members.</quote>

Yes, and I agree it's a clever way to get more donations.

I had lunch with RMS the other week. Email him if you don't believe me that the FSF didn't force him out.

You're misconstruing the content of this blog post. It's about the activities of the technical support team at the FSF, not the FSF as a whole.

One of the things they've mentioned they're doing is implementing Jitsi conferencing for their staff to use. They're not writing a new piece of software, and they're not trying to stand up a big public service -- this is really just an internal project.

This is what I was missing. Thanks for clearing that up.

The FSF is absolutely about software and promoting free/libre alternatives to proprietary solutions is their core activity.

Well, not entirely.

The decision years ago or GCC to deliberately obfuscate its inner workings so that it was impossible for proprietary plugins to be created (but also free plugins also) heavily contributed to the dominance of LLVM. GCC is still the only compiler for a couple of obscure architectures and the main compiler for most linux distros, but it's starting to lose ground there too. And the tooling ecosystem has totally moved to LLVM basically.

And they have had little if any focus on the Web until recently, it feels like they're still living in the 1990s. Stallman's departure might have been helpful in getting them to start broadening their horizons a bit.

Can I read up a bit more about that decision somewhere? Do you have any recommendations?

I noticed the massive ecosystem shift towards LLVM, ofc, but I never stopped to think why this happened.

GCC source code was always rather Greek to me, so making it even less readable deliberately sounds like a bad decision.

Here's an overview of at least part of the discussion https://lwn.net/Articles/582697/

The Free Software Foundation has always been about free software first. You seem to be describing the EFF more than the FSF

>after they release video conferencing, like the rest of the open source world after seeing zoom’s explosive growth?

They've considered real-time video and voice chat a high priority project since at least 2008, it's not like they've just taken an interest. They had an internal need to set up a system, and are offering the system to others who may need it

Well, those aren't necessarily orthogonal. Firefox fits squarely into Mozilla's Internet freedom and privacy goals.

The FSF has always been late to the game. Not the first to open source (predated by the BSD and MIT licenses) and now just copying the industry (badly) after the fact. Viral licenses are an interesting idea, but these days open source is driven more by pragmatic and economic forces. Even Apple releases the source to their kernels.

>Not the first to open source (predated by the BSD and MIT licenses)

Though the early versions of both the BSD and MIT license predate the GPL, they were inspired by the FSF and the license used for things like Emacs.

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