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Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

This is a 20-year-old problem. It won’t improve. And we’ve lost the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL).

OSS is dead.

Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.

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> OSS is dead.

Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I would hope so.

Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing better than ever.

I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal.

It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.

Largely failed? Everyone is using the GNU userland on Linux.

I don't see it struggling either really. The Linux desktops are in a better state than they have ever been.

To me that just further illustrates the point that GNU failed. I mean it's right there in the name, it's supposed to be "GNU's not Unix" but the only parts anyone actually uses are clones of Unix that get used on a different Unix-like operating system (Linux) which is not GNU. And the desktop environments also don't have anything to do with GNU. IIRC the only official desktop environment of GNU is GNUstep, which I don't even think is actually packaged by any distros at the moment.

GNU's not SysV/BSD UNIX. It isn't literally meant to be for a different OS altogether. Even Hurd has a POSIX syscall API.

Come on now, that is a pretty big stretch. And it's not even true, coreutils and glibc implement a lot of SysV and BSD compatibility. My point here is that GNU as an operating system is dead. People can make up some new goals for it but it seems obvious that the original goals have mostly been a failure. Even if you disregard Hurd and count the "FSF approved" Linux distributions, few people actually use those because most of them are just ordinary Linux distributions but with the only major change being that some proprietary packages and drivers are removed. Is that really adding value to the software ecosystem? I personally wouldn't recommend those to anyone beyond hardcore GNU nerds, for most people I'd still say just use Ubuntu.

The desktop environments are not from GNU, no. But they are all GPL. In that sense the FSF still has a strong influence IMO.

Yes the desktop environments are still using GPL but those are already established projects, not growth areas. For newer projects it seems there is a shift away from copyleft towards Apache-style licensing. The newer copyleft licenses (GPL3, AGPL) just haven't gotten that good of a reception. And in the areas I've seen that do use them it seems it's despite the FSF, not because of them, for example the FSF seems to have completely given up on license enforcement or helping with anything in that area.

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