The Free Software Foundation is dying
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it.
So far many of his predictions have come true and there are a few more that seems to be on their way to happening.
What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD.
This link is one prediction that seems to be where we are well on our way to heading for:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
If he is removed from the FSF, that will come true.
edit: spelling
This is neither good nor bad, so I'm not sure why your whole point seemingly is based on it. Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. There are examples of where corporations worked together and it turned out well for all and examples of the opposite happening, so I'm not sure why this is necessarily framed in such a negative way.
EDIT: consider the Linux Foundation. They combine private and corporate interests fairly well, with no corporate capture, and they are succeeding in ways the FSF never has.
"If I'm able to exploit you, it's your fault" is a strange take. Just because something isn't expressly forbidden doesn't make it ethical or moral.
This in no way nullifies my argument.
Corporations are not part of "everybody", except in insane US law which recognizes corporate "personhood".
In other words: A corporation is not just like, or even remotely like, anybody.
A well-run foundation that would benefit from corporate help doesn't necessarily have to bend to the whims of the corporation. The Linux Foundation is a good example of where private/corporate partnerships are done much better.
https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html
From first hand experience, I believe he is clearly a net negative.
At this point he's become so polarizing it doesn't matter anyway, it's just some weird tech drama no one wants anything to do with. The genie is out of the bottle and if we want this to be about software we need to move on.
The person promoting Free Software is never going to be a billionaire - that limits the quality of candidates. Simple fact. Anyone of outstanding character devoting their life to selfless good isn't going to spend it promoting Free Software to a thankless and ignorant audience of ordinary computer users.
Stallman is a lot better than nothing - honestly he's pretty good, we're probably going to see him replaced by someone less capable - and as you point out the alternatives are probably going to be compromises who dilute the freedom to serve corporate interests.
That's amazingly over-optimistic IMO. Stallman hasn't been relevant in decades. Companies don't fear him. The FSF is as far as I can tell politically irrelevant.
Just look at even the nerdiest sites: HN, Slashdot, the Linux-centric subreddits. Nobody talks about what Stallman is doing today unless it's the old "Do we need a new FSF leader?" topic. Even that pops up infrequently to be then forgotten. Most of the time you see him brought up is in a historic sense, like your reference to the Right To Read, which is from 1997. I frequent all the places I listed, and from my activity there I haven't the faintest idea what Stallman or the FSF are up to.
If that's the state in the places that would be most interested in what Stallman/the FSF have to say, then in further away areas things are just dire and their influence is probably close to nonexistent.
I think Stallman did excellent and valuable work. But he just doesn't make an effective leader at this point. I think he'd make a far better "guru". The FSF should shove him to the side to some sort of consulting role, and give the role of the public face to somebody who can communicate more effectively.
And in any case, that's going to be needed on a pretty short timeframe anyway, since the man is just old. He can't do this forever, so there has to exist a worthy successor.
* Presided over and actively contributed to the decline of GCC and gave up the world of compiler-based-tools and compiler research to LLVM by insisting on making it impossible to use GCC as a library. Pissed off the emacs maintainers in the process.
* Pissed off the glibc maintainers by trying to veto the removal of an abortion joke from the manual, even though he's had no involvement in glibc for years and "veto" is not a reasonable power for him to have nor one that he has ever had. On this basis a lot of other maintainers got pissed off about the level of control he was demanding over details that have nothing to do with software freedom
* Has done absolutely nothing to address any threat to free software since 2005, or otherwise adapt to the changing needs of developers to keep FSF/GNU relevant. RMS has no idea what those needs even are because the man reads his email with curl.
And now he's been back for a while, and nothing continues to happen, and the FSF is increasingly irrelevant year over year without even taking optics into consideration.
You believe you will never grow old? Do you wish your family and friends to turn back on you because you are old and don't have the same energy as you had when you were 20? The question is how the landscape would look like today and if there even would be "open source" in the broader sense as we see it today, with permissive licenses, if it wasn't for him.
Sure, you can look at a person's mistakes only, but you could also look at all the good a person has done. Do you yourself ever do mistakes? You never made a bad decision in your entire life? C'mon. To err is human. How would world look like if everyone was thrown out from the job and the society when they do a mistake, and if everything in the world would be judged by mistakes and not by the value it adds. Reflect over yourself first, are you sure you are qualified to throw a rock?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Knauth
Nobody claims RMS should be president for life, or anyone else, I just dislike the rhetoric the Op uses.
Sure, we can recognize that Stallman had very significant achievements that merit recognition, and accept that not everyone can keep on producing amazing work until they keel over. But that's in the context that's outside of being an active leader. That he did a good job before doesn't mean there's not a job now that still needs doing well.
Nobody said that, either.
> That he did a good job before doesn't mean there's not a job now that still needs doing well.
And you personally know he can't help doing this job further on, and he is on his own entire board in FSF? You are free to nominate and show the world what you can do!
I was referencing your "Do you wish your family and friends to turn back on you" part.
> And you personally know he can't help doing this job further on, and he is on his own entire board in FSF?
It looks to me like he's got an outsized influence in the FSF and even if he might be a board member among 7. But that is a good point, it may be the case that the problem is bigger than just Stallman.
> You are free to nominate and show the world what you can do!
I'm not an US citizen nor have any interest in being one, employed full time, and on a non-profit already, so my agenda is full.
That said given how things have gone the last few decades, I do think I could do a better job at this point. I don't doubt there are people far better suited than I, but I'm pretty confident I could do better than the current state.
Part of growing old is handing things over to other people to carry on.
> Do you wish your family and friends to turn back on you because you are old and don’t have the same energy as you had when you were 20?
I don’t think the FSF is intended to be Stallman’s personal support network first and foremost, and I particularly don’t think that is the premise it has used in raising funds. To the extent that the FSF has become that, that's an even more serious problem.
> The question is how the landscape would look like today and if there even would be “open source” in the broader sense as we see it today, with permissive licenses, if it wasn’t for him.
If we were talking about “should Stallman be inducted into the (hypothetical) Free Software Hall of Fame?” sure, but that’s not the issue.
> Sure, you can look at a person’s mistakes only, but you could also look at all the good a person has done.
Leadership roles aren’t about the good you have done but about the good you can be expected to do in the role.
"other people" means: corporate stooges
______
not the first time in history that voices appear to demand that a leader of some project, someone with a proven track record of principles over status/power/wealth, be replaced. typically what they're really asking for is a leader that's easier to pressure, more amenable to their interests. this is even more the case if they're demanding that the replacement be selected on the basis of immutable characteristics unrelated to the project.
Yes, every other person in the Free Software movement that isn’t currently on the FSF board of directors is a corporate stooge, obviously, so were he to ever leave, that’s the only possible replacement.
:eyeroll:
In fact many accomplished leaders themselves recognize that they need to be succeeded by a new person at some point. They can retain an emeritus status and participate in the discourse while allowing the baton to pass. Since we all die at some point, this is in truth necessary for a movement or organization to continue.
I also think that the enemies of free and libre open source software definitely don't want us to be able to have a civil debate, so they probably send shills to derail conversations (it's an asymmetric war, after all).
If we look back at historic movements, they weren't always led by people that were perfect by every metric (source: Behind The Bastards multi-volume episodes on Clarence Thomas, where they mention that some people that advanced equality in regards to racism were at the same time misogynistic, and didn't consider it worthwhile to advance women's rights).
As long as Stallman is a steward for the things we hold dear, I'm of the opinion that it's a good thing for us... Despite his flaws as a person, but with the condition that he get with the times and improve his behavior.
He's been proven right about most things, but he can't convince people to save his life, and that's a major problem because we stand to continue to lose essential freedom.
Can you provide an example or article? I have not yet encountered an intel platform that refuses to erase the secure boot keys.
That being said, I would not be surprised.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=377054
There was an article on a new lenovo model that you cannot install linux on, but to lazy to look for it.
Quote from a lonk:
>Lenovo says Microsoft requires they block Linux from booting on such PCs.
... ...
>This has nothing to do with better security. It is simply about restricting consumer choice by making it more difficult to install something other than Microsoft Windows
> Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD.
The Linux Mint forum post includes this:
> To be able to boot Linux on such PCs you need to either disable secure boot in the BIOS or you need to enable the "Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA" option in the Security section of the BIOS.
Then if you follow the link to the document from Lenovo:
> Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default. This means that for any of these Lenovo platforms shipped with Windows preinstalled an extra step is needed to allow Linux to boot with secure boot enabled.
Following that, Lenovo even gives instructions how to do it.
So it seems clear to me that it's allowed and that this does not match the original claim.
> To be able to boot Linux on such PCs you need to either disable secure boot in the BIOS or you need to enable the "Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA" option in the Security section of the BIOS.
it's not like they're blocking completely the ability to install Linux, anyone installing Linux should be able to follow those steps. Don't get me wrong I'm no Lenovo/MS fan but spreading FUD is not the way
edit: formatting
How would they do that? They have no influence, and if anything have worked for decades to alienate any potential allies. Nor do they have any leverage via the software or licenses the control. The only GPL software that's best of breed is Linux, which FSF has no say on. No critical software uses the latest versions of GPL.
The dystopia in Right to Read also happened decades ago: it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System. Less toy-like examples would be embedded systems and cellphones, which have always been locked-down[0] since day one (waaaaay before the iPhone popularized this business model). The FSF isn't positioned to stop this. Microsoft pushed for locked-down PCs back in 2012, with Windows RT[1]. It failed not because Defective by Design made a good protest campaign and got Congress to stop it, but because Microsoft made several key strategic blunders that made their attack on freedom irrelevant.
If Intel fails in pushing Linux or BSD off of people's laptops, it will not be because the FSF stopped it, either.
The problem with RMS is that his area of expertise is several decades old and his activism has taken time away from him maintaining that expertise. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the FSF was purely an activism project; but it also maintains an operating system and several other core utilities. The people actually fighting on the front lines of software freedom these days (e.g. Hector Martin) consider the FSF to be functionally impotent. The diversity concerns raised in the posted article are downstream of this: the FSF is still used to telling a very specific brand of techie why they should care about software freedom, they don't know how to make a convincing argument to the general public.
Now, let's contrast that to right-to-repair. This is a concern downstream of software freedom: you can't meaningfully restrict repair practices if you can modify the software on the device. So it might seem like a side-show we should just ignore. However, it's seen a lot more attention than software freedom. We've gotten right-to-repair legislation in Massachusetts and Colorado. And this is a function of two things:
- This being a more concrete and understandable concern. Nobody cares about being able to modify the software on their Tesla - until they need to break the software locks on their Tesla that keep them from swapping parts.
- Activism from people (e.g. Louis Rossman) who are willing to touch scummy social media platforms.
The last one is important. Social media is how a lot of political activism happens, for better and for worse. But as far as I'm aware the FSF does not have a presence here. Nobody at the FSF is making, say, punchy YouTube video essays or Twitbooktodon posts explaining the through-line between not having source code and corporations doing bad things to you. And as far as I'm aware their lobbying arm is nonexistent.
[0] Or, at least, not intended to be user programmable in ways that make locking them down palatable to consumers.
[1] The ARM port of Windows 8
True. Corporations have successfully coopted Free Software and GPL into OSS. And the final stab was SaaS. Now the majority of OSS projects and programming languages are corporate-driven.
It's difficult to imagine Corporations fearing Stallman.
Indeed. People in the inner circle around RMS do not use social media. They are either genuinely uninterested, or for the political reason does not want to use anything that includes non-free JavaScript or other non-free technologies, where non-free is defined by the GNU project, i.e. the GPL compatible license.
> Now, let's contrast that to right-to-repair.
Because that is something that people can immediately "feel".
I believe people should become more aware that free software, or at least, open source software, is important for democracy and freedom. How can you ever have freedom if whomever wish can spy on you and control what you say? Can you have free elections if your vote is manipulated? How can you ever be sure if machines run closed source software only very few chosen ones have access to? How can you ever know what happens in the world and make informed decisions if there is no free information. Can we trust any information and software if it runs closed source binary blobs? I believe that the only way to solve this is to make laws that demand open source software to be used in software of public importance.
The CDDL is GPL incompatible yet the FSF considers it a free software license: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CDDL
And Apple, of all companies, has offered an implementation solution. Their ARM chips in Macs can boot an OS with a fully-vetted chain of trust on the same drive as a completely untrusted Linux distro. And macOS does not reduce its security level to allow this. Why can't Intel do that? Wouldn't that be a great compromise? Don't any Linux people see value in a chain of trust?
By doing what, exactly?
> We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides.
Stallman is in many ways a problem - but the solution is finding technically and socially competent leadership with a vision that aligns with the core ideologies of the FSF and the ability to lay it out as a coherent long-term plan.
Forced diversity has not ever and will not ever make that sort of thing easier to achieve.
When someone starts out with bullet-point one devoted to orthogonal social issues and not the actual goals of the foundation and how to reach them, it's fairly clear where they stand.
Like, cops using secret rules to determine guilt would be considered dystopian basically anywhere.
If you want to have a talk about the also completely unrelated issue of facial recognition, we can do that too.
The way that you get the average user to care about software freedom is by drawing lines between it and seemingly unrelated issues. You don't say "proprietary software means you can't edit the code", you say "proprietary software means more surveillance tech everywhere". And the way that surveillance tech works is that it follows a very specific "shitty technology adoption curve"[0]. It will first be weaponized against socially acceptable targets such as criminals first, and then to social minorities that don't have the leverage to say 'no', and then to poor people at large, and so on and so forth up the chain of oppression.
Of course, because of how this adoption curve works, a foundation staffed entirely with old white guys isn't going to be inherently aware of these sorts of problems. They are going to be fighting them by accident, and losing out on a way to do effective outreach about the problem they want to solve.
[0] Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this one out.
Black people have darker faces with generally softer features, women paint themselves with makeup and frequently leave the house looking less like themselves than other people.
The sorts of solutions that a prescribed - more diversity - do nothing to fix those issues.
Multi-perspective and multi-frame processing can be used to reconstruct 3D models of a well-lit individual, which has the potential to get around makeup induced false contouring.
Solving the issues of clowns and women - but how do you deal people who are genetically predisposed to being poorly lit?
Infrared's probably your best option, and it's already common place in security.
There are multiple factors that lead to the software not working - and none of them stem from the fact that it's proprietary.
(The Stallman notion that anything other than copyleft needs to be erased is fucking ridiculous - and I really don't think that you'll find traction with it on a site where almost everyone uses the profits from software to feed themselves and their families.)
There is a related notion that would have granted you some traction - that tax payer funded software should be open source.
This nicely parallels the issue of public access to publicly funded scientific research - which has gotten a lot of traction here, over time.
As far as rising authoritarianism is concerned, you've chosen a weird hill to die on.
The court is packed, and the already broken two party system is being gerrymandered into oblivion.
You're focusing on the tools being used without regard for the intention and the users.
Anyway, you didn't even get to the fun part of the conversation - that facial recognition struggles with black people and women.
Which is a fun little conversation that people like to politicise and blame on the people who wrote the code.
Only if you begin by presuming diversity isn't a benefit on it's own.
The author contends that Stallman (and through his leadership, the FSF) ends up repelling the very kind of interconnected community that could sustain the free software movement. Thus, their first suggestion (replace Stallman, and include different kinds of people in future leadership) is directly related to that specific issue.
It's actually a rather nicely written piece, and they support their suggestions in the narrative pretty well. Perhaps you skipped ahead (or perhaps you just disagree, which is certainly your right), but they absolutely didn't "start out" with "orthogonal social issues". They made the case for why those issues matter and then connected them to their suggestions.
Reality begs to differ.
If they're well aligned, where are these people? Have they been oppressed by not being given a chance? Let's see where we are in 20 years when that argument can finally be put to rest (when's the last time you saw a positive _male_ role model in films or other pop-culture, tech-related or otherwise?).
I’m not the best person to ask about movies, but most example of protagonist “hackers” that comes to mind include white males. Counter examples that come to mind are “The Web” (female), and Sens8 (transgender lead, helped by straight white male)…
That said, I may have misunderstood your point, but happy to correct it elaborate if I’m off base!
My first point was that if it were true that "technical and social leadership" indeed was compatible and even "well-aligned", then why is it we don't see that in people in leadership positions? Where are they?
Then I pre-empted the tired argument that we don't see them because they've been oppressed for so long. I suggested that culture has been so "progressive" in recent years, that there are no longer any positive male role models (the over-compensating pendulum swing, in place of actual progress), so now that that's done, let's see what effect it has had on future society in 20 years, because we won't be able to blame "the patriarchy" or whatever any more.
Now having said all that, I'm super happy to hear that you've had a positive experience in diverse workplaces :) I'm old, and remember when being openly gay wasn't fun.
I’ve been fortunate in some ways, but nothing came easy to me. I didn’t come from money, didn’t graduate college, didn’t know anyone… I moved to LA just to escape that toxic environment, and found a good job developing embedded systems in 2 weeks. I’m an autodidact, so my only qualifications were a portfolio of projects, including an old TI DSP project and a pre-Wi-Fi embedded wireless device. Over the next ~15 years, I kept moving up in rank and salary, changed jobs a few times, received patents, contributed to papers, and was lucky enough to be mentored by some truly amazing people…
I’ve always felt success is a combination of hard work and luck, even for those “born into it”. If true, that likely means for everyone like me, there are a dozen or so who didn’t make it, or never took a chance.
And yeah, being gay still isn’t fun. Maybe it made it easier to take a chance moving 2600 miles from home though — I figured I’d be dead within a year if I stayed where I was…
Hope that doesn’t sound like some kind of humble brag; I’ve obviously had my share of failures and loss.. That said, given how lucky I feel at this point (I’m in my 40s), I couldn’t understand how you’ve never met a positive role model… But I do now, and it was naive of me to extrapolate my experience into the general population… And I’m not suggesting I worked harder or did anything to deserve my good fortune… FWIW, I’m really sorry you (and likely most people) haven’t known the same men and women I’ve been lucky enough to know…
Really hope that doesn’t sound like some arrogant humblebrag, or diminish your hard work!
Defo, but I'd tweak that a little and say they come hand in hand. The luck comes from hard work, or at least just going for it, it doesn't just magically land in your lap.
I have a similar background; grew up poor in a rough area, low expectations from my teachers due to my ethnicity, and thanks to my parents, worked through all that to become what most would call successful. The breaks came from opportunities, which came from putting myself out there.
It's a mistake to think people are lucky, because it implies things just happen to you. Nobody has it easy. Even those who are apparently patently lucky in that they have rich parents, are not lucky. The only thing worse than not having anything, is having everything.
Three off the top of my head.
I wonder why it is you wouldn't have run into any...
Do we live in the same reality?
If you imagine dealing out people like cards into stacks chosen randomly and enumerating the demographics of each stack then large stacks would tend towards the population demographics but many smaller stacks would have all sorts of distributions. The only way to ensure a small group is diverse or a large group isn't is to select them for immutable characteristics instead of skill.
There are not many people who are both talented in their fields and have the surplus time and energy to exercise a saint-like restraint to deal with all the draining crap. This environment is the sediment that filters a lot of talent and successfully prevents healthy growth.
This does not necessarily apply to individual GNU packages, but the overarching "project" structure is rotten and resistant to any attempts at reform.
I can’t really understand where the US is heading with this agenda. As a EU citizen I’m often puzzled and worried, why can’t the sentence just be “We need more competent leaders”? This should imply diversity per se, and btw who decides a place has enough diversity? There will be a diversity judge on workplaces?
The irony is that I live in a country where there was also some _very_ messed up history, and the reason things _are_ alright now, is because they don't keep dragging that shit up. Everybody acknowledges that it was unacceptable bullshit, and moved on.
The key difference is acknowledging and facing what your ancestors did, and _then_ moving on.
The legacy of all of it is still alive and white americans still benefit from the oppression at the expense of minorities.
Essentially, it was never made right to the benefit of modern white americans... therefore the guilt they feel is founded because at some level they see the benefits of their privilege even if they deny it out loud.
> The group of people whose ancestors were even in the country while slavery was legal or women couldn't vote or before the Civil Rights movement is getting smaller and smaller every year.
Did you know the majority of black Americans couldn't get home loans until about 1990? Even then it was very difficult.
Think about if your great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents all only lived in apartments or didn't have as secure of a housing situation.
What effect might that have on someones upbringing?
No, whites do not benefit from oppression, oppression harms the oppressed. Rich oppressors may benefit, but they are by no means all, or even a significant population group.
The vast majority of Americans are not involved in perpetuating or perpetrating oppression, discrimination, or injustice. Those that are responsible are a small affluent layer that rules our oligarchical society. Spreading the blame to a huge group, which is not even an ethnic group or nationality, but simply a skin color, is ridiculous and benefits only the powerful few.
Racializing political and social discourse is a dialectical trap designed to distract from real solutions to societal problems, and focus people's anger on the 'other'.
Confirmation bias and the inertia of continuing to choosing white males for leadership positions mean that there is no such thing as meritocracy.
Even if there were (there won't be), there are issues of representation and opportunity which can only be addressed by actively seeking more diversity.
That is dangerous mindset, so dangerous that I think the article is just trolling, trying to trigger people. But in case if author was serious, choosing leadership or any position for tha matter, should be based on their vision, skill, the weight of their respect is set community rather that on their sexual orientation, color of their skin, country of origin and ect. Discrimination needs to go. And this writing, suggests discrimination based on race or sexuality and gender.
I'll be honest I stopped reading after that point. From the beginning the ranting was already a salt mine, but kinda wanted to see what direction they were going with it.
Now some might thing diversity and inclusion should be the goals, but I think many disagree and consider that there is enough other organizations being able to do those things. FSF should have unique value proposition if it wants to continue to exist. And leadership should be effective for that value proposition.
Diversity could never be a goal, it creates exclusivity and privilege of one group over others. The diversity will happen in healthy environment naturally overtime. The real goal is to fight discrimination.
The dangerous mindset is acting as if people with the power of hiring positions are unbiased and don't hire based on soft skills, "culture fit", and other irrational things.
> Discrimination needs to go.
Yes it does, but... it hasn't. The status quo is a heavyweight and inertia pushes it forward... would you have minorities suffer until the mythical future where discrimination doesn't exist comes?
The FSF is the extreme org, the canary in the coal mine that is going to alert on critical issues, but also which frankly are going to send out a lot of false alerts. They are the die hards that will get it wrong constantly, but also will be the early alert system for true critical issues.
We need other, more moderate voices they are willing to compromise more and be less extreme. That should not happen within FSF, but as a separate org.
FSF is constantly telling us the sky is falling. It isn’t, and your point about GNU/Linux is a good example. The FSF is still valuable in those rare cases where they find serious issues. I just learn to ignore them on the nonsense side.
Not really? Stallman obviously wants everything possible to be GPL licensed and harped on about GNU/Linux for decades, and so far all that is gradually fading away.
The modern landscape is much different from when things started, the core tools are a far smaller proportion of a modern OS and have been rewritten many times since, including in non-GPL licenses. These days there's efforts to rewrite them in Rust, usually not under the GPL.
I think under better management the FSF would do a better job of dealing with this. Both in watching for new developments and making sure not to lose relevance (eg, IMO the FSF should lead the effort to build new Rust-based versions of the GNU tools), and in being in touch with the modern tech landscape (eg, cloud)
I'm pretty sure they don't see it that way. The last big ideological 'war' was between FSF and OSI and it's quite clear that FSF lost. Open source proponents successfully allied with and used the FSF the launch their own platform to achieve their goals. Once their goals where achieved they dropped the FSF in the dust. In fact the FSF lost so badly most people don't even remembers what they fought for or even that they lost.
Simple: empower the user. Focus on the user's freedom to do things.
I think FSF's goals can be easily rephrased in terms of that "new" freedom, while remaining consistent with the original vision.
I also think this is where free software is failing very hard in the recent decades. I was running Debian+SailfishOS as my daily drivers up until 2019, when I completely switched to the Apple ecosystem, after one simple realisation: it empowered me and granted me the freedom to do more with my devices.
There is no intrinsic reason why Apple is better at empowering their users than FOSS is, I think it's the exact opposite: FOSS as a principle and as a development practice has proven over and over again that it can compete with, and even take out proprietary juggernauts - in spaces other than personal computing.
I have on my desk (just for fun) a PowerBook G4 (2001) with OSX 10.5 (2007), and I think that machine + OS is still ahead in usability vs a modern release of KDE or Gnome.
I don't know, I don't think bridging that gap is impossible, but that might require unthinkable compromises like acknowledging the need for proprietary Wifi firmware, CPU microcode, or single sign-on for Google/Outlook/iCloud mail and calendar. So I'm not sure if it will ever happen.
There are other apt analogies between the Protestant Reformation and the Free software foundation but I will leave discovering that as an exercise to the reader.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
But about new licenses: I've written a few [1], and I'm currently getting them checked by a lawyer.
I think these licenses are an improvement, but feedback is welcome.
It's only natural that Stallman will refuse, and I can't blame him for that.
I mean, why not start your own "Libre Software Foundation" and get those unnamed "emerging leaders" behind your agenda? Why would you need to be the continuation of FSF if you plan to radically change it?
Unless, of course, the goal isn't actually about organizing at all and is actually about using the FSF's brand for clout and tapping on its already established network of donors.
1: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...
Eli Zaretskii and Lars Ingebrigtsen are doing amazing work as maintainers.
There seems to be far more freedom respecting choices nowadays than in the past and we're now entering the dawn of "free" cpus with RISC-V. I'd also consider that Linux is more widely used than at any time in the past as well. What am I missing?
Stallman has spent the majority of the time arguing pedantically about things he has no control over - for instance he would yell at you for saying "Linux" instead of "GNU-Linux". He outlived the utility of being the FSF leader about 30 years ago and should have passed on the baton then.
I would hesitate to call them "dying", but maybe just becoming less relevant compared to other organisations.
This largely comes back to RMS. It’s fairly common for organizations to have trouble surviving the departure of a key founder, and in his case that is especially complicated by having run it for decades as largely a personal vehicle. This was especially glaring when he was invited back after leaving in a cloud: how much does a “so what if he drove people away, he’s been here for years!” message suggest that they’ll become more relevant in the future, especially with the people who saw that and decided never to touch an FSF effort?
I do think RMS has made some very important comments and insights about how technology is being abused by companies, but I'd agree that he's probably not the best person to be running an organisation - maybe keep him around as a consultant.
RMS' management of the GNU project derailed long ago, from him vetoing for his jokes in project he's not involved anymore, going OT & insulting on mailing lists and often threatening GNU maintainers by stating that their project belongs to GNU, not them.
Will be interesting to see where that lawsuit goes.
That is, Amazon offered their users every right and information about how Elastic Search works. All of their modifications are public. I believe they even offer deployment information if you want to replicate it. The problem is that they are out-competing Elastic's managed offering on price and overall integration, and that they are not contributing to the Elastic Search code base, they are simply offering the existing code. This is all fully within the letter and spirit of any GNU license, and any further restriction would in fact be a violation of the 4 Freedoms described in the GPL. This is/was not a TiVo situation.
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/custom-page/...
Edit: This paper also gives a good overview of the license https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/c15...
I stopped donating to FSF upon his resignation.
I resumed donating after he returned to the Board.
In short, I disagree.
The author frequently posts in support of the OSI (applied for a seat, endorses their “we get to define open source” nonsense, etc.). A March 2022 post rants against Elastic and others because of a non-OSI “open source” license change, while glossing over Amazon’s and the OSI’s roles leading to that change. It also makes a strange argument about bias, which almost comically contradicts itself at the end.
IMHO, the OSI, FSF, RMS and ESR have all done more harm than good to the open source community. I’m not saying they’re all equal, or even always bad, but I’m not a fan of bringing one-sided political or philosophical arguments into the hobby and career I’ve truly enjoyed for over 20 years. And no, my contributions don’t somehow mean I get to define what “open source” means for everyone.
Drew doesn't really address this directly, although many of the things he points at I would say are related to this. RMS is a big reason why the FSF is the way it is ie. its why their site is a disorganized mess of philosophical ramblings, poorly organized (and often badly written, resulting in people believing things about their licenses that aren't accurate[0]) legal FAQs and kinda poorly written predictive fiction attempts from Stallman.
Your average user isn't going to give a shit about this. Your average programmer already knows and builds on top of FOSS - FOSS is the great portfolio establisher of the programming world at this point. You don't need to convince them. Your average user deals with far simpler (and frankly far more dystopian) problems like "my entire workflow broke because Google removed one of their apps and I was completely reliant on it", "Spotify removed all music of my favorite artist and now I don't have access to the music I paid for" and "Microsoft made it so that I can't use my computer without a Microsoft account anymore".
The FSF has an extremely myopic view here that if it's not invented in FOSS land, it's not worth talking about. The GNU Project has an attitude that actively works against bringing people over to FOSS tooling unless they go all-in. Most people don't... do that, they'd rather gradually replace things as they become an issue.
Your average user runs Windows and has an iPhone or an Android. Your average developer needs to target these platforms. What does the FSF provide through the GNU for developers and users? Preachy nonsense about how you should buy a Thinkpad and live like a digital hermit. Sure you can barely participate in modern society, but you're at least free!
FOSS successes come when a project does attempt to bridge the user problem. LineageOS is an extremely useful Apache licensed Custom ROM that's widely used as an Aftermarket OS for Android phones for example. LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice, MPL licensed) only became a household-ish tool because it openly was meant as an alternative word processor that strives to at least be compatible with Office (and most of its layout is basically borrowed from the last version of Office before they introduced the ribbon - aka the most production efficient version of Office). People gradually replace, but the FSF demands a total switch in workflows if you want to play on their turf, which for most people is frankly impossible.
They can call Facebook and Google silly names all they want, but grandma needs them to schedule her bingo club on Friday. And unless you want to take up the effort of teaching 10 octogenarians how to use a FOSS WebDAV calendar app and Matrix, how to set their devices up for it and more importantly, how that works when their tablet is replaced 3 years later. It's basically unreasonable unless the workflow and experience is exactly identical to that of the tools it's replacing. And it basically never is.
The FSF needs to start trying to work for FOSS being a reasonable option for end-users if it wants to live - the developer work is done, it's been done for upwards of 20 years now. Their insistence to keep focusing on the dev side has just let Google et al. create the dystopia they warned about just by ignoring FOSS (ironically the very thing the FSFs proposition claims was easily avoidable if we just build the tools. - We build them. Then Apple and Google just steamrolled the entire relevance of FOSS through either having proper UX design or shoring it up.)
[0]: Anything to do with the AGPL.
They're Europe focused though, and while that's not an issue for me, the US is still for now the prevailing legislative body when it comes to the territory of FOSS and it's hard to expect the European organization to take up the fight of the US FSF.
At the moment they're iirc not working with the US organization anymore because the FSF reinstated Stallman without any prior communication or warnings to them.
This made me laugh a bit, given the arguments being made.
(I'm not calling him a hypocrite; it's fine to use MIT licenses and make these arguments. It was just a funny concluding statement on the blog page)
Perhaps it is because of it ...
That's putting it nicely. The FSF's messaging is religious bordering on cultish. Frankly I'm amazed they've accomplished as much as they have despite constantly shaming developers for daring to ask to be paid for their labor.
Someone cannot really argue that something is failing without showing that it once succeeded at those goals. The FSF has never been very widely known or effective, except for creating a few pieces of software (gcc, emacs) and a few epic failures (hurd).
The FSF has already done enough. It created the GPL license, which is a huge achievement and enough that we can leave the FSF alone without trying to "fix" it or mold it into something new. If Drew wants an effective FSF, hey, you can go make your own. If your ideas are so great, it'll surely rocket past the FSF and become the new standard-bearer in the open-source world. But ideas are cheap...
I'm not a fan of RMS, but this is the exact kind of left wing platitude that people think will revive an organization, but really just signals thats the organization is more concerned with the appearance of reform, rather than substance. It is the death rattle of an organization which has allowed itself to become ideological rather than pragmatic (which is funny considering how ideological the FSF is)
The problem with FSF is that it either hasn't made its point clear, or has failed to convince people. People are naturally turned off by the GPL because they do not want to give their company's code away; they see it as a risk to their businesses.
I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work, and we should compete on quality of service and frequency of updates rather than having a monopoly on our code base, but that's simply not an argument that businesses buy.
It is an uphill battle convincing companies to give away their code to an ecosystem that they will, in the long run, potentially benefit from. The FSF fails to do this, and usually only makes ideological arguments presented by a long-haired, bare-footed, libertarian hippie with a history of extremely controversial takes on the topic of child molestation.
Make arguments for RMS's removal based on his actions, but wanting him gone because of his gender, skin colour and/or age is just as exclusionary as Ku Klux Klan is.
It's just wrong.
However, it is a complete other thing to say 'we'll fix this with more inclusion, yep, that'll fix it', this is the pinnacle of doing the least amount of effort, just like a convincing leader that use anecdotes to sell their vision..its cheap.
It's amazing how the article present five points and y'all are obsessed over this one point (which concerns the removal of RMS and open up for more diversity & inclusion). But sure buddy, that's the issue.
That's what the role is, say what nobody else will say, make people uncomfortable when apathy is comfortable, and when nobody else will act, take action and rally others against things that are bad. It's not a role that will inspire universal love whomever takes it.
If instead FSF stops with that and tries not to upset anyone it will be dead, not just in decline.
If living the FSF moral means being like RMS, you'll never convince anyone. Here is how he browses the internet:
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
This is the behavior of a lunatic, and not someone who I consider tethered to modern society or the economy that relies on technology. He reminds of the guy in "better call saul" who has removed all forms of electromagnetism in his house. If I met this person IRL, and he tried to convince me of literally any opinion, I would assume outright that these are the ravings of a mentally ill person with paranoid delusions of grandeur
I use noscript and uBlock... my wife thinks about that the same as you think about RMS' 12ft pole browsing. However she is just perfectly fine with Linux as her OS for 20 years now. How Linux came about IS bound up with - is thanks to - RMS and his particular place in the autistic spectrum. If he wants to use email as a frontend to the web instead of wget what's really the problem when his other activities have led to net wins that have affected everyone positively? Can you really sum both things up fairly with one word, "Lunatic", because it's not how you'd browse the web?
Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent.
It works perfectly fine if you own the copyright to all your code. You can't relicense somebody else's code of course, but you can relicense your own. So a company that develops something in-house and then slaps the GPL on the public release can change their mind on the license for future releases all they like.
It only gets tricky if they accepted external contributions. In which case there's often a contributor agreement, in which the contributor agree the company can relicense the contributed code.
I should have written,
"Updating someone else's GPL code ..."
Thank you.
I don't think it should be a goal. I think it should be a societal goal to provide equal opportunities to everyone, and we can probably measure the results of those efforts by a statistical sample at the end of the pipeline: what % of engineers are black, white, etc. If we find over-representation of one group in a field which usually requires a college degree, then we can probably intuit that not everyone is getting the same opportunities at the beginning of the pipeline. However, it should not be a goal to solve those problems at the end of the pipeline.
> It is becoming a bigger and bigger red flag for an organization to not have some diversity of gender or race, pointing it out is not inappropriate.
I think that in 2020, the zeitgeist was towards every company doing something for DEI. I also think that this was born out of the BLM protests that summer as well as the flatline-zero interest rates set by the federal reserve. Now that that political fad is over (new president) and the economy has become more strict (higher interest rates), companies have cut DEI programs as investors expect them to be more financially responsible. To sum up my point: I think fewer people care about DEI in the corporate world today than they did 3 years ago
1. Treat all candidates equally, regardless of race, sex, etc.
2. Hire the most qualified candidate for the job, regardless of race, sex, etc.
3. Not engage in conscious or unconscious selection bias when looking for new applicants. I consider it to be a valid hiring practice to make sure you show up to career fairs at HBCUs or women's universities
Doing anything beyond that is not only a bad solution, it is immoral to press your hand down on the weight of one candidate over another based on his or her identity categories. It is as wrong to prefer a white candidate as it is to prefer a black candidate.
This is a very convenient position to take for white men in power. Now we insist it must be a perfectly level playing field, never mind the centuries of racism.
It's like a child who flips the board when they don't like being told, "That's not how this game is played..."
Full disclosure: I cut off my contributions to the FSF in fall of 2004. It was obvious it outlived its utility even then.
Now I ride to downvote hell...
Whether or not the FSF is still the best champion for this cause is a different matter, but I support anyone pushing against the world of proprietary software.
...uh, what?
Like, if you're referring to, say, some hypothetically limited version of copyright where it's more or less a private right-of-action for artists to sue publishing firms for unpaid work, then sure. That would be anti-capitalist, specifically because the Soviets tried that.
As it currently stands copyright is the foundation of modern capitalism. Yes, it doesn't feel like that if you're, say, a right-libertarian or a hardcore free market guy. However, you have to remember that capitalism and a free market are two different things. Capitalists do not care if the market is free, they care if line goes up. They will happily choke off the free market using monopoly power or government power if it will make them more money.
A large corporation deciding that you will own nothing and be happy does not make them suddenly hardcore pinko commies. This is just the end stage of capitalism: once you run out of legitimate ways to make a profit, you find ways to steal from others. That's why we used to have antitrust laws[0] to keep companies from becoming democratically unaccountable quazi-governments of their own. And in my opinion the greatest own-goal right-libertarians ever made was campaigning against their use.
[0] Antitrust law in the US has been functionally braindead since the "consumer welfare" standard was adopted by a bunch of federal judges litigating from the bench in the 1980s.
>We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides.
The FSF is dying. What we need is women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos to lead the movement.
There is nothing inherently wrong with diversity, but this is an attempt to spread an agenda, not save the Free Software Foundation.
A character like Richard Stallman is and have been a necessity for the movement to be what it is. We cannot let people of weak character lead the movement. We must reject non-free, proprietary software, not fall into a spiral of pragmatism until we are OSS.
If you don't know how Stallman is a strong net negative, you haven't been paying attention, and you certainly haven't seen him in person. I write a bit about this here:
This keeps coming up, so I wrote about my experience. HN comments written on the toilet only do so much.
If we want the best advocate, assuming they hire somewhat locally, there is a 75% chance that candidate is male, and an 80% chance they are white or Asian. The FSF movement already struggles to make up numbers of people who actually care about freedom, it can't afford to be picky adding extra requirements on who it is searching for. Maybe the best person is any weird combination of traits, but the post is pretending the FSF has a luxury that it does not.
The original post is not calling for what is best for the Free Software movement, or a sober approach to figuring out what is best. They want to use the FSF as a vehicle for political goals not related to freedom.
And besides, the FSF doesn't appoint leaders. Leaders appoint themselves. The FSF didn't come along and found Stallman.
Many characteristics would be necessary to lead FSF. Gender, sexuality ot race are not important in this context.
By all means, if a person with the meaningful characteristics to lead belong to your preferred minority groups, that's awesome! But looking for a minority group first and the desired characteristics later definitely seems to be a roundabout way to push an agenda.
I think you're being uncharitable here, appointing a random person of color to a leadership position in the FSF is absurd and not what he's saying, but doing the work so that more than just pasty white nerds join are actively involved in the FSF and rise to the level of leadership is a worthwhile goal. It's basically an argument to be less exclusionary and expand and embrace a larger community which is very much in the realm of saving the FSF.
HN is for curious conversation—which rules out $X-fanaticism for pretty much any X.
If I may, I'd ask you to refrain from such bans until the poster proves a chronic flamer. At least give them a warning first (unless you already did, and they continued, in which case please ignore this comment).
* The combination of "women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos" with "people of weak character" points clearly in a flamewar direction—a hellish one, in fact.
Discrimination ("RMS should go because he's a white male") cannot be fought with more discrimination ("minorities never contributed to free software"), I agree on that wholeheartedly.
My name is irrelevant to the contents of this post. I believe I said nothing wrong, nor did I intend to start a flamewar or oppose diversity. Promoting free software over proprietary software will be a reoccurring theme to my posts but it looks like that ended already if my privileges are revoked.
The username is relevant because it suggests a single-purpose account and those are not allowed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Pre-existing agendas are antithetical to the curious conversation we want here—which, at its best, meanders through whatever catches a person's fancy.
> nor did I intend to start a flamewar or oppose diversity
If you say that wasn't your intent, I believe you! but your comment pointed in exactly that direction—enough that we got emails complaining about it. It's fine with me if people disagree about Stallman and whatnot but the ideological battle aspect is just poison. (And yes it was in the original article too.)
> Hammering on about “GNU/Linux” nomenclature
Linux is just a kernel, not an OS. It was bundled with the GNU system, which was missing a kernel. See explanation here:
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
For many years you could use Debian over the FreeBSD kernel, for example - having the GNU system, plus a bunch of non-GNU software, over another kernel.
These days, maybe we should call them GNU/systemd/Linux systems :-(
> maligning the audience as “useds” rather than “users”
Nowhere on the FSF website do I see that term used (I checked with their search function).
I do see this term on GNU.org, applied to Facebook "users". I think it is not maligning people, it is critiquing behavior, and that is quite appropriate in that context.
> antagonism towards our allies in the open source movement
I hope you mean the Free Software (or FOSS) movement - right?
Anyway, which allies do you mean? I hope you don't suggest that Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like are our allies. Or maybe your conception of "us" is simply different?
> none of this aids the cause.
Ah, but what is "the" cause?
> The pages and pages of dense philosophical essays and poorly organized FAQs do not provide a useful entry point or reference for the community.
It seems you disagree with the content more than you do with the website entry points. It is quite a useful reference; but again, perhaps your "the community" is different.
> As for copyleft, well, it’s no coincidence that many people struggle with the FSF’s approach. ... over 1 million npm packages use a permissive license while fewer than 20,000 use the GPL; cargo sports a half-million permissive packages and another 20,000 or so GPL’d.
1. There's LGPL, which is intended for libraries (and npm packages would typically be that).
2. "Dedicating" software to be free, in the GPL sense, is no trivial matter. Sometimes you just can't do it because you don't own the legal rights; sometimes its because potential commercial users you are interested in will avoid GPLed stuff; and there are other reasons.
But it is the direction we should be converging towards: Software as something that is fundamentally free, period. No more lock-ins and development siloing and other artificial sabotage of software development due to narrow commercial interests.
> The FOSS community is now dominated by people who are beyond the reach of the FSF’s message.
To the extent that's true - _that_ is the problem. And the author is part of that problem. But it's really not that new: In the 1980s and 1990s most of these people were simply mostly interested in closed-source commercial software.
> It’s time for Richard Stallman to go
No.
> and the demographics [Richard Stallman] represents is becoming a minority
Richard Stallman does not represent demographics. His community and institutional positions are not representational, they are based on his theoretical and practical contributions.
> reach out to emerging leaders throughout the FOSS world, and ask them to take charge of the FSF’s mission.
How is this different from how the FSF does recruitment right now? (I don't know, I'm asking)
> The message needs to be made much more accessible and level in tone, and the relationship between free software and open source needs to be reformed so that the FSF and OSI stand together as the pillars at the foundations of our ecosystem.
Let the OSI adopt the FSF's positions, then, and we'll have a "level tone" and everyone will "stand together".
> Decouple the FSF from the GNU project
Interesting. But - how closely are they coupled?
> Develop new copyleft licenses
I'm not a license expert, for sure. But - to the extent that the author's critique is of ease of reading and understanding what the license means, this is at least a worthwhile idea. But to the extent that the author suggests "permissive" licenses instead of freedom-preserving ones, that would be in line with the implied suggestion to just drop the free software philosophy altogether.
> Linux is just a kernel, not an OS. It was bundled with the GNU system, which was missing a kernel. See explanation here
In the business, we call this “missing the point”.
Quite. Is xorg GNU? xfce? Firefox? vim? gnumeric? (just looking at things on my desktop at the moment). Looking at pstree nothing particularly screams GNU. A few utilities like set and tar, but only 123 of the 3715 packages "dpkg -l" shows are GNU.
Historically certainly GNU was a key part of the typical machine, and the GPL is a brilliant license (although has clearly been hacked by SAAS companies hence requirements for things like AGPL) and the FSF is certainly a key part of the history of how we got here from there.
But to pretend that GNU is a particularly significant part of the typical linux machine (presumably because of the presence of libc), compared with half a dozen other organisations, is not particularly honest in my view.