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Generalising this to GNU and the FSF is daft. Claiming this somehow shows their irrelevance is even more so.
I disagree - this isn't some isolated example, this pattern is seen across many other GUN, FSF and other free as in freedom projects.
A lot of free as in freedom projects are completely out of touch with the modern world and waste their (already thin) resources on irrelevant, half-baked projects furthering some ideology rather than practical projects that would bring freedom (even if incomplete) to more people.
Software (or hardware) should be considered a means to an end, with freedom being a bonus. But for a lot of free as in freedom projects, the "freedom" is the key with the actual utility of the artifact being an afterthought (as a result it doesn't catch on, because nobody cares how free the thing is if it's useless or unusable in practice).
Probably to pretend you're not also talking about open source. But you are, because there's essentially no distinction in most cases. But hopefully you don't mean to say that most open source software is practically useless, because that would be pretty silly, right?
So what exactly are you saying? That there are very niche open source projects around? Sure, but that's fine. There's also open source code that runs on almost literally everything though, some of it even from the GNU project. There's also proprietary software that is incredibly niche and only a small handful of people would know what to do with it or have even heard of. So what?
Name some examples, I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say.
I see the broader open source movement as "hey I made this thing to get stuff done, oh btw it's open source under a permissive license so feel free to take it/improve it".
GNU/FSF is more like "here's a list of reasons why the way you do your computing is wrong, the right way is to go back to the dark ages of computing, oh and we have some half-baked software to help with that - and don't you dare use that other open-source thing over there, it's not free enough".
> Name some examples
The hundreds of different Linux distributions, none of which can match the stability, consistency and user-experience of proprietary OSes even from a decade ago? Imagine the collective effort that has been wasted reinventing the wheel and bikeshedding.
The PinePhone, which despite there being a permissively-licensed, battle-tested mobile userspace (Android), would rather try to adapt a desktop-focused userspace to it (and the effort is obviously spread across multiple distros, because why wouldn't it?), and as a result you have a device for sale today that's less usable than a PocketPC from 2003.
The whole "Respects Your Freedom" list from the FSF (https://ryf.fsf.org/index.php/), which looks like a low-budget computer parts catalog from a decade ago, or their absurd position against CPU microcode updates (https://ariadne.space/2022/01/22/the-fsfs-relationship-with-...)? The RYF thing in practice just seems like a major blow to whatever credibility they have left (are they really not understanding that nobody in 2023 cares about mostly decades-old generic computer parts?), and they'd be better off scrubbing every mention of it and pretend it never happened.
I could go on and on. To recap, I think GNU/FSF is pushing some impractical and unrealistic ideology that is ultimately harmful as it wastes effort that could instead be directed to provide practical and pragmatic solutions that offer software freedom, even if partial (which is still better than no freedom at all).
It’s a big, hairy project that is not easily reduced to a simple feature list. Also consider the audience. This project is not meant to attract us hipsters.
I found your conclusion a bit unfounded.
https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/running/live_cd.html
I love that they're referred to as CDs, I built my computer a couple of weeks ago and am running one with an optical drive for the first time in more than a decade. Might burn one for old times' sake.
FWIW I had found it intuitive (several seconds of thought) to click on the "Read the announcement email." link, which contains the link to the ISO images.
Anyway it's just a snapshot of Debian GNU/Hurd so you can see info here
On the right side, under "Hurd", the "Running" link can get you there.
I've seen several posts here in the last month about proprietary software being used to basically exploit the users: steeply increase fees, hold files ransom (upgrade for money or loose access to files), spying on users.
My conclusion is very different from yours: GNU Foundation and FSF are very relevant!
They seem to lack in the PR dept, which makes them look (by simply looking at the website) outdated and hence "possibly irrelevant". Looks can be deceiving though.
It's not really about "proprietary vs. free software", it whether the FSF and GNU are still a driving force for Free Software. And to me this seems ... not really? They're still trying to create their anno-1985 Unix replacement. That's great and all, but also not really driving anything forward.
I see copy-left as a form of hacker activism, and this getting less. I'm quite sure it's not a good thing. FLOSS has been commencialized.
I prefer AGPL for the simple reason big corps avoid it like the plague.
Now whether the organizations are actually doing a good job on that front is more questionable.
In an era of insane surveillance, AI technology, mass corporate insanity, the FSF is still arguing about firmware blobs on hardware vs loaded in by the OS, or advocating for switching from .docx to .odt when the world has moved on from even having document files.
Most gen-zers have no clue about how the real world works outside your smartphones. Hint: not as you think. At all.
Or do companies generally have better backup policies than Google dRive?
Also, isn't the whole .docx / OOXML thing just a published standard? The process may not be as "open" as one might like (i.e. not everyone can contribute) but that seems like a detail. IIRC there was a lot of FUD simply because it came from Microsoft.
That said: I don't think it's entirely irrelevant; e.g. my country's parliament publishes a lot of their files in .docx. But I can read them on my Linux machine and you don't need a byte of non-free software for it, and I had a lot more trouble with the .doc files they published 20 years ago, so...
It was annoying because we already had odt as open format and OOXML was reported to be more of a text dump of what Microsoft did in binary than a standard meant for interoperability.
> But I can read them on my Linux machine and you don't need a byte of non-free software for it, and I had a lot more trouble with the .doc files they published 20 years ago, so.
OpenOffice was already better at reading old doc files than Microsoft Word was well before OOXML was a thing. Meanwhile my last few attempts to deal with power point or excel sheets where still a gigantic mess of missing content.
Isn't it all XML based?
> OpenOffice was already better at reading old doc files than Microsoft Word was well before OOXML was a thing.
It's been a long time, but that was certainly not my experience from what I recall; I had a lot of trouble with this. And writing files and then expecting Word users to be able to read them well was another source of problems.
And look, maybe ODT would have been better; but that ship has sailed, and OOXML seems free for all intents and purposes, even though perhaps it's not 100% ideal. This is just not something that's all that important today.
That doesn't help much when the XML format consists of elements like "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8" which "specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 6.x/95/97)" [1]. I think this kind of thing is what the parent comment was referring to.
[1] https://www.consortiuminfo.org/opendocument-and-ooxml/the-co...
Either way, it seems like fighting yesterday's battle.
* Proprietary software allows me to get things done, sometimes with some user-hostility baked in, but in general, no software explicitly forces me to use it and I can weigh the pros of doing the thing vs the cons of user-hostility and decide whether to use it.
* Free software is more interested to promote some impractical ideology, at the expense of getting things done. More effort is spent on ideology rather than useful (and usable, in terms of UX) functionality, which is why proprietary (and even extremely user-hostile) software thrives.
Keep in mind that recent deviances of proprietary software with regards to privacy are more due to the effective legalization of spyware and fraud (when committed by a business as opposed to an individual) as well as an adtech/marketing and VC bubble rather than proprietary software itself.
We've had commercial, paid, proprietary software back in the day that was respectful of the user and where the incentives were actually aligned - the software was as good as it could be in order to convince the user to pay for it and recommend it to others. You get the occasional annoying DRM but I'm happy to take that in exchange for a healthy ecosystem of usable software.
Proprietary software doesn't have to be malicious, and its maliciousness can be fixed with legislation and regulation (enforcing the existing ones would be a good start) without getting rid of the concept of proprietary software itself.
Free software doesn't just have a PR problem - there are many verticals where a free software implementation either doesn't exist, can't get off the ground (because more resources are spent on bikeshedding and furthering ideology rather than making software) or is perpetually half-baked and its backers are deluded in thinking it's a viable alternative to the proprietary competition. I'd argue they wouldn't actually need PR if they had good software/hardware, it would sell itself (if anything, merely by being free as in money compared to paid, proprietary competition).