He is the one who we need now, in the era of saas/cloud run by big tech. So sad.
If your side of the argument is all compromise-makers trying to meet people halfway you often end up giving up more than you’re comfortable with. Both types of people play a useful part.
The FSF/GNU seems a bit too fringe and not too great at explaining the problem to everyday people instead just offering entirely uncompromising solutions that don't work for most people. More isolationist than activist. What would the less radical organization benefiting from the existence of FSF/GNU even be? The EFF?
Give them an inch and they'll take (or more precisely, they took) a mile.
On this kind of topic negotiations are at the political level and whether you like it or not they will take the unsavory position of large corporations into account. A total refusal to compromise can end up leaving your side out of the discussion and end up with worse regulation. Uncompromising idealists just don’t have the leverage to make impactful threats of leaving the negotiation table.
That doesn’t mean you should not draw lines and do your best to hold them. But if the line is already crossed you can still do good negotiating, as unpleasant as it is.
If there are no “soft mature adults” there to be heard, no one is heard. But your point that giving an inch ends up losing you a mile absolutely stands: this is what I was saying about absolutists being anchors, they allow the soft negotiators to start from a stricter position before the negotiation starts. A group made up entirely of “reasonable compromising people”, however, is terrible because they start from a weakened position that they view as a reasonable compromise.
However, there will be negotiations and you will end up giving away some inches unless you have a lot of power. I absolutely value your un-negotiable position, but don’t underestimate what moderates can do representing it in a politically-acceptable, watered-down way.
You do? No graphics card? No (good) games? No firmware? And if so, how much of a premium did you pay for the lack of scale from your hardware vendor alone?
I prefer to look at the positives in life. Literally the biggest companies in the world don't want people to have free software, yet we still do. It's been a hard battle at times. I was there in early 00s when running GNU/Linux sucked in many ways. Now it's an absolute joy.
Quake 3 is still free, you know.
With Google you can even make an argument that they can violate more user's rights because of Free software.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Free software per see, the topic is just more complex than what is presented.
I really liked the idea of Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
It's gotten to the point where most cloud services are no longer managed instances of open source or even compatible software.
You could take a managed cloud PostgreSQL instance and migrate to something self-hosted if the prices were to hike up or something else happened that would necessitate it.
But how many of the cloud services in your stack does that apply to? Geocoding or routing? Push notifications and messaging? Payment gateways? Authentication and authorization solutions? File storage solutions? Web Application Firewalls?
There are many cases where running a self hosted version is not feasible, which are also mentioned in the text. Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware. But outsourcing simple calculations that can be done locally is a bad thing I agree.
I mean, fediverse sites like Mastodon or Lemmy, or even something like PeerTube show that it's possible to at least run instances of a larger federated service, albeit the user experience could be better (the average person asking "What do you mean, I have to pick a server to join?").
Admittedly, video hosting is the hardest due to space and bandwidth requirements, though perhaps the real reason why none of these platforms see real widespread success is the network effect - most people already are pretty comfortably in popular walled gardens and don't feel like they want to switch to anything else.
Whether the software runs on my computer or not, if I am the user, I must be in control.
Whether the meal is prepared in my kitchen or not, if I am going to eat it, I must be in control.
If you want that sort of protection, BSL, SSPL, Elastic license, etc are what you want.
If you want to make Free Software, make it. Know that people you don’t like may use your software, even criminals may. That is what Free Software is. OSS is slightly different but similar.
If you want to make shareware, make shareware — no judgements on people who want to make money with their software and believe thats the best path.
I wish they would give back all the profit as well but that's another topic and the AGPL doesn't touch that.
You're never 100% in control, but that doesn't mean you should try and maximize it.
Say what you will about his personality, you don't have to like him but saying that his accomplishments are way overblown is a terrible take. His work flows through every part of the GNU land and it's used by almost every tech person on the planet to some extent.