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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago.

GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL.

The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. I barely hear anything about the FSF on Linux sites. Their reach elsewhere has to be essentially nonexistent.

And with the FSF it appears that RMS has no viable successor. That doesn't bode well either.

The sad outcome is that we keep rehashing things like Right to Read -- a fine thing from 1997, but what has happened since?

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> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach.

The FSF has been talking to users and to devs for decades, but unfortunately devs went from being users that had no problem sharing their progress to business people who thought that restricting access for personal, individual gain at the expense of the entire society of today and tomorrow is somehow "better", "more free", because who knows, maybe I'll be the next Bill Gates ?

I see the catastrophic state we are in today as the result of non-copyleft, of "Open Source" as opposed to "Libre Software", of the depolitization of what it means to take from the commons and give back to the commons, of what society means whether we see it as a sum of perfectly rational individuals with no money problems or as a group of interdependent agents. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and other big platforms could start up and be where they are today is because they could take a bunch of existing tools in the commons and not share back, to build their own fortune and control prison.

The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ? The issue runs deeper than software licenses, or even software.

Perhaps if the FSF had actual professionals running communications, people who persuade other people for a living, the FSF's message would actually get through to people.

I don't think PR is the real issue. IMHO, the fundamental principle behind FSF philosophy is the license is primarily written to secure the long-term interest of the _user_, not the community of the authors. The reason authors were okay with that in the first place is, early on in computing, users and authors largely overlapped, if not exactly the same. Over time, the authors and users diverged widely, thus their interests diverged. FSF philosophy has failed to appeal to the authors of the software because it is economically a bad deal for them. Users who do not pay are by-and-large leeches. Also, some of the freedoms are not considered as valuable by the users as they are for fellow authors, perhaps sensibly so because they are never going to utilize such freedoms.

That's of course an element, but there can be more than one problem at once. That the FSF holds position that's economically tricky makes it harder to "sell" it, which only reinforces the need for better communication.

Plus, the GPL has long been used for commercial purposes as well.

The FSF has had actual professionals running communications.

I don't think the issue is in the form but in the content: developers don't want to hear they are favoring greedy private interests (sometimes including themselves, sometimes at their expense) instead of the common goods, because the freedom to restrict a good from everyone for personal profit is more important than the freedom to access said good and build upon it.

Its not about communication. They are fighting against very strong incentives for devs to do the "wrong" thing

> The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ?

Yeah, the greed and individualism of earning a living wage. Not everyone can have a sheltered position at MIT or as head of a foundation.

Please, let's not pretend developers who build MIT- or BSD- licensed software on their free time after their day of work at BigTech are struggling for money. Let's not pretend React is done out of pure goodwill for the developers community by one of the richest companies in the history of mankind, and developers who work on it are evaluating whether they're going to have food on the table.

There is a distinction between "I need money to live" and "I want money because I want more", and the distinction should be clear enough. Yes, many projects are in the first case, but that's not the subject.

If you want to commit to a new project, make a living off of it, what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft ?

Let's also not pretend that the solution to this specific issue is to expect all the devs of the world to respect some sort of honor code.

Had the US done its job properly and antitrusted the offending companies a decade ago, as it should have, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.

> what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft?

This is not a statement of my values; simply providing plausible answers to that question.

Usually non-copyleft free software is written in a variant of these scenarios:

1. Paid for by a company whose business model is distinct from selling software (e.g. ads) and prefers to not have to worry about copyleft licensing issues in small contributions they get back from the community and be free to integrate it in proprietary products.

2a. An individual author who will indirectly benefit (in both ego and monetary ways) by writing a popular piece of software. Copyleft in fact limits the spread of the software. Think Tanenbaum being excited and proud when the news that MINIX is used in Intel Management Engine came out.

2b. Result of a academic research that benefits from maximum spread. Lots of consuming companies prefer Apache to GPL and are more likely to use the non-copyleft software.

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using!

> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter?

You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

I think it's obvious that the implicit question is: Why is the FSF so bad at spreading their gospel?

They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.

I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

>The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.

FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software.

It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say.

This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.

Please elaborate in a couple examples how you think one could have done better if suggesting it is straw man. It feels like an effective logical conclusion of what the critiques usually say.

One way would be not having Stallman do the advocacy.

His ideals is just fine. His social manners not so much, and that highly limits the effectiveness.

As someone else posted in the thread earlier, FSF has professional staff that work on PR etc. Please note that it is a small non-profit and they cannot afford a big marketing department, partially because their ideals hinder growth to a huge degree (e.g. even Linus is on record suggesting you should donate to EFF not FSF.) It is not surprising that big corporate donors will also avoid donating when they have pages undermining Netflix, Spotify, Google, FB, even Canonical/Ubuntu and pretty much everyone with deep pockets.

There's no need for any corporate conspiracy. RMS does a good job of looking bad on his own, and the FSF barely shows up on Linux sites. I don't think the likes of Netflix even know the FSF exists at this point, let alone bother allocating any effort towards fighting back.

All FAANGs have lawyers thinking about GPL, copyleft, AGPL, and have policies what to use by default for their own code, so you can be damn sure they are fully aware of FSF and what they are doing when they invest in LLVM and change the default shell to zsh and encourage Apache 2.0. The "Open Source" movement is explicitly a conspiracy to avoid using the term Free Software.

LLVM by the way happened in a good deal because Stallman refused to have GCC dump the AST. This created an area where LLVM could provide extremely valuable functionality which GCC just refused to offer at all.

And with that sort of maneuver, GNU lost exactly what made their stuff popular in the first place: that they provided better tools than what commercial Unix used to come with.

They are also a bunch of geeks terrible at communicating with normal people.

"Knights for hot ladies", "eating skin parts of own feet on video", "..."

And this is about the front face, so what do you expect?

Because they invariably prioritize ideological purity over coming up with solutions that meet people's practical needs/wants. Which is commendable in some sense - I respect sticking to principles. But good or bad, the reality is that most users (even technically savvy ones) don't care about the ideological principles of RMS. They just want shit to get done.

> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

Yes?

This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.

You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.

An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".

Youtube and Twitter are not Society. They are like the dark corner where people shit on each other.

I think you've fundamentally missed the point. You can call for more open platforms on a closed platform, there's nothing hypocritical or problematic about that. It's just accepting the reality of where people are.

Like it or not, YouTube and twitter are enormous with huge audiences.

> And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using!

Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

But yes, GCC is very nice.

> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

> GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.

I mean, most of what GRUB provides is completely unnecessary under EFI.

You can even boot Linux from EFI directly, I think, you just need to hardcode the kernel parameters, which is not ideal. So a very minimal loader is still useful, but way simpler than GRUB.

But you have to implement GPT with its mixed-endian UUID's (standard-nonconformance copied from Win 3.1), link the kernel into a windows executable (Which is hacked on top of a MS-DOS MZ .exe) and write that to the ESP, which is a floppy file system from the 80ies. And of course its relying on the VFAT extensions from windows 95.

I don't know how Microsoft managed to design a boot scheme that is conceptually better than boot sector booting while including a similar painful amount of legacy in it.

And then there are the people who celebrate that 'advance' of modern software while their kernel now has a 16-bit real mode "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" stub.

> If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

Twitter has been in the news for banning accounts for doing that.

Yeah, since Musk took over. There was plenty time to do this before that then.

And when the ban time comes, milk that for all it's worth.

I dislike GRUB - it is way overcomplex - but it is ubiquitous and very much in use.

Is it really that unreasonable a question to ask?

The purity inherent in insisting on using only free software is laudable, but evangelizing is only effective when there's reach. (It's also much more compelling when it demonstrably makes folks' lives materially better, but reasonable people will disagree on the particulars there.)

> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither.

Sadly they seemed to have tied themselves in all kinds of self imposed knots when it comes to spreading their reach via social networking sites.

See * https://www.fsf.org/twitter * https://www.fsf.org/facebook

You can't change today's world if you're not a bit pragmatic. FSF may make some correct objections but if you're not properly present on some of these platforms your reach will remain limited.

To effect change you need to be part of the world of today -- warts and all. Only then you can you change it. Rejecting the world by putting your head into the ground is a strategy that will often fail. Only when you become extremely big and influential can you help determine the rules of the game.

"*Note: The custom script allows us to interact with the Twitter API while circumventing the nonfree JS that is sent to the Web browser. For viewing replies and retweeting posts, we use Choqok."

So funny and so sad. Nonfree JS? They're in their own cloud of whatever. Yes, there is nonfree stuff. But nonfree stuff also can get things done.

That's exactly what I think about RMS, FSF and GNU.

I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is.

As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done! But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project.

A lot of these tools have pretty good documentation but when you visit one of the GNU websites you feel like it's 1995 again. It's more like man pages in HTML. Actually same for Apache Software Foundation.

And this is not getting better...

A start would be a modern representation of the tools and the ideas behind free software, maybe with a bit less philosophy. GNU needs to get a bit "cooler".

I understand your sentiment and I agree with you, but at the same time if we, as a community and as a society, are incapable of caring about the principles and philosophy behind free software because the websites aren't cool enough, then we (as a community or society) will ultimately deserve whatever dystopian fate awaits us.

Fully agree, but I doubt this is not the reality we live in... ;-)

> but for most people it's just "linux command line tools"

the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding.

Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.

Whats wrong with 1995 in this context?

Nothing is wrong with 1995 and I really liked the time when content was king.

But younger people looking at Times New Roman websites is like telling them 'use man pages'.

I think GNU is not doing themselves a favor in being so old school. I'm not saying they should use (nonfree scnr) JavaScript bloated websites but a more modern look is not that complicate and achievable with free HTML and CSS standards.

speaking as someone who quite enjoys the GNU website [0], I would rather they not start gunking everything up with "a CoOl LoOkInG JaVaScRiPt CaRoUsEl" like every other SaaS website out there.

[0] for example: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

I guess you're the audience they're targeting with this nerdy content :-)

I can also lightly smile but give this to a 20 or 30 year old person. They won't understand it.

I just turned 31.

I agree with the essence of what you're saying.

It's always been my opinion that the FSF screwed the pooch when it came to spreading their message. This starts right from their very name - the "Free" Software Foundation. Anyone of didn't know their message would understand them to be a group arguing that all software should be free of charge. This is completely orthogonal to their actual message of software having the ability to be easily understood and customized as needed by a tech-savvy user who has fairly compensated the original authors. They aimed for and missed badly the sweet spot message that all software should make simple things simple and complex things possible.

This expectation that users should not have to pay for the apps/software they use has partly lead to the dystopian landscape that is our ad-supported modern software experience. Users today think they're entitled to the same standard for all software they use. They expect LibreOffice Calc to be having the same feature set as MS Excel while at the same time paying nothing for it.

> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter?

Well, they are Free Software Foundation, they have Mastodon (and PeerTube, although the latter is pretty empty).

Yes, and I recall my XML geek co-worker back in 2004 saying how the friend-of-a-friend co-linking XML schema was going to win over this new social network stuff... what did you call it? Linked-In?

The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting.

Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. Those platforms are the opposite of free: Closed source, secret manipulation of content, censorship (and never mind the motivation), spying on users for the government, etc. The FSF would be hypocritical to endorse them. But of course, it does have "social network" videos - on PeerTube and MediaGoblin:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf35-videos-online-find...

so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?

Their goal should be encouraging people to demand open software and hardware, not being principled. Youtube and Twitter have power, not acknowledging that is dumb.

I get what you're saying, but open soft- and hardware IS a principle, and using nonfree software themselves would come across as hypocritical, undermining their own message.

The technology is there to make their own website and platforms; I'd argue that the problem isn't that they're not active on the big social media platforms, but that they don't produce media in the first place.

They can chuck videos onto their own website, license it under a free license and allow others to repost them onto social media for exposure, for example.

They should keep copies of all that data, yeah. Being successful in killing closed platforms shouldn't result in any losses for them.

I don’t see how to interpret your comment in a way that doesn’t say “their goal should be encouraging people to be principled, not being being principled themselves.”

You can use a tool of a system you disagree with to raise concerns against that very system. There is no contradiction here, only pragmatism.

GNU tools such as gcc were originally developed using proprietary software until the GNU fabric was dense enough to allow bootstrapping. How else can you achieve anything at all, really?

> The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them.

Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want?

> Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles.

And how else are people on those platforms going to hear anything? The only way I can imagine is either by people who don't agree with the FSF repeating their message (do you trust them to be accurate?), or people who do agree, but more willing to compromise.

> so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?

And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?

> And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?

Nobody is preventing you to post to multiple platform .., and you might have way more engagement in smaller platform.

The recent Mastodon growth allowed me to leave Twitter, I'm missing some content would be nice if more people cross-posted but well I'll do without.

There’s a conundrum though: the inescapable fact is that outside of a couple proprietary/closed networks such as YouTube, there is virtually no audience to speak to. So you can either stick to your principles and reach no one, or you can compromise and expose many more people to your discourse.

Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.

The GPL is a great license. It protects the author and the rights of the users. But a younger generation has gotten used to thinking of open source as "a free thing I can use for work", rather than as the blood-sweat-and-tears of someone else who has contributed hundreds of their own hours. So they bristle at copyleft.

If I switch my project to GPL I immediately will lose most potential contributors and a lot of users, who will start complaining about my license choice or will be forbidden by their employer from contributing to it or using it.

Corporate entities are (maybe rightly) scared of the GPL. And the rise of open source work by/in FAANG companies, etc. has meant the undermining of that license.

I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up.

It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.

The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.

AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".

I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.

At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).

So yeah, we're screwed.

At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.

> The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.

Can you develop a bit on that ?

The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently.

Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store).

Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.

The EU (technically, the European Commission and the European Council) is a large organization, so naturally there are many positions inside.

However, my impression is it has been a force for good overall, giving us cross-country mobility, getting rid of cellphone roaming charges, and avoiding waste by trying to standardize plugs. They notably introduced GDPR to protect citizen's data and they provide a court of human rights, and there is a push for "data sovereignty".

> GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL.

We need these "content" people who maintain reliable tools with stable interfaces/behaviours. These people and tools are at the core of what modern infrastructure run on. Fly by night tools, languages and frameworks do not allow us to progress like we have. It's very easy for us "users" of these tools to forget that there is something maintaining something we take for granted.

You seem to be forgetting you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

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