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> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

It rather depends on what that 1% is.

The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.

If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.

> This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.

> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

Yes, that's what it means to have ideals.

Free software is by its very nature dogmatic. Stallman himself makes cringey jokes and references to the “church of gnu”. It’s more of a way of life than a way to develop software. By design, a religion is only happy with 100%.

Open source is just pragmatic and is very happy with the 99% being open source. It’s more corporate and doesn’t generally care at all about the dogma.

  > we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent

Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at all".

  > I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again. Two of your examples are github and android: github got bought out by microsoft, and android is about to be hobbled to the point that f-droid won't work on it anymore. If you want to go and look at the history you'll see a bunch of other instances of Stallman and the FSF saying things that sound paranoid at first, but which turn out to be correct in the long run. It's genuinely annoying, life would be easier if they were wrong occasionally.

Does it still count as a cult if they're right? Do they still count as extremists if they're empirically correct? Maybe it's a good thing to have that type of extremist out there, fighting for everybody.

"Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again"

It's not that FSF is proven correct, it's that the FSF disapproves of 99.9% of software, it's easy for them to look back when there's a scandal and say "see? we told you so.". Too many false positives.

too many false positives means you should reconsider what you call a false positive

That doesn't actually mean that they're not correct.

    Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might 
    give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if 
    you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at 
    all".

If your enemy knows your entire plan of attack in a battle you will lose. This isn't theoretical it's just a fact. It's why military organizations invest so much in intelligence. Knowing what the other guy is planning gives you a massive advantage.

You could perhaps say "Well then you shouldn't get in a war". But that isn't really under your control. If someone else decides they are in a war with you. You are in a war. It doesn't really matter whether you wanted to be in one or not.

I'm not at war with anybody though.

Good for you, but that has nothing to do with whether secrecy is necessary in a security context.

it does, however, point out that there's not been a valid security context listed where secrecy would be necessary.

Pull your head out of the sand my friend. There's murders, kidnappings, wars occurring around us every day.

which of these requires my government to not be transparent?

> free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

That is the nature of software. 1% is too much. It is Free or it is not