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The FSF ideology was born at a time where the level of bidirectional mistrust between closed source software vendors and open source advocates was a lot higher
by dman 11y ago
The FSF ideology was born at a time where the level of bidirectional mistrust between closed source software vendors and open source advocates was a lot higher than it is currently. The world has evolved since then and the business world now embraces open source, possibly for reasons that have nothing to do with ideology (shared r&d costs, commoditising lower layers of the stack and the realization that you can just as easily get lock in with open source software as you can with closed source). In a world where even Microsoft is releasing more and more of its crown jewels as open source every given week, the FSF position can appear out of place but this I think is a testament of how far we have come on the original goals of the project.
- pekk 11y agoThe dangers that befell things like the Gosling Emacs code, which informed GPL and FSF, haven't gone away. Companies like Apple are actively working to erode any progress that has been made on this front because of their intense levels of investment in proprietary lockin.
- dman 11y agoIndeed. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
- spiralpolitik 11y agoYes they were so actively working to erode progress that they offered to license LLVM under the GPL. But because RMS uses an e-mail client written in the last century he missed the offer. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
- hahainternet 11y agoThere's no offer there. Please don't dishonestly quote.