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That's great, but the problem seems to be RMS's disruption of development activities. This doesn't change that. For example: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html

That's great, but the problem seems to be RMS's disruption of development activities. This doesn't change that. For example: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00187.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00... Imagine taking the time to publicly explain to an out-of-practice dev why some technical feature is needed, then being accused of a "pressure campaign" that requires the out-of-practice dev to consult privately, "with people I have confidence in." Gnu devs have an impressive amount of patience and grace to put up with that. But I see a lot of other FOSS devs try to replicate RMS's unnecessarily aggressive rhetoric. They often shoot themselves in the foot with it, disrespecting and consequently losing valuable contributors who are otherwise aligned philosophically with the project in every way. That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc. Even Debian put the hammer down when an out-of-practice dev tried to use permissions to disrupt the work of a new dev. Nobody sane and self-respecting should put up with this kind of behavior. Edit: clarification

mhh__ 6y ago
Someone I know who works on pretty much singlehandedly on something that is on the frontpage of GCC said that he entered Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children. GCC plugins were a stallman thing, LLVM was even offered to the FSF at one point IIRC. Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so?
- b215826 6y ago
  > Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so? While you may not care about it, GPLv3.
  - geofft 6y ago
    That was sort of the opposite of competent: - Because it was a new license, it necessarily resulted in license fragmentation, which is an ongoing headache for the free software community. It's worth doing if there's a serious need that outweighs the costs and you can guide the community towards dropping the old license, but.... - The Linux kernel had always been GPLv2 only and remained GPLv2-only, which meant that the most interesting GPL-licensed code on TiVos and similar devices was not subject to GPLv3. - Embedded devices like TiVos generally want a small userspace. The most popular choice was Busybox, which announced that it was GPLv2-only. - Also, Busybox turned out to be a reasonably straightforward product to replace, which hurt the ongoing aims of GPL enforcement - including regular old GPLv2 enforcement about simply getting source code at all: https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/ https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/ - The FSF moved its own projects to GPLv3 only, but that scared the largest surviving commercial UNIX vendor (Apple) enough that they remained on GPLv2-only versions, and eventually started sponsoring the development of permissively-licensed competitors to even reasonably difficult products to replace, such as LLVM and its ecosystem (lldb etc.) instead of GCC and its ecosystem, which are now technically on par with GCC, if not much more advanced. (Historically, one of the FSF's biggest successes at making inroads in the proprietary software world was getting Steve Jobs to use GCC and release the Objective-C frontend for it!) - Because the FSF couldn't guide enough other major projects towards GPLv3-only, many brand-new GPL'd software projects continue to use "GPLv2 or later" to this day to work around license fragmentation (i.e. so they can share code with other GPLv2+ projects), meaning any additional strictness of GPLv3 is irrelevant in enforcement. - Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization - and, as described above, that's not because GPLv3 was wildly successful in combating the threat, it's because it turned out not to be that pressing of a problem. There is basically no leverage in GPLv3. Just about everything you'd want to do with free software today, you can do with GPLv2 or permissively-licensed works.
    - arminiusreturns 6y ago
      > Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization According to what? It seems to me tivoization is exactly one of the biggest issues facing users these days, especially in an IoT world, so how you can draw that conclusion (and the others) baffles the mind. I think if you really want to understand GPLv3, you should listen to Eben Moglen more than RMS, because Eben has the ability to articulate in a way that RMS doesn't, and has given some very good speeches about not just GPLv3, but on the FOSS ecosystem as a whole. Why is it that almost always I find the attacks against GPLv3 to be so lacking in substance? (for example, using an openly user hostile company like Apple as a reason for why it was bad just seems... like blatant pandering to me, as opposed to a real argument)
      - geofft 6y ago
        My entire point relies on Apple being an openly user-hostile company, yes! It was a great victory for the FSF that they were able to get Apple to release code and build on a free-software compiler, wasn't it? And it's actually a little strange that they still release code and build on a different free-software compiler when not legally required to, despite being so user-hostile of a company, arguably quite a bit more user-hostile than they were in the past. There's a lot of discussion we ought to have about why they're contributing, whether that leverage was real, whether we could have predicted the rest of what they did, etc. For IoT in particular, given that the processing power on-device is limited, I think it's pretty common for the serious risk to one's freedom/autonomy to be the fact that the data is being held and processed remotely and you have basically no idea over what happens with it, let alone any control. The GPLv3 does not include a requirement to release the source for the server component, so the best you can do is reimplement the entire effective functioning of the product from scratch. Also, because the GPLv3 has no such requirement and probably couldn't, that effectively is a motivation for the manufacturer to move as much processing server-side as possible. (And at that point, you may have a better time building the device yourself or more practically buying it from a more friendly hardware manufacturer. Even for the TiVo, if you're going to have to implement a DVR yourself, the video capture card and the hard disk are the easiest part of it.) I can see a limited use case for things like smart TVs to just sort of prevent them from communicating with the network at all, but a firewall can do that just fine - and it's a lot more practical for most people than hacking the device firmware. My claim isn't that there's no use for freedom on consumer devices with on-board software - quite the opposite. My claim is that the specific thing the GPLv3 tried to save us from hasn't been the priority it was made out to be, and in the process it just made free software worse. I am totally open to a counterargument - is there a device you have where a) it does run some GPL (any version) code and b) there is some meaningful change you could make to the code it runs?
- linuxftw 6y ago
  > Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children. This is how disparaging internet rumors are spread. You know someone that allegedly experienced this. Do you know them well enough to know the account is factual, or maybe they were just piling on because they had a bad experience with him and decided to frame him in this negative way because it was the 'cool' thing to do at the time? Quit proliferating unsourced 3rd party accounts.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    I speak to them maybe every day and I have absolutely no reason to doubt him. I would just say what the project was but he's basically the sole maintainer of the GNU side of it.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  > Someone I know who works on pretty much singlehandedly on something that is on the frontpage of GCC said that he entered Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children. I know pretty much nothing about this Stallman person, does he actually dislike people with children?
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    I don't know whether he dislikes people with children, but the sin here is reproducing and thus hurting the planet or something like that. Apparently this argument only subsided because it was noted that rms is not vegetarian
  - craigsmansion 6y ago
    No. "He was kind, attentive, and has a loving core. In simple language, he patiently explained to my son, then around 12, about the virtues of the GNU/Linux operating system" https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vilified-by-those-who-dont-know-him-a3907b25b4c7 https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vili... He doesn't deem "having children" as some sort of special accomplishment though, which might rub some parents the wrong way.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    It's important to keep in mind that RMS is a controversial figure, and a lot of people disagree with the FSF mission/philosophy. So, naturally, you're going to see a lot of baseless rumors from anonymous assholes on the internet.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hackmiester 6y ago
What's the Debian occurrence you speak of?
iajrz 6y ago
> That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc. You're mixing things here. :) meritocracy and decentralization are completely orthogonal to free software. They [edit: s/are/could be construed as a/] part of the open-source ethos as explored in CATB & explained by esr, not a sine-qua-non of free software.
- jancsika 6y ago
  The problem in this case is an unspoken governance model where a participant from decades ago showed up, made public accusations about the trustworthiness of the other participants, then declared a time schedule of his own choosing during which he would consult his own private council to judge the veracity of all the public arguments given. Whatever we want to call that, and whatever the origins of the problem, it is a bad thing. Edit: clarification
  - iajrz 6y ago
    Hey, I've been thinking and talking in another thread; I just made a comment that is completely relevant for this convo, too; the people in the discussion, as well as you, are looking at things from a different value framework as rms, the gnu project, and the fsf. Here's the relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809646 We can agree the discussion could be handled better, and the accusations were unwarranted in context; I happily chalk that up to a misunderstanding (rms not seeing other people's lack of awareness of value framework incompatibility as a massive obstacle to conversation, instead assuming interlocutors had better information than they seemed to, in which case their behavior could have been construed as being in bad faith) - which implies 2015 rms should probably dial it down in the strength of his accusations among other adjustments. Communication is _not_ easy. If a farmer and a forest ranger go into a patch of land, they will see the same scenery, but may have heated discussions about what to do with it. Unless they understand that one of them wants to produce food, and the other to protect the forest. And if one of them has decision-making power over the terrain, even if they have not been in there personally for a while - the argument about how what they want to do fits with the decision-maker's values needs to be made. Of course, nobody is stopping the developers from going and doing the stuff they want to do in the first place, distributing it and, if the change is as technically important as it seems and the cards are played just right, even becoming the de-facto standard distribution of a piece of software; their changes just won't be merged into the main product for the foreseeable future.
rideontime 6y ago
Good lord, it's like talking to a brick wall. That thread is agonizing. Why do people still put up with that? e: Also, it's hilarious to jump to Apr 2021 and see a thread titled "How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less".
- CRConrad 6y ago
  Well, at least they've wised up on one part: In the 2015 thread, most of them seemed to think Emacs was still popular. (Personally, I thought it's used mostly for coding, so idunno if proportional fonts will be a popularity panacea.)

mhh__ 6y ago

Someone I know who works on pretty much singlehandedly on something that is on the frontpage of GCC said that he entered Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children. GCC plugins were a stallman thing, LLVM was even offered to the FSF at one point IIRC. Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so?

b215826 6y ago
> Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so? While you may not care about it, GPLv3.
- geofft 6y ago
  That was sort of the opposite of competent: - Because it was a new license, it necessarily resulted in license fragmentation, which is an ongoing headache for the free software community. It's worth doing if there's a serious need that outweighs the costs and you can guide the community towards dropping the old license, but.... - The Linux kernel had always been GPLv2 only and remained GPLv2-only, which meant that the most interesting GPL-licensed code on TiVos and similar devices was not subject to GPLv3. - Embedded devices like TiVos generally want a small userspace. The most popular choice was Busybox, which announced that it was GPLv2-only. - Also, Busybox turned out to be a reasonably straightforward product to replace, which hurt the ongoing aims of GPL enforcement - including regular old GPLv2 enforcement about simply getting source code at all: https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/ https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/ - The FSF moved its own projects to GPLv3 only, but that scared the largest surviving commercial UNIX vendor (Apple) enough that they remained on GPLv2-only versions, and eventually started sponsoring the development of permissively-licensed competitors to even reasonably difficult products to replace, such as LLVM and its ecosystem (lldb etc.) instead of GCC and its ecosystem, which are now technically on par with GCC, if not much more advanced. (Historically, one of the FSF's biggest successes at making inroads in the proprietary software world was getting Steve Jobs to use GCC and release the Objective-C frontend for it!) - Because the FSF couldn't guide enough other major projects towards GPLv3-only, many brand-new GPL'd software projects continue to use "GPLv2 or later" to this day to work around license fragmentation (i.e. so they can share code with other GPLv2+ projects), meaning any additional strictness of GPLv3 is irrelevant in enforcement. - Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization - and, as described above, that's not because GPLv3 was wildly successful in combating the threat, it's because it turned out not to be that pressing of a problem. There is basically no leverage in GPLv3. Just about everything you'd want to do with free software today, you can do with GPLv2 or permissively-licensed works.
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    > Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization According to what? It seems to me tivoization is exactly one of the biggest issues facing users these days, especially in an IoT world, so how you can draw that conclusion (and the others) baffles the mind. I think if you really want to understand GPLv3, you should listen to Eben Moglen more than RMS, because Eben has the ability to articulate in a way that RMS doesn't, and has given some very good speeches about not just GPLv3, but on the FOSS ecosystem as a whole. Why is it that almost always I find the attacks against GPLv3 to be so lacking in substance? (for example, using an openly user hostile company like Apple as a reason for why it was bad just seems... like blatant pandering to me, as opposed to a real argument)
    - geofft 6y ago
      My entire point relies on Apple being an openly user-hostile company, yes! It was a great victory for the FSF that they were able to get Apple to release code and build on a free-software compiler, wasn't it? And it's actually a little strange that they still release code and build on a different free-software compiler when not legally required to, despite being so user-hostile of a company, arguably quite a bit more user-hostile than they were in the past. There's a lot of discussion we ought to have about why they're contributing, whether that leverage was real, whether we could have predicted the rest of what they did, etc. For IoT in particular, given that the processing power on-device is limited, I think it's pretty common for the serious risk to one's freedom/autonomy to be the fact that the data is being held and processed remotely and you have basically no idea over what happens with it, let alone any control. The GPLv3 does not include a requirement to release the source for the server component, so the best you can do is reimplement the entire effective functioning of the product from scratch. Also, because the GPLv3 has no such requirement and probably couldn't, that effectively is a motivation for the manufacturer to move as much processing server-side as possible. (And at that point, you may have a better time building the device yourself or more practically buying it from a more friendly hardware manufacturer. Even for the TiVo, if you're going to have to implement a DVR yourself, the video capture card and the hard disk are the easiest part of it.) I can see a limited use case for things like smart TVs to just sort of prevent them from communicating with the network at all, but a firewall can do that just fine - and it's a lot more practical for most people than hacking the device firmware. My claim isn't that there's no use for freedom on consumer devices with on-board software - quite the opposite. My claim is that the specific thing the GPLv3 tried to save us from hasn't been the priority it was made out to be, and in the process it just made free software worse. I am totally open to a counterargument - is there a device you have where a) it does run some GPL (any version) code and b) there is some meaningful change you could make to the code it runs?
linuxftw 6y ago
> Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children. This is how disparaging internet rumors are spread. You know someone that allegedly experienced this. Do you know them well enough to know the account is factual, or maybe they were just piling on because they had a bad experience with him and decided to frame him in this negative way because it was the 'cool' thing to do at the time? Quit proliferating unsourced 3rd party accounts.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  I speak to them maybe every day and I have absolutely no reason to doubt him. I would just say what the project was but he's basically the sole maintainer of the GNU side of it.
dividedbyzero 6y ago
> Someone I know who works on pretty much singlehandedly on something that is on the frontpage of GCC said that he entered Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children. I know pretty much nothing about this Stallman person, does he actually dislike people with children?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  I don't know whether he dislikes people with children, but the sin here is reproducing and thus hurting the planet or something like that. Apparently this argument only subsided because it was noted that rms is not vegetarian
- craigsmansion 6y ago
  No. "He was kind, attentive, and has a loving core. In simple language, he patiently explained to my son, then around 12, about the virtues of the GNU/Linux operating system" https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vilified-by-those-who-dont-know-him-a3907b25b4c7 https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vili... He doesn't deem "having children" as some sort of special accomplishment though, which might rub some parents the wrong way.
- bogwog 6y ago
  It's important to keep in mind that RMS is a controversial figure, and a lot of people disagree with the FSF mission/philosophy. So, naturally, you're going to see a lot of baseless rumors from anonymous assholes on the internet.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hackmiester 6y ago

What's the Debian occurrence you speak of?

iajrz 6y ago

> That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc. You're mixing things here. :) meritocracy and decentralization are completely orthogonal to free software. They [edit: s/are/could be construed as a/] part of the open-source ethos as explored in CATB & explained by esr, not a sine-qua-non of free software.

jancsika 6y ago
The problem in this case is an unspoken governance model where a participant from decades ago showed up, made public accusations about the trustworthiness of the other participants, then declared a time schedule of his own choosing during which he would consult his own private council to judge the veracity of all the public arguments given. Whatever we want to call that, and whatever the origins of the problem, it is a bad thing. Edit: clarification
- iajrz 6y ago
  Hey, I've been thinking and talking in another thread; I just made a comment that is completely relevant for this convo, too; the people in the discussion, as well as you, are looking at things from a different value framework as rms, the gnu project, and the fsf. Here's the relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809646 We can agree the discussion could be handled better, and the accusations were unwarranted in context; I happily chalk that up to a misunderstanding (rms not seeing other people's lack of awareness of value framework incompatibility as a massive obstacle to conversation, instead assuming interlocutors had better information than they seemed to, in which case their behavior could have been construed as being in bad faith) - which implies 2015 rms should probably dial it down in the strength of his accusations among other adjustments. Communication is _not_ easy. If a farmer and a forest ranger go into a patch of land, they will see the same scenery, but may have heated discussions about what to do with it. Unless they understand that one of them wants to produce food, and the other to protect the forest. And if one of them has decision-making power over the terrain, even if they have not been in there personally for a while - the argument about how what they want to do fits with the decision-maker's values needs to be made. Of course, nobody is stopping the developers from going and doing the stuff they want to do in the first place, distributing it and, if the change is as technically important as it seems and the cards are played just right, even becoming the de-facto standard distribution of a piece of software; their changes just won't be merged into the main product for the foreseeable future.

rideontime 6y ago

Good lord, it's like talking to a brick wall. That thread is agonizing. Why do people still put up with that? e: Also, it's hilarious to jump to Apr 2021 and see a thread titled "How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less".

CRConrad 6y ago
Well, at least they've wised up on one part: In the 2015 thread, most of them seemed to think Emacs was still popular. (Personally, I thought it's used mostly for coding, so idunno if proportional fonts will be a popularity panacea.)