5 ms·

Man, the FSF and the GNU project need a new refresh and new blood in them ASAP. everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from

Man, the FSF and the GNU project need a new refresh and new blood in them ASAP. everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday.

pram 4y ago
IIRC Stallman 'browses the web' with something like a cron job scraping URLs with Lynx, and then it emails him the output so he can peruse it later. This isn't a joke lol
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  I believe he used to print them out, so perhaps we should consider at least reading them via an email client to be some sort of progress. Although I'm sure it was to be more "eco-friendly" than anything
- ydlr 4y ago
  That sounds... reasonable. There are some web-to-newsletter services that try to sell this feature.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Given how intrusive, ad-encrusted, and potentially malware-encrusted the web is becoming, this sounds like one of those Stallman absurdities that make increasing amounts of sense the more you think on them.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Exactly. We need characters like RMS to buck the trends, even if they come off as a*holes to us. And RMS was right about the danger of software not being under our control.
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      Which is why RMS and FSF tried to get the software under their control. Thankfully, they are much less adept at it than the commercial firms, so that attempt ultimately failed.
      - starkd 4y ago
        Not understanding how they did this. The movement merely supports a license that insists code is available to end users.
        bitwize 4y ago
        The FSF demands copyright assignation for all contributions to its projects. E.g., if you want your code to make it into Emacs, both you and your employer need to sign it over to the FSF.
  - gaius_baltar 4y ago
    It is like that "Stallman was right" subreddit is getting righter and righter every day. Except that Stallman is under some kind of Cassandra Curse, so people ignore all the signs, even when they are repeated by persons more skilled in PR tactics.
- davexunit 4y ago
  He did that for a long time, maybe still does for certain things for all I know, but he started using GNU IceCat (a firefox derivative) some years ago.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  I actually envy him for being able to do so.
- abawany 4y ago
  Sounds like a great way to prevent brain death brought about by the WMD (weapons of mental destruction) such as infini-scroll, etc.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  I used RSS to read HN up until Google killed their reader. (Being able to filter the feed by the post title was nice.)
therouwboat 4y ago
You open the site and read, what else do you need?
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  I mean, you kinda can't easily read this language reference from the site. So making that an easy to access set of HTML files would be a start.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    The reference doesn't exist yet. This is the source to the reference.
krapp 4y ago
>everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. It makes sense if you think of the FSF as a religion, and consider the thesis of the Free Software movement as theological - free software is an ultimate moral good, proprietary software is an ultimate moral evil, and the FSF sees themselves as clergy spreading the gospel and purifying themselves from the corruption and degradation of modernity. Sacred rituals and texts tend not to change over time, after all, being sacred they don't need to change.
- bogwog 4y ago
  The religion analogy is unnecessary. The FSF is a non-profit with the goal of fostering free software. As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. As an example, RMS himself actually recommends the dual licensing model of Qt for organizations looking to make a profit and contribute to the free software movement. With that model, the software is available under a copyleft license (GPL) and a proprietary commercial license (for those willing to pay) But as the FSF is not focused on profits (again, because they’re a non-profit organization), all of their software is exclusively licensed using copyleft licenses like GPL and LGPL. Not because it’s a “religion”, but because it’s literally the entire goal of the organization.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    > As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. 1)You can't succeed as a non-profit if you don't make money. 2)If the FSF cared about their goal of fostering free software blah blah, then why didn't they fire RMS out a cannon when basically the entire open-source world said "fire that serial sexual harasser who keeps opening his mouth about child rape not being rape, or we stop giving you money / working with you." They chose, overwhelmingly and very petulantly, to continue letting RMS have a leadership role.
    - sweetbitter 4y ago
      They didn't fire him because he did not do any sexual harassment, and his comment about children was made earnestly but out of a place of ignorance. I've met plenty of people who are at least that socially dense with that low of a filter, it's not really surprising that someone like this would have ignorance of such a topic + the lack of tact required to speak about it. If anything, that kind of sheer honesty and invulnerability to peer pressure gives him an advantage over ordinary people in a leadership role.
davexunit 4y ago
Here's an anecdote: In 2014, as part of my job as fsf's web developer (a new position at the time), I suggested moving gnu.org's version control from a private cvs repo (that requires passing a test to get access to) to a public git repo as a step towards attracting new contributors. The argument was simple: Not many new volunteers are coming in to work on gnu.org and very few know cvs any more. Making it operate more like a regular free software project that can receive patches from anyone and using the most popular version control system would lower the barrier to entry and improve transparency. It was viewed as a reasonable goal by the people I worked with at the fsf, but gnu has its own governance and the idea was met with strong resistance from all of the longtime gnu.org contributors, including rms. I even received an unpleasant off-list email (not from rms) because I was viewed as an outsider that doesn't know anything. So, that was the end of that little idea. There is a glimmer of hope for gnu's future in subprojects such as guix, which is doing technically interesting work and has created a healthy community that welcomes newcomers. Can that positive energy take hold and spread to the rest of the project? We'll see.
- macintux 4y ago
  I still remember in 1996 searching for GNU online only to discover they weren’t running on their own domain, instead something buried on (IIRC) mit.edu. I also couldn’t find any gcc binaries for Solaris online, had to steal a copy from my school’s IT administrator to help get a startup up and running. They definitely have serious challenges with inertia.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Probably prep.ai.mit.edu. MIT does that kind of thing; It’s like tsx-11.mit.edu, the famous US Linux FTP mirror, which was, IIRC, originally Theodore Ts'o personal workstation at MIT.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  A former boss still tells people about the time he emailed an address at gnu.org to inform them that a mirror was broken, and made the mistake of using "linux", and got a page-long rant from Stallman himself about how it was "gnu/linux" ...and nobody fixed the FTP site.
sidkshatriya 4y ago
I equally detest websites which are extremely graphics and animation intensive. When I see a lot of graphics and presentation my mind goes: "Sales pitch upcoming. Be careful!!" I actually like highly functional websites with a light touch that conveys sophistication. GNU's websites don't come in that category, of course.
- jacooper 4y ago
  I'm not asking for something full of animations. I'm just asking for something modern and useful, like GitHub and Gitea. The total opposite of Savannah.
b3morales 4y ago
Personally, most of the times I visit gnu.org I'm browsing the Emacs manuals and I do have to say I appreciate the simple HTML rendering. It makes them easy to read and navigate.
starkd 4y ago
Not every thing is about ease of use. Sometimes doing things without a nice GUI interface forces you to understand the system better. All the UI's and documentation systems are taking on the same boring corporate gloss. It has its uses, but it feels dead. It's not invigorating.
dwringer 4y ago
> everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. That's... kind of the point, no? Most people use computers most of the time in a way that's not free by FSF standards.
dark-star 4y ago
yeah, I expect GNU to go the way of the dodo in the not-so-distant future. Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. In every other industry you learn to adapt to new developments until you retire, yet GNU seems to insist on using decades-old software (cvs, autotools, ...) just because. That just has to backfire at some point...
- cies 4y ago
  > Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. That is called a fork. For the fork to work you need momentum. Historically this did not work really well. And the forks mostly died. What I do see is that big biz does not like (L)GPL (and absolutely hate AGPL), so they prefer to through their momentum behind BSD (and similar) licensed code. This is how a lot of momentum was focused away from GNU projects (e.g.: LLVM over GCC)
  - dark-star 4y ago
    > That is called a fork No that's not what I mean. I mean more like GNOME which once was a GNU project and then left GNU to continue on their own. There are more examples like that. They don't need new manpower or inertia. They just drop GNU if they feel it keeps them back (which a lot of projects recently think, apparently, after the whole RMS drama some time back)
- tpoacher 4y ago
  Not true. There's a large number of industries that prefer reliable older tech to unreliable ephemeral new tech.
- teddyh 4y ago
  People have been predicting the end of GNU ever since the beginning, perhaps starting in earnest in 1994, when the GNU project was 10 years old! Outdated, obsolete, practically one foot in the grave, surely, people said. And yet here we are in 2022, RMS being more right than ever.
dark-star 4y ago
Funny anecdote from an IRC chat I "overheard" today. The chat was for a relatively new GNU command line tool. It was discussed whether it would be possible to detect changes to a file being edited through "outside" programs, before saving. The typical "the file you have opened was changed on disk. Overwrite/Reload/..." question. It was suggested that they could use inotify for that. A GNU developer responded with "there's no inotify on OpenBSD". Then discussion went to "could we maybe use kqueue there?" The response from said GNU developer? I quote, and this is not a joke: "There are plenty of systems without kqueue. Like TOPS-10" The other developer jokingly said that he didn't know of anyone still using TOPS-10, to which the GNU developer responded along the lines of "Well, I am intending to compile and run this on TOPS-10, so we should use a mechanism similar to what EMACS does to detect those changes, as that is portable to more systems and is equally safe, i.e. race-condition-free" I'm not sure if the race conditions in the "EMACS way" are actually there or not (I didn't feel like reading the elisp code for saving files), the discussion quickly went to filesystem requirements, NFS and other remote filesystems, etc. But the fact that they are considering porting to an OS that has been out of (active) use for more than 30 years over using more recent APIs on more modern OS's shows how far in the past they are stuck. And this is only a very recent example that I wanted to share, there are many more such examples if you know where to look (mailing lists etc.). Things like "we cannot change this as SunOS requires this-or-that" and "this will break on VMS" are still things they are thinking about... I mean I get it, backwards compatibility is cool and all, but some things can be taken a bit to the extreme...

Man, the FSF and the GNU project need a new refresh and new blood in them ASAP. everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday.

pram 4y ago

IIRC Stallman 'browses the web' with something like a cron job scraping URLs with Lynx, and then it emails him the output so he can peruse it later. This isn't a joke lol

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
I believe he used to print them out, so perhaps we should consider at least reading them via an email client to be some sort of progress. Although I'm sure it was to be more "eco-friendly" than anything
ydlr 4y ago
That sounds... reasonable. There are some web-to-newsletter services that try to sell this feature.
bitwize 4y ago
Given how intrusive, ad-encrusted, and potentially malware-encrusted the web is becoming, this sounds like one of those Stallman absurdities that make increasing amounts of sense the more you think on them.
- starkd 4y ago
  Exactly. We need characters like RMS to buck the trends, even if they come off as a*holes to us. And RMS was right about the danger of software not being under our control.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Which is why RMS and FSF tried to get the software under their control. Thankfully, they are much less adept at it than the commercial firms, so that attempt ultimately failed.
    - starkd 4y ago
      Not understanding how they did this. The movement merely supports a license that insists code is available to end users.
      - bitwize 4y ago
        The FSF demands copyright assignation for all contributions to its projects. E.g., if you want your code to make it into Emacs, both you and your employer need to sign it over to the FSF.
- gaius_baltar 4y ago
  It is like that "Stallman was right" subreddit is getting righter and righter every day. Except that Stallman is under some kind of Cassandra Curse, so people ignore all the signs, even when they are repeated by persons more skilled in PR tactics.
davexunit 4y ago
He did that for a long time, maybe still does for certain things for all I know, but he started using GNU IceCat (a firefox derivative) some years ago.
dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
I actually envy him for being able to do so.
abawany 4y ago
Sounds like a great way to prevent brain death brought about by the WMD (weapons of mental destruction) such as infini-scroll, etc.
Koshkin 4y ago
I used RSS to read HN up until Google killed their reader. (Being able to filter the feed by the post title was nice.)

therouwboat 4y ago

You open the site and read, what else do you need?

spookthesunset 4y ago
I mean, you kinda can't easily read this language reference from the site. So making that an easy to access set of HTML files would be a start.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  The reference doesn't exist yet. This is the source to the reference.

krapp 4y ago

>everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. It makes sense if you think of the FSF as a religion, and consider the thesis of the Free Software movement as theological - free software is an ultimate moral good, proprietary software is an ultimate moral evil, and the FSF sees themselves as clergy spreading the gospel and purifying themselves from the corruption and degradation of modernity. Sacred rituals and texts tend not to change over time, after all, being sacred they don't need to change.

bogwog 4y ago
The religion analogy is unnecessary. The FSF is a non-profit with the goal of fostering free software. As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. As an example, RMS himself actually recommends the dual licensing model of Qt for organizations looking to make a profit and contribute to the free software movement. With that model, the software is available under a copyleft license (GPL) and a proprietary commercial license (for those willing to pay) But as the FSF is not focused on profits (again, because they’re a non-profit organization), all of their software is exclusively licensed using copyleft licenses like GPL and LGPL. Not because it’s a “religion”, but because it’s literally the entire goal of the organization.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > As a non-profit, their actions and their investments are focused on their goal, not on becoming profitable. 1)You can't succeed as a non-profit if you don't make money. 2)If the FSF cared about their goal of fostering free software blah blah, then why didn't they fire RMS out a cannon when basically the entire open-source world said "fire that serial sexual harasser who keeps opening his mouth about child rape not being rape, or we stop giving you money / working with you." They chose, overwhelmingly and very petulantly, to continue letting RMS have a leadership role.
  - sweetbitter 4y ago
    They didn't fire him because he did not do any sexual harassment, and his comment about children was made earnestly but out of a place of ignorance. I've met plenty of people who are at least that socially dense with that low of a filter, it's not really surprising that someone like this would have ignorance of such a topic + the lack of tact required to speak about it. If anything, that kind of sheer honesty and invulnerability to peer pressure gives him an advantage over ordinary people in a leadership role.

davexunit 4y ago

Here's an anecdote: In 2014, as part of my job as fsf's web developer (a new position at the time), I suggested moving gnu.org's version control from a private cvs repo (that requires passing a test to get access to) to a public git repo as a step towards attracting new contributors. The argument was simple: Not many new volunteers are coming in to work on gnu.org and very few know cvs any more. Making it operate more like a regular free software project that can receive patches from anyone and using the most popular version control system would lower the barrier to entry and improve transparency. It was viewed as a reasonable goal by the people I worked with at the fsf, but gnu has its own governance and the idea was met with strong resistance from all of the longtime gnu.org contributors, including rms. I even received an unpleasant off-list email (not from rms) because I was viewed as an outsider that doesn't know anything. So, that was the end of that little idea. There is a glimmer of hope for gnu's future in subprojects such as guix, which is doing technically interesting work and has created a healthy community that welcomes newcomers. Can that positive energy take hold and spread to the rest of the project? We'll see.

macintux 4y ago
I still remember in 1996 searching for GNU online only to discover they weren’t running on their own domain, instead something buried on (IIRC) mit.edu. I also couldn’t find any gcc binaries for Solaris online, had to steal a copy from my school’s IT administrator to help get a startup up and running. They definitely have serious challenges with inertia.
- teddyh 4y ago
  Probably prep.ai.mit.edu. MIT does that kind of thing; It’s like tsx-11.mit.edu, the famous US Linux FTP mirror, which was, IIRC, originally Theodore Ts'o personal workstation at MIT.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
A former boss still tells people about the time he emailed an address at gnu.org to inform them that a mirror was broken, and made the mistake of using "linux", and got a page-long rant from Stallman himself about how it was "gnu/linux" ...and nobody fixed the FTP site.

sidkshatriya 4y ago

I equally detest websites which are extremely graphics and animation intensive. When I see a lot of graphics and presentation my mind goes: "Sales pitch upcoming. Be careful!!" I actually like highly functional websites with a light touch that conveys sophistication. GNU's websites don't come in that category, of course.

jacooper 4y ago
I'm not asking for something full of animations. I'm just asking for something modern and useful, like GitHub and Gitea. The total opposite of Savannah.

b3morales 4y ago

Personally, most of the times I visit gnu.org I'm browsing the Emacs manuals and I do have to say I appreciate the simple HTML rendering. It makes them easy to read and navigate.

starkd 4y ago

Not every thing is about ease of use. Sometimes doing things without a nice GUI interface forces you to understand the system better. All the UI's and documentation systems are taking on the same boring corporate gloss. It has its uses, but it feels dead. It's not invigorating.

dwringer 4y ago

> everything from their projects, to their websites is outdated and distant from how people actually use tech everyday. That's... kind of the point, no? Most people use computers most of the time in a way that's not free by FSF standards.

dark-star 4y ago

yeah, I expect GNU to go the way of the dodo in the not-so-distant future. Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. In every other industry you learn to adapt to new developments until you retire, yet GNU seems to insist on using decades-old software (cvs, autotools, ...) just because. That just has to backfire at some point...

cies 4y ago
> Most projects will survive, of course, but probably under new leadership or something. That is called a fork. For the fork to work you need momentum. Historically this did not work really well. And the forks mostly died. What I do see is that big biz does not like (L)GPL (and absolutely hate AGPL), so they prefer to through their momentum behind BSD (and similar) licensed code. This is how a lot of momentum was focused away from GNU projects (e.g.: LLVM over GCC)
- dark-star 4y ago
  > That is called a fork No that's not what I mean. I mean more like GNOME which once was a GNU project and then left GNU to continue on their own. There are more examples like that. They don't need new manpower or inertia. They just drop GNU if they feel it keeps them back (which a lot of projects recently think, apparently, after the whole RMS drama some time back)
tpoacher 4y ago
Not true. There's a large number of industries that prefer reliable older tech to unreliable ephemeral new tech.
teddyh 4y ago
People have been predicting the end of GNU ever since the beginning, perhaps starting in earnest in 1994, when the GNU project was 10 years old! Outdated, obsolete, practically one foot in the grave, surely, people said. And yet here we are in 2022, RMS being more right than ever.

dark-star 4y ago

Funny anecdote from an IRC chat I "overheard" today. The chat was for a relatively new GNU command line tool. It was discussed whether it would be possible to detect changes to a file being edited through "outside" programs, before saving. The typical "the file you have opened was changed on disk. Overwrite/Reload/..." question. It was suggested that they could use inotify for that. A GNU developer responded with "there's no inotify on OpenBSD". Then discussion went to "could we maybe use kqueue there?" The response from said GNU developer? I quote, and this is not a joke: "There are plenty of systems without kqueue. Like TOPS-10" The other developer jokingly said that he didn't know of anyone still using TOPS-10, to which the GNU developer responded along the lines of "Well, I am intending to compile and run this on TOPS-10, so we should use a mechanism similar to what EMACS does to detect those changes, as that is portable to more systems and is equally safe, i.e. race-condition-free" I'm not sure if the race conditions in the "EMACS way" are actually there or not (I didn't feel like reading the elisp code for saving files), the discussion quickly went to filesystem requirements, NFS and other remote filesystems, etc. But the fact that they are considering porting to an OS that has been out of (active) use for more than 30 years over using more recent APIs on more modern OS's shows how far in the past they are stuck. And this is only a very recent example that I wanted to share, there are many more such examples if you know where to look (mailing lists etc.). Things like "we cannot change this as SunOS requires this-or-that" and "this will break on VMS" are still things they are thinking about... I mean I get it, backwards compatibility is cool and all, but some things can be taken a bit to the extreme...