13 ms·

Is the FSF Fighting the Previous War?

116 points by smitty1e 4y ago

zzo38computer 4y ago
I think they are right to try to exclude nonfree parts of Linux kernel, and to try to avoid Intel ME and other things like that (but they will need to try better to make improved hardware designs that can be used, which I would think would be difficult for an organization that deals with software), but the certification requirements are a bit too strict in my opinion (while I think there are legitimate reasons to mechanically disable the GPU and WiFi (to save power, avoid unwanted communications, etc), this should not be permanent; it should be possible to re-enable them if their functionality is desired, and free replacement firmware can be used (they could, if desired, make them disabled by default and not include any nonfree firmware with it so that they cannot be used without free firmware, I hope)), and I think they are wrong to remove "ns-do-applescript" (they could, if needed, put it in a separate file which can be omitted if you are not using AppleScript, and there is also possibility of making FOSS implementation of AppleScript in future on other systems possibly, even if for now there might not be).
danuker 4y ago
I agree. Big Tech can afford to wall their gardens and close off their ecosystems. That is because they have billions of users, and profits merely require keeping the users. But services undergoing adoption need to offer disruptive advantages such as extraordinary user experiences, or being interoperable with other networks to benefit from network effects. When a small movement (which is what Free Software is becoming sadly) chooses to burn bridges, they are bound to get even smaller.
- bawolff 4y ago
  FSF has been burning bridges for pretty much their entire existence (what is "open source" if not: have you considered not firebombing every bridge you see)
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kazinator 4y ago
> She says that strict adherence to the FSF’s Respects Your Freedom program means that you’ll be using only obsolete and probably broken hardware. Old, like from a time when it respected your freedom more? I don't like the insinuation here, which is that we have lost; if you want the shiny new hardware, just shut up and fork over your freedom. Just because you put up a white flag and surrendered doesn't mean that those who haven't are fighting the "previous war". If Stallman is "fighting a war that’s no longer going on", why can't you have your freedoms respected on new hardware? > If you’re particularly masochistic, here’s the start of the thread on Emacs-Devel. Here we see completely cringe-inducing, uncivil exchanges such as: RMS> Is it possible to do this with call-process or by running a shell command [instead of the do-applescript function]? H. Melman> I think so, though I have to figure out the right incantation to get stdout returned as a string. I might be nice if call-process' DESTINATION arg had an option for this. A. Schwab> See shell-command-to-string for how to do that. It's like not being able to look away from a trainwreck, these uncouth, unconstructive GNU diatribes.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  > Old, like from a time when it respected your freedom more? Old and broken as in "You can't update the firmware" because updating the firmware with proprietary software is Bad, but using the proprietary firmware that ships with the product is A-OK.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    That position is crystal clear and makes sense. If absolutely nobody can replace the firmware (without desoldering chips and such), then the playing field is level; the firmware is effectively part of the hardware, like a voltage controller chip on the circuit board. If the firmware is flashable, then until someone actually flashes it, the situation sort of resembles the above, which is why the original firmware image is acceptable. Would you prefer that Stallman declare unacceptable any proprietary factory firmware that can be overwritten? Basically the FSF concerns itself with things that are programmable: who controls that. If only some privileged players can produce images for the device (like the original manufacturer or some parner or other cohor thereof), then the user is disadvantaged: the field is not level. A device with a nonprogrammable ROM could be be harmful, and that could be due to code. But it is not fixable by programming, just like a harmful toaster.
falcolas 4y ago
If I can’t run free software on current hardware, that means that the war is not over; that it is still going, and that we’re losing. Accepting the loss isn’t going to help us move forward, just backward.
googlryas 4y ago
Did anyone read the actual email thread? RMS is in there saying stuff like > In principle, it is good to remove it, but there is no principled reason why we must remove it, if that means breaking a user-level feature that does work on non-MacOS systems. Basically it is one person(Po Lu) pushing for removing it, in part "to encourage users to switch to Linux", but it seems like he is getting a lot of push back from other contributors about why this is actually necessary, and that if he wants to remove it, there should be some more generalized equivalent functionality which would let current mac users port their deprecated usages to some other method.
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- bombcar 4y ago
  Nothing much (ok probably lots) infuriates me more than intentionally breaking software as a way to push you toward an OS, even if it is Linux.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    FWIW, Emacs is a GNU tool at the end of the day. Complaining about upstream changes negatively effecting MacOS is like complaining to Microsoft when your games don't run in WINE. It's the wrong tree to bark up, even if the project is community-led.
    - AceJohnny2 4y ago
      Yet, by the very nature of its freedom, if people are unhappy with the direction GNU Emacs goes, they can take it another way. Hence XEmacs. And hence why I run the Mituharu-branch [1] Emacs rather than upstream on Mac. [1] https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ aka emacs-mac-app in MacPorts or railwaycat/emacsmacport in Homebrew
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  It's saying something when RMS is the voice of pragmatism.
datadata 4y ago
What is the proposed "next war" for FSF? Right now they are anchoring the Overton window, this still seems pretty important.
- danielheath 4y ago
  Fighting against user data being stored in cloud services, available (if at all) only in non-standard, proprietary formats?
zugi 4y ago
> And I don't think that RMS is the only reason the free software movement has failed For one thing it hasn't failed, the free software movement has been an amazing success. For another, RMS created the free software movement, in an era where most software was proprietary. The GPL, LGPL, and probably many subsequent free software licenses might not exist if not for him. Read his story that led him to this: he was trying to connect a printer to a new machine in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and the maker would not share their proprietary drivers, even though he was willing to port it to the new machine himself, so he reverse engineered it, wrote a new driver himself, and proclaimed his version to be free for all so others wouldn't have to face that same problem in the future, on the condition that they also share any improvements they make to it. Viewing most RMS behavior through the lens of this early formative experience makes it mostly make sense. Most of the article is really not about the FSF but about emacs. Emacs is Stallman's own project - he started it in the 1980s and remains its mostly-benevolent dictator. He wants it to abide by his own strict principles. If others disagree, they're free to fork it, as has been done over the years. And his free software ideals are the reason they have that freedom. I just don't see a general argument here to justify the broad title about the FSF in general.
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- wmf 4y ago
  RMS is micromanaging Emacs in a user-hostile and developer-hostile way. RYF is a disaster that accomplishes nothing. FSF/GNU has a habit of forking or rewriting existing free software to make it "more free" but delivering no actual benefits to users, like gNewSense, Libreboot, Guix, and GnuTLS.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    Then fork it and run it in the way you see fit.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      The existing software is already that fork, isn't it? Even ignoring the other reasons that lazy counter is bad to throw out.
basicplus2 4y ago
FSF - Free Software Foundation RMS - Richard M Stallman OSS - Open-source software Very poor writing to launch into accronyms with no explaination.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  If you are writing with an expectation that your audience knows those acronyms, there's no reason to stop to explain them. When personal blog posts like these get picked up by HN there's always someone who wants to die on the hill of "but you're writing on THE PUBLIC INTERNET and thus you can't ASSUME that your posts will only be read by your regular readers," and, I mean, sure, you're technically correct -- but on a practical level, do we really want to archly insist that everyone writing any blog post anywhere must write it as if they were writing for a widespread mainstream audience on the off-chance that it becomes the one post that gets 50,000 views instead of the usual 500?
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    They can just use an <abbr> tag. There's no need to explain anything, just put the expansion of the acronym in the title attribute. It's very simple. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/abbr https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...
roenxi 4y ago
1) The FSF is on the winning side of the war they are fighting, the GPL is nearly everywhere except firmware and phones. Their job is to keep fighting that war. If you want to start a new war, start a new group with different goals. 2) There has never been a time when using free software & hardware didn't end up with a weird system. It isn't like FOSS was a beacon of great engineering through the 2000s. We were lucky if half the hardware on a given computer worked even with non-free drivers. 3) The FSF needs to be a lighthouse on this issues. Compromising will mean the lighthouse is in the wrong spot. The FOSS movement has the best system for letting people disagree of any organisation - it lets those who care, do. Let the FSF do its thing. If you want compromises, start a Compromised Free Software society or a Partially Free Software Foundation. Maybe even all it the Open Source Initiative, hint hint. Someone needs to be standing up for raw freedom, devil take convenience.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Really? It seems to me that that the percentage of source opting for a BSD/MIT type license vs GPL is much greater than 10-15 years ago. FSF is stuck in a world where everyone still writes everything in C.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > FSF is stuck in a world where everyone still writes everything in C. And in a world where software is always compiled from source code to an executable binary file which is stored and run by the user's own computer. There are a number of situations in modern software development which the GPL handles spectacularly badly, including: * Software which usually runs on other people's computers, like cloud hosted services. * Software which is exclusively delivered and executed over the Internet, like Javascript-heavy web applications. * Software which is distributed in a form similar, but not identical, to its source code, like minified Javascript. * Software which is written, distributed, and used in a source or source-equivalent format, like Python applications or shell scripts. * Software which runs on embedded hardware which is not trivially modifiable. * Software whose operating environment is another piece of software which may have an incompatible license, like browser extensions or game mods. * Software which is not precisely executable, like web site templates or C++ template libraries. * Software which isn't precisely software at all, like FPGA hardware designs.
duskwuff 4y ago
> I have my own data point in this discussion. Back in May, there was a long thread on Emacs-Devel about removing ns-do-applescript from the Next Step branch. The problem, according to the instigator, was that applescript runs only on macOS which is not a free operating system—although it does represent over 25% of Emacs users—and therefore ns-do-applescript should not be in Emacs. This isn't the first time that free-software spite has led Emacs developers to disable perfectly good features. Back in 2016, Emacs developers deliberately prevented color emoji from being displayed on the macOS port because Linux (and other free software platforms) didn't support color fonts at the time. http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Emacs is a GNU tool, right? Why should they be forced to merge patches that don't relate to the GNU software ecosystem? Adding Applescript compatibility means that contributors who maintain that code require proprietary hardware to fix these issues. The GNU project forbids members from spending donation money on proprietary hardware, even for debugging purposes. You're better off asking why MacOS doesn't have support for EXT4, just because "all the work is already done for them" If color emojis and Applescript compatibility is such a huge deal, the license explicitly allows you to fork Emacs with these changes merged. Knowing MacOS developers, they'll probably even charge you for it too (which the license graciously permits as well).
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > Why should they be forced to merge patches that don't relate to the GNU software ecosystem? They don't need to. Color emoji worked by default until it was deliberately broken. AppleScript support currently exists and works; what was being proposed is that it be removed simply because it interacts with a feature which is unique to a non-free operating system. > Adding Applescript compatibility means that contributors who maintain that code require proprietary hardware to fix these issues. You seem to be working towards the conclusion that Free Software should only be usable within a fully Free environment, which is pretty thoroughly out of step with the expectations and requirements of actual users.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > What is broken about old hardware? Libreboot -- the FSF-approved fork of Coreboot which the author is indirectly referencing -- only supports a small number of Intel Core2 systems. This microarchitecture is heavily affected by speculative execution vulnerabilities, and rejecting Intel's microcode blobs means that these vulnerabilities cannot be effectively mitigated, even partially.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
    Oh that thing. Only a problem if you want to run VMs for other people or javascript in a browser.
- imafraid 4y ago
Barrin92 4y ago
The biggest problem with the FSFs religious and dogmatic set of beliefs is that it leads to bizarre outcomes that don't make any sense. Like shipping proprietary firmware is ok as long as you don't change it because then it's not really software and it doesn't count, or whatever. So your software is free if it's proprietary and old but it's suddenly not free if it's proprietary and new, try to explain this to anyone not steeped in free software theology. It has the same energy as only being able to walk x steps on the Shabbat. It's important to recognize when your doctrine has started to hijack you rather than making and adapting rules to serve your long term goals.
- comex 4y ago
  > It has the same energy as only being able to walk x steps on the Shabbat. It's important to recognize when your doctrine has started to hijack you rather than making and adapting rules to serve your long term goals. Except that religions and political movements are different. Many people following Shabbat restrictions would freely admit that some of the restrictions have no practical value, but are observed purely for their symbolic value, as a way to honor God. That's fine if that's your goal. The FSF too has many practices that could be seen as symbolic, but they're still meant to indirectly promote a concrete objective. Which makes it a problem when they fail to do so.
foxes 4y ago
The FSF and Stallman are pretty mid tbh. The whole thing seem hopelessly outdated. Some of the media on the FSF website is extremely cringe, the weird cartoons in particular. Stallman is problematic and it feels like that tarnishes things. The front has long moved on from writing C and package jannying your distro together.
parker_mountain 4y ago
I have a lot of thoughts on this and not a lot of time to write them up. The things that really stand out to me are: - a lot of FSF projects are based around the premise of a multi user *nix system. This is an outdated model of usage. Systems are generally single-user or no-user (and instead part of a herd of application hosts). Human login rarely happens except to debug, and that debugging rarely occurs on the host. - the FSF has not done a good job of bringing new people in. They do not make a compelling case for their importance. I think this ties into the above - they don't have any compelling work to demonstrate for modern consumer freedom in one of the most important spaces - phones. This also ties into RMS - regardless of how you feel about the man, his presence in the FSF still continues to generate controversy that makes recruiting more difficult. - The FSF is supposed to address issues about freedom, privacy, etc, but they have completely missed the modern age of application usage models. Web apps, centralized auth, locked down phone OSes, etc. They have very little presence, and a lot of licensing mindshare has gone to non-copyleft FOSS (apache, mit, etc) - Richard Stallman famously corrects people who say Linux, by saying "GNU/Linux". This would be fine, except the vast majority of consumer electronics using Linux no longer ship with the GNU userspace. This should have been a huge red flag to the FSF that their efforts were being sidestepped entirely. The FSF does not appear to have a clear vision of the future, or concrete goals, and has lost significant amounts of influence through inaction. I do not know what the way forward looks like for them. Ultimately, I think the FSF "won" the mindset war, but has lost the overall battle.
- the-printer 4y ago
  This sounds like a level-headed analysis. Granted, I don't totally understand the history nor the practical nuances of all of the FSF's work, I do have a basic grasp of their overall influence and imprint on FOSS and am a happy Emacs user. It seems to me that all of this talk questioning the need for the foundation in the modern age is good. The ought to be a bevy of splinter groups advocating and developing for the rights of certain users.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > a bevy of splinter groups advocating and developing for the rights of certain users. I'm curious what you mean by this. Free Software has always been about licensing software indiscriminately to all users. I much prefer that than a bunch of ideologically-driven splinter groups fighting for the rights of "certain users".
medo-bear 4y ago
- Gigachad 4y ago
  RMS is probably the main reason the free software movement has got as far as it has.
dathinab 4y ago
Believing that people will stop using macOs just because Emacs stops working nicely is probably the most ridiculous thing I have read this week. It shows a complete non-understanding about how most users, including developers, use software. If I would guess it has two possible (and possible overlapping) outcomes: - a mac fork which will maintain this functionality, and probably adds other mac specific functionality over time, basically making the situation worse - the user will decide it's time to move away from Emacs. Hypothetical quote: "I mean <modern GUI editor> doesn't look that bad and it's 2022 the area of stateless cloud has replaced dedicated servers, so why care for TUI interfaces anymore." So also a loss of free software. Which is what is at the core of the recent complains about the FSF I think. It looks like they don't fight a ware for a better future anymore but a war for fanatically enforcing ideology even if it hurts their original goals in the bigger picture.
renewiltord 4y ago
FSF has succeeded in its mission wildly. So much good free software today. Fully functional Free Software desktop. Over the last 20 years of use, I have watched us enter a phenomenal era of Free Software and Open Source software. This is victory and it is absolutely great.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  You should land on an aircraft carrier with a huge "Mission Accomplished" banner for the press conference and party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech
smitty1e 4y ago
I take a syncretic view that there is a spectrum of licensing along an axis like: |-GNU GPL...apache/MIT...proprietary-| I submit that motives for doing code vary from: * the social concerns of the GPL * to the libertarian view of apache/MIT * to the darwinian capitalist vistas of proprietary Further, the optimal overall result is obtained by respecting everyone's rights and using the legal system where necessary to resolve frictions. Messy? Inefficient? Confusing? Occasionally riddled by contradiction? Welcome to people.
faisal_ksa 4y ago
I have to agree. I saw FSF members argue with uutils coreutils [0] developers about having their project licensed under MIT. And for no good reason, they started attacking the project and the people behind it. I was a big fan of FSF until that point. [0] https://github.com/uutils/coreutils https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
- jacooper 4y ago
  I mean if it continues to get better, it will be just a matter of time till we see a cloud provider sepcifc usershell that is closed sourcd and built on top of the rust rewrite. and naturally its going to have its own features and options, away from the GNU's standard. then we start seeing every provider doing the same, and out goes the GNU standard, and welcome to proprietary cloud linux.
comex 4y ago
I read the Emacs thread. Say what you want about the FSF as a whole, or even Emacs policy as a whole. But this is at another level. The proposal was to remove the function ns-do-applescript, which runs an AppleScript script using the C API, because AppleScript is proprietary and thus bad. I can sort of understand that. What I can't understand is the suggested replacement: to run the same AppleScript scripts using a shell command. And I don't mean something like "well, we won't endorse any use of AppleScript, but 'run shell command' is a general-purpose interface and we can't stop users from using it for AppleScript if they really want to". I could understand that. No, there are uses of AppleScript in Lisp code within the Emacs repo itself (not a separate package repository or something). The thread discussed one such use, which fetches the user's contact list using AppleScript. This was considered completely fine. Fetching the user's contact list, as a high-level feature, is supported on free operating systems, so it's okay to also implement it for non-free operating systems, even if that requires using a proprietary OS-specific API, in this case AppleScript. All fine. But for some reason, it was considered essential to do this using a shell command instead of a C API. There was even a post suggesting that ns-do-applescript be reimplemented on top of the shell command instead of the C API. In this case, Emacs would still be offering its users a built-in API to run AppleScript scripts, just… in Lisp code instead of C! Because that's so different!
- kazinator 4y ago
  Maybe Emacs has to link with a particular library in order to have that API? So the part I don't understand is why the GPL exception wouldn't apply, if it is a system library that is going to be there on any Apple box. Emacs integrates a lot of various Mac-specific API's. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/nsfns.m https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/nsfns.m ... and other "ns" files. These would fall under that GPL exception. It's the same like, say, GTK+ having to use a Win32 API to be able to do its job of opening a window and painting into it. I see that Emacs' w32fns.c source file uses ShellExecuteEx. Why not insist that CMD.EXE has to be spawned to run stuff.
uwagar 4y ago
bcos they are fighting folks can blog post like this. if they arent there, they will form again bcos lack of freedom will make ya thirsty.
skrebbel 4y ago
Don’t forget that all todays browsers being open source is in no small part thanks to Stallman inventing the GPL and the KHTML team adopting it (ok, the LGPl but who’s counting)
gtsop 4y ago
Quite a rehashed discussion I think. I the essence of my question towards the fsf critics camp is: There is a non-gplv3 alternative for every single thing the fsf has made. You can literally live your life as normal without even touching their software. Why is there such a chronic pressure towards making the fsf more pragmatic? what do you wish to get out of such a move? aren't there other organizations that fight for that cause you want better than fsf? honest question.
grumbel 4y ago
If there is one area where the FSF has failed it's "user data". They focus only on the software side of things, which given their name and history is understandable, but more and more irrelevant in the modern cloud driven world. Having a web browser under an Free Software license is nice to have, but everything that matters is stored on the server side, which you have no access or control over. The FSF, as far as I can tell, never did anything to address that. Even the AGPL, which didn't even originate from the FSF, still just addresses the source code side of things, not the data side of things. I am not even talking here about actual licenses here, but just a philosophical framework about how to deal with data that is on computers that aren't yours. Somewhat surprising, politics got there first. The GDPR is actual law that tells you what you are and aren't allowed with user data. So we did get a bit of a happy end, but it feels like that would have been a fight in which the FSF could have played a more active role. The FSF is still stuck in a model where you own and control your computer and data. But that's simply no longer the case, neither with cloud nor with smartphones.
- vkou 4y ago
  FSF's job is dealing with software, EFF's job is dealing with the consequences of that software.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    EFF is concerned with actual law and legal defense in court, they don't write licensees. They don't have their equivalent of a GPL. Nobody really does as far as I know. If you wanted to make the next Youtube or Twitter, but be "Free as in Freedom", what rules would you follow? As far as I can tell, there is nobody dealing with whatever the "Free Software" analog would be in a cloud world where you don't own the computer. And that's kind of sad given how important and dominant that area has gotten over the last decade. GDPR is the best we have, but that only applies in a few selected countries, we don't even have a license version of that that you could slap on your cloud software.
    - vkou 4y ago
      There are free as in speech non-software licenses for copyrighted works like CC. As for you telling me what software I can run on my server, that sounds like the opposite of freedom. You can tell me what I can do with your data, and that's entirely in the EFF's wheelhouse of advocacy.
anon25453 4y ago
I think the article is misrepresenting RMS' view. In fact he does not seem to be against it at all. His point is that so long as the feature works on other systems, it is ok to use this implementation for Mac OS using what's available there. He's only against adding features that are exclusive to closed systems. He seems to prefer a 100% end-to-end "free" implementation, but is not against interfacing with proprietary systems if that is the only option, so long as it replicates a feature that is available in a free system (GNU). In my view, if you want to provide a 100% "free" alternative you need to pull users in. If a feature works on GNU/Linux, but requires you to connect to a proprietary system on Mac OS (apple script) to implement the same feature, you should do that. When you run enough free software on a closed OS, it lowers the bar for choosing a free OS the next time you buy a computer. Relevant quotes from the mail thread, that shows that RMS does have a relatively pragmatic view: > Does anyone object to its removal? RMS: In principle, it is good to remove it, but there is no principled reason why we must remove it, if that means breaking a user-level feature that does work on non-MacOS systems. > but using it in a subprocess to retrieve only contacts data (which is already possible on free systems) must be more acceptable than Emacs including a C primitive to do the same thing. RMS: Since retrieving contact data in Emacs is supported on free systems, adding code to do the same job on MacOS is ok in principle. An implementation which implements only that particular feature poses no special problem. Implementing something more general than that might pose a problem > Just FTR, AppleScript is used in eudcb-macos-contacts.el, but via osascript executable RMS: The comments in that file suggest that this is not a general facility to execute AppleScript programs, but rather a way to get data out of a MacOS-specific contacts database. [...] If so, then under the conditions in the node Non-GNU-Only Features of the GNU Maintainers Guide, this is a system-specific implementation of a feature that is supported equally well on the GNU system, so it is ok.
guilhas 4y ago
Ironic people complaning about FSF just as Debian decides to kneel I think this kind of reflects the mood of the newer generation "oh ye I am all for free software values, but if it gets inconveniente I can trade them for a 20$ coupon on Starbucks. These people with values are sooo antiquated" That and whine about Richard Stallman and the FSF First step create something better, then trade it for the coupon, leave other people projects to be guided as they see fit
vonwoodson 4y ago
Blah… blah… blah… As long as the Free Software movement has been around people have said that it’s too <X> and not <Y>. Technology as we know it today only exists because of Free Software (period)
ghuntley 4y ago
Consider what is happening in the Visual Studio Code ecosystem. In this particular case the FSF is on-point on topics about freedom.... "When I see people arguing over open-source vs non-opensource in 2022, I feel like people are completely missing the bigger and more pressing issues at hand, like how the Visual Studio Code ecosystem has been designed..." https://ghuntley.com/fracture https://ghuntley.com/fracture
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control This about sums up everything these corporations do. Why do people accept this? Is this really going to be our future?
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ThinkBeat 4y ago
If it is new to you that RMS is hostile towards proprietary software and operating systems then you have not been paying much attention. An open-source project is not going in the direction you like, the founder of the text editor has opinions you disagree with and you spend your time pissing on him because of it. Just fork the code. Be the change. It is far more productive. And if there are a lot of people who feel like you do then great. That is part of the freedom that Stallmann has given users.
jrm4 4y ago
When I see takes like this, I just want them to look up "Overton Window." The point (or perhaps best purpose) of the FSF isn't to dominate the world with their vision, it's to remind people of what the endpoints of the whole debate should be. It is not inconsistent to support FSF/RMS etc. and not follow everything they do.

116 points by smitty1e 4y ago

I think they are right to try to exclude nonfree parts of Linux kernel, and to try to avoid Intel ME and other things like that (but they will need to try better to make improved hardware designs that can be used, which I would think would be difficult for an organization that deals with software), but the certification requirements are a bit too strict in my opinion (while I think there are legitimate reasons to mechanically disable the GPU and WiFi (to save power, avoid unwanted communications, etc), this should not be permanent; it should be possible to re-enable them if their functionality is desired, and free replacement firmware can be used (they could, if desired, make them disabled by default and not include any nonfree firmware with it so that they cannot be used without free firmware, I hope)), and I think they are wrong to remove "ns-do-applescript" (they could, if needed, put it in a separate file which can be omitted if you are not using AppleScript, and there is also possibility of making FOSS implementation of AppleScript in future on other systems possibly, even if for now there might not be).

danuker 4y ago

I agree. Big Tech can afford to wall their gardens and close off their ecosystems. That is because they have billions of users, and profits merely require keeping the users. But services undergoing adoption need to offer disruptive advantages such as extraordinary user experiences, or being interoperable with other networks to benefit from network effects. When a small movement (which is what Free Software is becoming sadly) chooses to burn bridges, they are bound to get even smaller.

bawolff 4y ago
FSF has been burning bridges for pretty much their entire existence (what is "open source" if not: have you considered not firebombing every bridge you see)
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kazinator 4y ago

> She says that strict adherence to the FSF’s Respects Your Freedom program means that you’ll be using only obsolete and probably broken hardware. Old, like from a time when it respected your freedom more? I don't like the insinuation here, which is that we have lost; if you want the shiny new hardware, just shut up and fork over your freedom. Just because you put up a white flag and surrendered doesn't mean that those who haven't are fighting the "previous war". If Stallman is "fighting a war that’s no longer going on", why can't you have your freedoms respected on new hardware? > If you’re particularly masochistic, here’s the start of the thread on Emacs-Devel. Here we see completely cringe-inducing, uncivil exchanges such as: RMS> Is it possible to do this with call-process or by running a shell command [instead of the do-applescript function]? H. Melman> I think so, though I have to figure out the right incantation to get stdout returned as a string. I might be nice if call-process' DESTINATION arg had an option for this. A. Schwab> See shell-command-to-string for how to do that. It's like not being able to look away from a trainwreck, these uncouth, unconstructive GNU diatribes.

aidenn0 4y ago
> Old, like from a time when it respected your freedom more? Old and broken as in "You can't update the firmware" because updating the firmware with proprietary software is Bad, but using the proprietary firmware that ships with the product is A-OK.
- kazinator 4y ago
  That position is crystal clear and makes sense. If absolutely nobody can replace the firmware (without desoldering chips and such), then the playing field is level; the firmware is effectively part of the hardware, like a voltage controller chip on the circuit board. If the firmware is flashable, then until someone actually flashes it, the situation sort of resembles the above, which is why the original firmware image is acceptable. Would you prefer that Stallman declare unacceptable any proprietary factory firmware that can be overwritten? Basically the FSF concerns itself with things that are programmable: who controls that. If only some privileged players can produce images for the device (like the original manufacturer or some parner or other cohor thereof), then the user is disadvantaged: the field is not level. A device with a nonprogrammable ROM could be be harmful, and that could be due to code. But it is not fixable by programming, just like a harmful toaster.

falcolas 4y ago

If I can’t run free software on current hardware, that means that the war is not over; that it is still going, and that we’re losing. Accepting the loss isn’t going to help us move forward, just backward.

googlryas 4y ago

Did anyone read the actual email thread? RMS is in there saying stuff like > In principle, it is good to remove it, but there is no principled reason why we must remove it, if that means breaking a user-level feature that does work on non-MacOS systems. Basically it is one person(Po Lu) pushing for removing it, in part "to encourage users to switch to Linux", but it seems like he is getting a lot of push back from other contributors about why this is actually necessary, and that if he wants to remove it, there should be some more generalized equivalent functionality which would let current mac users port their deprecated usages to some other method.

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bombcar 4y ago
Nothing much (ok probably lots) infuriates me more than intentionally breaking software as a way to push you toward an OS, even if it is Linux.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  FWIW, Emacs is a GNU tool at the end of the day. Complaining about upstream changes negatively effecting MacOS is like complaining to Microsoft when your games don't run in WINE. It's the wrong tree to bark up, even if the project is community-led.
  - AceJohnny2 4y ago
    Yet, by the very nature of its freedom, if people are unhappy with the direction GNU Emacs goes, they can take it another way. Hence XEmacs. And hence why I run the Mituharu-branch [1] Emacs rather than upstream on Mac. [1] https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ aka emacs-mac-app in MacPorts or railwaycat/emacsmacport in Homebrew
AceJohnny2 4y ago
It's saying something when RMS is the voice of pragmatism.

datadata 4y ago

What is the proposed "next war" for FSF? Right now they are anchoring the Overton window, this still seems pretty important.

danielheath 4y ago
Fighting against user data being stored in cloud services, available (if at all) only in non-standard, proprietary formats?

zugi 4y ago

> And I don't think that RMS is the only reason the free software movement has failed For one thing it hasn't failed, the free software movement has been an amazing success. For another, RMS created the free software movement, in an era where most software was proprietary. The GPL, LGPL, and probably many subsequent free software licenses might not exist if not for him. Read his story that led him to this: he was trying to connect a printer to a new machine in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and the maker would not share their proprietary drivers, even though he was willing to port it to the new machine himself, so he reverse engineered it, wrote a new driver himself, and proclaimed his version to be free for all so others wouldn't have to face that same problem in the future, on the condition that they also share any improvements they make to it. Viewing most RMS behavior through the lens of this early formative experience makes it mostly make sense. Most of the article is really not about the FSF but about emacs. Emacs is Stallman's own project - he started it in the 1980s and remains its mostly-benevolent dictator. He wants it to abide by his own strict principles. If others disagree, they're free to fork it, as has been done over the years. And his free software ideals are the reason they have that freedom. I just don't see a general argument here to justify the broad title about the FSF in general.

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wmf 4y ago
RMS is micromanaging Emacs in a user-hostile and developer-hostile way. RYF is a disaster that accomplishes nothing. FSF/GNU has a habit of forking or rewriting existing free software to make it "more free" but delivering no actual benefits to users, like gNewSense, Libreboot, Guix, and GnuTLS.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  Then fork it and run it in the way you see fit.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    The existing software is already that fork, isn't it? Even ignoring the other reasons that lazy counter is bad to throw out.

basicplus2 4y ago

FSF - Free Software Foundation RMS - Richard M Stallman OSS - Open-source software Very poor writing to launch into accronyms with no explaination.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago
If you are writing with an expectation that your audience knows those acronyms, there's no reason to stop to explain them. When personal blog posts like these get picked up by HN there's always someone who wants to die on the hill of "but you're writing on THE PUBLIC INTERNET and thus you can't ASSUME that your posts will only be read by your regular readers," and, I mean, sure, you're technically correct -- but on a practical level, do we really want to archly insist that everyone writing any blog post anywhere must write it as if they were writing for a widespread mainstream audience on the off-chance that it becomes the one post that gets 50,000 views instead of the usual 500?
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  They can just use an <abbr> tag. There's no need to explain anything, just put the expansion of the acronym in the title attribute. It's very simple. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/abbr https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...

roenxi 4y ago

1) The FSF is on the winning side of the war they are fighting, the GPL is nearly everywhere except firmware and phones. Their job is to keep fighting that war. If you want to start a new war, start a new group with different goals. 2) There has never been a time when using free software & hardware didn't end up with a weird system. It isn't like FOSS was a beacon of great engineering through the 2000s. We were lucky if half the hardware on a given computer worked even with non-free drivers. 3) The FSF needs to be a lighthouse on this issues. Compromising will mean the lighthouse is in the wrong spot. The FOSS movement has the best system for letting people disagree of any organisation - it lets those who care, do. Let the FSF do its thing. If you want compromises, start a Compromised Free Software society or a Partially Free Software Foundation. Maybe even all it the Open Source Initiative, hint hint. Someone needs to be standing up for raw freedom, devil take convenience.

TylerE 4y ago
Really? It seems to me that that the percentage of source opting for a BSD/MIT type license vs GPL is much greater than 10-15 years ago. FSF is stuck in a world where everyone still writes everything in C.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > FSF is stuck in a world where everyone still writes everything in C. And in a world where software is always compiled from source code to an executable binary file which is stored and run by the user's own computer. There are a number of situations in modern software development which the GPL handles spectacularly badly, including: * Software which usually runs on other people's computers, like cloud hosted services. * Software which is exclusively delivered and executed over the Internet, like Javascript-heavy web applications. * Software which is distributed in a form similar, but not identical, to its source code, like minified Javascript. * Software which is written, distributed, and used in a source or source-equivalent format, like Python applications or shell scripts. * Software which runs on embedded hardware which is not trivially modifiable. * Software whose operating environment is another piece of software which may have an incompatible license, like browser extensions or game mods. * Software which is not precisely executable, like web site templates or C++ template libraries. * Software which isn't precisely software at all, like FPGA hardware designs.

duskwuff 4y ago

> I have my own data point in this discussion. Back in May, there was a long thread on Emacs-Devel about removing ns-do-applescript from the Next Step branch. The problem, according to the instigator, was that applescript runs only on macOS which is not a free operating system—although it does represent over 25% of Emacs users—and therefore ns-do-applescript should not be in Emacs. This isn't the first time that free-software spite has led Emacs developers to disable perfectly good features. Back in 2016, Emacs developers deliberately prevented color emoji from being displayed on the macOS port because Linux (and other free software platforms) didn't support color fonts at the time. http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html

smoldesu 4y ago
Emacs is a GNU tool, right? Why should they be forced to merge patches that don't relate to the GNU software ecosystem? Adding Applescript compatibility means that contributors who maintain that code require proprietary hardware to fix these issues. The GNU project forbids members from spending donation money on proprietary hardware, even for debugging purposes. You're better off asking why MacOS doesn't have support for EXT4, just because "all the work is already done for them" If color emojis and Applescript compatibility is such a huge deal, the license explicitly allows you to fork Emacs with these changes merged. Knowing MacOS developers, they'll probably even charge you for it too (which the license graciously permits as well).
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > Why should they be forced to merge patches that don't relate to the GNU software ecosystem? They don't need to. Color emoji worked by default until it was deliberately broken. AppleScript support currently exists and works; what was being proposed is that it be removed simply because it interacts with a feature which is unique to a non-free operating system. > Adding Applescript compatibility means that contributors who maintain that code require proprietary hardware to fix these issues. You seem to be working towards the conclusion that Free Software should only be usable within a fully Free environment, which is pretty thoroughly out of step with the expectations and requirements of actual users.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago

duskwuff 4y ago
> What is broken about old hardware? Libreboot -- the FSF-approved fork of Coreboot which the author is indirectly referencing -- only supports a small number of Intel Core2 systems. This microarchitecture is heavily affected by speculative execution vulnerabilities, and rejecting Intel's microcode blobs means that these vulnerabilities cannot be effectively mitigated, even partially.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Oh that thing. Only a problem if you want to run VMs for other people or javascript in a browser.
imafraid 4y ago

Barrin92 4y ago

The biggest problem with the FSFs religious and dogmatic set of beliefs is that it leads to bizarre outcomes that don't make any sense. Like shipping proprietary firmware is ok as long as you don't change it because then it's not really software and it doesn't count, or whatever. So your software is free if it's proprietary and old but it's suddenly not free if it's proprietary and new, try to explain this to anyone not steeped in free software theology. It has the same energy as only being able to walk x steps on the Shabbat. It's important to recognize when your doctrine has started to hijack you rather than making and adapting rules to serve your long term goals.

comex 4y ago
> It has the same energy as only being able to walk x steps on the Shabbat. It's important to recognize when your doctrine has started to hijack you rather than making and adapting rules to serve your long term goals. Except that religions and political movements are different. Many people following Shabbat restrictions would freely admit that some of the restrictions have no practical value, but are observed purely for their symbolic value, as a way to honor God. That's fine if that's your goal. The FSF too has many practices that could be seen as symbolic, but they're still meant to indirectly promote a concrete objective. Which makes it a problem when they fail to do so.

foxes 4y ago

The FSF and Stallman are pretty mid tbh. The whole thing seem hopelessly outdated. Some of the media on the FSF website is extremely cringe, the weird cartoons in particular. Stallman is problematic and it feels like that tarnishes things. The front has long moved on from writing C and package jannying your distro together.

parker_mountain 4y ago

I have a lot of thoughts on this and not a lot of time to write them up. The things that really stand out to me are: - a lot of FSF projects are based around the premise of a multi user *nix system. This is an outdated model of usage. Systems are generally single-user or no-user (and instead part of a herd of application hosts). Human login rarely happens except to debug, and that debugging rarely occurs on the host. - the FSF has not done a good job of bringing new people in. They do not make a compelling case for their importance. I think this ties into the above - they don't have any compelling work to demonstrate for modern consumer freedom in one of the most important spaces - phones. This also ties into RMS - regardless of how you feel about the man, his presence in the FSF still continues to generate controversy that makes recruiting more difficult. - The FSF is supposed to address issues about freedom, privacy, etc, but they have completely missed the modern age of application usage models. Web apps, centralized auth, locked down phone OSes, etc. They have very little presence, and a lot of licensing mindshare has gone to non-copyleft FOSS (apache, mit, etc) - Richard Stallman famously corrects people who say Linux, by saying "GNU/Linux". This would be fine, except the vast majority of consumer electronics using Linux no longer ship with the GNU userspace. This should have been a huge red flag to the FSF that their efforts were being sidestepped entirely. The FSF does not appear to have a clear vision of the future, or concrete goals, and has lost significant amounts of influence through inaction. I do not know what the way forward looks like for them. Ultimately, I think the FSF "won" the mindset war, but has lost the overall battle.

the-printer 4y ago
This sounds like a level-headed analysis. Granted, I don't totally understand the history nor the practical nuances of all of the FSF's work, I do have a basic grasp of their overall influence and imprint on FOSS and am a happy Emacs user. It seems to me that all of this talk questioning the need for the foundation in the modern age is good. The ought to be a bevy of splinter groups advocating and developing for the rights of certain users.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > a bevy of splinter groups advocating and developing for the rights of certain users. I'm curious what you mean by this. Free Software has always been about licensing software indiscriminately to all users. I much prefer that than a bunch of ideologically-driven splinter groups fighting for the rights of "certain users".

medo-bear 4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago
RMS is probably the main reason the free software movement has got as far as it has.

dathinab 4y ago

Believing that people will stop using macOs just because Emacs stops working nicely is probably the most ridiculous thing I have read this week. It shows a complete non-understanding about how most users, including developers, use software. If I would guess it has two possible (and possible overlapping) outcomes: - a mac fork which will maintain this functionality, and probably adds other mac specific functionality over time, basically making the situation worse - the user will decide it's time to move away from Emacs. Hypothetical quote: "I mean <modern GUI editor> doesn't look that bad and it's 2022 the area of stateless cloud has replaced dedicated servers, so why care for TUI interfaces anymore." So also a loss of free software. Which is what is at the core of the recent complains about the FSF I think. It looks like they don't fight a ware for a better future anymore but a war for fanatically enforcing ideology even if it hurts their original goals in the bigger picture.

renewiltord 4y ago

FSF has succeeded in its mission wildly. So much good free software today. Fully functional Free Software desktop. Over the last 20 years of use, I have watched us enter a phenomenal era of Free Software and Open Source software. This is victory and it is absolutely great.

shapefrog 4y ago
You should land on an aircraft carrier with a huge "Mission Accomplished" banner for the press conference and party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech

smitty1e 4y ago

I take a syncretic view that there is a spectrum of licensing along an axis like: |-GNU GPL...apache/MIT...proprietary-| I submit that motives for doing code vary from: * the social concerns of the GPL * to the libertarian view of apache/MIT * to the darwinian capitalist vistas of proprietary Further, the optimal overall result is obtained by respecting everyone's rights and using the legal system where necessary to resolve frictions. Messy? Inefficient? Confusing? Occasionally riddled by contradiction? Welcome to people.

faisal_ksa 4y ago

I have to agree. I saw FSF members argue with uutils coreutils [0] developers about having their project licensed under MIT. And for no good reason, they started attacking the project and the people behind it. I was a big fan of FSF until that point. [0] https://github.com/uutils/coreutils https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

jacooper 4y ago
I mean if it continues to get better, it will be just a matter of time till we see a cloud provider sepcifc usershell that is closed sourcd and built on top of the rust rewrite. and naturally its going to have its own features and options, away from the GNU's standard. then we start seeing every provider doing the same, and out goes the GNU standard, and welcome to proprietary cloud linux.

comex 4y ago

I read the Emacs thread. Say what you want about the FSF as a whole, or even Emacs policy as a whole. But this is at another level. The proposal was to remove the function ns-do-applescript, which runs an AppleScript script using the C API, because AppleScript is proprietary and thus bad. I can sort of understand that. What I can't understand is the suggested replacement: to run the same AppleScript scripts using a shell command. And I don't mean something like "well, we won't endorse any use of AppleScript, but 'run shell command' is a general-purpose interface and we can't stop users from using it for AppleScript if they really want to". I could understand that. No, there are uses of AppleScript in Lisp code within the Emacs repo itself (not a separate package repository or something). The thread discussed one such use, which fetches the user's contact list using AppleScript. This was considered completely fine. Fetching the user's contact list, as a high-level feature, is supported on free operating systems, so it's okay to also implement it for non-free operating systems, even if that requires using a proprietary OS-specific API, in this case AppleScript. All fine. But for some reason, it was considered essential to do this using a shell command instead of a C API. There was even a post suggesting that ns-do-applescript be reimplemented on top of the shell command instead of the C API. In this case, Emacs would still be offering its users a built-in API to run AppleScript scripts, just… in Lisp code instead of C! Because that's so different!

kazinator 4y ago
Maybe Emacs has to link with a particular library in order to have that API? So the part I don't understand is why the GPL exception wouldn't apply, if it is a system library that is going to be there on any Apple box. Emacs integrates a lot of various Mac-specific API's. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/nsfns.m https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/nsfns.m ... and other "ns" files. These would fall under that GPL exception. It's the same like, say, GTK+ having to use a Win32 API to be able to do its job of opening a window and painting into it. I see that Emacs' w32fns.c source file uses ShellExecuteEx. Why not insist that CMD.EXE has to be spawned to run stuff.

uwagar 4y ago

bcos they are fighting folks can blog post like this. if they arent there, they will form again bcos lack of freedom will make ya thirsty.

skrebbel 4y ago

Don’t forget that all todays browsers being open source is in no small part thanks to Stallman inventing the GPL and the KHTML team adopting it (ok, the LGPl but who’s counting)

gtsop 4y ago

Quite a rehashed discussion I think. I the essence of my question towards the fsf critics camp is: There is a non-gplv3 alternative for every single thing the fsf has made. You can literally live your life as normal without even touching their software. Why is there such a chronic pressure towards making the fsf more pragmatic? what do you wish to get out of such a move? aren't there other organizations that fight for that cause you want better than fsf? honest question.

grumbel 4y ago

If there is one area where the FSF has failed it's "user data". They focus only on the software side of things, which given their name and history is understandable, but more and more irrelevant in the modern cloud driven world. Having a web browser under an Free Software license is nice to have, but everything that matters is stored on the server side, which you have no access or control over. The FSF, as far as I can tell, never did anything to address that. Even the AGPL, which didn't even originate from the FSF, still just addresses the source code side of things, not the data side of things. I am not even talking here about actual licenses here, but just a philosophical framework about how to deal with data that is on computers that aren't yours. Somewhat surprising, politics got there first. The GDPR is actual law that tells you what you are and aren't allowed with user data. So we did get a bit of a happy end, but it feels like that would have been a fight in which the FSF could have played a more active role. The FSF is still stuck in a model where you own and control your computer and data. But that's simply no longer the case, neither with cloud nor with smartphones.

vkou 4y ago
FSF's job is dealing with software, EFF's job is dealing with the consequences of that software.
- grumbel 4y ago
  EFF is concerned with actual law and legal defense in court, they don't write licensees. They don't have their equivalent of a GPL. Nobody really does as far as I know. If you wanted to make the next Youtube or Twitter, but be "Free as in Freedom", what rules would you follow? As far as I can tell, there is nobody dealing with whatever the "Free Software" analog would be in a cloud world where you don't own the computer. And that's kind of sad given how important and dominant that area has gotten over the last decade. GDPR is the best we have, but that only applies in a few selected countries, we don't even have a license version of that that you could slap on your cloud software.
  - vkou 4y ago
    There are free as in speech non-software licenses for copyrighted works like CC. As for you telling me what software I can run on my server, that sounds like the opposite of freedom. You can tell me what I can do with your data, and that's entirely in the EFF's wheelhouse of advocacy.

anon25453 4y ago

I think the article is misrepresenting RMS' view. In fact he does not seem to be against it at all. His point is that so long as the feature works on other systems, it is ok to use this implementation for Mac OS using what's available there. He's only against adding features that are exclusive to closed systems. He seems to prefer a 100% end-to-end "free" implementation, but is not against interfacing with proprietary systems if that is the only option, so long as it replicates a feature that is available in a free system (GNU). In my view, if you want to provide a 100% "free" alternative you need to pull users in. If a feature works on GNU/Linux, but requires you to connect to a proprietary system on Mac OS (apple script) to implement the same feature, you should do that. When you run enough free software on a closed OS, it lowers the bar for choosing a free OS the next time you buy a computer. Relevant quotes from the mail thread, that shows that RMS does have a relatively pragmatic view: > Does anyone object to its removal? RMS: In principle, it is good to remove it, but there is no principled reason why we must remove it, if that means breaking a user-level feature that does work on non-MacOS systems. > but using it in a subprocess to retrieve only contacts data (which is already possible on free systems) must be more acceptable than Emacs including a C primitive to do the same thing. RMS: Since retrieving contact data in Emacs is supported on free systems, adding code to do the same job on MacOS is ok in principle. An implementation which implements only that particular feature poses no special problem. Implementing something more general than that might pose a problem > Just FTR, AppleScript is used in eudcb-macos-contacts.el, but via osascript executable RMS: The comments in that file suggest that this is not a general facility to execute AppleScript programs, but rather a way to get data out of a MacOS-specific contacts database. [...] If so, then under the conditions in the node Non-GNU-Only Features of the GNU Maintainers Guide, this is a system-specific implementation of a feature that is supported equally well on the GNU system, so it is ok.

guilhas 4y ago

Ironic people complaning about FSF just as Debian decides to kneel I think this kind of reflects the mood of the newer generation "oh ye I am all for free software values, but if it gets inconveniente I can trade them for a 20$ coupon on Starbucks. These people with values are sooo antiquated" That and whine about Richard Stallman and the FSF First step create something better, then trade it for the coupon, leave other people projects to be guided as they see fit

vonwoodson 4y ago

Blah… blah… blah… As long as the Free Software movement has been around people have said that it’s too <X> and not <Y>. Technology as we know it today only exists because of Free Software (period)

ghuntley 4y ago

Consider what is happening in the Visual Studio Code ecosystem. In this particular case the FSF is on-point on topics about freedom.... "When I see people arguing over open-source vs non-opensource in 2022, I feel like people are completely missing the bigger and more pressing issues at hand, like how the Visual Studio Code ecosystem has been designed..." https://ghuntley.com/fracture https://ghuntley.com/fracture

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control This about sums up everything these corporations do. Why do people accept this? Is this really going to be our future?

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ThinkBeat 4y ago

If it is new to you that RMS is hostile towards proprietary software and operating systems then you have not been paying much attention. An open-source project is not going in the direction you like, the founder of the text editor has opinions you disagree with and you spend your time pissing on him because of it. Just fork the code. Be the change. It is far more productive. And if there are a lot of people who feel like you do then great. That is part of the freedom that Stallmann has given users.

jrm4 4y ago

When I see takes like this, I just want them to look up "Overton Window." The point (or perhaps best purpose) of the FSF isn't to dominate the world with their vision, it's to remind people of what the endpoints of the whole debate should be. It is not inconsistent to support FSF/RMS etc. and not follow everything they do.