6 ms·

Long Live the Free Software Foundation

74 points by upofadown 4y ago

phoe-krk 4y ago
The clue of the rebuttal, to the best of my understanding: > Free Software cares about users and computer owners, Open Source cares about programmers. (......) And they are two separate things which Mr. DeVault—in accordance with many, many other knowledgeable and coders and activists and authoritative persons in the Open Source world—elides and blurs together in one giant movement.
nextaccountic 4y ago
The article doesn't touch on it, but this explains why open source advocates prefer permissive licenses like MIT (which is in the OSS view "more free" because they grant more freedom to developers - even the freedom to make their software proprietary!), while free software advocates prefer copyleft licenses like GPL, which grants more freedoms to end users at expense of the developer themselves
- paxcoder 4y ago
  [dead]
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  "End users" that may want to modify code are pretty much always developers themselves, by definition. By the time they are modifying source code, they are developing. So I'm not sure the distinction FOSS makes between end users and developers is actually meaningful in practice. Also I need it explained to me how an end user is more free to modify under a GPL license than MIT.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    The end user might not get the code at all if under MIT license.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      Good chance they won't get it under GPL either, since companies just won't use it.
      - pabs3 4y ago
        Lots of companies use GPL code and don't distribute it to users either, for example Vizio. Some of those also violate the BSD/MIT licenses. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
  - carapace 4y ago
    Context counts. > programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his [Bernie Greenberg] office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  I sure don't prefer MIT. GPL and CC-BY-SA all the way. People who advocate for MIT are compatible, acceptable, harmlessly misguided as far as I'm concerned. IE I don't hate them or avoid their works, but do consider them not to be helping themselves or the world as much as they could, and for free with no extra effort. But they aren't hurting either. I do not call failing to do the most possible good according to my views to be equivalent to doing harm. MIT is at least not harming. But also at best not harming.
- guilhas 4y ago
  MIT license makes it easier to exploit a developer's free work
lapinot 4y ago
Maybe i'm mistaken but i believe there's some serious misreading of the original text (of ddvault). I'm pretty sure ddvault knows about the distinction between open source and free/libre and i'm also pretty sure he's definitely on the free/libre part. Politically it's pretty clear the distinction between the two is the same one as between liberals and the left. And his blog regularly features words definitely hinting at more or less leftist and anticapitalists concepts (eg "union" in https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....). So for me this "rebutal" is a misreading insofar that it is treated as an attack on free/libre coming from the oss world, whereas i definitely view it as a call for reflectivity and strategical reevaluation coming from within free/libre. Or maybe it wasn't and i'm seeing in it what i want to see: i definitely consider myself on the political side of free software as some sort of communism applied to technology and science, but i also find the fsf very dusty and dogmatic. Looks very much like nowadays's communist parties: a long time since these weren't on the forefront of these revolutionary ideas.
- m000 4y ago
  I don't think there's a misreading. McLuhan argues that there is value for FOSS in FSF remaining independent and "radical". FS & OSS being in sorts of a (shotgun?) marriage, does not mean that they need a shared Facebook profile.
  - lapinot 4y ago
    > McLuhan argues that there is value for FOSS in FSF remaining independent and "radical". I didn't say the opposite. My point is that the FSF shouldn't be so sure they are the most radical out there. People more radical than them also criticize them. It's easy dismissing critics by saying they come from people with somehow "compromised" opinions, but it doesn't address any of the critics.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Even though I've spent decades working on software I release under the GPL, I try to direct as many people as possible to my friend Louigi Verona's excellent dissection of the many issues with "The Four Freedoms" rationale for free software: https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&a=philosophy_freedoms https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philoso...
dale_glass 4y ago
I don't think the FSF is healthy. The evidence can be had right here. About the only thing you hear about the FSF these days is controversy about Stallman and the peripheral issues about that. The FSF should be huge, and have a very prominent impact on the relevant parts of the industry, like say HN, various subreddits and slashdot. Instead it barely shows up anywhere. If the FSF isn't prominent in its home turf, then things are even more dire anywhere outside it. A movement that wants to fight for user freedom has to somehow reach those users. Problem is, these days they barely know that it exists, and what they do hear about is all unflattering (eg, Stallman). The FSF has a very tough mission to accomplish. Gathering a few like-minded people at a Linux conference is certainly a good thing, but comes very far from wielding the political influence needed to actually get things done. Worse, even on its own home turf it's losing relevance. The FSF should be aggressively keeping up with modern developments and reacting to them, and finding ways to spread its message. But it seems woefully out of date in that respect.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Hacker News as a whole has essentially never been pro free software or freedom. It's a forum for the discussion of profitable endeavour first and foremost. Mac discussion is as common as Linux. There's a pervasive bias against cryptocurrency, not only the scams but the basic principle of freedom from regulation. "Intellectual property" isn't a joke here, it's generally respected. I could go on, but my main point is that this is predominantly a capitalist forum, not an anarchist one. Principles take a back seat to pragmatism here, the FSF is the opposite of that.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Point taken, but still it's adjacent enough that I think something or other should percolate here. And there should be some measure of shared interest all the same. Eg, the Linux kernel is under the GPL and I don't see anybody really complaining about that. Pragmatism tells me that even if the philosophy isn't to your liking, the code works and you can often make use of it anyway.
    - 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
It seems like the next major stepping stone in FOSS will have to be the replacement of proprietary blobs for hardware drivers by open source alternatives, and that in turn is most likely to come out of the RISC-V ecosystem, not from anything related to Intel or ARM. So, learn assembly and C, that's one takeaway for anyone interested in this area.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  But that is a insane endavour. Like, new hardware appears every day, to reverse engineer all of it, thats the ultimate futile endavour i can think of. Why not get a more usefull stone if one wants to be sisyphos?
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    I'm sure people said in the 1980s that open-source free compilers and open-source free operating systems were also an insane endeavor. A little research turns up this claim: > "In 1987, the Borland Turbo C compiler for MS-DOS was priced at $99, while the Microsoft C compiler for MS-DOS was priced at $495. On the other hand, the Sun Microsystems SPARCstation C compiler for the SPARC platform was priced at $7,500." I also think this is an area where OpenAI / GPT code generation will have a huge impact. It should be possible, given open-source hardware specs, to build the appropriate drivers for any operating system (i.e. Linux) quite quickly with the assistance of these new tools.
    - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
      Are you aware how lowlevel hardware often works? Its basically .. write value 0xDEADBEEF to adress 0x00A0. Wait three cycles, while the underlying hardware performs some steps, to switch into a different mode, then continue with operations in said mode. This seems something that is very unintuitive, even with the given documentation (which one often does not get). Often enough, all that is available is the assembly itself (thus reverse engineer). So how does chat gpt do with just the assembly? Can it write documentation on a given hardware plattform, just given the assembly?
mattl 4y ago
I worked at the FSF for a number of years. The FSF has some hard working and dedicated staff, but is dogged by a number of the issues Drew deVault mentions in their article. https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dyi... I think free software and open source are at this point the same thing. A lot of people who care about software freedom issues do so under the banner of open source because of the issues of the FSF and wanting to distance themselves from the FSF. The FSF doesn't do a good job of promoting free software. Take a look at the FSF homepage -- where's the messaging on getting typical computer users (especially those on Windows or a Mac or a Chromebook) to use free software? The approach seems to be that either you install Linux from a small subset of minority distributions -- https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html -- or nothing. Thirteen years ago (2010) I worked on a campaign aimed at end-users and it looks like it has been updated very little since -- https://www.fsf.org/working-together/moving https://www.fsf.org/working-together/moving -- getting this done was an uphill battle as the FSF didn't want to promote Firefox at the time. Where is the end user campaign for using free software? Where is the EFF for users?
jmull 4y ago
To me this is a better affirmation of "The Free Software Foundation is dying" than a rebuttal. Focused on the distinctions between FS and OS, building an antagonistic narrative between them, doubling-down on purity. I would agree "dying" is too strong a word, though, since there's no reason the FSF can't continue to exist indefinitely, as a kind of club of like-minded enthusiasts. But the direction they are going now, their activities will be ever more insular, having less and less affect on anyone but themselves. Their stated mission is "to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all software users." If you aren't having an effect outside your own group it's hard to see how that can be fulfilled. (Not that I'm sad to see it end up this way. I've always understood how developer hostile it is.)
- dale_glass 4y ago
  I think an adherence to purity makes a lot of sense for the FSF, but they could still keep it while compromising a bit on the very edges of it without changing anything fundamental. Eg, they refuse to use Youtube. Using it would involve a tiny bit of nose holding on their part, but they could still use it to spread their message.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Has it ever been anything more than insular like-minded people though, or was it all illusory?
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  This is like saying they are stupid for not just using Microsoft/Google/etc services like everyone else if they want to reach people where they are. This is a dumb take. If you don't understand principles or integrity, that is not a failing of others that do.
markphip 4y ago
I am more of an open-source than free-software advocate. I think this post explains it well and it was also my reaction to DeVault's post. I have no opinion on whether the FSF is dying but what I did not understand about DeVault's post is what they can do about it. The only reason for FSF to exist is to protect the rights of the users of software, often at the expense of the developers. That is why copyleft exists, why the FSF exists. They cannot "change" and embrace open source and still have any purpose. You could argue that they could be friendlier to OSS but if they are, how does that help the free software movement? For the free software movement to be successful the open source movement has to be less successful. More developers need to embrace copyleft licenses over MIT, BSD, Apache. As a developer, my interest in open source has always been in engaging with other developers. I prefer that model, even if a company wants to go make money off my code. I had option to choose a different license, or not contribute to an existing project. I did so for the collaboration and opportunity to work with other developers to solve the same problem I needed to solve. Copyleft licensed software, more often than not, has other goals.
seabass-labrax 4y ago
living the ideal Free Software lifestyle—that is, using no proprietary software or hardware, meaning no SteamDeck, no game consoles, no smartphones, etc. I'm a proud owner of a PinePhone, on which I run an operating system called postmarketOS; there's no proprietary software to be seen. Due to the amazing success of postmarketOS and the projects they package, I can enjoy cellular networking and a whole host of apps. Occasionally the lacklustre performance of the hardware can be frustrating, but apparently the faster PinePhone Pro is vastly better in that regard - as it was, the PinePhone was a fraction of the price of more popular phones. Furthermore, I can even SSH between my PC and PinePhone via the internet or USB to transfer files! I think my ideal Free Software lifestyle seems preferable to the author's :)
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  There are always people who think any sacrifice or suffering is stupid. Every good thing tbey currently enjoy and are so proud of their cleverness in securing for themselves, whether it's a tech toy or a liberal law, only exists because someone before them took on the burden of bringing about the change, which made their lives actually a bit more difficult in the immediate. Some people see that as stupid but I sure don't.
  - seabass-labrax 4y ago
    Indeed - to use proprietary software is to suffer, but you can still let it into your life and be 'net-positive in freedom' both for yourself and for others. I'm very grateful to those behind the FOSS applications that I use for making the personal sacrifices necessary to develop them for everyone.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      To be clear I was saying that I see no problem with using a pinephone almost no matter what deficiencies it might have compared to the latest galaxy or iphone etc.
      - 4y ago
ryukafalz 4y ago
From an outside perspective, the FSFE has felt for a while like a much more effective organization than the FSF. The "Public Money, Public Code" campaign seems like it's actually had some results (with European governments adopting free software in a few cases), while the FSF has done... seemingly not much of note, for a long time? LibrePlanet is generally a good conference, but outside of that the FSF doesn't seem to be doing much impactful work, and the most I ever hear about it these days is about controversies surrounding Stallman. I think we probably need a new organization to take up the cause at this point.
alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
I think this is really missing the point. The essay from Drew DeVault didn't say "the FSF is dying, and good riddance", or "help me kill the FSF", or anything like that. I read it as aligned with their goals, wanting them to be realized... and saying the FSF is doing a bad job at achieving them, with suggestions for how to improve. This whole response is defending against an imaginary attack that wasn't made.
guilhas 4y ago
Some people are happy with ChatGPT, some prefere Llama, FSF people like projects with all the source and training data available Is that too close to a dream? Maybe. Is it misguided? I don't think so Everyone will benefit even if smaller projects that you have access to all the steps from start to finish. Either for learning or new companies to compete Today is very difficult, almost impossible, to run a fully open source PC, from firmwares, BIOS, drivers, OS, software... but I am happy for FSF to keep the dream alive as there is no other organization bothering with it The other extreme also exists where the company would like you to sell you hardware and software that you'll never own. That you have to connect to the network, login, and it asks everyday if it is allowed to run. Only for the subscribed purpose, user, and location. Otherwise to disable itself and contact local authorities
taylodl 4y ago
"Free Software cares about users and computer owners, Open Source cares about programmers." And that's why I care about Free Software and not Open Source - and I'm a programmer! Freedom goes way beyond us "technical elites" and as such, I see Open Source as elitist since it cares only about an elite few. Free Software cares about everybody.

74 points by upofadown 4y ago

The clue of the rebuttal, to the best of my understanding: > Free Software cares about users and computer owners, Open Source cares about programmers. (......) And they are two separate things which Mr. DeVault—in accordance with many, many other knowledgeable and coders and activists and authoritative persons in the Open Source world—elides and blurs together in one giant movement.

nextaccountic 4y ago

The article doesn't touch on it, but this explains why open source advocates prefer permissive licenses like MIT (which is in the OSS view "more free" because they grant more freedom to developers - even the freedom to make their software proprietary!), while free software advocates prefer copyleft licenses like GPL, which grants more freedoms to end users at expense of the developer themselves

paxcoder 4y ago
[dead]
DangitBobby 4y ago
"End users" that may want to modify code are pretty much always developers themselves, by definition. By the time they are modifying source code, they are developing. So I'm not sure the distinction FOSS makes between end users and developers is actually meaningful in practice. Also I need it explained to me how an end user is more free to modify under a GPL license than MIT.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  The end user might not get the code at all if under MIT license.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    Good chance they won't get it under GPL either, since companies just won't use it.
    - pabs3 4y ago
      Lots of companies use GPL code and don't distribute it to users either, for example Vizio. Some of those also violate the BSD/MIT licenses. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
- carapace 4y ago
  Context counts. > programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his [Bernie Greenberg] office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
Brian_K_White 4y ago
I sure don't prefer MIT. GPL and CC-BY-SA all the way. People who advocate for MIT are compatible, acceptable, harmlessly misguided as far as I'm concerned. IE I don't hate them or avoid their works, but do consider them not to be helping themselves or the world as much as they could, and for free with no extra effort. But they aren't hurting either. I do not call failing to do the most possible good according to my views to be equivalent to doing harm. MIT is at least not harming. But also at best not harming.
guilhas 4y ago
MIT license makes it easier to exploit a developer's free work

lapinot 4y ago

Maybe i'm mistaken but i believe there's some serious misreading of the original text (of ddvault). I'm pretty sure ddvault knows about the distinction between open source and free/libre and i'm also pretty sure he's definitely on the free/libre part. Politically it's pretty clear the distinction between the two is the same one as between liberals and the left. And his blog regularly features words definitely hinting at more or less leftist and anticapitalists concepts (eg "union" in https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....). So for me this "rebutal" is a misreading insofar that it is treated as an attack on free/libre coming from the oss world, whereas i definitely view it as a call for reflectivity and strategical reevaluation coming from within free/libre. Or maybe it wasn't and i'm seeing in it what i want to see: i definitely consider myself on the political side of free software as some sort of communism applied to technology and science, but i also find the fsf very dusty and dogmatic. Looks very much like nowadays's communist parties: a long time since these weren't on the forefront of these revolutionary ideas.

m000 4y ago
I don't think there's a misreading. McLuhan argues that there is value for FOSS in FSF remaining independent and "radical". FS & OSS being in sorts of a (shotgun?) marriage, does not mean that they need a shared Facebook profile.
- lapinot 4y ago
  > McLuhan argues that there is value for FOSS in FSF remaining independent and "radical". I didn't say the opposite. My point is that the FSF shouldn't be so sure they are the most radical out there. People more radical than them also criticize them. It's easy dismissing critics by saying they come from people with somehow "compromised" opinions, but it doesn't address any of the critics.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Even though I've spent decades working on software I release under the GPL, I try to direct as many people as possible to my friend Louigi Verona's excellent dissection of the many issues with "The Four Freedoms" rationale for free software: https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&a=philosophy_freedoms https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philoso...

dale_glass 4y ago

I don't think the FSF is healthy. The evidence can be had right here. About the only thing you hear about the FSF these days is controversy about Stallman and the peripheral issues about that. The FSF should be huge, and have a very prominent impact on the relevant parts of the industry, like say HN, various subreddits and slashdot. Instead it barely shows up anywhere. If the FSF isn't prominent in its home turf, then things are even more dire anywhere outside it. A movement that wants to fight for user freedom has to somehow reach those users. Problem is, these days they barely know that it exists, and what they do hear about is all unflattering (eg, Stallman). The FSF has a very tough mission to accomplish. Gathering a few like-minded people at a Linux conference is certainly a good thing, but comes very far from wielding the political influence needed to actually get things done. Worse, even on its own home turf it's losing relevance. The FSF should be aggressively keeping up with modern developments and reacting to them, and finding ways to spread its message. But it seems woefully out of date in that respect.

throwaway22032 4y ago
Hacker News as a whole has essentially never been pro free software or freedom. It's a forum for the discussion of profitable endeavour first and foremost. Mac discussion is as common as Linux. There's a pervasive bias against cryptocurrency, not only the scams but the basic principle of freedom from regulation. "Intellectual property" isn't a joke here, it's generally respected. I could go on, but my main point is that this is predominantly a capitalist forum, not an anarchist one. Principles take a back seat to pragmatism here, the FSF is the opposite of that.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Point taken, but still it's adjacent enough that I think something or other should percolate here. And there should be some measure of shared interest all the same. Eg, the Linux kernel is under the GPL and I don't see anybody really complaining about that. Pragmatism tells me that even if the philosophy isn't to your liking, the code works and you can often make use of it anyway.
  - 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

It seems like the next major stepping stone in FOSS will have to be the replacement of proprietary blobs for hardware drivers by open source alternatives, and that in turn is most likely to come out of the RISC-V ecosystem, not from anything related to Intel or ARM. So, learn assembly and C, that's one takeaway for anyone interested in this area.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
But that is a insane endavour. Like, new hardware appears every day, to reverse engineer all of it, thats the ultimate futile endavour i can think of. Why not get a more usefull stone if one wants to be sisyphos?
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I'm sure people said in the 1980s that open-source free compilers and open-source free operating systems were also an insane endeavor. A little research turns up this claim: > "In 1987, the Borland Turbo C compiler for MS-DOS was priced at $99, while the Microsoft C compiler for MS-DOS was priced at $495. On the other hand, the Sun Microsystems SPARCstation C compiler for the SPARC platform was priced at $7,500." I also think this is an area where OpenAI / GPT code generation will have a huge impact. It should be possible, given open-source hardware specs, to build the appropriate drivers for any operating system (i.e. Linux) quite quickly with the assistance of these new tools.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Are you aware how lowlevel hardware often works? Its basically .. write value 0xDEADBEEF to adress 0x00A0. Wait three cycles, while the underlying hardware performs some steps, to switch into a different mode, then continue with operations in said mode. This seems something that is very unintuitive, even with the given documentation (which one often does not get). Often enough, all that is available is the assembly itself (thus reverse engineer). So how does chat gpt do with just the assembly? Can it write documentation on a given hardware plattform, just given the assembly?

mattl 4y ago

I worked at the FSF for a number of years. The FSF has some hard working and dedicated staff, but is dogged by a number of the issues Drew deVault mentions in their article. https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dyi... I think free software and open source are at this point the same thing. A lot of people who care about software freedom issues do so under the banner of open source because of the issues of the FSF and wanting to distance themselves from the FSF. The FSF doesn't do a good job of promoting free software. Take a look at the FSF homepage -- where's the messaging on getting typical computer users (especially those on Windows or a Mac or a Chromebook) to use free software? The approach seems to be that either you install Linux from a small subset of minority distributions -- https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html -- or nothing. Thirteen years ago (2010) I worked on a campaign aimed at end-users and it looks like it has been updated very little since -- https://www.fsf.org/working-together/moving https://www.fsf.org/working-together/moving -- getting this done was an uphill battle as the FSF didn't want to promote Firefox at the time. Where is the end user campaign for using free software? Where is the EFF for users?

jmull 4y ago

To me this is a better affirmation of "The Free Software Foundation is dying" than a rebuttal. Focused on the distinctions between FS and OS, building an antagonistic narrative between them, doubling-down on purity. I would agree "dying" is too strong a word, though, since there's no reason the FSF can't continue to exist indefinitely, as a kind of club of like-minded enthusiasts. But the direction they are going now, their activities will be ever more insular, having less and less affect on anyone but themselves. Their stated mission is "to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all software users." If you aren't having an effect outside your own group it's hard to see how that can be fulfilled. (Not that I'm sad to see it end up this way. I've always understood how developer hostile it is.)

dale_glass 4y ago
I think an adherence to purity makes a lot of sense for the FSF, but they could still keep it while compromising a bit on the very edges of it without changing anything fundamental. Eg, they refuse to use Youtube. Using it would involve a tiny bit of nose holding on their part, but they could still use it to spread their message.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Has it ever been anything more than insular like-minded people though, or was it all illusory?
Brian_K_White 4y ago
This is like saying they are stupid for not just using Microsoft/Google/etc services like everyone else if they want to reach people where they are. This is a dumb take. If you don't understand principles or integrity, that is not a failing of others that do.

markphip 4y ago

I am more of an open-source than free-software advocate. I think this post explains it well and it was also my reaction to DeVault's post. I have no opinion on whether the FSF is dying but what I did not understand about DeVault's post is what they can do about it. The only reason for FSF to exist is to protect the rights of the users of software, often at the expense of the developers. That is why copyleft exists, why the FSF exists. They cannot "change" and embrace open source and still have any purpose. You could argue that they could be friendlier to OSS but if they are, how does that help the free software movement? For the free software movement to be successful the open source movement has to be less successful. More developers need to embrace copyleft licenses over MIT, BSD, Apache. As a developer, my interest in open source has always been in engaging with other developers. I prefer that model, even if a company wants to go make money off my code. I had option to choose a different license, or not contribute to an existing project. I did so for the collaboration and opportunity to work with other developers to solve the same problem I needed to solve. Copyleft licensed software, more often than not, has other goals.

seabass-labrax 4y ago

living the ideal Free Software lifestyle—that is, using no proprietary software or hardware, meaning no SteamDeck, no game consoles, no smartphones, etc. I'm a proud owner of a PinePhone, on which I run an operating system called postmarketOS; there's no proprietary software to be seen. Due to the amazing success of postmarketOS and the projects they package, I can enjoy cellular networking and a whole host of apps. Occasionally the lacklustre performance of the hardware can be frustrating, but apparently the faster PinePhone Pro is vastly better in that regard - as it was, the PinePhone was a fraction of the price of more popular phones. Furthermore, I can even SSH between my PC and PinePhone via the internet or USB to transfer files! I think my ideal Free Software lifestyle seems preferable to the author's :)

Brian_K_White 4y ago
There are always people who think any sacrifice or suffering is stupid. Every good thing tbey currently enjoy and are so proud of their cleverness in securing for themselves, whether it's a tech toy or a liberal law, only exists because someone before them took on the burden of bringing about the change, which made their lives actually a bit more difficult in the immediate. Some people see that as stupid but I sure don't.
- seabass-labrax 4y ago
  Indeed - to use proprietary software is to suffer, but you can still let it into your life and be 'net-positive in freedom' both for yourself and for others. I'm very grateful to those behind the FOSS applications that I use for making the personal sacrifices necessary to develop them for everyone.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    To be clear I was saying that I see no problem with using a pinephone almost no matter what deficiencies it might have compared to the latest galaxy or iphone etc.
    - 4y ago

ryukafalz 4y ago

From an outside perspective, the FSFE has felt for a while like a much more effective organization than the FSF. The "Public Money, Public Code" campaign seems like it's actually had some results (with European governments adopting free software in a few cases), while the FSF has done... seemingly not much of note, for a long time? LibrePlanet is generally a good conference, but outside of that the FSF doesn't seem to be doing much impactful work, and the most I ever hear about it these days is about controversies surrounding Stallman. I think we probably need a new organization to take up the cause at this point.

alwaysbeconsing 4y ago

I think this is really missing the point. The essay from Drew DeVault didn't say "the FSF is dying, and good riddance", or "help me kill the FSF", or anything like that. I read it as aligned with their goals, wanting them to be realized... and saying the FSF is doing a bad job at achieving them, with suggestions for how to improve. This whole response is defending against an imaginary attack that wasn't made.

guilhas 4y ago

Some people are happy with ChatGPT, some prefere Llama, FSF people like projects with all the source and training data available Is that too close to a dream? Maybe. Is it misguided? I don't think so Everyone will benefit even if smaller projects that you have access to all the steps from start to finish. Either for learning or new companies to compete Today is very difficult, almost impossible, to run a fully open source PC, from firmwares, BIOS, drivers, OS, software... but I am happy for FSF to keep the dream alive as there is no other organization bothering with it The other extreme also exists where the company would like you to sell you hardware and software that you'll never own. That you have to connect to the network, login, and it asks everyday if it is allowed to run. Only for the subscribed purpose, user, and location. Otherwise to disable itself and contact local authorities

taylodl 4y ago

"Free Software cares about users and computer owners, Open Source cares about programmers." And that's why I care about Free Software and not Open Source - and I'm a programmer! Freedom goes way beyond us "technical elites" and as such, I see Open Source as elitist since it cares only about an elite few. Free Software cares about everybody.