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40 years on and they still seem to think giving talks and making free software is a suitable defense of Free Software. It's passive, and has fallen apart in the

by Osmose 3y ago

40 years on and they still seem to think giving talks and making free software is a suitable defense of Free Software. It's passive, and has fallen apart in the face of tech companies that actively use their free software tools to make closed source software that routinely violates user's rights. There's so much they _could_ be doing. Where's the grant program for startups working on free software? Where's their shop reselling used computer hardware with free software preinstalled, with discounts for low-income communities or libraries? Where's their work with labor unions in tech[1]? The FSF never adapted once thought leading and making free alternatives stopped being enough to support the ideals of their movement. They just kinda exist now. [1] Workers' rights may seem orthogonal to user's rights for software, but the power imbalance between workers and the companies they work for is deeply tied in with why companies can demand their workers product software that doesn't respect user's rights, and there's interesting work that could be done here in the long term.

dale_glass 3y ago
Yeah, I think the FSF and GNU are resting on their laurels and barely relevant. So one of the core things for the FSF has been the GNU tools. Recently it's become trendy to rewrite stuff in Rust, and overall it seems like an excellent idea to have the core tooling of an OS being much harder to exploit, and often much more performant. For instance ripgrep is a nice improvement on the classical grep, nushell is a better shell, exa is a better ls, and none of those is under the GPL. There's also a project to do a straightforward rewrite of coreutils in Rust, and that is MIT licensed. Where's the FSF's effort to modernize things and remain relevant?
- mbakke 3y ago
  I think the FSFE (Europe) is doing a lot better than its American sister foundation, with active involvement in EU politics, running campaigns, etc. Individual GNU projects are doing fairly well on the technical side (toolchain, Emacs, Guix, Mes), but there is little to no coordination across GNU, much less with the FSFs. FSF Asia seems to have fallen off the earth, even though India appears to have a fairly active free software movement. I don't think rewrite in Rust is a solution to "modernize" GNU tools. Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    > I don't think rewrite in Rust is a solution to "modernize" GNU tools. Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency. That IMO is of lesser importance. It's a technical problem that's of little relevance to most end-users. It's still a problem, but one that I think can be solved. The point though is that the world keeps on moving, and the FSF and GNU should be keeping up. If things are going to Rust, or Java, or Go, or whatever then the FSF should do its best to follow and to assert its influence there. Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position -- taking care of old tools that few need anymore. That may be a valuable thing to do in many contexts, but is not what you want to be doing if you want to influence where the world is going.
    - mbakke 3y ago
      <this comment was removed because of general bitterness> Apologies to anyone who had to endure my display of contempt. I agree with the parent comment that FSF (and friends) needs to step up their game to have any influence on the tech scene of the future.
    - cxr 3y ago
      I agree with your overall position, but where you say: > Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position I think we actually need this; somebody should already be doing it. I wrote about this several years ago: > Maybe in an alternate universe there exists an organization—or some sort of loosely connected movement—that focuses on software comprehensibility as a gift to the world and for future generations. The idea is that once software approaches doneness, the org would pour effort into fastidiously eliminating hacks around the codebase in lieu of rewrites that presents the affected logic in a way that's clearer. This work would extend to getting compiler changes upstream that allows the group to judiciously cull constructs of dubious readability so that they may be replaced with such passages, which may have previously been not as performant but that now work just as well as the sections being replaced, without any penalty at runtime. > For example, one of the cornerstones of the FSF/GNU philosophy is that it focuses on maximizing benefit to the user. What could be more beneficial to a user of free software than ensuring that its codebase is clean and comprehensible for study and modification? <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html#software-finishing https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html...>
- phkahler 3y ago
  Rewrite it in Rust has become "rewrite it without the GPL" and that is a big problem. While there are valid reasons for permissive licenses at times, there is no valid reason to do core utils under a non-free license other than co-opting freedom. One day a new OS and ecosystem will come along and it will all be closed. The hardware will also not allow you to run free software. Please stop enabling this with thoughtless license choices.
- 9659 3y ago
  The 're-implement in rust' crowd is doing it for the evangelizing of rust. If they cared about free software, they would have improved the existing tools. I long for the days when the basic unix system is unusable because everything has been "improved" and is "secure and written in rust".
zelphirkalt 3y ago
> The FSF never adapted once thought leading and making free alternatives stopped being enough to support the ideals of their movement. They just kinda exist now. To their credit, free software exists and there are many high quality examples, that outshine proprietary or big corp tech, when in capable hands. Those can be used by anyone anywhere on the planet, without having to buy a license from a shady company. We have Blender, Inkscape, Emacs, GCC, Linux kernel, Guix, and great things like Syncthing or whole OS that run on free/libre software. I dare say even Gimp is a solid choice in the right hands for many purposes, while surely not without flaws. Such projects I count as successes of the free software movement. It is not really, that the FSF (and the GNU project) does not help at all. Without them we would be off much worse by now. However, your points about what they could do additionally still stand and you raise some perhaps good ideas.
miohtama 3y ago
Today there is more relevance to ensure that open source software does not become illegal, and lobbying various parliament members in the EU and in the US https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-will-ban-open-source-operating-systems/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil... For the past 40 years all open source license terms have started WITHOUT WARRANTY, but today the governments have the idea that if someone uses your software for something they do not like, you deserve jail time.

by Osmose 3y ago

dale_glass 3y ago

Yeah, I think the FSF and GNU are resting on their laurels and barely relevant. So one of the core things for the FSF has been the GNU tools. Recently it's become trendy to rewrite stuff in Rust, and overall it seems like an excellent idea to have the core tooling of an OS being much harder to exploit, and often much more performant. For instance ripgrep is a nice improvement on the classical grep, nushell is a better shell, exa is a better ls, and none of those is under the GPL. There's also a project to do a straightforward rewrite of coreutils in Rust, and that is MIT licensed. Where's the FSF's effort to modernize things and remain relevant?

mbakke 3y ago
I think the FSFE (Europe) is doing a lot better than its American sister foundation, with active involvement in EU politics, running campaigns, etc. Individual GNU projects are doing fairly well on the technical side (toolchain, Emacs, Guix, Mes), but there is little to no coordination across GNU, much less with the FSFs. FSF Asia seems to have fallen off the earth, even though India appears to have a fairly active free software movement. I don't think rewrite in Rust is a solution to "modernize" GNU tools. Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > I don't think rewrite in Rust is a solution to "modernize" GNU tools. Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency. That IMO is of lesser importance. It's a technical problem that's of little relevance to most end-users. It's still a problem, but one that I think can be solved. The point though is that the world keeps on moving, and the FSF and GNU should be keeping up. If things are going to Rust, or Java, or Go, or whatever then the FSF should do its best to follow and to assert its influence there. Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position -- taking care of old tools that few need anymore. That may be a valuable thing to do in many contexts, but is not what you want to be doing if you want to influence where the world is going.
  - mbakke 3y ago
    <this comment was removed because of general bitterness> Apologies to anyone who had to endure my display of contempt. I agree with the parent comment that FSF (and friends) needs to step up their game to have any influence on the tech scene of the future.
  - cxr 3y ago
    I agree with your overall position, but where you say: > Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position I think we actually need this; somebody should already be doing it. I wrote about this several years ago: > Maybe in an alternate universe there exists an organization—or some sort of loosely connected movement—that focuses on software comprehensibility as a gift to the world and for future generations. The idea is that once software approaches doneness, the org would pour effort into fastidiously eliminating hacks around the codebase in lieu of rewrites that presents the affected logic in a way that's clearer. This work would extend to getting compiler changes upstream that allows the group to judiciously cull constructs of dubious readability so that they may be replaced with such passages, which may have previously been not as performant but that now work just as well as the sections being replaced, without any penalty at runtime. > For example, one of the cornerstones of the FSF/GNU philosophy is that it focuses on maximizing benefit to the user. What could be more beneficial to a user of free software than ensuring that its codebase is clean and comprehensible for study and modification? <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html#software-finishing https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html...>
phkahler 3y ago
Rewrite it in Rust has become "rewrite it without the GPL" and that is a big problem. While there are valid reasons for permissive licenses at times, there is no valid reason to do core utils under a non-free license other than co-opting freedom. One day a new OS and ecosystem will come along and it will all be closed. The hardware will also not allow you to run free software. Please stop enabling this with thoughtless license choices.
9659 3y ago
The 're-implement in rust' crowd is doing it for the evangelizing of rust. If they cared about free software, they would have improved the existing tools. I long for the days when the basic unix system is unusable because everything has been "improved" and is "secure and written in rust".

zelphirkalt 3y ago

> The FSF never adapted once thought leading and making free alternatives stopped being enough to support the ideals of their movement. They just kinda exist now. To their credit, free software exists and there are many high quality examples, that outshine proprietary or big corp tech, when in capable hands. Those can be used by anyone anywhere on the planet, without having to buy a license from a shady company. We have Blender, Inkscape, Emacs, GCC, Linux kernel, Guix, and great things like Syncthing or whole OS that run on free/libre software. I dare say even Gimp is a solid choice in the right hands for many purposes, while surely not without flaws. Such projects I count as successes of the free software movement. It is not really, that the FSF (and the GNU project) does not help at all. Without them we would be off much worse by now. However, your points about what they could do additionally still stand and you raise some perhaps good ideas.

miohtama 3y ago

Today there is more relevance to ensure that open source software does not become illegal, and lobbying various parliament members in the EU and in the US https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-will-ban-open-source-operating-systems/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil... For the past 40 years all open source license terms have started WITHOUT WARRANTY, but today the governments have the idea that if someone uses your software for something they do not like, you deserve jail time.