5 ms·

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL. The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. I barely hear anything about the FSF on Linux sites. Their reach elsewhere has to be essentially nonexistent. And with the FSF it appears that RMS has no viable successor. That doesn't bode well either. The sad outcome is that we keep rehashing things like Right to Read -- a fine thing from 1997, but what has happened since?

einpoklum 3y ago
The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting. Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. Those platforms are the opposite of free: Closed source, secret manipulation of content, censorship (and never mind the motivation), spying on users for the government, etc. The FSF would be hypocritical to endorse them. But of course, it does have "social network" videos - on PeerTube and MediaGoblin: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf35-videos-online-find-them-on-peertube-and-mediagoblin https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf35-videos-online-find... so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?
- Kinrany 3y ago
  Their goal should be encouraging people to demand open software and hardware, not being principled. Youtube and Twitter have power, not acknowledging that is dumb.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    I get what you're saying, but open soft- and hardware IS a principle, and using nonfree software themselves would come across as hypocritical, undermining their own message. The technology is there to make their own website and platforms; I'd argue that the problem isn't that they're not active on the big social media platforms, but that they don't produce media in the first place. They can chuck videos onto their own website, license it under a free license and allow others to repost them onto social media for exposure, for example.
    - Kinrany 3y ago
      They should keep copies of all that data, yeah. Being successful in killing closed platforms shouldn't result in any losses for them.
  - l33t7332273 3y ago
    I don’t see how to interpret your comment in a way that doesn’t say “their goal should be encouraging people to be principled, not being being principled themselves.”
    - david-gpu 3y ago
      You can use a tool of a system you disagree with to raise concerns against that very system. There is no contradiction here, only pragmatism. GNU tools such as gcc were originally developed using proprietary software until the GNU fabric was dense enough to allow bootstrapping. How else can you achieve anything at all, really?
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want? > Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. And how else are people on those platforms going to hear anything? The only way I can imagine is either by people who don't agree with the FSF repeating their message (do you trust them to be accurate?), or people who do agree, but more willing to compromise. > so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations? And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?
  - Timshel 3y ago
    > And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything? Nobody is preventing you to post to multiple platform .., and you might have way more engagement in smaller platform. The recent Mastodon growth allowed me to leave Twitter, I'm missing some content would be nice if more people cross-posted but well I'll do without.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  There’s a conundrum though: the inescapable fact is that outside of a couple proprietary/closed networks such as YouTube, there is virtually no audience to speak to. So you can either stick to your principles and reach no one, or you can compromise and expose many more people to your discourse. Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oytis 3y ago
> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? Well, they are Free Software Foundation, they have Mastodon (and PeerTube, although the latter is pretty empty).
- bdamm 3y ago
  Yes, and I recall my XML geek co-worker back in 2004 saying how the friend-of-a-friend co-linking XML schema was going to win over this new social network stuff... what did you call it? Linked-In?
blueflow 3y ago
And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! > Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?
- nvy 3y ago
  I think it's obvious that the implicit question is: Why is the FSF so bad at spreading their gospel? They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.
  - gitanovic 3y ago
    I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.
    - nvy 3y ago
      >The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that. Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - tgma 3y ago
        FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software. It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
jokethrowaway 3y ago
I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up. It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens. The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security. AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this". I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom. At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models). So yeah, we're screwed. At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.
- adev_ 3y ago
  > The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security. Can you develop a bit on that ? The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently. Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store). Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.
  - jll29 3y ago
    The EU (technically, the European Commission and the European Council) is a large organization, so naturally there are many positions inside. However, my impression is it has been a force for good overall, giving us cross-country mobility, getting rid of cellphone roaming charges, and avoiding waste by trying to standardize plugs. They notably introduced GDPR to protect citizen's data and they provide a court of human rights, and there is a push for "data sovereignty".
sidkshatriya 3y ago
> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. Sadly they seemed to have tied themselves in all kinds of self imposed knots when it comes to spreading their reach via social networking sites. See * https://www.fsf.org/twitter https://www.fsf.org/twitter * https://www.fsf.org/facebook https://www.fsf.org/facebook You can't change today's world if you're not a bit pragmatic. FSF may make some correct objections but if you're not properly present on some of these platforms your reach will remain limited. To effect change you need to be part of the world of today -- warts and all. Only then you can you change it. Rejecting the world by putting your head into the ground is a strategy that will often fail. Only when you become extremely big and influential can you help determine the rules of the game.
- maurice2k 3y ago
  "*Note: The custom script allows us to interact with the Twitter API while circumventing the nonfree JS that is sent to the Web browser. For viewing replies and retweeting posts, we use Choqok." So funny and so sad. Nonfree JS? They're in their own cloud of whatever. Yes, there is nonfree stuff. But nonfree stuff also can get things done.
maurice2k 3y ago
That's exactly what I think about RMS, FSF and GNU. I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is. As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done! But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project. A lot of these tools have pretty good documentation but when you visit one of the GNU websites you feel like it's 1995 again. It's more like man pages in HTML. Actually same for Apache Software Foundation. And this is not getting better... A start would be a modern representation of the tools and the ideas behind free software, maybe with a bit less philosophy. GNU needs to get a bit "cooler".
- dnh44 3y ago
  I understand your sentiment and I agree with you, but at the same time if we, as a community and as a society, are incapable of caring about the principles and philosophy behind free software because the websites aren't cool enough, then we (as a community or society) will ultimately deserve whatever dystopian fate awaits us.
  - maurice2k 3y ago
    Fully agree, but I doubt this is not the reality we live in... ;-)
- chii 3y ago
  > but for most people it's just "linux command line tools" the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding. Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.
- concordDance 3y ago
  Whats wrong with 1995 in this context?
rakoo 3y ago
> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. The FSF has been talking to users and to devs for decades, but unfortunately devs went from being users that had no problem sharing their progress to business people who thought that restricting access for personal, individual gain at the expense of the entire society of today and tomorrow is somehow "better", "more free", because who knows, maybe I'll be the next Bill Gates ? I see the catastrophic state we are in today as the result of non-copyleft, of "Open Source" as opposed to "Libre Software", of the depolitization of what it means to take from the commons and give back to the commons, of what society means whether we see it as a sum of perfectly rational individuals with no money problems or as a group of interdependent agents. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and other big platforms could start up and be where they are today is because they could take a bunch of existing tools in the commons and not share back, to build their own fortune and control prison. The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ? The issue runs deeper than software licenses, or even software.
- nvy 3y ago
  Perhaps if the FSF had actual professionals running communications, people who persuade other people for a living, the FSF's message would actually get through to people.
  - tgma 3y ago
    I don't think PR is the real issue. IMHO, the fundamental principle behind FSF philosophy is the license is primarily written to secure the long-term interest of the _user_, not the community of the authors. The reason authors were okay with that in the first place is, early on in computing, users and authors largely overlapped, if not exactly the same. Over time, the authors and users diverged widely, thus their interests diverged. FSF philosophy has failed to appeal to the authors of the software because it is economically a bad deal for them. Users who do not pay are by-and-large leeches. Also, some of the freedoms are not considered as valuable by the users as they are for fellow authors, perhaps sensibly so because they are never going to utilize such freedoms.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
The GPL is a great license. It protects the author and the rights of the users. But a younger generation has gotten used to thinking of open source as "a free thing I can use for work", rather than as the blood-sweat-and-tears of someone else who has contributed hundreds of their own hours. So they bristle at copyleft. If I switch my project to GPL I immediately will lose most potential contributors and a lot of users, who will start complaining about my license choice or will be forbidden by their employer from contributing to it or using it. Corporate entities are (maybe rightly) scared of the GPL. And the rise of open source work by/in FAANG companies, etc. has meant the undermining of that license.
varunnrao 3y ago
I agree with the essence of what you're saying. It's always been my opinion that the FSF screwed the pooch when it came to spreading their message. This starts right from their very name - the "Free" Software Foundation. Anyone of didn't know their message would understand them to be a group arguing that all software should be free of charge. This is completely orthogonal to their actual message of software having the ability to be easily understood and customized as needed by a tech-savvy user who has fairly compensated the original authors. They aimed for and missed badly the sweet spot message that all software should make simple things simple and complex things possible. This expectation that users should not have to pay for the apps/software they use has partly lead to the dystopian landscape that is our ad-supported modern software experience. Users today think they're entitled to the same standard for all software they use. They expect LibreOffice Calc to be having the same feature set as MS Excel while at the same time paying nothing for it.
onetruepretzel 3y ago
> GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL. We need these "content" people who maintain reliable tools with stable interfaces/behaviours. These people and tools are at the core of what modern infrastructure run on. Fly by night tools, languages and frameworks do not allow us to progress like we have. It's very easy for us "users" of these tools to forget that there is something maintaining something we take for granted. You seem to be forgetting you're standing on the shoulders of giants. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

einpoklum 3y ago

The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting. Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. Those platforms are the opposite of free: Closed source, secret manipulation of content, censorship (and never mind the motivation), spying on users for the government, etc. The FSF would be hypocritical to endorse them. But of course, it does have "social network" videos - on PeerTube and MediaGoblin: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf35-videos-online-find-them-on-peertube-and-mediagoblin https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf35-videos-online-find... so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?

Kinrany 3y ago
Their goal should be encouraging people to demand open software and hardware, not being principled. Youtube and Twitter have power, not acknowledging that is dumb.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I get what you're saying, but open soft- and hardware IS a principle, and using nonfree software themselves would come across as hypocritical, undermining their own message. The technology is there to make their own website and platforms; I'd argue that the problem isn't that they're not active on the big social media platforms, but that they don't produce media in the first place. They can chuck videos onto their own website, license it under a free license and allow others to repost them onto social media for exposure, for example.
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    They should keep copies of all that data, yeah. Being successful in killing closed platforms shouldn't result in any losses for them.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  I don’t see how to interpret your comment in a way that doesn’t say “their goal should be encouraging people to be principled, not being being principled themselves.”
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    You can use a tool of a system you disagree with to raise concerns against that very system. There is no contradiction here, only pragmatism. GNU tools such as gcc were originally developed using proprietary software until the GNU fabric was dense enough to allow bootstrapping. How else can you achieve anything at all, really?
dale_glass 3y ago
> The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want? > Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. And how else are people on those platforms going to hear anything? The only way I can imagine is either by people who don't agree with the FSF repeating their message (do you trust them to be accurate?), or people who do agree, but more willing to compromise. > so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations? And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?
- Timshel 3y ago
  > And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything? Nobody is preventing you to post to multiple platform .., and you might have way more engagement in smaller platform. The recent Mastodon growth allowed me to leave Twitter, I'm missing some content would be nice if more people cross-posted but well I'll do without.
loup-vaillant 3y ago
There’s a conundrum though: the inescapable fact is that outside of a couple proprietary/closed networks such as YouTube, there is virtually no audience to speak to. So you can either stick to your principles and reach no one, or you can compromise and expose many more people to your discourse. Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oytis 3y ago

> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? Well, they are Free Software Foundation, they have Mastodon (and PeerTube, although the latter is pretty empty).

bdamm 3y ago
Yes, and I recall my XML geek co-worker back in 2004 saying how the friend-of-a-friend co-linking XML schema was going to win over this new social network stuff... what did you call it? Linked-In?

blueflow 3y ago

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! > Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

nvy 3y ago
I think it's obvious that the implicit question is: Why is the FSF so bad at spreading their gospel? They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.
- gitanovic 3y ago
  I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.
  - nvy 3y ago
    >The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that. Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - tgma 3y ago
      FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software. It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

jokethrowaway 3y ago

I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up. It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens. The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security. AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this". I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom. At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models). So yeah, we're screwed. At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.

adev_ 3y ago
> The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security. Can you develop a bit on that ? The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently. Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store). Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.
- jll29 3y ago
  The EU (technically, the European Commission and the European Council) is a large organization, so naturally there are many positions inside. However, my impression is it has been a force for good overall, giving us cross-country mobility, getting rid of cellphone roaming charges, and avoiding waste by trying to standardize plugs. They notably introduced GDPR to protect citizen's data and they provide a court of human rights, and there is a push for "data sovereignty".

sidkshatriya 3y ago

> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. Sadly they seemed to have tied themselves in all kinds of self imposed knots when it comes to spreading their reach via social networking sites. See * https://www.fsf.org/twitter https://www.fsf.org/twitter * https://www.fsf.org/facebook https://www.fsf.org/facebook You can't change today's world if you're not a bit pragmatic. FSF may make some correct objections but if you're not properly present on some of these platforms your reach will remain limited. To effect change you need to be part of the world of today -- warts and all. Only then you can you change it. Rejecting the world by putting your head into the ground is a strategy that will often fail. Only when you become extremely big and influential can you help determine the rules of the game.

maurice2k 3y ago
"*Note: The custom script allows us to interact with the Twitter API while circumventing the nonfree JS that is sent to the Web browser. For viewing replies and retweeting posts, we use Choqok." So funny and so sad. Nonfree JS? They're in their own cloud of whatever. Yes, there is nonfree stuff. But nonfree stuff also can get things done.

maurice2k 3y ago

That's exactly what I think about RMS, FSF and GNU. I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is. As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done! But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project. A lot of these tools have pretty good documentation but when you visit one of the GNU websites you feel like it's 1995 again. It's more like man pages in HTML. Actually same for Apache Software Foundation. And this is not getting better... A start would be a modern representation of the tools and the ideas behind free software, maybe with a bit less philosophy. GNU needs to get a bit "cooler".

dnh44 3y ago
I understand your sentiment and I agree with you, but at the same time if we, as a community and as a society, are incapable of caring about the principles and philosophy behind free software because the websites aren't cool enough, then we (as a community or society) will ultimately deserve whatever dystopian fate awaits us.
- maurice2k 3y ago
  Fully agree, but I doubt this is not the reality we live in... ;-)
chii 3y ago
> but for most people it's just "linux command line tools" the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding. Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.
concordDance 3y ago
Whats wrong with 1995 in this context?

rakoo 3y ago

> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. The FSF has been talking to users and to devs for decades, but unfortunately devs went from being users that had no problem sharing their progress to business people who thought that restricting access for personal, individual gain at the expense of the entire society of today and tomorrow is somehow "better", "more free", because who knows, maybe I'll be the next Bill Gates ? I see the catastrophic state we are in today as the result of non-copyleft, of "Open Source" as opposed to "Libre Software", of the depolitization of what it means to take from the commons and give back to the commons, of what society means whether we see it as a sum of perfectly rational individuals with no money problems or as a group of interdependent agents. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and other big platforms could start up and be where they are today is because they could take a bunch of existing tools in the commons and not share back, to build their own fortune and control prison. The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ? The issue runs deeper than software licenses, or even software.

nvy 3y ago
Perhaps if the FSF had actual professionals running communications, people who persuade other people for a living, the FSF's message would actually get through to people.
- tgma 3y ago
  I don't think PR is the real issue. IMHO, the fundamental principle behind FSF philosophy is the license is primarily written to secure the long-term interest of the _user_, not the community of the authors. The reason authors were okay with that in the first place is, early on in computing, users and authors largely overlapped, if not exactly the same. Over time, the authors and users diverged widely, thus their interests diverged. FSF philosophy has failed to appeal to the authors of the software because it is economically a bad deal for them. Users who do not pay are by-and-large leeches. Also, some of the freedoms are not considered as valuable by the users as they are for fellow authors, perhaps sensibly so because they are never going to utilize such freedoms.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

The GPL is a great license. It protects the author and the rights of the users. But a younger generation has gotten used to thinking of open source as "a free thing I can use for work", rather than as the blood-sweat-and-tears of someone else who has contributed hundreds of their own hours. So they bristle at copyleft. If I switch my project to GPL I immediately will lose most potential contributors and a lot of users, who will start complaining about my license choice or will be forbidden by their employer from contributing to it or using it. Corporate entities are (maybe rightly) scared of the GPL. And the rise of open source work by/in FAANG companies, etc. has meant the undermining of that license.

varunnrao 3y ago

I agree with the essence of what you're saying. It's always been my opinion that the FSF screwed the pooch when it came to spreading their message. This starts right from their very name - the "Free" Software Foundation. Anyone of didn't know their message would understand them to be a group arguing that all software should be free of charge. This is completely orthogonal to their actual message of software having the ability to be easily understood and customized as needed by a tech-savvy user who has fairly compensated the original authors. They aimed for and missed badly the sweet spot message that all software should make simple things simple and complex things possible. This expectation that users should not have to pay for the apps/software they use has partly lead to the dystopian landscape that is our ad-supported modern software experience. Users today think they're entitled to the same standard for all software they use. They expect LibreOffice Calc to be having the same feature set as MS Excel while at the same time paying nothing for it.

onetruepretzel 3y ago

> GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL. We need these "content" people who maintain reliable tools with stable interfaces/behaviours. These people and tools are at the core of what modern infrastructure run on. Fly by night tools, languages and frameworks do not allow us to progress like we have. It's very easy for us "users" of these tools to forget that there is something maintaining something we take for granted. You seem to be forgetting you're standing on the shoulders of giants. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/