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We've accepted it at this point, but I wonder if the religious element of GNU tools and free software in general was as contentious way back when.
by mid-kid 1y ago
We've accepted it at this point, but I wonder if the religious element of GNU tools and free software in general was as contentious way back when.
- Analemma_ 1y agoA little while ago I realized with a start that it's been years since I've heard anyone angrily insist on calling it "GNU/Linux", when that was constant background noise during the Slashdot era. One of those old fights that just faded away, I guess.
- mid-kid 1y agoThat's true. I find myself still saying GNU/Linux where it's relevant (e.g. when referring to the userland, or a compatible userland) but it's not as contentious as it used to be, which is a nice breath.
- i80and 1y agoOh yeah, I got to meet Stallman at a book signing when I was like 17, and like an idiot happened to wear a "Linux" shirt. I genuinely hadn't thought of this point of contention beforehand, but oof he did not care for that.
- jcalvinowens 1y agoIts more that it ceased to be true: you can build a "nognu" Linux now, with LLVM as the system compiler, and musl/libc++ instead of glibc/libstdc++. https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/current-stage3-amd64-musl-llvm/ https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/curre...
- Klonoar 1y agoOr use Chimera Linux.
- colechristensen 1y agoA lot of the userland _isn't_ GNU any more, people use a lot of alternatives for once much more dominant GNU tools, and people use a lot more commandline tools which have no relation to GNU. Systemd took over and for containers there's no init. Plenty of alternative libc implementations as well. GNU is nowhere near as dominant in the non-kernel code that people run any longer. And a lot of the GNU zealots who were particularly interested in getting credit with naming got old.
- hedora 1y agoGNU sort of lost its way around GPLv3 (it gives cloud services a free pass, but not locally run software, which is the opposite of letting users control what their computer does). That killed most of the “user freedom” enthusiasm of the early days. These days, there’s the AGPL, but that’s mostly used like the BSL (“if you want to use AGPL in production, pay us”), than for bootstrapping freedom-respecting compute environments. If you disagree, show me an AGPL userland that’s appropriate for daily-driving. I’m slowly migrating off Linux to the BSDs these days. The politics seem less destructive to the user experience with them.
- Dylan16807 1y agoWhat kind of free pass would you want to give to locally run software? Can't you already do anything you want to GPL code locally?
- hedora 1y agoGPLv2 was fine. AGPL is fine. V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days). Concretely, I can’t do this local thing: Take GPLv3 software, build a board, link the software to vendor blob firmware (~ all current hardware requires this step), flash it to a ROM on the board and sell it to you with a copy of the GPLv3 software’s source code. I can take the same vendor blob, add a TCP stack, and have your device shell into a copy of GPLv3 software with closed source modifications running in my data center. This has massive negative consequences for users of GPLv3-reliant IoT crap and cloud services.
- rbanffy 1y ago> V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days). Which is great. It prevents enshitification of consumer devices.
- Dylan16807 1y agoIf you look just at consumer devices, it's great. But their argument is that blocking that loophole, while not blocking an even worse loophole, caused more harm than good. In other words we should have moved as much as possible directly to AGPL, and left the rest on GPLv2.
- steveklabnik 1y agoSt IGNUcius has been a thing for a quarter century at least https://stallman.org/saint.html https://stallman.org/saint.html