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?
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.
Yeah, the greed and individualism of earning a living wage. Not everyone can have a sheltered position at MIT or as head of a foundation.
There is a distinction between "I need money to live" and "I want money because I want more", and the distinction should be clear enough. Yes, many projects are in the first case, but that's not the subject.
If you want to commit to a new project, make a living off of it, what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft ?
I don't think the issue is in the form but in the content: developers don't want to hear they are favoring greedy private interests (sometimes including themselves, sometimes at their expense) instead of the common goods, because the freedom to restrict a good from everyone for personal profit is more important than the freedom to access said good and build upon it.
> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter?
You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?
Yes?
This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.
You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.
An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".
Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.
But yes, GCC is very nice.
> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?
If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.
Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.
Twitter has been in the news for banning accounts for doing that.
They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.
The purity inherent in insisting on using only free software is laudable, but evangelizing is only effective when there's reach. (It's also much more compelling when it demonstrably makes folks' lives materially better, but reasonable people will disagree on the particulars there.)
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/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.
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.
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".
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.
[0] for example: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
I can also lightly smile but give this to a 20 or 30 year old person. They won't understand it.
But younger people looking at Times New Roman websites is like telling them 'use man pages'.
I think GNU is not doing themselves a favor in being so old school. I'm not saying they should use (nonfree scnr) JavaScript bloated websites but a more modern look is not that complicate and achievable with free HTML and CSS standards.
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.
Well, they are Free Software Foundation, they have Mastodon (and PeerTube, although the latter is pretty empty).
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...
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
