RMS insistence in turning the free software movement into a personality cult of himself has whittled it down to a small troop of true believers and left it with a few legacy codebases (that is mostly maintained by corporate interests to boot) while being completely absent in any technology that appeared during the last 30 years.
If anything is needed it’s fresh blood, and that is not going to appear by making holy writ of the teachings of Saint Richard.
He hasn’t fostered a new generation of leaders nor shared the spotlight with them. Whenever someone gets invited to speak about free software, it’s inevitably just him.
I suspect the free software movement as we know it will die if it can’t move past him. After all, the world’s already moved past the same ideas he’s had for ~40 years now.
I think the free software movement “as we know it” will inevitably die, precisely because it will have to move past RMS eventually. But I think the relative stasis of free software thought is a testament to the effectiveness of RMS in spreading the ideas that he thinks are important for the movement, as well as to the relative lack of effectiveness or dedication or imagination among other potential leaders.
If the “moving past RMS” that you desire entails changing the philosophy or the content of the message, then why not share how you think it should change rather than complaining that RMS is the speaker who conference attendees want to hear.
Seems a bit unfair to ask the autist to do community building.
edit: I acknowledge that this comment is at the very least simplified too far. There are parts of it that I would/will defend, but autists are not across-the-board incapable of building communities.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Autism has effects on people’s ability to do things, right? Is it unreasonable to change your expectation of somebody’s skill on that basis? Or are you just asserting that one shouldn’t exclude that autists can community-build?
That second thing, more or less. There are important subtleties here, and I apologize that it’s too late at night for me to get into them right now. My main concern with the remarks up-thread is that they oversimplify a complex situation. We can discuss more tomorrow if it’s helpful.
Sometimes it’s useful to take a charitable interpretation so as not to derail a thread. OP did not say that autistic people can’t be community builders, but he did stop short of explicitly affirming it, possibly in the interest of brevity. I think it’s good to assume people are sensible and respectful at least in how they think, regardless of how much they express. I would bet OP and everyone reading this understands that autistic people can be different in different ways, and being autistic doesn’t preclude someone from building communities. Whether leaving this out is an “oversimplification” I guess depends on your view of how many readers might read a generalization into OP’s comment.
I do like to make that assumption in general, and I appreciate the feedback you’re offering, it’s important that we be able to have this kind of conversation about site policies.
The remark was just very close to certain things that the autistic community is very used to hearing, and very tired of having to be patient with. If this comes up again I’ll try to draw a more nuanced line policy-wise; it was late at night and the choice was offer the gentlest correction I could come up with, or let it pass. Letting it pass didn’t feel fair to other autistic Lobsters users, of whom I personally know quite a few.
I didn’t mean that autistic people can’t community build by default, I stressed that maybe it’s a thing that has conditions attached in that case, or other modifiers. Apologies if it didn’t come out like that.
One core aspect of internet projects is that you can just go and do something. “Talk is cheap, show me the code.” I think Stallman personifies this idea. There are many skills involved in community management, and we tend to look at an organization like the FSF or GNU and assume that they have these skills covered, but as far as I can tell Stallman isn’t “taking up a slot” here, isn’t pulling the spotlight on himself or claiming to try and engage in community building. In fact, I believe people keep spotlighting him because he has such a purity of focus.
So my argument is just that we shouldn’t judge him for his failure to do something that he has never signed up for or claimed interest in. (If Stallman in fact has taken responsibility for community-building around the FSF/GPL, I retract this point.)
And of course, this goes double if you have difficulty with a skill for some reason. Then the calls just become cruel.
If I want to run a GPL project, do I have an obligation to be good at handling bug reports, or managing contributors, or selecting a successor? No, I don’t have any obligation. I just write code and publish it. As long as I don’t misrepresent my skills, I have done everything that can reasonably be expected of me. If people then look to me to do these things, and start blaming me for failing to do them, in my opinion that’s on them.
Doesn’t his position at FSF imply community-building, “thought leadership” and so on? How can you be the founder of a foundation and not create a community around it, or not think that’s part of the job? How can you start a movement for Free Software without aiming for community building around said movement?
As far as I can tell, at any point in his career, rms has just gone and done things. I don’t think this creates an obligation to do other things, even seemingly related. The disagreement then would be whether starting a movement or a foundation implies an obligation to socially maintain it.
The deciding factor for me is, I honestly don’t think anyone who decided to follow rms was, you know, deluded or misled about where his focus lay. Stallman strikes me as a very WYSIWYG sort of person.
Doesn’t his position at FSF imply community-building, “thought leadership” and so on?
Those are two different things, and my sense is that his position aligns with the latter and not the former.
How can you be the founder of a foundation and not create a community around it, or not think that’s part of the job? How can you start a movement for Free Software without aiming for community building around said movement?
Your incredulity suggests you think someone who founds an organization ought to do all those things. Does that imply that people who aren’t able to do those things also shouldn’t be founders or leaders of any kind?
How can you be the founder of a foundation and not create a community around it, or not think that’s part of the job?
What makes you think he didn’t? Did you take a look at the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation and conclude that it all just magically appeared without any community behind it? All the GNU/FSF mailing lists, events, campaigns, initiatives, and other resources:
These all don’t count, in your opinion? Or are you saying that he himself didn’t do all that, but other people did? Then, did those other people appear by magic? Are they not part of the Free Software movement/community and don’t they believe in its ideals? They’re what, all paid stooges? I don’t understand your logic.
From what I hear, the (small) community that grew in the 90s is shrinking by the year, and a lot of people were horrified that someone with his history of opinions and actions got invited back after the whole Epstein thing.
Being inflexible and fundamentalist is not how movements get shit done, or communities grow. In my opinion he’s not attracting people to the cause, just collecting the ones that already think like him to it. As a consequence, the FSF grows increasingly irrelevant as dogma just persists unchallenged and dialogue with others boils down to “I can’t use this computer because the firmware on the hard drive isn’t free”.
he’s not attracting people to the cause, just collecting the ones that already think like him to it.
Come on, now you are just splitting hairs. You are playing with words. How exactly did those people start thinking like him? Did they all spontaneously happen to come up with the exact same idea about strong copyleft licensing? If not, maybe admit that some people heard his message and joined the community because it made sense to them?
I saw Stallman at 31C3 in 2014. It was pretty weird.
At the “Dead Tree Lovers” assembly (the book club) there was this small section with some old furniture, a bookshelf and a chair. I vividly remember RMS sitting on the chair with 6 or 7 people sitting on the floor in front of him. A women was serving him tea while sitting beside him. Everyone very intently listening to everything he said.
Years ago I got told a story about how at some Sci Fi convention there was going to be a party in someone’s room and RMS thought it would be hilarious to tell ESR that it was going to be an orgy and so ESR turned up wearing nothing but a bathrobe
Anyway now you all to deal with that as well sorry
Fair enough lol, but I don’t think that demonstrates an “insistence in turning the free software movement into a personality cult.” For that you would expect some of that to seep into the speeches he gives to the general public, which are focused on growing the movement by spreading the ideas, and without any playful costumes.
As much as I like Free Software philosophy and copyleft (a lot), trying to rebuild RMS’ image and return to 90’s/early-2000’s Free Software Advocacy is fighting the last war. I think that RMS is an effective ideological leader, but a poor administrative leader: I was flabbergasted to find that in 2015 2005, the LLVM project basically offered to assign copyright to the FSF, but the offer was lost to Stallman’s idiosyncratic email-handling practices.
What might fighting the current war look like?
GPLv3 and AGPLv3 have not had the uptake or impact that Software Freedom advocates had hoped. The AGPLv3 in particular is hard to understand and yet probably doesn’t go far enough in securing freedom for people interacting with remote software.
It’s hard to promote copyleft projects when BSD/MIT/X11-style alternatives exist. A possible point of leverage: writing high-quality copyleft libraries for emerging language ecosystems. Newer languages are usually intended to be more powerful and expressive than existing ones, so a Free Software developer should be more productive there, as well as not having to compete with other alternatives (the first JSON library is very helpful; it’s rare for a community to care about the 20th) and helping to set the licensing norms of the emerging community.
Have something substantial to say about LLM-based laundering of copyleft code. This probably includes revising the GPLs, despite my complaints in #1. EDIT, Related: Also have something substantial to say about projects which need a tonne of data or expensive compute to do anything useful. Example: machine learning algorithms (where, strangely, nobody really has Freedom 1 wrt the outputs: “freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish”).
Support Guix as much as possible. Despite being a cousin of Nix, which I use for nearly everything, Guix is easily the single most attractive GNU project in my mind right now. Nix is an incredible achievement held back by a bad language (some might object to having to code in a lazy ML-style language; I object to its weak type system). A thriving competitor in Guix could be attractive enough that people might join and learn more about software freedom.
Yeah, poor choice of words on my part. I was more speculating about why people don’t like Nix-the-language, and at least there’s a decent amount of scheme libraries available to pick up, whereas Nix had to implement its own libraries to get off the ground.
So, guile and nix-lang are both dynamically typed without type hints. Guile at least has explicit record types though, which guix uses throughout, so you get explicit type errors instead of failures to access some map key. It’s not static typing but I’d count it as a pretty definite improvement.
I would argue that it looks like re-evaluating the AGPL, since one of its primary use cases is to do exactly the thing the Free Software movement is supposed to abhor and have been founded in reaction against: using copyright to enforce a commercial monopoly over the software.
VC-backed companies that suddenly switch their software from permissive license to AGPL (a trend lately!) are not doing it because of a deep commitment to Free Software ideals. They’re doing it because they want everyone else to serve as free labor for their commercial product (which, as the copyright holders, they can use as they please without being bound to release their own proprietary/internal improvements, while everyone else who runs the software must release their own changes to the world gratis).
I think this is repeating what I have regarded as the critical mistake of the FSF and RMS for the past 20 years: You can’t force people to embrace your ideology unless you have a lot of guns and are willing to be responsible for a genocide along the way (and even then it rarely works). Ideologies win by persuasion and by showing their advantages, not by coercion.
The problem with the GPL is that it immediately puts people who are not already bought into the FSF’s ideology in the mindset of ‘this is a bunch of restrictions, how do we avoid having to comply with them?’ You end up with things like the nVidia dodge, where you make a kernel module that isn’t a derived work of the kernel and a shim that is a derived work of both the kernel and your proprietary module. You follow the rules of the GPL with respect to derived works by releasing your shim under a GPL compatible license. You can’t redistribute the linked result, but you can distribute your code separately from the kernel and end users can combine them. Or you realise that the GPL is a distribution license and so you can avoid releasing any changes and just keep your improved version secret. I’ve encountered a lot of companies that enter this mindset and never leave.
In contrast, companies that come across permissive software typically go through a process of:
This is amazing, people are giving us things for free! Let’s build a proprietary thing on top.
We want to keep them happy, let’s donate a token amount to support the project or they might change the license.
Well, this bit is costing us money to maintain as a fork and it’s not giving us any competitive advantage. Let’s upstream it.
Actually, 90% of what we’re doing is no competitive advantage, let’s upstream that too.
They may still keep 10% of their code proprietary, but I would rather take a 90% win for Free Software than a 0% win. The FSF wants to eliminate proprietary software, I would rather have an order of magnitude more Free Software than proprietary and create the kinds of expectations in consumers that you have to try really hard to sell proprietary software.
The other big problem with the FSF is that they talk a lot about end users but they never invested in end-user programming environments. From the perspective of most end users, MS Office is more aligned with the FSF’s ideals than most GPL’d software because it has plugin interfaces, scripting languages, and so on that make it easy for non-programmers to extend. From a corporate perspective, having an automatic second source for a software package that you depend on is valuable but for an end user if it’s written in uncommented C code then it may as well be a binary. The fact that you can hypothetically modify it is of no value unless you can actually modify it. We were trying to address this in Étoilé by building a desktop environment out of tiny components that were composable and extensible in DSLs. Most big Free Software packages are adopting architectures that are inherited from the proprietary software world, where building big tightly integrated monoliths is an win because it lets you sell a single product that’s hard for competitors to adopt. A vibrant Free Software ecosystem needs to make it easy to compose different things. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical have been pushing back against this because their business models are close to those of proprietary software companies (they sell a single polished thing, they don’t want it to be easy for people to create competing products).
The GPL also has a long history of being used as a money-maker, where people would publicly release something GPL and then have a nice business selling commercial licenses – which allow proprietary usage – on the side.
The other big problem with the FSF is that they talk a lot about end users but they never invested in end-user programming environments.
They’re committed to an all-or-nothing approach. A system that has 999,999 RMS-approved certified Free Software packages, and one package that isn’t, no matter how small, is as unacceptable to them as a system that has one million non-Free packages and zero Free, because their stance is that any compromise, no matter how small or slight, is a complete sellout and moral failure. So they’re not capable of the sort of incremental opening-up of a system that would be possible in your approach.
The GPL also has a long history of being used as a money-maker, where people would publicly release something GPL and then have a nice business selling commercial licenses – which allow proprietary usage – on the side.
And this is terrible messaging for the movement because it tells people that the proprietary version is more valuable. If the GPL’d version is free but the proprietary version costs money then you build an association in people’s minds that the GPL’d version is less valuable.
So they’re not capable of the sort of incremental opening-up of a system that would be possible in your approach.
That definitely does seem true for the modern FSF but I wonder when it changed. The GNU project was all about incremental adoption. They released individual components of a UNIX system that you could run on any proprietary UNIX. If the GNU replacement didn’t have a feature you needed then you could use the other one until you (or someone else) added the feature that you needed. By the time Linux was released, they had basically everything except a kernel. At some point they decided that everything that a user might need existed in the Free Software ecosystem and so there was no excuse for using proprietary things.
I think the incremental approach was just barely tolerated out of necessity in the early days and now that they feel there’s enough of “GNU” out there it’s been eagerly discarded in favor of all-or-nothing no-compromise-ever approaches.
I see why though - accepting any nonfree component “back in” is a slippery backwards slope to the olden days. When you finally have a completely free system it should stay that way.
Unfortunately, it’s deeply impractical and a huge turnoff for people who aren’t already fully committed to the free software cause. It’s exactly this hardline approach that makes it difficult to attract newcomers. I think I read a piece by Stallman about “allowing” a more lenient approach for newcomers, but it doesn’t fit the rest of his retoric so it gets overlooked and forgotten.
This is a totally different context (I’m in academia), but coincidentally, before you replied I was thinking of replying to @jackdk with a comment that was similar but with almost the opposite conclusion! (I got interrupted and had to make dinner and do some other stuff.)
The related but opposite valence comment from my vantage point: the GPL used to be attractive to academics (or perhaps more accurately, in some cases, to university IP offices) precisely because it promised a kind of win-win scenario on openness and commercial monopoly. The idea was that if we GPL our cool new image processing algorithm, we’re open, which means other academics and some hippies like the GIMP or whoever can use it, but we’re still not giving it away for free to Adobe, because if they want to use it, the GPL is a poison-pill they’ll never accept into Photoshop, so they’ll negotiate a proprietary license from us.
My impression is that this strategy mostly failed. Academics with this dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach rarely got any money, and then technological changes weakened the GPL’s poison-pill aspect anyway (so Google uses all kinds of GPL’d code and pays nobody). In my corner of the world I don’t actually see many people using AGPL, which would be one response, to double-down on the poison-pill strategy. Instead, almost everyone seems to have gone one of two directions: 1) just use BSD/MIT and accept you will never make direct $$ licensing this software, but maybe at least Google will cite you in some papers and you get academic currency that way, or 2) just abandon free-software entirely, either not releasing code at all, or when required by journal/conference reproducibility guidelines, release it under the non-free-software license “free for non-commercial use only”.
FTR Google does not allow GPL source in its codebase for exactly the reasons one would expect. It uses GPL binaries, in the same way as anyone else would, but including GPLed source is very much prohibited.
What do you mean by “its codebase”? I see a lot of GPL’d source in public Google repositories, notably the Android-related ones, but maybe the policy is more specific?
If the policy is no server side GPL then I suppose that does weaken my point, perhaps the GPL is still an effective poison pill even with technological changes. Although it still seems true that nobody makes money from this dual licensing strategy so it has failed for some combination of reasons anyway.
Sorry I wasn’t clear, I meant in their internal proprietary monorepo (called google3 at the time I worked there).
Edit: to be clear I agree that the GPL is not effective at motivating meaningful financial support to open source. That was never its intent of course, but in the current world of massive corporations profiting hugely from open source with little reciprocation, a different approach should be considered.
So, are we saying here that the Linux kernel source code does not appear anywhere inside their google3 monorepo? I think it would be interesting to have someone do a fulltext search and see if they can find any kernel code in there.
I can’t say for certain, but I would be very surprised if it was. For one thing, the monorepo has its own build system which would not work for the kernel, and for another, code in the monorepo is only there to build Google backend services, it’s not used as a generalised source of code for any purpose. I would imagine that Google’s kernel code would be in a separate repository.
I would imagine that Google’s kernel code would be in a separate repository.
In that case it sounds like they’re using GPLd source code, just with a layer of insulation from their internal services. To me, this sounds like Free Software doing its job.
It’s weird to me that academics already have an extremely effective mechanism to prevent distribution of their work and make it effectively inaccessible (publishing in high-priced journals), and somehow feel a need to turn to software licensing to further restrict it.
Maybe true 30 years ago, but almost all CS papers of any relevance published this century are freely available, from the author’s website and/or arXiv and/or the official venue itself. In any case, unrelated to the point regarding licensing software – the default license of software is All Rights Reserved, so they would not need to “turn to” anything if they wanted that default.
That is an excellent point. In these instances, are external contributors offering their patches under AGPL, or are the companies asking for copyright assignments?
The usual pattern is that initially the software is under a permissive license like BSD, MIT, Apache, etc., maybe with a CLA for people contributing. And then they switch it to AGPL – many permissive licenses allow relicensing, after all – and (ab)use the fact that now they can continue developing in-house proprietary improvements to the software, but no competing business can do that, since competitors are bound by the AGPL to release their changes, thus removing the ability for anyone else to gain a market advantage through having a better or more featureful version.
One problem here is the normalisation of CLAs rather than treating the project as an agglomeration of various contributions all under individual authors’ copyleft. Had that happened instead, the vendor would not be able to close off its improvements once it accepted contributions from the public.
One problem here is the normalisation of CLAs rather than treating the project as an agglomeration of various contributions all under individual authors’ copyleft.
So, like the FSF’s long-time policy of requiring outright assignment of copyright in contributions (not merely licensing them to the projects)? Which was done and recommended for the express purpose of letting the FSF relicense at will due to being the unitary copyright holder?
The assignment was used to relicense from GPLv2 to v3, but it was originally done to ensure that the FSF had standing to sue for copyright infringement. The problem with something like Linux or FreeBSD is that someone violating the license is infringing the copyright of a bunch of individual contributors, most of whom don’t have the resources to sue and who, if they did, could often be shown to own only a small part of the total, which can reduce actual damages awarded. If an organisation like the FSF or SFLC wanted to sue on behalf of such a project then they need to act as the agent of multiple contributors, which can be hard.
The other half of this is that the FSF doesn’t really want to go to court, they want to settle. Their settlement terms require them to be able to issue a retroactive, time-limited, proprietary license to FSF projects. They grant you a license that makes your infringement legal, which expires sufficiently far into the future that you can comply with the GPL by then. It always amused me that this, in effect, means that a large chunk of the FSF’s income is as a seller of proprietary software. This is impossible if they do not have the right to relicense everything in the codebase.
It’s time for the next generation of copylift / libre software philosophers to take their place. I do think rms’ intellectual lineage should be preserved. But it’s time to look to the future.
Who is a shining star today, who is philosophizing the ground breaking concepts for the next 30 years?
I would posit that the shining star today is Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC): https://sfconservancy.org/ (disclosure: I am an employee of SFC).
If there are things we at SFC could do to help show people we are that organization you want, please do let me know. There is a lot of good we can do with copyleft, and it’s sad so many people have sworn it off just because of one person.
If there are things we at SFC could do to help show people we are that organization you want, please do let me know. There is a lot of good we can do with copyleft, and it’s sad so many people have sworn it off just because of one person.
I think part of the problem here is that FSF still monopolizes the authoritative resources for “what is free software”, “how is free software different from open source”, the GPL FAQs, etc., as well as the GPL itself. (A lot of this stuff is on gnu.org technically, but you have to already be pretty deep in the free software community to understand where GNU ends and FSF begins.) In order to fix this, Conservancy would have to publish first-party resources on what free software is in a way that essentially directly competes with FSF for mindshare. It’s unclear to me whether this is actually a good idea, but I can see a lot of arguments for it.
For example, I often link to the gnu.org philosophy pages to help explain what free software is, and every time I do so I wish there were better resources out there because all the RMS/GNU/FSF stuff tends to be written in kind of stilted language (it’s often more formal than it should be, gets incredibly hung up on nomenclature to the point of alienating an audience that doesn’t know why they should care/probably feels condescended to, and generally feels more like a philosophy paper than something designed to educate and convince people who aren’t already familiar with the ideas). I was heartened to see Write Free Software submitted today for this very reason: I glanced at it and though I haven’t looked at it in any depth it seems a lot better - though not perfect, and it appears to be more oriented towards developers. Conservancy could probably do this a lot better with some time to refine the approach, but as of now sfconservancy.org is sorely lacking - as far as I can tell, there literally is not a definition of free software on the site except for a three-sentence blurb in the glossary.
Conservancy also has a chance to learn from FSF’s mistakes. For example FSF’s rigidity and focus on software freedom purity (which I’m sure comes primarily if not entirely from Stallman) is one of its greatest strengths but also one of its greatest weaknesses. I frequently think of a Lobsters comment about how the RYF program could have been orders of magnitude more effective, and there’s another great comment in the same submission pointing out how FSF pushes people away by their purity-driven focus. E.g. gnu.org recommends installing a blobless Linux distribution for purity reasons when it might be much more effective to just tell people to use Ubuntu (or even just, try switching to Firefox and LibreOffice while you’re still on Windows/macOS) while pointing out that this recommendation isn’t perfect and why, and if you’re really devoted to this stuff and understand the caveats then here’s our ideal world recommendation, a blobless distribution. People are usually intelligent enough to be able to see when you’re not giving them the full story, which the FSF doesn’t as a matter of policy. I could go on, linking to more Lobsters threads, but I’m sure you get the point ;)
Again, I don’t actually know whether this is a good idea and you will certainly catch a lot of flak for “competing” with FSF. You also may stretch yourselves too thin and lose your ability to effectively do anything, including your existing work (which I admire and think SFC is good at). But if SFC wants to become a true leader in the free software space, instead of an (effective and valuable!) supporting actor, this seems to me to be the way.
(or even just, try switching to Firefox and LibreOffice while you’re still on Windows/macOS) while pointing out that this recommendation isn’t perfect and why
They actually do have a guide like this on their wiki [0]. It explains at a high level what Free Software is, explains some of the problems with Windows from a software freedom perspective, and has a table of Free Software replacements for common Windows applications as a “first steps” towards getting comfortable with Free Software..
it’s sad so many people have sworn it off just because of one person.
I’m not sure this is actually true. I suspect a lot of this is counterfactual “well I WOULD be into it if not for rms”; I suspect barring rms, these people would find other reasons to not be into it. I smell politics.
I haven’t seen the SFC do anything except blogpost about things that aren’t Free Software and fail to threaten important actors (remember Truth Social?). Most people aren’t avoiding copyleft because of RMS, people generally know nothing about him. They’re avoiding it because Big Software and the OSI cartel have spent millions upon millions shilling Open Source and Free Software advocates don’t really have good arguments nor strong battle-lines.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s problematic to say “it’s time for new leaders” without any idea of who those new leaders would be or how they would be different?
I wish people making statements like this would explain their reasoning or their idea of a better alternative; otherwise it starts to seem just like the people who said “Bernie Sanders is too old” when they really just wanted a more business-friendly candidate.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s problematic to say “it’s time for new leaders” without any idea of who those new leaders would be or how they would be different?
The question is whether, say, the FSF can outlive Richard Stallman. Who are the people in the up-and-coming next generation of leaders? Who is being groomed to step up when the time comes? If Stallman were hit by a bus tomorrow, who would step up?
Or is it the case that there are no people up-and-coming, there is nobody being groomed to step up, and if Stallman were hit by a bus, the FSF would for all practical purposes die with him?
As an outsider, it seems like the latter option, because the FSF keeps doubling and tripling down on the idea that only Stallman can be the leader. That is not a good plan for the long term. Organizations that will survive in the long term explicitly work on continuity and succession, but the FSF just keeps coming back to “only Richard Stallman can lead us” as a bedrock principle.
The question is whether, say, the FSF can outlive Richard Stallman. Who are the people in the up-and-coming next generation of leaders? Who is being groomed to step up when the time comes? If Stallman were hit by a bus tomorrow, who would step up?
That may be your question, but you’re not the original commenter I replied to. I don’t know the answer.
I am curious in what ways have you observed the FSF “doubling and tripling down on the idea that only Stallman can be the leader”? If they said that, it would certainly imply that they expect the organization to die with the man.
Re-electing Stallman over and over. Even after his alleged “departure” (is that the euphemism now?) for a while.
This is getting pretty tedious at this point, though. Do you have an actual counter-argument to make, or are we going to go a thousand rounds of you trying to deflect this by asking over and over again for hard proof that Richard Stallman has repeatedly been installed/maintained as a leader?
Re-electing Stallman over and over. Even after his alleged “departure” (is that the euphemism now?) for a while.
I’m aware of that, but it seems a leap to then say they have no plan or that they think nobody else could be the leader. For all we know they could have a plan for when RMS dies, or there could have been a runner-up in the recent elections that the board agrees would be a perfectly good leader, no? Is there something more that makes you think electing RMS is a “bedrock principle”?
This is getting pretty tedious at this point, though. Do you have an actual counter-argument to make, or are we going to go a thousand rounds of you trying to deflect this by asking over and over again for hard proof that Richard Stallman has repeatedly been installed/maintained as a leader?
I wasn’t aware that I was deflecting. Is there a question you wanted me to answer?
Saying the FSF board has repeatedly elected RMS would be an objective statement of fact. I only took issue with what appeared to be unjustified editorializing.
I only took issue with what appeared to be unjustified editorializing.
Let’s apply your standard, then: provide a link to an explicit statement by me that I was deliberately and knowingly “editorializing” in this thread.
If you cannot provide such a link, you will immediately and permanently retract the above statement.
After all, you are a rational person who operates on verifiable citations for all claims made, and I am sure you would never dream of doing something so awfully wrong as advancing a claim without ironclad citations to back it up, yes?
Organizations that will survive in the long term explicitly work on continuity and succession, but the FSF just keeps coming back to “only Richard Stallman can lead us” as a bedrock principle.
Which is why I asked this in my last comment:
Is there something more that makes you think electing RMS is a “bedrock principle”?
And I explained why I think that’s a leap given just the facts you cited, i.e. editorializing. (FWIW, I never said you did it deliberately or knowingly, and I don’t think it’s so awfully wrong.)
So you get to assume my intent by interpreting my actions, but I don’t get to assume the FSF’s intent by interpreting their actions. You don’t have to provide any sort of evidence for your interpretation and it’s just automatically assumed to be valid, but I must provide citations for my interpretation or it is automatically assumed invalid.
As in my last comment, I never said you editorialized deliberately or knowingly, so I don’t know what you’re referring to when you say I assumed your intent. I’m just pointing out a difference between what you originally wrote and what we can reasonably assume based on the facts.
I also don’t know why you would think my interpretation is “automatically assumed to be valid;” if you wanted to make a counterargument you would be welcome to.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s problematic to say “it’s time for new leaders” without any idea of who those new leaders would be or how they would be different?
Well, I’m just a schmuck. But rms is
(1) old, which means that in some years, he will pass on … like all mortals.
(2) definitely known to have a consistent creepiness over the years. A lot of stories have come out about him, and, people trying to explain why he needs to act different and not getting very far with that.
Part 1 means that a successor needs to be found, for ordinary human reasons. I would like to see the FSF be a long-running multi-generational institution prioritizing libre software and supporting it.
Part 2 means that the organization and movement around him is very offputting to people who otherwise would be all right associating with the FSF & movement. It is well understood that a leader imprints on an organization and culture generally forms from above. A social movement leader needs to be an attractor or neutral, and not an offputter.
I would want to see these 3 foci by the FSF:
rms not in a position on the FSF board. He can be a paid “emeritus philosopher”, that is fine by me. He has been profoundly prescient about the future. Yet, he retains an active vote in how the FSF is going, which means he is still imprinting himself on the culture. Not good.
a post-rms leader dedicated to the long-term viability of libre software. Software has transitioned away from workstation use by and large. What does that mean for libre software for the ordinary person?
And, for my personal interest, a focus by the FSF on how libre software contributors can financially survive in the world today.
(nit: using libre, not ‘free’, to be precise with meaning)
RMS was right and copyleft is correct, no doubt about that.
However, his biggest mistake was being a hostile jerk about it for longer than I’ve been alive. There are countless stories supporting this. He has been called “the GPL’s worst sponsor” and that’s accurate. Him being excluded based on some trumped up nonsense related to Epstein is one of the best things to happen, even if the reason was not correct. He should have been excluded long ago because he’s a walking Code of Conduct violation.
We need less of Richard Stallman, preferably zero. We need more people who are positive cooperative charismatic convincing ambassadors for copyleft and software freedom.
People being excluded based on nonsense is the worst thing that can happen to a movement. Doesn’t matter who it is.
The power to exclude people is one of the most impactful to shaping a movement. If you can exclude people based on nonsense, this translates in reality to “exclusions are decided based on personal charisma”.
There’s a principle (I forgot the name) that asserts that any organization pursuing a goal will start out filled by people invested in the goal, but be invaded and replaced by people invested in the organization in itself. I can’t but see the anti-RMS push as a step in that trend.
I can get behind renewing the push for copyleft, and even attributing much of the original promotion to RMS, but c’mon: the artful B/W portrait, repeated calls out to his prescience, etc. reads like hagiography, brief mention of “toxicity” aside.
The dude is a misogynistic ideologue who abused his platform as a Free Software pioneer to subject other people to his gross views.
So yeah, support copyleft, but don’t sweep aside how the FSF backed RMS and ignored his willingness to blithely dismiss child abuse as “not that big of a deal”.
He’s definitely an ideologue, but for the cause of software freedom, which is a good thing. Labeling him a misogynist is just a politicized insult, based on disliking other political opinions adjacent to gender he has expressed at some point, or just finding him personally awkward and spergy. There’s hell of a lot of prominent technologists who I’d want to see ostracized for their tech-unrelated stated political views ahead of Stallman.
Labeling him a misogynist is just a politicized insult, based on disliking other political opinions adjacent to gender he has expressed at some point
This can be used to handwave away any level of complaint. After reviewing the GeekFeminism wiki article, with citations, I feel comfortable saying that I’m not throwing my lot in with him.
There’s hell of a lot of prominent technologists who I’d want to see ostracized for their tech-unrelated stated political views ahead of Stallman.
He has said and done plenty of things directly related to tech, or software projects, that this too comes off as handwave and dismissive.
I think RMS was/is right about a lot and I don’t care about canceling him, or being upset, but I’m not going to bat for him either, and I’d love to have a figure like him, that I could fully respect and endorse.
I agree with all this article’s points about RMS’s ideas, which indeed I hope more people learn to take seriously. He genuinely did see a lot of stuff coming and tried to head it off. I do think that his failures are a movement leader are precisely due to how he structured everything around himself as an individual.
It’s quite striking that even all these decades later, when discussing the merits of the efforts he spearheaded, people are still focused on trying to pass verdict on him as a person rather than on the ideas.
What difference does RMS as a person make these days? His leadership style was ineffectual, so certainly no practical relevance. Society kind of does this thing where we all kind of orient around celebrities and tell our own stories in terms of their stories, because it feels more dramatic that way, and… why? All that does is tie the fate of the movement to the fate of the individuals.
We don’t need celebrities to keep fighting for what we believe it. Let’s focus on the ideas, not the people.
To look at Firefox’s shrinking slice of the browser market, to see Windows still dominating the desktop, to see the FOSS world as it is right now and say “yeah, the main problem here is clearly the choice of FOSS license” takes a very particular type of blindness.
LibreOffice has a less polished interface than MS Office. This is because Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars focus-testing their UI/UX and polishing the shit out of it. People are using MS Office even if they don’t need docx files, because the interface is so easy. In other words, this can’t be blamed on network effects.
So it seems really obvious why LibreOffice is losing - a lack of money. The FOSS community desperately needs to prioritize 1) funding mechanisms (like liberapay) and the ease of which you can pick software you like and fund it, and 2) a culture of getting dedicated users to put in at least some funds to support the software they use. That second one will be hard because it has to be done respectfully and must be truly voluntary, we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of nagware.
I remember reading a while back that LibreOffice’s donations page got something like $200/year,because an absolutely tiny fraction of LibreOffice users put any money whatsoever towards it. The way I see it, if there are about ~30 million Linux desktop users, they should at least be donating an average of $1/year for a total of $30 million. On the high end, if that number bumped up to e.g. $50/year average per user, that would be $1.5B/year total and now FOSS can at least sustainably challenge FAANG companies that drop the ball - Twitter and Reddit are particularly pissing people off right now and in better circumstances we could have absolutely gutted them as a result.
Twitter and Reddit are particularly pissing people off right now and in better circumstances we could have absolutely gutted them as a result.
Yes. This is a huge deal. We could have been well placed with sites built on free software operated like distributions and old forums are operated (maintainer donations and some public donations… imagine what you could do with reddit gold as an open source distributed taxable entity!) We could have been ready to have a fully open organization be the next reddit. No steering committee, no CEO, just members doing their hardest, donating their labor, doing something they want to do, hopefully being paid for some of what they do along the way.
We were not ready. And I think Why ties into my dispute with your comment.
I don’t know that I agree on the Microsoft Word side. The MS suite is the standard business interconnection format. If you produce it, your colleagues at the other end can read it. This is partly because of the network effect of every office using windows. They use windows because the tools work, people will grumble but accept the changes they hate, and the product will move forward, eventually bringing up the whole world. Which feeds back into itself, since you can send a docx to a vendor or customer and they’ll be able to read it. Patricia in accounting can read your slides. John in compliance will be able to read the document you produced. Neither of them will say “I need to know what font this was, I don’t have it on my machine. “ neither of them, if aware of fonts, will think about them all day while they do their jobs.
A working standard interconnection format that all people in the office can use. That sounds like a net positive. No amount of research dollars into libreoffice would fix this. The project might add a ribbon like Office did. The project would get forked and you’ll hear vocal people on both sides. Ultimately the ribbon will become a configuration option, defaulting to on. People will grumble, but effort will be wasted on the way. Inclusion of fonts in documents will be hotly contested. How do you distribute the licenses for those fonts with the document?
Weirdly the web offers us the equivalent of already-installed-everywhere. We just don’t seem to focus in the open source world on web based productivity tools, those are boring, and hard to do, and unrewarding. Open source is people taking their labor and giving it as a gift to the world. When I give a gift, I want to feel good about it. So I’ll go rewrite ls(1) in rust with a few conveniences added, and be pleased with my day.
Instead of operating a site that does standard communications easily, built and managed as an open source project, we have Office365, draw.io (closed source why?????), and Outlook.
But at least I feel good about the gifts I give to the world.
I don’t know that I agree on the Microsoft Word side. The MS suite is the standard business interconnection format. If you produce it, your colleagues at the other end can read it.
That’s true but irrelevant. What I’m saying is that some people use MS Office outside of a business context, because it has a good interface. I’m saying that even if we solved the docx problem, LibreOffice still would not dominate, because frankly it has an inferior UI.
My comment really isn’t about Word, to be honest. It’s no secret that projects with a bigger budget have a far easier time delivering high quality software; professionally made software tends to be more consistently high-quality than hobbyist-made software.
Open source is people taking their labor and giving it as a gift to the world.
I agree (as long as the “is” doesn’t morph into a “should be”), and this is kind of the problem - in a hypothetical world of this type of open source, the entire software world is made of volunteers and frankly that’s just insane and stupid. In any sort of fair and sustainable world, people will either 1) be paid for their labor, or 2) not require money in the first place for food/shelter/etc (which basically requires a communist/anarchist revolution).
What we need is a system where people get paid to work on GPL’d software, by the people who use it. Not by corporations like Google - even with the best of intentions, Google has different priorities e.g. they want their software to scale to three continents, whereas people running home servers just want it to be simple and easy to maintain without a deep tech background.
And yes, some people will have to write GPL software that is boring, hard, and unrewarding. If it needs to be done, then someone should do it, and they’ll do it because they’re being well paid to do their job - the same reason as why people work at a sewage plant.
So, it’s one thing to diagnose where the world went wrong (and I don’t really buy this reading, but whatever, that’s open to debate); it’s yet another to ask, what can we do to try and recover something from the wreckage of the modern software economy? And for the answers to that latter question, I would not be looking at someone who is fighting a 40 yr old battle over printer drivers. I would want someone deeply engaged with the state of the world as it exists today. Stallman and the FSF have shown no interest in or aptitude for engaging with the actual problems of the world.
The role of Cassandra is valuable, but it’s not constructive.
I actually think free software ideals ought to be easier to sell now than ever: any time i try to use a mobile phone app and it sends me trash notifications makes me wish I (or someone else who then has the right to share their fork) can rip it open and disable those, while keeping the legitimately useful ones enabled.
Too often I think free software discussions get bogged down in backend details without expression the wins users themselves can experience. Phone notifications are a pretty clear thing i think a lot of people can relate to and free software actually does have a direct answer to solve the nusiance.
I mean, even as it is, Android is just unambiguously a win for the GPL, right? Any kid who ever rooted their phone or installed Cyanogenmod or Lineage is a potential convert.
I would show it as a failure of the GPL. The only bit of Android that’s GPL’d is the kernel and that’s the hardest bit for a port. Vendors typically ship drivers that don’t work with multiple kernels, often the code that they release is hard to update. Just because you have the code (and, since the GPL relies on people going to court to enforce it, you might not even have the code) doesn’t mean that you can make it work with a newer kernel. Once you have the kernel working, the rest of the Android stack (Apache / BSD / MIT) typically just works, but being able to build a working kernel for a random Android handset if a huge amount of work. Look at the number of Android phones that are supported by LineageOS as a proportion of the total: I have to check the list carefully before I buy a new phone because you often find the models N and N+2 in a particular line are supported by N+1 isn’t.
Note that the LineageOS “support” page doesn’t indicate “LineageOS will run on this” so much as “somebody on the project is committed to fixing issues with that device.” If you check xda-developers for your phone, you can often find unofficial LineageOS builds. Or even use a Treble image (hardware-independent Android), that’s what I run right now.
But also, my impression is there’s just been an enormous proliferation of phone models. There is no longer any clear targets for porting in a given generation.
God damn, I always get it wrong. You’re right of course, inasmuch as you can swap a kernel on a phone it’s because of freedom to run a modified version, not anything to do with the source code.
OK, but I can’t make money off of AGPL unless I add a paid exclusion. Then I’ll get yelled at for not being truly free. And then I won’t care and I’ll just write proprietary code.
That’s ignoring the already stated issues around RMS being god awful, truly a worst case icon.
Look at it this way. You’ll get yelled at no matter what you do. If you work for an employer–you’ll get yelled at at some point. If you work for yourself and have your own customers–you’ll get yelled at for something or the other. You just need to decide–what are your principles? And that’s what you live with.
I have never ever been yelled at by an employer. Same as a CEO. I feel far more likely to engage in a negative discussion online while producing OSS code for no compensation.
You’ve never had an irate customer from some breakage? Wow, lucky. But the reality for most people is that they have to deal with something like that at some point or the other. If your goal is to fully insulate yourself from all negativity then I don’t see how you’re living in the real world. Also, ‘engage in a negative discussion online’–no one is forcing you to engage. Publishing Free Software doesn’t obligate you to engage with or listen to the opinions of the peanut gallery. You can literally disable GitHub issues, or publish your code on your own website, you don’t even need to use GitHub.
If you don’t want to get into Free Software, obviously don’t. But I don’t see the point of making up excuses.
I’m not fully insulating myself from all negativity. I’m just pointing out that I can get paid money and have less negativity relative to doing work in OSS for free.
But I don’t see the point of making up excuses.
I mean, it’s not excuses… it’s reasons. And a lot of people share these reasons, which is why most people don’t give a shit about building “free” software - the reason they use github is because it’s a career booster/ the easiest way to distribute.
In lots of occidental countries, political positions seen as “centre” twenty years ago are now seen as “extreme left” because the left of twenty years ago was called extremist.
Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with the cancer.
I agree with the sentiment, but not sure rallying behind RMS (philosophy only since the rest is toxic, or not) is the way to go. After all, he failed! Corporate open source has won, and maybe someone more flexible, more capable could have prevented that, or made it less of a total victory for corporations.
Yes, he saw this coming, but I seriously doubt he was the only one.
It wasn’t RMS who failed but the world and its technologists failed him as a collective. He was the only one who stood against proprietary and closed systems till the end, he was the only one who spoke against surveillance capitalism and big tech. He was the one who came up with GPL licensing but the others still kept using the permissive ones.
Trying to throttle the only voice of sanity in the ecosystem is in dishonest taste and furthering the agenda of the crony capitalists.
It wasn’t RMS who failed but the world and its technologists failed him as a collective.
Just so you’re aware: when people accuse the FSF and the Free Software movement of having devolved from a serious advocacy movement to a mere cult of personality, this is the sort of thing they mean. Declaring that the Leader does not fail (He only ever is failed by others) is an absolutely gigantic red flag, and I hope one day you’re able to see that and understand it.
Then let’s rephrase and put it like this: powerful vested interests made sure that the Free Software movement (the one that tries to guarantee the freedoms of users of the software) was stigmatized as ‘hippie commie business-unfriendly cancer’, while ardently pushing their ‘Open Source’ alternative which allowed businesses to fully exploit the unpaid labour of OSS creators.
It’s not about the person, it’s about the software movement.
ardently pushing their ‘Open Source’ alternative which allowed businesses to fully exploit the unpaid labour of OSS creators.
So, you are not in favor of granting the freedom to run the software, for any purpose?
Because what I am getting from this is that you think either that certain entities should not receive that freedom, or that certain purposes should not be permitted.
I don’t know how you’re getting that from what I said, because in many cases the simple solution is the already known one: strong copyleft reciprocating licenses which preserve software freedom.
Also, from your response, what I’m getting is that you actually do understand that it’s not about the ‘cult of personality’, there are wider commercial interests at work here.
I don’t know how you’re getting that from what I said
Well, you seem to think that certain entities, or certain purposes, don’t deserve the right to run the software. I’m not sure how exactly that’s compatible with the notion of Free Software as promulgated by Richard Stallman and the FSF.
strong copyleft reciprocating licenses which preserve software freedom.
Well, I’m one of those awful terrible exploitative people who supports “Open Source” (vade retro!). But I’m also a producer of software released under licenses that the FSF does, for the time being, consider to be Free even if they would prefer I slap something stronger on there, so I guess I also am one of the exploited.
The vast majority of my horrible exploitative leeching consumption consists of installing and running things as they are and without modifying their source, though, so even if it was all AGPL’d I still wouldn’t incur any legally-forced obligation to distribute any of my own code reciprocally if I didn’t want to.
And I don’t really feel the need to have you, or Stallman, or the FSF, come rushing to rescue me and my software from being “exploited”. If someone finds utility in code I wrote, that’s great! That’s why I released it to the public! Even if literally zero people ever contribute anything back to a particular project of mine, that’s OK. I write things to solve problems I have, and release them in case anyone else has the same problem, and I don’t feel a need to load them up with draconian rules and restrictions and manifestoes as a condition of use. I just want to have the problem solved and move on.
Perhaps it’s the deontologist lurking in me, who understands that people should do the right thing for the right reason, and also understands that “because I forced you to through my license terms” is not really the right reason. But also perhaps it’s that, in between our regular meetings in smoky back rooms with our corporate overlords, us “Open Source” folks do have some decent communities built around mutual contribution, and what I like about those communities is that people are there because they want to be there and they feel it’s right for them to be there.
Also, from your response, what I’m getting is that you actually do understand that it’s not about the ‘cult of personality’
I have very serious concerns about the cult of personality around Stallman, and I am a strong critic of the way the FSF does not really seem to be preparing for a world in which he is no longer around to be eternally re-elected as the leader.
there are wider commercial interests at work here.
You seem to think that just because you don’t feel exploited, others are not. Given your interest in philosophy, I’m surprised that you fell into this fallacy of thinking that your experience must be the universal one. Just to give one example–you surely must have heard of the log4shell vulnerability? Maybe you heard about how the log4j team had to spend their Christmas 2021 under intense pressure, working round the clock to patch that vulnerability, while facing massive online scrutiny and criticism?
you seem to think that certain entities, or certain purposes, don’t deserve the right to run the software. I’m not sure how exactly that’s compatible with the notion of Free Software as promulgated by Richard Stallman and the FSF.
You just answered your own question there. That would be incompatible with the notion of Free Software, and hence I don’t think that. What I actually think is that ideally, software freedoms should be reciprocal, not going in a one-way street. But I understand that because of permissive OSS licenses, that’s often not the case. I don’t think anyone should be forced to choose Free Software licenses, but surely you don’t object to my making an argument for why people should choose them?
You seem to think that just because you don’t feel exploited, others are not.
No, what I think is that you do not get to decide for me whether I am exploited or not. You don’t get to make blanket declarations that “Open Source” is corporate exploitation.
I’m surprised that you fell into this fallacy of thinking that your experience must be the universal one.
What I said, and I will quote it for you again in case you forgot, was:
And I don’t really feel the need to have you, or Stallman, or the FSF, come rushing to rescue me and my software from being “exploited”. If someone finds utility in code I wrote, that’s great! That’s why I released it to the public! Even if literally zero people ever contribute anything back to a particular project of mine, that’s OK. I write things to solve problems I have, and release them in case anyone else has the same problem, and I don’t feel a need to load them up with draconian rules and restrictions and manifestoes as a condition of use. I just want to have the problem solved and move on.
I see no good-faith way to get from what I said to what you are claiming I said. Perhaps you would like to try again, this time engaging with what I actually said and not some straw-man you can condescendingly knock down with “oh haven’t you heard of log4shell”.
That would be incompatible with the notion of Free Software, and hence I don’t think that.
So if a corporate entity builds their for-profit business entirely around, say, running unmodified AGPL software, so that they never incur a legal obligation to contribute anything to the upstream projects, do you feel that’s OK? Do you want them to have some type of obligation anyway?
What if instead of a for-profit corporate entity, it’s someone’s personal or community forum that they run for free out of their own pocket? If they just run unmodified AGPL software and thus never incur a legal obligation to contribute anything to the upstream projects, do you feel that’s OK? Do you want them to have some type of obligation anyway?
And if there is a difference between your reactions to those two scenarios, please explain how to reconcile it with the Stallman/FSF definition of software freedom (which would not permit a difference).
What I actually think is that ideally, software freedoms should be reciprocal, not going in a one-way street.
This is incompatible with the Stallman/FSF definition of software freedom, since it apparently does not allow me to run the software for any purpose without incurring obligations. And what sort of “obligations” do you have in mind here? What if someone runs the software unmodified and so doesn’t have any changes they can be compelled to contribue back? What if they’re not a programmer and can’t meaningfully contribute code at all? Perhaps instead they could be required to make a monetary contribution to the project in exchange for the legal right to run the software?
You are jumping to conclusions and assuming that I think there are ‘obligations’ which I don’t actually think, and which aren’t specified in any of the GPL licenses anyway. So let me repeat your own words back at you:
I see no good-faith way to get from what I said to what you are claiming I said.
But let’s be clear about it:
if a corporate entity builds their for-profit business entirely around, say, running unmodified AGPL software, so that they never incur a legal obligation to contribute anything to the upstream projects, do you feel that’s OK?
Of course! That’s what it’s there for!
Do you want them to have some type of obligation anyway?
Only the ones imposed by the license of the software they are using. Your imagination seems to be running wild with ideas that I am making up arbitrary obligations on users of Free Software. I am not. This is simply not true. I have said from the beginning:
in many cases the simple solution is the already known one: strong copyleft reciprocating licenses which preserve software freedom.
I would appreciate it if you didn’t put words in my mouth.
‘Open Source’ alternative which allowed businesses to fully exploit the unpaid labour of OSS creators.
If you’re OK with businesses just passively consuming without contributing back (monetarily or otherwise), it seems odd to condemn such consumption as a form of exploitation.
Also, “strong copyleft reciprocating licenses” is not really a clear term – even the most invasive major license (the AGPL) does not require businesses to support the projects whose software they use, and does not impose any obligations on a business that passively consumes AGPL-licensed software.
So let’s just be absolutely clear. Consider
Scenario 1: Acme Corp., a for-profit corporation, uses OpenSourceCorporateFriendlyCMS, a web-based content-management system licensed 0BSD. Acme Corp. has no need or desire to modify the code of OpenSourceCorporateFriendlyCMS, deploying it as-is. Acme Corp. provides neither monetary nor any other form of support to the developers of OpenSourceCorporateFriendlyCMS.
Scenario 2: Acme Corp., a for-profit corporation, uses FreeAsInFreedomCMS, a web-based content-management system licensed AGPL3. Acme Corp. has no need or desire to modify the code of FreeAsInFreedomCMS, deploying it as-is. Acme Corp. provides neither monetary nor any other form of support to the developers of FreeAsInFreedomCMS.
Can you please explain to me what moral difference, if any, you see between the two scenarios? As far as I can tell, there is no such difference, and any argument that the developers are “exploited” in Scenario 1 applies equally to Scenario 2. So I don’t understand why you think “strong copyleft” somehow prevents developers being “exploited”. Even the most ultra-mega-hyper-copyleft licenses available are susceptible to free riders. I also don’t see why focusing on “businesses” uniquely as exploiters makes sense; either the software is available to everyone, to run for any purpose, or it isn’t.
If you cherry-pick the perfect scenario, you can of course poke holes in any general statement. I’m not making a statement that covers 100% of every scenario, I am talking about the most common forms of exploitation, and I already mentioned an example of what I mean–corporations angrily pressuring the log4j devs to patch the log4shell vulnerability (for free) over Christmas 2021. Surely we agree about this?
I am talking about the most common forms of exploitation, and I already mentioned an example of what I mean–corporations angrily pressuring the log4j devs to patch the log4shell vulnerability (for free) over Christmas 2021
So… there aren’t different classes of users when it comes to just obtaining the software, but there might be when it comes to ongoing access? If I as a private citizen who does not contribute (monetarily or otherwise) to a project ask for a bugfix, is that morally different from I as an employee of a company that does not contribute (monetarily or otherwise) asking for a bugfix?
What if private-citizen me is quite well-off and corporate-employee me works for a small struggling company that’s trying to do good in the world?
Also, I don’t see how the license of the software would affect the morality of someone asking for a bugfix. Whether it’s 0BSD or AGPL3, there are going to be users who are either unwilling or unable to develop a fix themselves and will ask the maintainers to do it.
So can you elaborate more on where this apparently-clear-to-you line is that divides the “exploitation” from the non-“exploitation”?
If you need someone to explain morality to you, I’m afraid this is a larger conversation than just open source. One of the basic assumptions of my engagement here is that at least we agree on what exploitation looks like. If you first answer my question on whether you agree with my example, then at least we have a baseline.
Suppose a company – we’ll call them “Bed Cat” – puts a lot of time and money and other resources into producing a polished distribution of a bunch of Free software. And they make this work by also offering support contracts where they will help fix problems and track down and resolve bugs and so on, in exchange for money.
And suppose that another company – let’s call them “Pocky” – starts a competing business whose sole purpose is repackaging Bed Cat’s work.
Is that “exploitation”?
If it is, how does copyleft prevent it? If it isn’t “exploitation”, how can we differentiate it from, say, businesses leaning on other maintainers to fix bugs without being paid for it?
If ‘Pocky’ is charging their users money for a support contract and actually providing support services like troubleshooting, documentation, finding and patching bugs and security issues etc.–then they are actually providing value for money. That’s not exploitation.
If they are just repackaging the upstream software, reselling it under their own label, and pointing their customers at the upstream support forums or channels, then they are not adding any value. That’s exploitation.
If they are just repackaging the upstream software, reselling it under their own label, and pointing their customers at the upstream support forums or channels, then they are not adding any value. That’s exploitation.
OK. So suppose that at least some – possibly quite a lot! – of the software in question is distributed under copyleft licenses. You seem to think those somehow prevent this kind of “exploitation”, but I’m not seeing how they do that. Since, y’know, this exact situation is going down right now.
Red Hat puts significant effort into polishing and packaging a distribution of software, much of which is under copyleft licenses, and charges for ongoing access to their support and fixes. Other people take advantage of repackagings of that to get the fixes without offering anything to those who did the work of fixing.
This seems to be exactly the sort of thing you were willing to call “exploitation”. And copyleft licensing did not prevent it.
That’s a very vague assertion. When I said ‘Can you provide an example’, I meant a concrete, verifiable (with sourcing) one that matches with the definition I gave you earlier. Not vague hearsay.
If you’re deflecting that a description of the ongoing RHEL-versus-repackagers kerfuffle is “vague hearsay”, then I don’t believe that you are participating in this discussion in good faith.
Sorry but you’re the one engaging in bad faith. You are trying to launder the ‘repackager kerfluffle’ as somehow meeting my very specific definition of exploitation, while providing zero evidence or logic for exactly how it does that. You have not shown that Rocky or Alma are simply rebranding RHEL and passing on all support burden to upstream. Unless you show your work, your arguments don’t carry any weight.
Every time I propose an example, you redefine “exploitation”.
But I will put the question as bluntly as I can. You offered this definition a few comments ago:
If they are just repackaging the upstream software, reselling it under their own label, and pointing their customers at the upstream support forums or channels, then they are not adding any value. That’s exploitation.
You also appear to believe that copyleft licenses can somehow do something (unspecified what or how) to prevent “exploitation”.
Explain, in detail, with specific examples, how precisely you believe copyleft licenses achieve this, since repackaging, reselling, and disclaiming any additional support or warranty all are explicitly permitted by copyleft licenses.
Hey, I didn’t say that copyleft licenses are a perfect solution, but they are better at preventing exploitation of FOSS maintainers than every other solution that has been presented so far. The more corporate-ish and exploitative a company gets, the more allergic it gets to GPL. Just look at Google for example.
So Google runs on Linux, but because they don’t directly commit the kernel source to their monorepo, you think that causes it not to count as using it?
Of course not. Google is well-known as using and contributing to Linux. I just gave one example of the kind of thinking that Corporate Legal has about GPL. I used to work on a project where we were asked to stop using the pm2 process manager for Node.js because it was AGPL-licensed (despite pm2 itself not touching the codebase). I personally went in and replaced it with systemd. I am just saying that this is the kind of attitude you will find towards GPL in larger and more risk-averse lawyer-driven companies. Because of the GPL’s design and reputation, it’s a self-correcting problem.
I think you’ve highlighted one of the things that I find most off-putting about the GPL and friends: it depends on poor software engineering to be able to achieve the goals that it’s advocates claim. If I create a modular component then code that interfaces with it can extend it in arbitrary ways without being a derived work of my code and without modifying my code. As such, consumers of it that integrate it in complex systems have no requirement to do anything that a permissive license wouldn’t also require, except that they must distribute the (unmodified) source code for my components.
In a micro services world, it makes no difference to the overall license of a logical program if one component that handles RPCs is BSDL, GPL, or AGPL. The AGPL version may expose an endpoint that allows a user to download the source code for that component but it isn’t required to let them download the code for the other hundred modular components in the system.
This is intrinsic to how these licenses work with copyright. They are not EULAs (any EULA violate’s the FSF’s freedom 0) and so they can only restrict how you can distribute the code or how what you can do with derived works.
This is the first time I’m hearing that linking against shared libraries is ‘poor software engineering’. Actually it gets even funnier if you look at how the microservices world is filled with bad practices and huge inefficiency.
he was the only one who spoke against surveillance capitalism and big tech
This is kind of an insane thing to say. He was the only one with a platform to say this, but a multitude of people were against big tech (remember Micro$oft on Slashdot?) and surveillance capitalism as well.
Stallman is mostly unaffected by the worst of modern privacy-invading tech because it’s either on mobile devices that he refuses to use due to being insufficiently Free, or on the web which he uses through a weird workflow to avoid accidentally running non-Free JavaScript. That insulates him in ways that make him a relatively useless and uninformed advocate.
I’m not going to try to rank them, but yeah, Cory was also one of those voices who was around from the beginning, very much speaking against all this stuff. In many cases it was him who originally connected specific abuses of technology to the big picture, even if other people wound up driving the conversations around them.
Open Source was an attempt at forming a licensing cartel that collapsed into a software-freedom black hole. Releasing Netscape as free software happened to be beneficial, so Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond worked overtime to try and secure a trademark for a term that allowed them to resell a cheapened GPL that only benefits exploiters. It was all about cash flow and the rejection of their trademark request resulted in a meaningless term being pushed by an organisation that couldn’t enforce it to people who realised they didn’t have to pay to use it or follow any rules.
Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with the cancer.
Annnnnnd there you go. The anti-capitalism popular amongst a vocal subset of FSF supporters is pretty obvious to casual observers, and it turns people off. I believe it was a significant factor in the rise of the Open Source movement versus Free Software.
Most of us enjoy the prosperity generated by capitalism. We enjoy the greater life expectancy, the probability of eliminating absolute poverty worldwide in the course of this century, etc. etc. Most of us are proud to work for a living to make and sell products and services that other people will choose to pay for.
You go side with the cancer; I’ll side with the oncologists.
You don’t have a point; points require evidence. You have an opinion: you are “turn[ed] off” by anti-capitalist sentiment. Okay, be turned off; software is invariant to your opinions. Free Software forms communes because of the underlying logical relations between market participants, and any privatization of the commons will eventually be overcome by the sheer affordability of software given away for gratis.
You have an opinion: you are “turn[ed] off” by anti-capitalist sentiment.
That wasn’t the point @duncan_bayne was making. The point was that many people are turned off by anti-capitalist sentiment, and whether this opinion is valid/correct/whatever is irrelevant. If we’re going to be effective advocates for free software, step 1 is literally to get the other person to start listening to you. If there’s perceived anti-capitalistic sentiment in the free software community, you’re failing at step 1 for a large swath of the population that believes in capitalism. It doesn’t matter how good your software ethics ideas are (and they’re very good!) if people aren’t listening.
The point isn’t about market forces - it’s about rhetoric and rhetorical effectiveness.
And that’s kind of Corbin’s point–duncan_bayne is all about caring about the rhetoric and not about the useful substance of the matter. It’s caring about optics over caring about doing the right thing and preserving the freedoms of software users. What I don’t get is how can anyone even call this off-putting at this point–we have seen the walled gardens of the app stores divide up the internet for profit. We’ve seen OSS maintainers exploited while corporations profit on scales unheard of. Apple’s cash flow is more than that of most countries.
We have literally seen the scenarios that were warned about. Only the most self-deluded people can deny that this is a worse system.
What I mean is: the very real concerns the FSF has about software freedoms are orthogonal to anticapitalism.
However (as you can see from the comments on this story!) the Free Software movement has a strong, vocal, and visible contingent of anticapitalists whose rhetoric turns off people who would otherwise become your allies.
Bluntly, if every conversation about software walled gardens and open APIs turns into rants about third world water shortages and privilege callouts, you’re always going to remain marginalised.
I personally care enough about software freedoms that I’m willing to put up with the anticapitalists to work with and use Free Software. Many people - and especially the capitalists you’re supposedly trying to convert - aren’t and don’t.
I’m afraid I don’t see the ‘strong, vocal, and visible contingent of anticapitalists’ that you are so afraid of. I saw maybe one or two comments with an anticapitalist flavour, but almost every comment that talks about commercial use understands that the GPL is compatible with commerce–many people have pointed that out here.
If you see only the thing that you are afraid of, instead of the whole picture–maybe consider that it’s your own confirmation bias?
I’m afraid I don’t see the ‘strong, vocal, and visible contingent of anticapitalists’ that you are so afraid of.
I mean, I’m not afraid of them exactly - it’s the same sort of feeling I get when people start explaining how they think racialism explains third world debt, or how they think feminism causes economic decline. More of a frustration that otherwise smart humans are adopting such bloodstained ideology.
I’d be afraid of them if they had guns and gulags.
But I don’t get how you can fail to see them, with the tenor of the comments on this story alone.
I thought about this for a bit. It’s a great point, with strong argumentation. There’s one slight flaw, though; Free Software must exist before we can ask others to use it. Thus, before step one, there’s a step zero: produce Free Software. And this zeroth step necessarily forms a commune, so step one will always be about convincing folks to use the fruits of communist labor.
There’s one slight flaw, though; Free Software must exist before we can ask others to use it.
Sure, but the ask doesn’t have to be to use the software. You could ask people to demand better of companies, for example, or ask them to demand systemic change from their government like less aggressive IP law. Of course the end goal is for everyone to be using free software but there’s lots of intermediate steps before we get there.
And this zeroth step necessarily forms a commune, so step one will always be about convincing folks to use the fruits of communist labor.
I also don’t really buy this. E.g. Sentry and Red Hat are counterexamples. Maybe you could argue that if you look closely at the communities formed around these pieces of software they resemble communes (I don’t really know enough to say whether this is the case), but even if that’s so, I simply wouldn’t frame it this way to people who I know aren’t into communism - I often heavily emphasize the idea that free software can be sold because I know this is a common concern people have (whether or not it can actually work at the scale of an entire economy). Of course I wouldn’t emphasize that nearly as much if I was talking to someone into socialism or communism because I know they’re far less likely to have that concern. Remember, any writing 101 class worth anything will tell you to have a specific audience in mind when writing an essay - same goes for verbal communication.
Of course this assumes that you want to be maximally effective at advocating for free software at the expense of advocating for communism. If you don’t want to do that, it’s perfectly valid to explicitly note that the ideas of free software are separate from those of communism - “I personally am a communist, but others would argue that free software can also function in a capitalist system, in xyz way”. Now even if you haven’t been able to convince them that communism is the right system, you’ve at least given yourself a better shot of convincing them that free software is the way to go. This clarifying statement is what’s so often missing in free software advocacy from communism-leaning folks, and that leads to the phenomenon @duncan_bayne was referring to in the root comment.
Red Hat isn’t a counterexample; they gave away so much of RHEL that there is an entire Wikipedia article about forks of RHEL. I recommend you read my linked Mastodon thread; I go into the economics briefly and justify why marginally free goods will always form what I call “Cartesian communes.” Each of us can contribute Free Software according to our ability, and we use whatever Free Software we might happen to need; this is the textbook Marxist view of abundant goods.
It’s the developing world enjoying the most growth in prosperity, on the whole. Projections are that absolute poverty could be eliminated, across the entire world, within this century.
Don’t post this stuff here, this is a community about computing.
Unfortunately, it’s very much on-topic for this article. RMS and the FSF were rendered irrelevant by the Open Source movement in large part because the latter wasn’t visibly dominated by anti-capitalists.
Projections are that absolute poverty could be eliminated, across the entire world, within this century.
Projections are that by 2050 over half of the population will, not could experience water scarcity at least one month per year. Freshwater demand will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030. These are best-case predictions based on governments suddenly enforcing dramatic eco-authoritarian action. “Eliminating poverty” doesn’t mean anything when your millionaire Rothbardian sweatshop boys don’t have the water available to survive. I love Von Mises and I love SEK III, but the facts of the matter are that mercantilist, corporatist, statist etc. capitalist astroturfing and propagandising has left us with a planet that will be uninhabitable unless people take explicitly anti-profit motive stances on the procession of software and hardware development.
That prosperity you speak of is build on unsustainable practices that are only kept in place because “line has to go up”. THAT’s what people dislike about capitalism. And it’s not people in Congo coming out of absolute poverty to buy their first car that will change it, or make it a positive.
You realize China - not capitalist - has already eliminated absolute poverty internally, and that if you exclude China, growth in the rest of the developing world doesn’t look so hot, right?
Usually, it’s two different groups of people claiming China is one or the other, though.
Historians, economists, and anarchists claim China is state capitalist (though they may disagree on the start date.)
Chinese politicians, and politicians from opposing countries claim China is (still) communist, though for different reasons (deriving legitimacy from Mao and to paint them as the enemy, respectively.)
has already eliminated absolute poverty internally
Ignoring whether China is communist, state capitalist, or something else, that is a claim that could only possibly be made by someone who has never visited the country or read anything about it that is not CCP propaganda.
I’ve been to China. The only reason the party is still in power is because of what they brought to the table: prosperity (not for all, of course) and an end to Mao-style famines.
I can bet that as soon as that goes away (and the cracks are starting to show) so does the Party.
Modern China is most assuredly capitalist. Chinese billionaires like Alibaba’s Jack Ma do not arise under socialism.
If China was communist under Mao, that day is long gone. And that’s without even getting into the debate about whether 20th c.“socialist” countries were actually state capitalist.
Amusingly, Stallman himself, at least in his early Free Software writings, was a pretty clear and ardent capitalist – the proposed ideal world was one where software freedom would create a thriving market for programmers-for-hire who would fix/customize software to whatever specifications you wanted.
Oh, yeah - RMS himself has repeatedly stated that he’s not anti-capitalist, and that Free Software itself is specifically not communist.
A few decades ago he wrote:
The best analogy is with the environmental movement, which is not against corporations per se but is against business practices that pollute.
It’s a good analogy (perhaps better than RMS realised!), because the environmentalist movement has almost entirely been captured, worldwide, by anti-capitalists for their own purposes.
Edited to add: What RMS describes is baaascially a gig economy for programmers. Not that that’s bad, but it is funny when you consider the political leanings of many FSF supporters ;)
The difference between a pleasant situation with lots of freedom for individual tech workers and a gig economy - which I would, in fact, describe as bad - is willingness to take collective action. The writer’s guild, for example, is the sort of thing that I could see working for programmers. Individual writers work wherever they want but they still get the benefits of collective bargaining.
Of course, that doesn’t bear on capitalism or opposition to it at all, really. It’s a labor topic, which would exist regardless of the economic system.
In fact it’s literally a gig economy, because RMS has stated that musicians shouldn’t make money selling copyrighted recorded music but by playing in concerts!
If you include greenwashing, it would be more accurate to say that the environmentalist movement has almost entirely been captured, worldwide, by capitalists for their own purposes.
There’s a cottage industry of developers/consultants around most “open core” systems. Problem is that the hardcore free software folks are against “open core”, as it often ends up with more stuff getting closed up over time.
Yeah, and I think that’s actually a big part of why the Free Software movement failed. Permissive licenses were always intended as a giveaway to exploiters, but the “four freedoms” kept GPL software from having a moat against corporate control. I think Stallman intended that GPL’ed libraries would form that moat, but then that got watered down with the LGPL, and the industry went on to standardize on permissive licenses anyway.
What I’m saying is that the part of the article I disagree with is that copyleft is enough. It’s clearly not. We need some kind of copyfarleft or collective software commons, though I’m not sure licensing is the right place to go about this.
The anti-capitalism popular amongst a vocal subset of FSF supporters is pretty obvious to casual observers, and it turns people off. I believe it was a significant factor in the rise of the Open Source movement versus Free Software.
I have believed this for years, and it’s why I think the inclusion of freedom 2 (the right to distribute copies) was a mistake. IMO in order to gain the benefits of free software as conceptualized by Stallman/the FSF you need to enshrine the right to distribute patches, because otherwise practically it’s difficult to benefit from others’ expertise. But I don’t really see how you require the right to distribute the entire program. (There’s practical nuance in here that I’m ignoring though; for example, at one point is a big patch simply reproducing a significant chunk of the whole program?)
What you’d need there is an end-user friendly way of applying the patches too… I don’t even like compiling other people’s stuff from source myself, and the GPL is ideally all about the end user’s freedom.
Actually, come to think of it, it shouldn’t really be called “free software” since it isn’t the software that is free, but rather more like “end user rights”.
Hmmmm. That distinction might be the answer to the question I asked (to much flamage) back in around 2008. That is, how can I help my customers help each other without providing for free redistribution. A patch based license might have been the answer.
Some of the things he predicted came true, and most of them have benefitted us all immensely. His solutions would not lead to “the world we have now only with source code” it would’ve lead to a world with far less, and far, far, worse software. I don’t care how many times neckbeards say “the license doesn’t forbid you from selling it”, the GPL means you can’t sell it.
If you can’t sell a thing that requires expertise and time to create, it will only ever be a hobby of the rich, which means far, far fewer programmers, and far fewer programs.
If you can’t sell software that takes time and money to maintain, attracting new users becomes a massive cost. If more users is a cost rather than a boon, there is a disincentive to make software that is useable, and those who write the software nobody likes will be the most likely to keep writing software.
If anybody who touches your software in any way is entitled to the source code (arguably the general direction of the GPL over time), then you will not pay programmers to create user-facing software that you believe gives you an edge over your competitors.
RMSs dream of a GPL world and a general acceptance that all proprietary anythings are morally wrong is not some place I’d move to from here, not for all the tea in China.
If you can’t sell a thing that requires expertise and time to create
You can sell the thing that takes expertise and time to create and a lot of companies have made a lot of money around this. You can’t sell the thing that is basically free to create (a copy of the first thing). Open source exists as a distinct concept from Free Software in a large part because it recognises this economic reality: writing software is expensive, copying software is cheap, and a good business model needs to focus on compensating people for the former, not the latter.
I don’t care how many times neckbeards say “the license doesn’t forbid you from selling it”, the GPL means you can’t sell it.
Case in point, Grsecurity. They are GPL in every way, and yet they’ve been constantly slandered online because when they sell the code their customers sign a contract stating that customers will not distribute that code.
Free software advocates have attacked them for years (even before this, when they had an out of tree patch to the kernel) because it wasn’t “free in the right way”. God forbid that one of the most advanced security research projects attempts to take any kind of ownership over itself.
Beautifully written and inspiring. The current state of affairs is really sad. I’ll try to do my part with what I write, but I’m also pessimistic as I see the troves of new software hackers using all proprietary tools to develop “open source” software that will just end up being locked away. “Open core” is probably a more apt term I’ve heard looking at software like android, vs code, and so many others.
Speaking of the devil, a link posted to lobste.rs points to writefreesoftware.org which puts both copyleft and permissive licenses under the same umbrella of free software.
I’ll try to do my part with what I write, but I’m also pessimistic as I see the troves of new software hackers using all proprietary tools to develop “open source” software that will just end up being locked away. “Open core” is probably a more apt term I’ve heard looking at software like android, vs code, and so many others.
To me this just indicates that “free software”, and even “open source” simply does not resonate with most developers. It sure doesn’t resonate with me. How am I supposed to sustainably write free software? Donations? What if someone forks my code? I can’t protect it, that wouldn’t be free! If I use a true copyleft license and I want users I need to create exclusions. If I want to get paid I need more exclusions.
A very small number of people a few decades ago were able to turn “I write copyleft software” into “and I get paid for it” and we’re all supposed to follow suit as if that’s a repeatable model.
One model I think might be interesting is where you’re not permitted to distribute it for less than you paid for it. So if you got a free copy, sure you can distribute more free copies. But if you paid $9.99, you need to charge at least $9.99 per copy too. At least then the original won’t be automatically out-competed on price by one of its own distributors.
Though I actually think even better would be that you must pay your own upstream source the same amount for each copy you make. So then if you want an actual profit, you will need to mark the price up a bit, and each fork that does will then justify their higher price (hopefully) with the value they added to it.
Is this “free software”? Well, everybody has the same right to the source to modify for their own personal use, and can still distribute said modifications right down to the end user, so one could certainly make the argument that it is still free-as-in-freedom.
That’s the age old problem for which I unfortunately have no solution. A solution to the problem you’ve indicated would solve quite many problems! This is one of the many cases where pocketbooks and ideologies don’t get along :( I really wish they did.
At this point, the best I can think of is “take my code and do whatever you want with it” may not be the best options, which is where we seem to be heading. Maybe a better alternative is “use my program, but if you make any changes, give it back! Do with your part as you see fit, but my part will remain in the commons” (to use the terminology of the article). I think LGPL does this and I still have yet to review MPL, but it seems to do this as well from what I’ve heard.
If everyone is nice and respectful to each other and don’t exploit others and not be greedy, we won’t have these problems :P /s
despite all of the weird sexual allegations (of which there are many), rms is unfit to lead the movement he helped create because he is unwilling to change or deviate in any way. he is responsible for stagnating and killing the free software movement.
but stallman is an old man now. the world moved on without him. he beats the same war drum, but nobody is listening. groups of capital formed, and two libertarians started the open source movement[1] as a corporate-friendly free software alternative. and they won.
Interesting. I believe societies need “extremists” like RMS in order to make progress. That doesn’t mean that they should end up completely giving into the extremists’ proposals. But they should consider them and use this to renegotiate societal contracts and settle on counter proposals.
RMS is not the inspiring leader the masses need. Capitalism is not the pure evil the article may make it out to be.
Bashing Stallman became a trend; multiplied by viral videos of him eating some dead skin off his feet in public didn’t help with general image, and clearly he is a person whose views don’t align with lots of people or even outright scandalous.
Yes, we want to see leaders of movements as role models and ideally they should appear as perfect/acceptable as possible, but to all that critique and rationale I always ask - where were/are those “acceptable” people that are ready to fight and promote the free software idea? We got the best we could back then, and in general that kind of evangelism is not some 1-in-a-billion magic trait, it is essentially an applied effort and determination.
We chose or elect or get leaders and they’re usually far from ideal and in my opinion if the society churns out someone that (arguably) unfit for the leadership - this is the best we can do. It says just as much about us all.
Society is like open market; if someone doesn’t like something they can do something better and come on top.
And the article in general gives the right vibe (at least for me). We’re losing freedom built on top of stuff free by design, and while the the moral aspect is subjective it is a fact that the whole process literally hinders progress.
I think a set of financial/revenue models for non-corporate-backed jurisdiction-agnostic Open Source development model (and corresponding non-profit orgs helping to implement and execute these model) – is the next step in the evolution of OSS.
I am not sure who the right leaders are or will be for this next step, but it is not typical that they will be the same ones that lead and inspired the first step.
RMS insistence in turning the free software movement into a personality cult of himself has whittled it down to a small troop of true believers and left it with a few legacy codebases (that is mostly maintained by corporate interests to boot) while being completely absent in any technology that appeared during the last 30 years.
If anything is needed it’s fresh blood, and that is not going to appear by making holy writ of the teachings of Saint Richard.
the “personality cult” thing never resonated with me. in everything I’ve seen from RMS he stays 100% focused on the ideas.
He hasn’t fostered a new generation of leaders nor shared the spotlight with them. Whenever someone gets invited to speak about free software, it’s inevitably just him.
I suspect the free software movement as we know it will die if it can’t move past him. After all, the world’s already moved past the same ideas he’s had for ~40 years now.
I think the free software movement “as we know it” will inevitably die, precisely because it will have to move past RMS eventually. But I think the relative stasis of free software thought is a testament to the effectiveness of RMS in spreading the ideas that he thinks are important for the movement, as well as to the relative lack of effectiveness or dedication or imagination among other potential leaders.
If the “moving past RMS” that you desire entails changing the philosophy or the content of the message, then why not share how you think it should change rather than complaining that RMS is the speaker who conference attendees want to hear.
Seems a bit unfair to ask the autist to do community building.
edit: I acknowledge that this comment is at the very least simplified too far. There are parts of it that I would/will defend, but autists are not across-the-board incapable of building communities.
Roles have constraints - if you stammer, you can’t be a politician. If you’re afraid of dogs, you can’t be a vet.
If you’re autistic, maybe community building isn’t a thing we should expect you’re good at, or place a lot of faith on.
Hi! Mod here. I’m autistic. I didn’t build Lobsters but I have built other places.
Let’s not generalize like that, please.
(Edit: Actually I should say this with the hat on.)
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Autism has effects on people’s ability to do things, right? Is it unreasonable to change your expectation of somebody’s skill on that basis? Or are you just asserting that one shouldn’t exclude that autists can community-build?
That second thing, more or less. There are important subtleties here, and I apologize that it’s too late at night for me to get into them right now. My main concern with the remarks up-thread is that they oversimplify a complex situation. We can discuss more tomorrow if it’s helpful.
Sometimes it’s useful to take a charitable interpretation so as not to derail a thread. OP did not say that autistic people can’t be community builders, but he did stop short of explicitly affirming it, possibly in the interest of brevity. I think it’s good to assume people are sensible and respectful at least in how they think, regardless of how much they express. I would bet OP and everyone reading this understands that autistic people can be different in different ways, and being autistic doesn’t preclude someone from building communities. Whether leaving this out is an “oversimplification” I guess depends on your view of how many readers might read a generalization into OP’s comment.
I do like to make that assumption in general, and I appreciate the feedback you’re offering, it’s important that we be able to have this kind of conversation about site policies.
The remark was just very close to certain things that the autistic community is very used to hearing, and very tired of having to be patient with. If this comes up again I’ll try to draw a more nuanced line policy-wise; it was late at night and the choice was offer the gentlest correction I could come up with, or let it pass. Letting it pass didn’t feel fair to other autistic Lobsters users, of whom I personally know quite a few.
Ah, sorry, thanks.
no worries, thanks likewise <3
I didn’t mean that autistic people can’t community build by default, I stressed that maybe it’s a thing that has conditions attached in that case, or other modifiers. Apologies if it didn’t come out like that.
Thanks very much for responding. I appreciate the clarification, and I’m sure others will too.
One core aspect of internet projects is that you can just go and do something. “Talk is cheap, show me the code.” I think Stallman personifies this idea. There are many skills involved in community management, and we tend to look at an organization like the FSF or GNU and assume that they have these skills covered, but as far as I can tell Stallman isn’t “taking up a slot” here, isn’t pulling the spotlight on himself or claiming to try and engage in community building. In fact, I believe people keep spotlighting him because he has such a purity of focus.
So my argument is just that we shouldn’t judge him for his failure to do something that he has never signed up for or claimed interest in. (If Stallman in fact has taken responsibility for community-building around the FSF/GPL, I retract this point.)
And of course, this goes double if you have difficulty with a skill for some reason. Then the calls just become cruel.
If I want to run a GPL project, do I have an obligation to be good at handling bug reports, or managing contributors, or selecting a successor? No, I don’t have any obligation. I just write code and publish it. As long as I don’t misrepresent my skills, I have done everything that can reasonably be expected of me. If people then look to me to do these things, and start blaming me for failing to do them, in my opinion that’s on them.
Doesn’t his position at FSF imply community-building, “thought leadership” and so on? How can you be the founder of a foundation and not create a community around it, or not think that’s part of the job? How can you start a movement for Free Software without aiming for community building around said movement?
As far as I can tell, at any point in his career, rms has just gone and done things. I don’t think this creates an obligation to do other things, even seemingly related. The disagreement then would be whether starting a movement or a foundation implies an obligation to socially maintain it.
The deciding factor for me is, I honestly don’t think anyone who decided to follow rms was, you know, deluded or misled about where his focus lay. Stallman strikes me as a very WYSIWYG sort of person.
Those are two different things, and my sense is that his position aligns with the latter and not the former.
Your incredulity suggests you think someone who founds an organization ought to do all those things. Does that imply that people who aren’t able to do those things also shouldn’t be founders or leaders of any kind?
What makes you think he didn’t? Did you take a look at the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation and conclude that it all just magically appeared without any community behind it? All the GNU/FSF mailing lists, events, campaigns, initiatives, and other resources:
These all don’t count, in your opinion? Or are you saying that he himself didn’t do all that, but other people did? Then, did those other people appear by magic? Are they not part of the Free Software movement/community and don’t they believe in its ideals? They’re what, all paid stooges? I don’t understand your logic.
From what I hear, the (small) community that grew in the 90s is shrinking by the year, and a lot of people were horrified that someone with his history of opinions and actions got invited back after the whole Epstein thing.
Being inflexible and fundamentalist is not how movements get shit done, or communities grow. In my opinion he’s not attracting people to the cause, just collecting the ones that already think like him to it. As a consequence, the FSF grows increasingly irrelevant as dogma just persists unchallenged and dialogue with others boils down to “I can’t use this computer because the firmware on the hard drive isn’t free”.
Come on, now you are just splitting hairs. You are playing with words. How exactly did those people start thinking like him? Did they all spontaneously happen to come up with the exact same idea about strong copyleft licensing? If not, maybe admit that some people heard his message and joined the community because it made sense to them?
I saw Stallman at 31C3 in 2014. It was pretty weird.
At the “Dead Tree Lovers” assembly (the book club) there was this small section with some old furniture, a bookshelf and a chair. I vividly remember RMS sitting on the chair with 6 or 7 people sitting on the floor in front of him. A women was serving him tea while sitting beside him. Everyone very intently listening to everything he said.
It was very much a culty vibe watching that.
Oh no! People listening to speaker, what next? D:
Come on man, at least talk about something juicy. Where are the Eyes Wide Shut “black tie, no pants” backroom Stallman parties?
An ESR-only invitation, apparently.
https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1382859041941057537?lang=en
It’s not like hotel room orgies comprised of awkward nerds are unprecedented at sci fi conventions.
That’s actually incredibly funny.
RMS goes to congress? I never knew
He held a talk during 31C3.
https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6123_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412291130_-_freedom_in_your_computer_and_in_the_net_-_richard_stallman/playlist
oh, I completely missed that back then.
He puts a hard disk platter on his head and calls himself a saint. How is this focusing 100% on ideas?
Fair enough lol, but I don’t think that demonstrates an “insistence in turning the free software movement into a personality cult.” For that you would expect some of that to seep into the speeches he gives to the general public, which are focused on growing the movement by spreading the ideas, and without any playful costumes.
The “cult” is that he lives rent free in the heads of detractors who cannot imagine what it’s like to not be a social climber and crowd pleaser.
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As much as I like Free Software philosophy and copyleft (a lot), trying to rebuild RMS’ image and return to 90’s/early-2000’s Free Software Advocacy is fighting the last war. I think that RMS is an effective ideological leader, but a poor administrative leader: I was flabbergasted to find that in
20152005, the LLVM project basically offered to assign copyright to the FSF, but the offer was lost to Stallman’s idiosyncratic email-handling practices.What might fighting the current war look like?
Isn’t Guile dynamically typed and lacking in type hints? That’s not much better, it’s worse in a lot of ways.
Yeah, poor choice of words on my part. I was more speculating about why people don’t like Nix-the-language, and at least there’s a decent amount of scheme libraries available to pick up, whereas Nix had to implement its own libraries to get off the ground.
So, guile and nix-lang are both dynamically typed without type hints. Guile at least has explicit record types though, which guix uses throughout, so you get explicit type errors instead of failures to access some map key. It’s not static typing but I’d count it as a pretty definite improvement.
I would argue that it looks like re-evaluating the AGPL, since one of its primary use cases is to do exactly the thing the Free Software movement is supposed to abhor and have been founded in reaction against: using copyright to enforce a commercial monopoly over the software.
VC-backed companies that suddenly switch their software from permissive license to AGPL (a trend lately!) are not doing it because of a deep commitment to Free Software ideals. They’re doing it because they want everyone else to serve as free labor for their commercial product (which, as the copyright holders, they can use as they please without being bound to release their own proprietary/internal improvements, while everyone else who runs the software must release their own changes to the world gratis).
I think this is repeating what I have regarded as the critical mistake of the FSF and RMS for the past 20 years: You can’t force people to embrace your ideology unless you have a lot of guns and are willing to be responsible for a genocide along the way (and even then it rarely works). Ideologies win by persuasion and by showing their advantages, not by coercion.
The problem with the GPL is that it immediately puts people who are not already bought into the FSF’s ideology in the mindset of ‘this is a bunch of restrictions, how do we avoid having to comply with them?’ You end up with things like the nVidia dodge, where you make a kernel module that isn’t a derived work of the kernel and a shim that is a derived work of both the kernel and your proprietary module. You follow the rules of the GPL with respect to derived works by releasing your shim under a GPL compatible license. You can’t redistribute the linked result, but you can distribute your code separately from the kernel and end users can combine them. Or you realise that the GPL is a distribution license and so you can avoid releasing any changes and just keep your improved version secret. I’ve encountered a lot of companies that enter this mindset and never leave.
In contrast, companies that come across permissive software typically go through a process of:
They may still keep 10% of their code proprietary, but I would rather take a 90% win for Free Software than a 0% win. The FSF wants to eliminate proprietary software, I would rather have an order of magnitude more Free Software than proprietary and create the kinds of expectations in consumers that you have to try really hard to sell proprietary software.
The other big problem with the FSF is that they talk a lot about end users but they never invested in end-user programming environments. From the perspective of most end users, MS Office is more aligned with the FSF’s ideals than most GPL’d software because it has plugin interfaces, scripting languages, and so on that make it easy for non-programmers to extend. From a corporate perspective, having an automatic second source for a software package that you depend on is valuable but for an end user if it’s written in uncommented C code then it may as well be a binary. The fact that you can hypothetically modify it is of no value unless you can actually modify it. We were trying to address this in Étoilé by building a desktop environment out of tiny components that were composable and extensible in DSLs. Most big Free Software packages are adopting architectures that are inherited from the proprietary software world, where building big tightly integrated monoliths is an win because it lets you sell a single product that’s hard for competitors to adopt. A vibrant Free Software ecosystem needs to make it easy to compose different things. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical have been pushing back against this because their business models are close to those of proprietary software companies (they sell a single polished thing, they don’t want it to be easy for people to create competing products).
The GPL also has a long history of being used as a money-maker, where people would publicly release something GPL and then have a nice business selling commercial licenses – which allow proprietary usage – on the side.
They’re committed to an all-or-nothing approach. A system that has 999,999 RMS-approved certified Free Software packages, and one package that isn’t, no matter how small, is as unacceptable to them as a system that has one million non-Free packages and zero Free, because their stance is that any compromise, no matter how small or slight, is a complete sellout and moral failure. So they’re not capable of the sort of incremental opening-up of a system that would be possible in your approach.
And this is terrible messaging for the movement because it tells people that the proprietary version is more valuable. If the GPL’d version is free but the proprietary version costs money then you build an association in people’s minds that the GPL’d version is less valuable.
That definitely does seem true for the modern FSF but I wonder when it changed. The GNU project was all about incremental adoption. They released individual components of a UNIX system that you could run on any proprietary UNIX. If the GNU replacement didn’t have a feature you needed then you could use the other one until you (or someone else) added the feature that you needed. By the time Linux was released, they had basically everything except a kernel. At some point they decided that everything that a user might need existed in the Free Software ecosystem and so there was no excuse for using proprietary things.
I think the incremental approach was just barely tolerated out of necessity in the early days and now that they feel there’s enough of “GNU” out there it’s been eagerly discarded in favor of all-or-nothing no-compromise-ever approaches.
I see why though - accepting any nonfree component “back in” is a slippery backwards slope to the olden days. When you finally have a completely free system it should stay that way.
Unfortunately, it’s deeply impractical and a huge turnoff for people who aren’t already fully committed to the free software cause. It’s exactly this hardline approach that makes it difficult to attract newcomers. I think I read a piece by Stallman about “allowing” a more lenient approach for newcomers, but it doesn’t fit the rest of his retoric so it gets overlooked and forgotten.
This is a totally different context (I’m in academia), but coincidentally, before you replied I was thinking of replying to @jackdk with a comment that was similar but with almost the opposite conclusion! (I got interrupted and had to make dinner and do some other stuff.)
The related but opposite valence comment from my vantage point: the GPL used to be attractive to academics (or perhaps more accurately, in some cases, to university IP offices) precisely because it promised a kind of win-win scenario on openness and commercial monopoly. The idea was that if we GPL our cool new image processing algorithm, we’re open, which means other academics and some hippies like the GIMP or whoever can use it, but we’re still not giving it away for free to Adobe, because if they want to use it, the GPL is a poison-pill they’ll never accept into Photoshop, so they’ll negotiate a proprietary license from us.
My impression is that this strategy mostly failed. Academics with this dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach rarely got any money, and then technological changes weakened the GPL’s poison-pill aspect anyway (so Google uses all kinds of GPL’d code and pays nobody). In my corner of the world I don’t actually see many people using AGPL, which would be one response, to double-down on the poison-pill strategy. Instead, almost everyone seems to have gone one of two directions: 1) just use BSD/MIT and accept you will never make direct $$ licensing this software, but maybe at least Google will cite you in some papers and you get academic currency that way, or 2) just abandon free-software entirely, either not releasing code at all, or when required by journal/conference reproducibility guidelines, release it under the non-free-software license “free for non-commercial use only”.
FTR Google does not allow GPL source in its codebase for exactly the reasons one would expect. It uses GPL binaries, in the same way as anyone else would, but including GPLed source is very much prohibited.
What do you mean by “its codebase”? I see a lot of GPL’d source in public Google repositories, notably the Android-related ones, but maybe the policy is more specific?
If the policy is no server side GPL then I suppose that does weaken my point, perhaps the GPL is still an effective poison pill even with technological changes. Although it still seems true that nobody makes money from this dual licensing strategy so it has failed for some combination of reasons anyway.
Sorry I wasn’t clear, I meant in their internal proprietary monorepo (called google3 at the time I worked there).
Edit: to be clear I agree that the GPL is not effective at motivating meaningful financial support to open source. That was never its intent of course, but in the current world of massive corporations profiting hugely from open source with little reciprocation, a different approach should be considered.
I think their licensing policy is publicly outlined in this document: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty/licenses#types
Oh nice, good find.
So, are we saying here that the Linux kernel source code does not appear anywhere inside their google3 monorepo? I think it would be interesting to have someone do a fulltext search and see if they can find any kernel code in there.
I can’t say for certain, but I would be very surprised if it was. For one thing, the monorepo has its own build system which would not work for the kernel, and for another, code in the monorepo is only there to build Google backend services, it’s not used as a generalised source of code for any purpose. I would imagine that Google’s kernel code would be in a separate repository.
In that case it sounds like they’re using GPLd source code, just with a layer of insulation from their internal services. To me, this sounds like Free Software doing its job.
Yep, agreed.
Yeah. Important points for sure.
It’s weird to me that academics already have an extremely effective mechanism to prevent distribution of their work and make it effectively inaccessible (publishing in high-priced journals), and somehow feel a need to turn to software licensing to further restrict it.
Maybe true 30 years ago, but almost all CS papers of any relevance published this century are freely available, from the author’s website and/or arXiv and/or the official venue itself. In any case, unrelated to the point regarding licensing software – the default license of software is All Rights Reserved, so they would not need to “turn to” anything if they wanted that default.
That is an excellent point. In these instances, are external contributors offering their patches under AGPL, or are the companies asking for copyright assignments?
The usual pattern is that initially the software is under a permissive license like BSD, MIT, Apache, etc., maybe with a CLA for people contributing. And then they switch it to AGPL – many permissive licenses allow relicensing, after all – and (ab)use the fact that now they can continue developing in-house proprietary improvements to the software, but no competing business can do that, since competitors are bound by the AGPL to release their changes, thus removing the ability for anyone else to gain a market advantage through having a better or more featureful version.
One problem here is the normalisation of CLAs rather than treating the project as an agglomeration of various contributions all under individual authors’ copyleft. Had that happened instead, the vendor would not be able to close off its improvements once it accepted contributions from the public.
So, like the FSF’s long-time policy of requiring outright assignment of copyright in contributions (not merely licensing them to the projects)? Which was done and recommended for the express purpose of letting the FSF relicense at will due to being the unitary copyright holder?
Pretty much, just applied for different ends.
The assignment was used to relicense from GPLv2 to v3, but it was originally done to ensure that the FSF had standing to sue for copyright infringement. The problem with something like Linux or FreeBSD is that someone violating the license is infringing the copyright of a bunch of individual contributors, most of whom don’t have the resources to sue and who, if they did, could often be shown to own only a small part of the total, which can reduce actual damages awarded. If an organisation like the FSF or SFLC wanted to sue on behalf of such a project then they need to act as the agent of multiple contributors, which can be hard.
The other half of this is that the FSF doesn’t really want to go to court, they want to settle. Their settlement terms require them to be able to issue a retroactive, time-limited, proprietary license to FSF projects. They grant you a license that makes your infringement legal, which expires sufficiently far into the future that you can comply with the GPL by then. It always amused me that this, in effect, means that a large chunk of the FSF’s income is as a seller of proprietary software. This is impossible if they do not have the right to relicense everything in the codebase.
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Man, that’s the reason I like Nix over Guix. MLs are great & LISPs do not have the ergonomics and readability for me. Is there a Guix without Guile?
It’s time for the next generation of copylift / libre software philosophers to take their place. I do think rms’ intellectual lineage should be preserved. But it’s time to look to the future.
Who is a shining star today, who is philosophizing the ground breaking concepts for the next 30 years?
Well, believe it or not…the European Union! They released a strong copyleft license which can be used by anyone, translated into more than 20 languages: https://commission.europa.eu/content/european-union-public-licence_en
I would posit that the shining star today is Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC): https://sfconservancy.org/ (disclosure: I am an employee of SFC).
If there are things we at SFC could do to help show people we are that organization you want, please do let me know. There is a lot of good we can do with copyleft, and it’s sad so many people have sworn it off just because of one person.
I think part of the problem here is that FSF still monopolizes the authoritative resources for “what is free software”, “how is free software different from open source”, the GPL FAQs, etc., as well as the GPL itself. (A lot of this stuff is on gnu.org technically, but you have to already be pretty deep in the free software community to understand where GNU ends and FSF begins.) In order to fix this, Conservancy would have to publish first-party resources on what free software is in a way that essentially directly competes with FSF for mindshare. It’s unclear to me whether this is actually a good idea, but I can see a lot of arguments for it.
For example, I often link to the gnu.org philosophy pages to help explain what free software is, and every time I do so I wish there were better resources out there because all the RMS/GNU/FSF stuff tends to be written in kind of stilted language (it’s often more formal than it should be, gets incredibly hung up on nomenclature to the point of alienating an audience that doesn’t know why they should care/probably feels condescended to, and generally feels more like a philosophy paper than something designed to educate and convince people who aren’t already familiar with the ideas). I was heartened to see Write Free Software submitted today for this very reason: I glanced at it and though I haven’t looked at it in any depth it seems a lot better - though not perfect, and it appears to be more oriented towards developers. Conservancy could probably do this a lot better with some time to refine the approach, but as of now sfconservancy.org is sorely lacking - as far as I can tell, there literally is not a definition of free software on the site except for a three-sentence blurb in the glossary.
Conservancy also has a chance to learn from FSF’s mistakes. For example FSF’s rigidity and focus on software freedom purity (which I’m sure comes primarily if not entirely from Stallman) is one of its greatest strengths but also one of its greatest weaknesses. I frequently think of a Lobsters comment about how the RYF program could have been orders of magnitude more effective, and there’s another great comment in the same submission pointing out how FSF pushes people away by their purity-driven focus. E.g. gnu.org recommends installing a blobless Linux distribution for purity reasons when it might be much more effective to just tell people to use Ubuntu (or even just, try switching to Firefox and LibreOffice while you’re still on Windows/macOS) while pointing out that this recommendation isn’t perfect and why, and if you’re really devoted to this stuff and understand the caveats then here’s our ideal world recommendation, a blobless distribution. People are usually intelligent enough to be able to see when you’re not giving them the full story, which the FSF doesn’t as a matter of policy. I could go on, linking to more Lobsters threads, but I’m sure you get the point ;)
Again, I don’t actually know whether this is a good idea and you will certainly catch a lot of flak for “competing” with FSF. You also may stretch yourselves too thin and lose your ability to effectively do anything, including your existing work (which I admire and think SFC is good at). But if SFC wants to become a true leader in the free software space, instead of an (effective and valuable!) supporting actor, this seems to me to be the way.
They actually do have a guide like this on their wiki [0]. It explains at a high level what Free Software is, explains some of the problems with Windows from a software freedom perspective, and has a table of Free Software replacements for common Windows applications as a “first steps” towards getting comfortable with Free Software..
[0] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:Windows
I’m not sure this is actually true. I suspect a lot of this is counterfactual “well I WOULD be into it if not for rms”; I suspect barring rms, these people would find other reasons to not be into it. I smell politics.
I smell economic incentives
Well, the economy is just a subset of the political economy, a fact which mainstream economics tries to obscure.
I haven’t seen the SFC do anything except blogpost about things that aren’t Free Software and fail to threaten important actors (remember Truth Social?). Most people aren’t avoiding copyleft because of RMS, people generally know nothing about him. They’re avoiding it because Big Software and the OSI cartel have spent millions upon millions shilling Open Source and Free Software advocates don’t really have good arguments nor strong battle-lines.
I’m actually a SFC member. :)
Am I the only one who thinks it’s problematic to say “it’s time for new leaders” without any idea of who those new leaders would be or how they would be different?
I wish people making statements like this would explain their reasoning or their idea of a better alternative; otherwise it starts to seem just like the people who said “Bernie Sanders is too old” when they really just wanted a more business-friendly candidate.
I assume this has something to do with current US politics? Do we really need more US-centrism? 🤮
The question is whether, say, the FSF can outlive Richard Stallman. Who are the people in the up-and-coming next generation of leaders? Who is being groomed to step up when the time comes? If Stallman were hit by a bus tomorrow, who would step up?
Or is it the case that there are no people up-and-coming, there is nobody being groomed to step up, and if Stallman were hit by a bus, the FSF would for all practical purposes die with him?
As an outsider, it seems like the latter option, because the FSF keeps doubling and tripling down on the idea that only Stallman can be the leader. That is not a good plan for the long term. Organizations that will survive in the long term explicitly work on continuity and succession, but the FSF just keeps coming back to “only Richard Stallman can lead us” as a bedrock principle.
That may be your question, but you’re not the original commenter I replied to. I don’t know the answer.
I am curious in what ways have you observed the FSF “doubling and tripling down on the idea that only Stallman can be the leader”? If they said that, it would certainly imply that they expect the organization to die with the man.
Can you point me to efforts of the FSF to recruit and train and groom a next generation of leadership?
All I can find when I look into their leadership is that they don’t appear to have any plans beyond “keep electing Stallman the leader until he dies”.
No, I can’t. That’s why I said I don’t know the answer to your previous question.
Where’d you see that?
In their actions.
Oh okay. Which ones?
Re-electing Stallman over and over. Even after his alleged “departure” (is that the euphemism now?) for a while.
This is getting pretty tedious at this point, though. Do you have an actual counter-argument to make, or are we going to go a thousand rounds of you trying to deflect this by asking over and over again for hard proof that Richard Stallman has repeatedly been installed/maintained as a leader?
I’m aware of that, but it seems a leap to then say they have no plan or that they think nobody else could be the leader. For all we know they could have a plan for when RMS dies, or there could have been a runner-up in the recent elections that the board agrees would be a perfectly good leader, no? Is there something more that makes you think electing RMS is a “bedrock principle”?
I wasn’t aware that I was deflecting. Is there a question you wanted me to answer?
Saying the FSF board has repeatedly elected RMS would be an objective statement of fact. I only took issue with what appeared to be unjustified editorializing.
Let’s apply your standard, then: provide a link to an explicit statement by me that I was deliberately and knowingly “editorializing” in this thread.
If you cannot provide such a link, you will immediately and permanently retract the above statement.
After all, you are a rational person who operates on verifiable citations for all claims made, and I am sure you would never dream of doing something so awfully wrong as advancing a claim without ironclad citations to back it up, yes?
Sure:
https://lobste.rs/s/ii7fpk/we_need_more_richard_stallman_not_less#c_hadnr0
Which is why I asked this in my last comment:
And I explained why I think that’s a leap given just the facts you cited, i.e. editorializing. (FWIW, I never said you did it deliberately or knowingly, and I don’t think it’s so awfully wrong.)
So you get to assume my intent by interpreting my actions, but I don’t get to assume the FSF’s intent by interpreting their actions. You don’t have to provide any sort of evidence for your interpretation and it’s just automatically assumed to be valid, but I must provide citations for my interpretation or it is automatically assumed invalid.
Got it. Have fun with that.
As in my last comment, I never said you editorialized deliberately or knowingly, so I don’t know what you’re referring to when you say I assumed your intent. I’m just pointing out a difference between what you originally wrote and what we can reasonably assume based on the facts.
I also don’t know why you would think my interpretation is “automatically assumed to be valid;” if you wanted to make a counterargument you would be welcome to.
Well, I’m just a schmuck. But
rmsisPart 1 means that a successor needs to be found, for ordinary human reasons. I would like to see the FSF be a long-running multi-generational institution prioritizing libre software and supporting it.
Part 2 means that the organization and movement around him is very offputting to people who otherwise would be all right associating with the FSF & movement. It is well understood that a leader imprints on an organization and culture generally forms from above. A social movement leader needs to be an attractor or neutral, and not an offputter.
I would want to see these 3 foci by the FSF:
rms not in a position on the FSF board. He can be a paid “emeritus philosopher”, that is fine by me. He has been profoundly prescient about the future. Yet, he retains an active vote in how the FSF is going, which means he is still imprinting himself on the culture. Not good.
a post-rms leader dedicated to the long-term viability of libre software. Software has transitioned away from workstation use by and large. What does that mean for libre software for the ordinary person?
And, for my personal interest, a focus by the FSF on how libre software contributors can financially survive in the world today.
(nit: using libre, not ‘free’, to be precise with meaning)
Well said, and this is exactly the attitude I take to it all, as well.
No we absolutely do not.
RMS was right and copyleft is correct, no doubt about that.
However, his biggest mistake was being a hostile jerk about it for longer than I’ve been alive. There are countless stories supporting this. He has been called “the GPL’s worst sponsor” and that’s accurate. Him being excluded based on some trumped up nonsense related to Epstein is one of the best things to happen, even if the reason was not correct. He should have been excluded long ago because he’s a walking Code of Conduct violation.
We need less of Richard Stallman, preferably zero. We need more people who are positive cooperative charismatic convincing ambassadors for copyleft and software freedom.
Your comment shares a central theme and structure with the content of the article itself. I’d highly consider reading it, I think you’d like it ;)
People being excluded based on nonsense is the worst thing that can happen to a movement. Doesn’t matter who it is.
The power to exclude people is one of the most impactful to shaping a movement. If you can exclude people based on nonsense, this translates in reality to “exclusions are decided based on personal charisma”.
There’s a principle (I forgot the name) that asserts that any organization pursuing a goal will start out filled by people invested in the goal, but be invaded and replaced by people invested in the organization in itself. I can’t but see the anti-RMS push as a step in that trend.
I can get behind renewing the push for copyleft, and even attributing much of the original promotion to RMS, but c’mon: the artful B/W portrait, repeated calls out to his prescience, etc. reads like hagiography, brief mention of “toxicity” aside.
The dude is a misogynistic ideologue who abused his platform as a Free Software pioneer to subject other people to his gross views.
So yeah, support copyleft, but don’t sweep aside how the FSF backed RMS and ignored his willingness to blithely dismiss child abuse as “not that big of a deal”.
He’s definitely an ideologue, but for the cause of software freedom, which is a good thing. Labeling him a misogynist is just a politicized insult, based on disliking other political opinions adjacent to gender he has expressed at some point, or just finding him personally awkward and spergy. There’s hell of a lot of prominent technologists who I’d want to see ostracized for their tech-unrelated stated political views ahead of Stallman.
This can be used to handwave away any level of complaint. After reviewing the GeekFeminism wiki article, with citations, I feel comfortable saying that I’m not throwing my lot in with him.
He has said and done plenty of things directly related to tech, or software projects, that this too comes off as handwave and dismissive.
I think RMS was/is right about a lot and I don’t care about canceling him, or being upset, but I’m not going to bat for him either, and I’d love to have a figure like him, that I could fully respect and endorse.
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I agree with all this article’s points about RMS’s ideas, which indeed I hope more people learn to take seriously. He genuinely did see a lot of stuff coming and tried to head it off. I do think that his failures are a movement leader are precisely due to how he structured everything around himself as an individual.
It’s quite striking that even all these decades later, when discussing the merits of the efforts he spearheaded, people are still focused on trying to pass verdict on him as a person rather than on the ideas.
What difference does RMS as a person make these days? His leadership style was ineffectual, so certainly no practical relevance. Society kind of does this thing where we all kind of orient around celebrities and tell our own stories in terms of their stories, because it feels more dramatic that way, and… why? All that does is tie the fate of the movement to the fate of the individuals.
We don’t need celebrities to keep fighting for what we believe it. Let’s focus on the ideas, not the people.
To look at Firefox’s shrinking slice of the browser market, to see Windows still dominating the desktop, to see the FOSS world as it is right now and say “yeah, the main problem here is clearly the choice of FOSS license” takes a very particular type of blindness.
LibreOffice has a less polished interface than MS Office. This is because Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars focus-testing their UI/UX and polishing the shit out of it. People are using MS Office even if they don’t need docx files, because the interface is so easy. In other words, this can’t be blamed on network effects.
So it seems really obvious why LibreOffice is losing - a lack of money. The FOSS community desperately needs to prioritize 1) funding mechanisms (like liberapay) and the ease of which you can pick software you like and fund it, and 2) a culture of getting dedicated users to put in at least some funds to support the software they use. That second one will be hard because it has to be done respectfully and must be truly voluntary, we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of nagware.
I remember reading a while back that LibreOffice’s donations page got something like $200/year,because an absolutely tiny fraction of LibreOffice users put any money whatsoever towards it. The way I see it, if there are about ~30 million Linux desktop users, they should at least be donating an average of $1/year for a total of $30 million. On the high end, if that number bumped up to e.g. $50/year average per user, that would be $1.5B/year total and now FOSS can at least sustainably challenge FAANG companies that drop the ball - Twitter and Reddit are particularly pissing people off right now and in better circumstances we could have absolutely gutted them as a result.
Yes. This is a huge deal. We could have been well placed with sites built on free software operated like distributions and old forums are operated (maintainer donations and some public donations… imagine what you could do with reddit gold as an open source distributed taxable entity!) We could have been ready to have a fully open organization be the next reddit. No steering committee, no CEO, just members doing their hardest, donating their labor, doing something they want to do, hopefully being paid for some of what they do along the way.
We were not ready. And I think Why ties into my dispute with your comment.
I don’t know that I agree on the Microsoft Word side. The MS suite is the standard business interconnection format. If you produce it, your colleagues at the other end can read it. This is partly because of the network effect of every office using windows. They use windows because the tools work, people will grumble but accept the changes they hate, and the product will move forward, eventually bringing up the whole world. Which feeds back into itself, since you can send a docx to a vendor or customer and they’ll be able to read it. Patricia in accounting can read your slides. John in compliance will be able to read the document you produced. Neither of them will say “I need to know what font this was, I don’t have it on my machine. “ neither of them, if aware of fonts, will think about them all day while they do their jobs.
A working standard interconnection format that all people in the office can use. That sounds like a net positive. No amount of research dollars into libreoffice would fix this. The project might add a ribbon like Office did. The project would get forked and you’ll hear vocal people on both sides. Ultimately the ribbon will become a configuration option, defaulting to on. People will grumble, but effort will be wasted on the way. Inclusion of fonts in documents will be hotly contested. How do you distribute the licenses for those fonts with the document?
Weirdly the web offers us the equivalent of already-installed-everywhere. We just don’t seem to focus in the open source world on web based productivity tools, those are boring, and hard to do, and unrewarding. Open source is people taking their labor and giving it as a gift to the world. When I give a gift, I want to feel good about it. So I’ll go rewrite ls(1) in rust with a few conveniences added, and be pleased with my day.
Instead of operating a site that does standard communications easily, built and managed as an open source project, we have Office365, draw.io (closed source why?????), and Outlook.
But at least I feel good about the gifts I give to the world.
That’s true but irrelevant. What I’m saying is that some people use MS Office outside of a business context, because it has a good interface. I’m saying that even if we solved the docx problem, LibreOffice still would not dominate, because frankly it has an inferior UI.
My comment really isn’t about Word, to be honest. It’s no secret that projects with a bigger budget have a far easier time delivering high quality software; professionally made software tends to be more consistently high-quality than hobbyist-made software.
I agree (as long as the “is” doesn’t morph into a “should be”), and this is kind of the problem - in a hypothetical world of this type of open source, the entire software world is made of volunteers and frankly that’s just insane and stupid. In any sort of fair and sustainable world, people will either 1) be paid for their labor, or 2) not require money in the first place for food/shelter/etc (which basically requires a communist/anarchist revolution).
What we need is a system where people get paid to work on GPL’d software, by the people who use it. Not by corporations like Google - even with the best of intentions, Google has different priorities e.g. they want their software to scale to three continents, whereas people running home servers just want it to be simple and easy to maintain without a deep tech background.
And yes, some people will have to write GPL software that is boring, hard, and unrewarding. If it needs to be done, then someone should do it, and they’ll do it because they’re being well paid to do their job - the same reason as why people work at a sewage plant.
The argument presented here is essentially “Stallman wasn’t persuasive and that’s everyone else’s fault”.
So, it’s one thing to diagnose where the world went wrong (and I don’t really buy this reading, but whatever, that’s open to debate); it’s yet another to ask, what can we do to try and recover something from the wreckage of the modern software economy? And for the answers to that latter question, I would not be looking at someone who is fighting a 40 yr old battle over printer drivers. I would want someone deeply engaged with the state of the world as it exists today. Stallman and the FSF have shown no interest in or aptitude for engaging with the actual problems of the world.
The role of Cassandra is valuable, but it’s not constructive.
I actually think free software ideals ought to be easier to sell now than ever: any time i try to use a mobile phone app and it sends me trash notifications makes me wish I (or someone else who then has the right to share their fork) can rip it open and disable those, while keeping the legitimately useful ones enabled.
Too often I think free software discussions get bogged down in backend details without expression the wins users themselves can experience. Phone notifications are a pretty clear thing i think a lot of people can relate to and free software actually does have a direct answer to solve the nusiance.
I mean, even as it is, Android is just unambiguously a win for the GPL, right? Any kid who ever rooted their phone or installed Cyanogenmod or Lineage is a potential convert.
“It’s
open sourcefree software what did that.”edit: Grah!
I would show it as a failure of the GPL. The only bit of Android that’s GPL’d is the kernel and that’s the hardest bit for a port. Vendors typically ship drivers that don’t work with multiple kernels, often the code that they release is hard to update. Just because you have the code (and, since the GPL relies on people going to court to enforce it, you might not even have the code) doesn’t mean that you can make it work with a newer kernel. Once you have the kernel working, the rest of the Android stack (Apache / BSD / MIT) typically just works, but being able to build a working kernel for a random Android handset if a huge amount of work. Look at the number of Android phones that are supported by LineageOS as a proportion of the total: I have to check the list carefully before I buy a new phone because you often find the models N and N+2 in a particular line are supported by N+1 isn’t.
Note that the LineageOS “support” page doesn’t indicate “LineageOS will run on this” so much as “somebody on the project is committed to fixing issues with that device.” If you check xda-developers for your phone, you can often find unofficial LineageOS builds. Or even use a Treble image (hardware-independent Android), that’s what I run right now.
But also, my impression is there’s just been an enormous proliferation of phone models. There is no longer any clear targets for porting in a given generation.
It’s Free Software what did that, not Open Source.
God damn, I always get it wrong. You’re right of course, inasmuch as you can swap a kernel on a phone it’s because of freedom to run a modified version, not anything to do with the source code.
OK, but I can’t make money off of AGPL unless I add a paid exclusion. Then I’ll get yelled at for not being truly free. And then I won’t care and I’ll just write proprietary code.
That’s ignoring the already stated issues around RMS being god awful, truly a worst case icon.
Look at it this way. You’ll get yelled at no matter what you do. If you work for an employer–you’ll get yelled at at some point. If you work for yourself and have your own customers–you’ll get yelled at for something or the other. You just need to decide–what are your principles? And that’s what you live with.
I have never ever been yelled at by an employer. Same as a CEO. I feel far more likely to engage in a negative discussion online while producing OSS code for no compensation.
You’ve never had an irate customer from some breakage? Wow, lucky. But the reality for most people is that they have to deal with something like that at some point or the other. If your goal is to fully insulate yourself from all negativity then I don’t see how you’re living in the real world. Also, ‘engage in a negative discussion online’–no one is forcing you to engage. Publishing Free Software doesn’t obligate you to engage with or listen to the opinions of the peanut gallery. You can literally disable GitHub issues, or publish your code on your own website, you don’t even need to use GitHub.
If you don’t want to get into Free Software, obviously don’t. But I don’t see the point of making up excuses.
I’m not fully insulating myself from all negativity. I’m just pointing out that I can get paid money and have less negativity relative to doing work in OSS for free.
I mean, it’s not excuses… it’s reasons. And a lot of people share these reasons, which is why most people don’t give a shit about building “free” software - the reason they use github is because it’s a career booster/ the easiest way to distribute.
In lots of occidental countries, political positions seen as “centre” twenty years ago are now seen as “extreme left” because the left of twenty years ago was called extremist.
Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with the cancer.
Amen. Tell it brother!
I agree with the sentiment, but not sure rallying behind RMS (philosophy only since the rest is toxic, or not) is the way to go. After all, he failed! Corporate open source has won, and maybe someone more flexible, more capable could have prevented that, or made it less of a total victory for corporations.
Yes, he saw this coming, but I seriously doubt he was the only one.
It wasn’t RMS who failed but the world and its technologists failed him as a collective. He was the only one who stood against proprietary and closed systems till the end, he was the only one who spoke against surveillance capitalism and big tech. He was the one who came up with GPL licensing but the others still kept using the permissive ones.
Trying to throttle the only voice of sanity in the ecosystem is in dishonest taste and furthering the agenda of the crony capitalists.
Just so you’re aware: when people accuse the FSF and the Free Software movement of having devolved from a serious advocacy movement to a mere cult of personality, this is the sort of thing they mean. Declaring that the Leader does not fail (He only ever is failed by others) is an absolutely gigantic red flag, and I hope one day you’re able to see that and understand it.
Then let’s rephrase and put it like this: powerful vested interests made sure that the Free Software movement (the one that tries to guarantee the freedoms of users of the software) was stigmatized as ‘hippie commie business-unfriendly cancer’, while ardently pushing their ‘Open Source’ alternative which allowed businesses to fully exploit the unpaid labour of OSS creators.
It’s not about the person, it’s about the software movement.
So, you are not in favor of granting the freedom to run the software, for any purpose?
Because what I am getting from this is that you think either that certain entities should not receive that freedom, or that certain purposes should not be permitted.
I don’t know how you’re getting that from what I said, because in many cases the simple solution is the already known one: strong copyleft reciprocating licenses which preserve software freedom.
Also, from your response, what I’m getting is that you actually do understand that it’s not about the ‘cult of personality’, there are wider commercial interests at work here.
Well, you seem to think that certain entities, or certain purposes, don’t deserve the right to run the software. I’m not sure how exactly that’s compatible with the notion of Free Software as promulgated by Richard Stallman and the FSF.
Well, I’m one of those awful terrible exploitative people who supports “Open Source” (vade retro!). But I’m also a producer of software released under licenses that the FSF does, for the time being, consider to be Free even if they would prefer I slap something stronger on there, so I guess I also am one of the exploited.
The vast majority of my horrible exploitative leeching consumption consists of installing and running things as they are and without modifying their source, though, so even if it was all AGPL’d I still wouldn’t incur any legally-forced obligation to distribute any of my own code reciprocally if I didn’t want to.
And I don’t really feel the need to have you, or Stallman, or the FSF, come rushing to rescue me and my software from being “exploited”. If someone finds utility in code I wrote, that’s great! That’s why I released it to the public! Even if literally zero people ever contribute anything back to a particular project of mine, that’s OK. I write things to solve problems I have, and release them in case anyone else has the same problem, and I don’t feel a need to load them up with draconian rules and restrictions and manifestoes as a condition of use. I just want to have the problem solved and move on.
Perhaps it’s the deontologist lurking in me, who understands that people should do the right thing for the right reason, and also understands that “because I forced you to through my license terms” is not really the right reason. But also perhaps it’s that, in between our regular meetings in smoky back rooms with our corporate overlords, us “Open Source” folks do have some decent communities built around mutual contribution, and what I like about those communities is that people are there because they want to be there and they feel it’s right for them to be there.
I have very serious concerns about the cult of personality around Stallman, and I am a strong critic of the way the FSF does not really seem to be preparing for a world in which he is no longer around to be eternally re-elected as the leader.
Stallman is a capitalist.
You seem to think that just because you don’t feel exploited, others are not. Given your interest in philosophy, I’m surprised that you fell into this fallacy of thinking that your experience must be the universal one. Just to give one example–you surely must have heard of the log4shell vulnerability? Maybe you heard about how the log4j team had to spend their Christmas 2021 under intense pressure, working round the clock to patch that vulnerability, while facing massive online scrutiny and criticism?
You just answered your own question there. That would be incompatible with the notion of Free Software, and hence I don’t think that. What I actually think is that ideally, software freedoms should be reciprocal, not going in a one-way street. But I understand that because of permissive OSS licenses, that’s often not the case. I don’t think anyone should be forced to choose Free Software licenses, but surely you don’t object to my making an argument for why people should choose them?
No, what I think is that you do not get to decide for me whether I am exploited or not. You don’t get to make blanket declarations that “Open Source” is corporate exploitation.
What I said, and I will quote it for you again in case you forgot, was:
I see no good-faith way to get from what I said to what you are claiming I said. Perhaps you would like to try again, this time engaging with what I actually said and not some straw-man you can condescendingly knock down with “oh haven’t you heard of log4shell”.
So if a corporate entity builds their for-profit business entirely around, say, running unmodified AGPL software, so that they never incur a legal obligation to contribute anything to the upstream projects, do you feel that’s OK? Do you want them to have some type of obligation anyway?
What if instead of a for-profit corporate entity, it’s someone’s personal or community forum that they run for free out of their own pocket? If they just run unmodified AGPL software and thus never incur a legal obligation to contribute anything to the upstream projects, do you feel that’s OK? Do you want them to have some type of obligation anyway?
And if there is a difference between your reactions to those two scenarios, please explain how to reconcile it with the Stallman/FSF definition of software freedom (which would not permit a difference).
This is incompatible with the Stallman/FSF definition of software freedom, since it apparently does not allow me to run the software for any purpose without incurring obligations. And what sort of “obligations” do you have in mind here? What if someone runs the software unmodified and so doesn’t have any changes they can be compelled to contribue back? What if they’re not a programmer and can’t meaningfully contribute code at all? Perhaps instead they could be required to make a monetary contribution to the project in exchange for the legal right to run the software?
You are jumping to conclusions and assuming that I think there are ‘obligations’ which I don’t actually think, and which aren’t specified in any of the GPL licenses anyway. So let me repeat your own words back at you:
But let’s be clear about it:
Of course! That’s what it’s there for!
Only the ones imposed by the license of the software they are using. Your imagination seems to be running wild with ideas that I am making up arbitrary obligations on users of Free Software. I am not. This is simply not true. I have said from the beginning:
I would appreciate it if you didn’t put words in my mouth.
You started out complaining about:
If you’re OK with businesses just passively consuming without contributing back (monetarily or otherwise), it seems odd to condemn such consumption as a form of exploitation.
Also, “strong copyleft reciprocating licenses” is not really a clear term – even the most invasive major license (the AGPL) does not require businesses to support the projects whose software they use, and does not impose any obligations on a business that passively consumes AGPL-licensed software.
So let’s just be absolutely clear. Consider
Scenario 1: Acme Corp., a for-profit corporation, uses
OpenSourceCorporateFriendlyCMS, a web-based content-management system licensed0BSD. Acme Corp. has no need or desire to modify the code ofOpenSourceCorporateFriendlyCMS, deploying it as-is. Acme Corp. provides neither monetary nor any other form of support to the developers ofOpenSourceCorporateFriendlyCMS.Scenario 2: Acme Corp., a for-profit corporation, uses
FreeAsInFreedomCMS, a web-based content-management system licensedAGPL3. Acme Corp. has no need or desire to modify the code ofFreeAsInFreedomCMS, deploying it as-is. Acme Corp. provides neither monetary nor any other form of support to the developers ofFreeAsInFreedomCMS.Can you please explain to me what moral difference, if any, you see between the two scenarios? As far as I can tell, there is no such difference, and any argument that the developers are “exploited” in Scenario 1 applies equally to Scenario 2. So I don’t understand why you think “strong copyleft” somehow prevents developers being “exploited”. Even the most ultra-mega-hyper-copyleft licenses available are susceptible to free riders. I also don’t see why focusing on “businesses” uniquely as exploiters makes sense; either the software is available to everyone, to run for any purpose, or it isn’t.
If you cherry-pick the perfect scenario, you can of course poke holes in any general statement. I’m not making a statement that covers 100% of every scenario, I am talking about the most common forms of exploitation, and I already mentioned an example of what I mean–corporations angrily pressuring the log4j devs to patch the log4shell vulnerability (for free) over Christmas 2021. Surely we agree about this?
Here’s another example off the top of my head: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/11/18/free-apple-support/
So… there aren’t different classes of users when it comes to just obtaining the software, but there might be when it comes to ongoing access? If I as a private citizen who does not contribute (monetarily or otherwise) to a project ask for a bugfix, is that morally different from I as an employee of a company that does not contribute (monetarily or otherwise) asking for a bugfix?
What if private-citizen me is quite well-off and corporate-employee me works for a small struggling company that’s trying to do good in the world?
Also, I don’t see how the license of the software would affect the morality of someone asking for a bugfix. Whether it’s 0BSD or AGPL3, there are going to be users who are either unwilling or unable to develop a fix themselves and will ask the maintainers to do it.
So can you elaborate more on where this apparently-clear-to-you line is that divides the “exploitation” from the non-“exploitation”?
If you need someone to explain morality to you, I’m afraid this is a larger conversation than just open source. One of the basic assumptions of my engagement here is that at least we agree on what exploitation looks like. If you first answer my question on whether you agree with my example, then at least we have a baseline.
So, let’s take a topical example.
Suppose a company – we’ll call them “Bed Cat” – puts a lot of time and money and other resources into producing a polished distribution of a bunch of Free software. And they make this work by also offering support contracts where they will help fix problems and track down and resolve bugs and so on, in exchange for money.
And suppose that another company – let’s call them “Pocky” – starts a competing business whose sole purpose is repackaging Bed Cat’s work.
Is that “exploitation”?
If it is, how does copyleft prevent it? If it isn’t “exploitation”, how can we differentiate it from, say, businesses leaning on other maintainers to fix bugs without being paid for it?
If ‘Pocky’ is charging their users money for a support contract and actually providing support services like troubleshooting, documentation, finding and patching bugs and security issues etc.–then they are actually providing value for money. That’s not exploitation.
If they are just repackaging the upstream software, reselling it under their own label, and pointing their customers at the upstream support forums or channels, then they are not adding any value. That’s exploitation.
OK. So suppose that at least some – possibly quite a lot! – of the software in question is distributed under copyleft licenses. You seem to think those somehow prevent this kind of “exploitation”, but I’m not seeing how they do that. Since, y’know, this exact situation is going down right now.
Is it? Can you provide an example of this exact situation?
Red Hat puts significant effort into polishing and packaging a distribution of software, much of which is under copyleft licenses, and charges for ongoing access to their support and fixes. Other people take advantage of repackagings of that to get the fixes without offering anything to those who did the work of fixing.
This seems to be exactly the sort of thing you were willing to call “exploitation”. And copyleft licensing did not prevent it.
That’s a very vague assertion. When I said ‘Can you provide an example’, I meant a concrete, verifiable (with sourcing) one that matches with the definition I gave you earlier. Not vague hearsay.
If you’re deflecting that a description of the ongoing RHEL-versus-repackagers kerfuffle is “vague hearsay”, then I don’t believe that you are participating in this discussion in good faith.
Sorry but you’re the one engaging in bad faith. You are trying to launder the ‘repackager kerfluffle’ as somehow meeting my very specific definition of exploitation, while providing zero evidence or logic for exactly how it does that. You have not shown that Rocky or Alma are simply rebranding RHEL and passing on all support burden to upstream. Unless you show your work, your arguments don’t carry any weight.
Every time I propose an example, you redefine “exploitation”.
But I will put the question as bluntly as I can. You offered this definition a few comments ago:
You also appear to believe that copyleft licenses can somehow do something (unspecified what or how) to prevent “exploitation”.
Explain, in detail, with specific examples, how precisely you believe copyleft licenses achieve this, since repackaging, reselling, and disclaiming any additional support or warranty all are explicitly permitted by copyleft licenses.
Hey, I didn’t say that copyleft licenses are a perfect solution, but they are better at preventing exploitation of FOSS maintainers than every other solution that has been presented so far. The more corporate-ish and exploitative a company gets, the more allergic it gets to GPL. Just look at Google for example.
Google uses a lot of GPL’d software. So does Amazon.
How has the GPL prevented them from “exploiting” the authors of that software?
But they forbid it from being committed into their main internal source tree.
Through a simple process of elimination. If they aren’t allowed to use it, they end up not pressuring its maintainers.
So Google runs on Linux, but because they don’t directly commit the kernel source to their monorepo, you think that causes it not to count as using it?
Of course not. Google is well-known as using and contributing to Linux. I just gave one example of the kind of thinking that Corporate Legal has about GPL. I used to work on a project where we were asked to stop using the pm2 process manager for Node.js because it was AGPL-licensed (despite pm2 itself not touching the codebase). I personally went in and replaced it with systemd. I am just saying that this is the kind of attitude you will find towards GPL in larger and more risk-averse lawyer-driven companies. Because of the GPL’s design and reputation, it’s a self-correcting problem.
I think you’ve highlighted one of the things that I find most off-putting about the GPL and friends: it depends on poor software engineering to be able to achieve the goals that it’s advocates claim. If I create a modular component then code that interfaces with it can extend it in arbitrary ways without being a derived work of my code and without modifying my code. As such, consumers of it that integrate it in complex systems have no requirement to do anything that a permissive license wouldn’t also require, except that they must distribute the (unmodified) source code for my components.
In a micro services world, it makes no difference to the overall license of a logical program if one component that handles RPCs is BSDL, GPL, or AGPL. The AGPL version may expose an endpoint that allows a user to download the source code for that component but it isn’t required to let them download the code for the other hundred modular components in the system.
This is intrinsic to how these licenses work with copyright. They are not EULAs (any EULA violate’s the FSF’s freedom 0) and so they can only restrict how you can distribute the code or how what you can do with derived works.
This is the first time I’m hearing that linking against shared libraries is ‘poor software engineering’. Actually it gets even funnier if you look at how the microservices world is filled with bad practices and huge inefficiency.
He wasn’t failed, he was stabbed in the back.
;)
This is kind of an insane thing to say. He was the only one with a platform to say this, but a multitude of people were against big tech (remember Micro$oft on Slashdot?) and surveillance capitalism as well.
I think it’s arguable that Cory Doctorow is doing more in this space than RMS ever did.
Stallman is mostly unaffected by the worst of modern privacy-invading tech because it’s either on mobile devices that he refuses to use due to being insufficiently Free, or on the web which he uses through a weird workflow to avoid accidentally running non-Free JavaScript. That insulates him in ways that make him a relatively useless and uninformed advocate.
I’m not going to try to rank them, but yeah, Cory was also one of those voices who was around from the beginning, very much speaking against all this stuff. In many cases it was him who originally connected specific abuses of technology to the big picture, even if other people wound up driving the conversations around them.
The more I grow up, the more I side with you, and him. Nice article.
The other vocal advocates disagreed with him. That’s exactly how we got “open source.”
Open Source was an attempt at forming a licensing cartel that collapsed into a software-freedom black hole. Releasing Netscape as free software happened to be beneficial, so Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond worked overtime to try and secure a trademark for a term that allowed them to resell a cheapened GPL that only benefits exploiters. It was all about cash flow and the rejection of their trademark request resulted in a meaningless term being pushed by an organisation that couldn’t enforce it to people who realised they didn’t have to pay to use it or follow any rules.
Annnnnnd there you go. The anti-capitalism popular amongst a vocal subset of FSF supporters is pretty obvious to casual observers, and it turns people off. I believe it was a significant factor in the rise of the Open Source movement versus Free Software.
Most of us enjoy the prosperity generated by capitalism. We enjoy the greater life expectancy, the probability of eliminating absolute poverty worldwide in the course of this century, etc. etc. Most of us are proud to work for a living to make and sell products and services that other people will choose to pay for.
You go side with the cancer; I’ll side with the oncologists.
In the USA, life expectancy is dropping and over half of laborers live paycheck-to-paycheck. (Those are just two reasonable recent primary sources, but there are dozens of surveys on these topics.) You have a very rosy view of a system which encodes suffering as a requirement.
If it makes you feel uncomfortable to use Free Software written by communists, then don’t use it.
I’ll cheerfully use software written by Communists; I don’t think a person’s politics should come into that decision.
But you’re sort of making my point for me.
You don’t have a point; points require evidence. You have an opinion: you are “turn[ed] off” by anti-capitalist sentiment. Okay, be turned off; software is invariant to your opinions. Free Software forms communes because of the underlying logical relations between market participants, and any privatization of the commons will eventually be overcome by the sheer affordability of software given away for gratis.
That wasn’t the point @duncan_bayne was making. The point was that many people are turned off by anti-capitalist sentiment, and whether this opinion is valid/correct/whatever is irrelevant. If we’re going to be effective advocates for free software, step 1 is literally to get the other person to start listening to you. If there’s perceived anti-capitalistic sentiment in the free software community, you’re failing at step 1 for a large swath of the population that believes in capitalism. It doesn’t matter how good your software ethics ideas are (and they’re very good!) if people aren’t listening.
The point isn’t about market forces - it’s about rhetoric and rhetorical effectiveness.
And that’s kind of Corbin’s point–duncan_bayne is all about caring about the rhetoric and not about the useful substance of the matter. It’s caring about optics over caring about doing the right thing and preserving the freedoms of software users. What I don’t get is how can anyone even call this off-putting at this point–we have seen the walled gardens of the app stores divide up the internet for profit. We’ve seen OSS maintainers exploited while corporations profit on scales unheard of. Apple’s cash flow is more than that of most countries.
We have literally seen the scenarios that were warned about. Only the most self-deluded people can deny that this is a worse system.
That’s not at all what I’m saying.
What I mean is: the very real concerns the FSF has about software freedoms are orthogonal to anticapitalism.
However (as you can see from the comments on this story!) the Free Software movement has a strong, vocal, and visible contingent of anticapitalists whose rhetoric turns off people who would otherwise become your allies.
Bluntly, if every conversation about software walled gardens and open APIs turns into rants about third world water shortages and privilege callouts, you’re always going to remain marginalised.
I personally care enough about software freedoms that I’m willing to put up with the anticapitalists to work with and use Free Software. Many people - and especially the capitalists you’re supposedly trying to convert - aren’t and don’t.
I’m afraid I don’t see the ‘strong, vocal, and visible contingent of anticapitalists’ that you are so afraid of. I saw maybe one or two comments with an anticapitalist flavour, but almost every comment that talks about commercial use understands that the GPL is compatible with commerce–many people have pointed that out here.
If you see only the thing that you are afraid of, instead of the whole picture–maybe consider that it’s your own confirmation bias?
I mean, I’m not afraid of them exactly - it’s the same sort of feeling I get when people start explaining how they think racialism explains third world debt, or how they think feminism causes economic decline. More of a frustration that otherwise smart humans are adopting such bloodstained ideology.
I’d be afraid of them if they had guns and gulags.
But I don’t get how you can fail to see them, with the tenor of the comments on this story alone.
I thought about this for a bit. It’s a great point, with strong argumentation. There’s one slight flaw, though; Free Software must exist before we can ask others to use it. Thus, before step one, there’s a step zero: produce Free Software. And this zeroth step necessarily forms a commune, so step one will always be about convincing folks to use the fruits of communist labor.
Sure, but the ask doesn’t have to be to use the software. You could ask people to demand better of companies, for example, or ask them to demand systemic change from their government like less aggressive IP law. Of course the end goal is for everyone to be using free software but there’s lots of intermediate steps before we get there.
I also don’t really buy this. E.g. Sentry and Red Hat are counterexamples. Maybe you could argue that if you look closely at the communities formed around these pieces of software they resemble communes (I don’t really know enough to say whether this is the case), but even if that’s so, I simply wouldn’t frame it this way to people who I know aren’t into communism - I often heavily emphasize the idea that free software can be sold because I know this is a common concern people have (whether or not it can actually work at the scale of an entire economy). Of course I wouldn’t emphasize that nearly as much if I was talking to someone into socialism or communism because I know they’re far less likely to have that concern. Remember, any writing 101 class worth anything will tell you to have a specific audience in mind when writing an essay - same goes for verbal communication.
Of course this assumes that you want to be maximally effective at advocating for free software at the expense of advocating for communism. If you don’t want to do that, it’s perfectly valid to explicitly note that the ideas of free software are separate from those of communism - “I personally am a communist, but others would argue that free software can also function in a capitalist system, in xyz way”. Now even if you haven’t been able to convince them that communism is the right system, you’ve at least given yourself a better shot of convincing them that free software is the way to go. This clarifying statement is what’s so often missing in free software advocacy from communism-leaning folks, and that leads to the phenomenon @duncan_bayne was referring to in the root comment.
Red Hat isn’t a counterexample; they gave away so much of RHEL that there is an entire Wikipedia article about forks of RHEL. I recommend you read my linked Mastodon thread; I go into the economics briefly and justify why marginally free goods will always form what I call “Cartesian communes.” Each of us can contribute Free Software according to our ability, and we use whatever Free Software we might happen to need; this is the textbook Marxist view of abundant goods.
Oof. Not only is this off topic for lobste.rs, it’s also extremely naive and myopic; not everyone lives with your privilege.
Don’t post this stuff here, this is a community about computing.
It’s the developing world enjoying the most growth in prosperity, on the whole. Projections are that absolute poverty could be eliminated, across the entire world, within this century.
Unfortunately, it’s very much on-topic for this article. RMS and the FSF were rendered irrelevant by the Open Source movement in large part because the latter wasn’t visibly dominated by anti-capitalists.
Projections are that by 2050 over half of the population will, not could experience water scarcity at least one month per year. Freshwater demand will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030. These are best-case predictions based on governments suddenly enforcing dramatic eco-authoritarian action. “Eliminating poverty” doesn’t mean anything when your millionaire Rothbardian sweatshop boys don’t have the water available to survive. I love Von Mises and I love SEK III, but the facts of the matter are that mercantilist, corporatist, statist etc. capitalist astroturfing and propagandising has left us with a planet that will be uninhabitable unless people take explicitly anti-profit motive stances on the procession of software and hardware development.
Projection are that Mankind has a 50/50 chance of making it to 2100, so yeah…
That prosperity you speak of is build on unsustainable practices that are only kept in place because “line has to go up”. THAT’s what people dislike about capitalism. And it’s not people in Congo coming out of absolute poverty to buy their first car that will change it, or make it a positive.
You realize China - not capitalist - has already eliminated absolute poverty internally, and that if you exclude China, growth in the rest of the developing world doesn’t look so hot, right?
From wikipedia:
So when it’s convenient, China is communist, but when it’s more convenient, China is capitalist. Nice.
Usually, it’s two different groups of people claiming China is one or the other, though.
Historians, economists, and anarchists claim China is state capitalist (though they may disagree on the start date.)
Chinese politicians, and politicians from opposing countries claim China is (still) communist, though for different reasons (deriving legitimacy from Mao and to paint them as the enemy, respectively.)
Ignoring whether China is communist, state capitalist, or something else, that is a claim that could only possibly be made by someone who has never visited the country or read anything about it that is not CCP propaganda.
I’ve been to China. The only reason the party is still in power is because of what they brought to the table: prosperity (not for all, of course) and an end to Mao-style famines.
I can bet that as soon as that goes away (and the cracks are starting to show) so does the Party.
Modern China is most assuredly capitalist. Chinese billionaires like Alibaba’s Jack Ma do not arise under socialism.
If China was communist under Mao, that day is long gone. And that’s without even getting into the debate about whether 20th c.“socialist” countries were actually state capitalist.
Amusingly, Stallman himself, at least in his early Free Software writings, was a pretty clear and ardent capitalist – the proposed ideal world was one where software freedom would create a thriving market for programmers-for-hire who would fix/customize software to whatever specifications you wanted.
Oh, yeah - RMS himself has repeatedly stated that he’s not anti-capitalist, and that Free Software itself is specifically not communist.
A few decades ago he wrote:
It’s a good analogy (perhaps better than RMS realised!), because the environmentalist movement has almost entirely been captured, worldwide, by anti-capitalists for their own purposes.
Edited to add: What RMS describes is baaascially a gig economy for programmers. Not that that’s bad, but it is funny when you consider the political leanings of many FSF supporters ;)
The difference between a pleasant situation with lots of freedom for individual tech workers and a gig economy - which I would, in fact, describe as bad - is willingness to take collective action. The writer’s guild, for example, is the sort of thing that I could see working for programmers. Individual writers work wherever they want but they still get the benefits of collective bargaining.
Of course, that doesn’t bear on capitalism or opposition to it at all, really. It’s a labor topic, which would exist regardless of the economic system.
In fact it’s literally a gig economy, because RMS has stated that musicians shouldn’t make money selling copyrighted recorded music but by playing in concerts!
If you include greenwashing, it would be more accurate to say that the environmentalist movement has almost entirely been captured, worldwide, by capitalists for their own purposes.
There’s a cottage industry of developers/consultants around most “open core” systems. Problem is that the hardcore free software folks are against “open core”, as it often ends up with more stuff getting closed up over time.
Yeah, and I think that’s actually a big part of why the Free Software movement failed. Permissive licenses were always intended as a giveaway to exploiters, but the “four freedoms” kept GPL software from having a moat against corporate control. I think Stallman intended that GPL’ed libraries would form that moat, but then that got watered down with the LGPL, and the industry went on to standardize on permissive licenses anyway.
What I’m saying is that the part of the article I disagree with is that copyleft is enough. It’s clearly not. We need some kind of copyfarleft or collective software commons, though I’m not sure licensing is the right place to go about this.
I have believed this for years, and it’s why I think the inclusion of freedom 2 (the right to distribute copies) was a mistake. IMO in order to gain the benefits of free software as conceptualized by Stallman/the FSF you need to enshrine the right to distribute patches, because otherwise practically it’s difficult to benefit from others’ expertise. But I don’t really see how you require the right to distribute the entire program. (There’s practical nuance in here that I’m ignoring though; for example, at one point is a big patch simply reproducing a significant chunk of the whole program?)
What you’d need there is an end-user friendly way of applying the patches too… I don’t even like compiling other people’s stuff from source myself, and the GPL is ideally all about the end user’s freedom.
Actually, come to think of it, it shouldn’t really be called “free software” since it isn’t the software that is free, but rather more like “end user rights”.
Hmmmm. That distinction might be the answer to the question I asked (to much flamage) back in around 2008. That is, how can I help my customers help each other without providing for free redistribution. A patch based license might have been the answer.
Some of the things he predicted came true, and most of them have benefitted us all immensely. His solutions would not lead to “the world we have now only with source code” it would’ve lead to a world with far less, and far, far, worse software. I don’t care how many times neckbeards say “the license doesn’t forbid you from selling it”, the GPL means you can’t sell it.
If you can’t sell a thing that requires expertise and time to create, it will only ever be a hobby of the rich, which means far, far fewer programmers, and far fewer programs.
If you can’t sell software that takes time and money to maintain, attracting new users becomes a massive cost. If more users is a cost rather than a boon, there is a disincentive to make software that is useable, and those who write the software nobody likes will be the most likely to keep writing software.
If anybody who touches your software in any way is entitled to the source code (arguably the general direction of the GPL over time), then you will not pay programmers to create user-facing software that you believe gives you an edge over your competitors.
RMSs dream of a GPL world and a general acceptance that all proprietary anythings are morally wrong is not some place I’d move to from here, not for all the tea in China.
I, for one, would like to se a world with far less software. And on the whole, I don’t see how the average quality could get any worse.
You can sell the thing that takes expertise and time to create and a lot of companies have made a lot of money around this. You can’t sell the thing that is basically free to create (a copy of the first thing). Open source exists as a distinct concept from Free Software in a large part because it recognises this economic reality: writing software is expensive, copying software is cheap, and a good business model needs to focus on compensating people for the former, not the latter.
Case in point, Grsecurity. They are GPL in every way, and yet they’ve been constantly slandered online because when they sell the code their customers sign a contract stating that customers will not distribute that code.
Free software advocates have attacked them for years (even before this, when they had an out of tree patch to the kernel) because it wasn’t “free in the right way”. God forbid that one of the most advanced security research projects attempts to take any kind of ownership over itself.
Beautifully written and inspiring. The current state of affairs is really sad. I’ll try to do my part with what I write, but I’m also pessimistic as I see the troves of new software hackers using all proprietary tools to develop “open source” software that will just end up being locked away. “Open core” is probably a more apt term I’ve heard looking at software like android, vs code, and so many others.
Speaking of the devil, a link posted to lobste.rs points to writefreesoftware.org which puts both copyleft and permissive licenses under the same umbrella of free software.
To me this just indicates that “free software”, and even “open source” simply does not resonate with most developers. It sure doesn’t resonate with me. How am I supposed to sustainably write free software? Donations? What if someone forks my code? I can’t protect it, that wouldn’t be free! If I use a true copyleft license and I want users I need to create exclusions. If I want to get paid I need more exclusions.
A very small number of people a few decades ago were able to turn “I write copyleft software” into “and I get paid for it” and we’re all supposed to follow suit as if that’s a repeatable model.
One model I think might be interesting is where you’re not permitted to distribute it for less than you paid for it. So if you got a free copy, sure you can distribute more free copies. But if you paid $9.99, you need to charge at least $9.99 per copy too. At least then the original won’t be automatically out-competed on price by one of its own distributors.
Though I actually think even better would be that you must pay your own upstream source the same amount for each copy you make. So then if you want an actual profit, you will need to mark the price up a bit, and each fork that does will then justify their higher price (hopefully) with the value they added to it.
Is this “free software”? Well, everybody has the same right to the source to modify for their own personal use, and can still distribute said modifications right down to the end user, so one could certainly make the argument that it is still free-as-in-freedom.
That’s the age old problem for which I unfortunately have no solution. A solution to the problem you’ve indicated would solve quite many problems! This is one of the many cases where pocketbooks and ideologies don’t get along :( I really wish they did.
At this point, the best I can think of is “take my code and do whatever you want with it” may not be the best options, which is where we seem to be heading. Maybe a better alternative is “use my program, but if you make any changes, give it back! Do with your part as you see fit, but my part will remain in the commons” (to use the terminology of the article). I think LGPL does this and I still have yet to review MPL, but it seems to do this as well from what I’ve heard.
If everyone is nice and respectful to each other and don’t exploit others and not be greedy, we won’t have these problems :P /s
absolutely not.
despite all of the weird sexual allegations (of which there are many), rms is unfit to lead the movement he helped create because he is unwilling to change or deviate in any way. he is responsible for stagnating and killing the free software movement.
https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-run-linux-free-software-isnt-enough.html
Interesting. I believe societies need “extremists” like RMS in order to make progress. That doesn’t mean that they should end up completely giving into the extremists’ proposals. But they should consider them and use this to renegotiate societal contracts and settle on counter proposals.
RMS is not the inspiring leader the masses need. Capitalism is not the pure evil the article may make it out to be.
Good article on a controversial subject. This was my favourite part:
hehe 🦶
Bashing Stallman became a trend; multiplied by viral videos of him eating some dead skin off his feet in public didn’t help with general image, and clearly he is a person whose views don’t align with lots of people or even outright scandalous.
Yes, we want to see leaders of movements as role models and ideally they should appear as perfect/acceptable as possible, but to all that critique and rationale I always ask - where were/are those “acceptable” people that are ready to fight and promote the free software idea? We got the best we could back then, and in general that kind of evangelism is not some 1-in-a-billion magic trait, it is essentially an applied effort and determination.
We chose or elect or get leaders and they’re usually far from ideal and in my opinion if the society churns out someone that (arguably) unfit for the leadership - this is the best we can do. It says just as much about us all.
Society is like open market; if someone doesn’t like something they can do something better and come on top.
And the article in general gives the right vibe (at least for me). We’re losing freedom built on top of stuff free by design, and while the the moral aspect is subjective it is a fact that the whole process literally hinders progress.
I think a set of financial/revenue models for non-corporate-backed jurisdiction-agnostic Open Source development model (and corresponding non-profit orgs helping to implement and execute these model) – is the next step in the evolution of OSS.
I am not sure who the right leaders are or will be for this next step, but it is not typical that they will be the same ones that lead and inspired the first step.