The Free Software Foundation is dying

&gt;It’s time for Richard Stallman to go<p>I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it.<p>So far many of his predictions have come true and there are a few more that seems to be on their way to happening.<p>What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD.<p>This link is one prediction that seems to be where we are well on our way to heading for:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html</a><p>If he is removed from the FSF, that will come true.<p>edit: spelling

&gt; Reform the leadership. It’s time for Richard Stallman to go.<p>&gt; We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides.<p>Stallman is in many ways a problem - but the solution is finding technically and socially competent leadership with a vision that aligns with the core ideologies of the FSF and the ability to lay it out as a coherent long-term plan.<p>Forced diversity has not ever and will not ever make that sort of thing easier to achieve.

&gt;We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides.<p>I can’t really understand where the US is heading with this agenda. As a EU citizen I’m often puzzled and worried, why can’t the sentence just be “We need more competent leaders”? This should imply diversity per se, and btw who decides a place has enough diversity? There will be a diversity judge on workplaces?

The FSF (and GNU) have had plenty of opportunity to be encouraging to new people and ideas but instead they punish you for caring. The FSF office has historically been a revolving door where people enter bright and hopeful and leave disappointed and jaded. The union bargaining unit is mostly powerless. GNU mailing lists (the meta ones like gnu-prog-discuss), are mostly devoid of interesting discussion, preferring endless bikeshedding and resistance to trying new things. Plenty of people who contribute to GNU avoid those lists because they are so toxic. The inescapable founder&#x27;s syndrome surrounding RMS and conspiratorial thinking that any change is equivalent to corporate takeover stops all change. GNU <i>could</i> be run collectively and democratically, but the old guard prefers to worship the man RMS used to be, when he actually was a brilliant programmer, and let him do whatever. The people who will bring free software into the modern day will come from outside the FSF bubble.

&gt;We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others...<p>That is dangerous mindset, so dangerous that I think the article is just trolling, trying to trigger people. But in case if author was serious, choosing leadership or any position for tha matter, should be based on their vision, skill, the weight of their respect is set community rather that on their sexual orientation, color of their skin, country of origin and ect. Discrimination needs to go. And this writing, suggests discrimination based on race or sexuality and gender.<p>I&#x27;ll be honest I stopped reading after that point. From the beginning the ranting was already a salt mine, but kinda wanted to see what direction they were going with it.

From my perspective, movements need multiple organizations that exist on different levels of the “extremism” spectrum. Just like there are various environmental NGO’s, some very radical, and others more mild and open to compromise, the free software movement needs the same.<p>The FSF is the extreme org, the canary in the coal mine that is going to alert on critical issues, but also which frankly are going to send out a lot of false alerts. They are the die hards that will get it wrong constantly, but also will be the early alert system for true critical issues.<p>We need other, more moderate voices they are willing to compromise more and be less extreme. That should not happen within FSF, but as a separate org.

For the parts of the world I see I would question the present continuous form of the article. The FSF isn&#x27;t dying. It is in all practical ways dead and all discussion around it is stuck to RMS. Which is sad, as we need a similar organisation as the &quot;user freedom&quot; is challenged more than ever, as users don&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; their devices ever less, but also operations depends more and more on closed services, which are partially built around Free Software (in FSF&#x27;s definition) while offering none of the freedoms anymore (as it is tied to the cloud service vendor)

Maybe it’s dying because it already succeeded in its goals. That’s a good thing. From my myopic perspective, RMS is FSF. And he has changed the discussion around software forever. Now we need another kind of freedom, we feel it but cannot articulate it. And whoever articulates it, I wish them all the best, whether they do so under the banner of FSF or something else. One thing I am almost sure of is that whatever watering down of FSF message, as I feel this article suggests, will not be it.

The Free software foundation needs its Martin Luther and Reformation. Stallman has quite literally become the pope of the Free software foundation and we need to remember that like with the Protestant Reformation, the individual has their own, unmediated relationship with free software.<p>There are other apt analogies between the Protestant Reformation and the Free software foundation but I will leave discovering that as an exercise to the reader.

Appreciate and agree with this article. It is nice to see an article that strongly agrees with the principles of FSF, but also critical of their clear stagnation. It&#x27;s also disappointing to see a number of comments here that dismiss the call for more diversity in leadership and participation, and more connections to other communities. I think this is very important to spread the reach of the FSF.

Whenever you&#x27;re making an assertion that representation should be the top priority, you&#x27;re saying that merit is not. That is not good. We need the <i>best</i> leaders for FOSS, whoever they are; their skin color, sex, and sexuality are secondary.<p>But about new licenses: I&#x27;ve written a few [1], and I&#x27;m currently getting them checked by a lawyer.<p>I think these licenses are an improvement, but feedback is welcome.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yzena.com&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yzena.com&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;</a>

I find the proposed changes a bit disingenious. The gist is that Stallman should hand over the FSF <i>franchise</i>, to some unspecified persons, with free rein to do whatever they want with it, as long as it is loosely relevant with free software.<p>It&#x27;s only natural that Stallman will refuse, and I can&#x27;t blame him for that.<p>I mean, why not start your own &quot;Libre Software Foundation&quot; and get those unnamed &quot;emerging leaders&quot; behind your agenda? Why would you need to be the continuation of FSF if you plan to radically change it?

I dunno why there&#x27;s such an inordinate focus on changing the FSF. The FSF is what it is. It feels like instead of going another ten rounds with the leadership, it&#x27;d be more productive for the detractors of the FSF to simply make the organization they want.<p>Unless, of course, the goal isn&#x27;t actually about organizing at all and is actually about using the FSF&#x27;s brand for clout and tapping on its already established network of donors.

Are they even coming out with any new software? I remember GNU being big in the 1990s and I know a new version of gawk came out recently, but it seems the center of gravity of “free software” (as in beer) has moved in the direction of the Apache foundation (so many data-related projects it is a “big data” problem to keep track of them all), Github, etc.

How is the FSF failing?<p>There seems to be far more freedom respecting choices nowadays than in the past and we&#x27;re now entering the dawn of &quot;free&quot; cpus with RISC-V. I&#x27;d also consider that Linux is more widely used than at any time in the past as well. What am I missing?

It&#x27;s crazy that the FSF only stands up for license violations of the GNU project, not all GPL licensed projects. That&#x27;s the reason the software freedom conservancy was created in the 1st place.<p>RMS&#x27; management of the GNU project derailed long ago, from him vetoing for his jokes in project he&#x27;s not involved anymore, going OT &amp; insulting on mailing lists and often threatening GNU maintainers by stating that their project belongs to GNU, not them.

I feel like there is a stronger case in saying open source is dying, or at least being corrupted. The vast majority of OSS is served by github, a company owned by Microsoft which already uses it for its own profits. In time the OSS movement may be completely compromised. Perhaps FSF shouldn’t change much and continue functioning as a beacon to guide us rather than a motor to drive us.

Not much new here, but I do echo the call for new licenses. I would like to see an &quot;Affero MIT&quot; license where I get web-accessible credit for my contribution to a web service and something like an &quot;Affero LGPL&quot; to fill in the gap exposed by the ElasticSearch re-licensing debacle.

&gt; It’s time for Richard Stallman to go<p>I stopped donating to FSF upon his resignation.<p>I resumed donating after he returned to the Board.<p>In short, I disagree.

I lost all the respect that I had for FSF when they decided to re-elect Stallman. Would love to see a lot of changes in that foundation.

Hello all, I found this debate after 4 days of &quot;internet vacation&quot; to fulfill a dream of my grandson (10 years old) to go with me on the Legoland roller coaster in Denmark. What shocks me is the reproach made to RMS to be old! The real reproach would be to be dogmatic, stubborn, incapable of compromise, which perhaps is partly justified. I am over 70 myself and still enjoy advising the European Commission on FLOSS and the EUPL license. Old age is when dreams give way to regrets, Kind regards, Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz - EC Joinup legal support

IMHO, this just seems to be another polarizing piece of clickbait, rehashing the pointless “RMS vs. ESR” diatribes.<p>The author frequently posts in support of the OSI (applied for a seat, endorses their “we get to define open source” nonsense, etc.). A March 2022 post rants against Elastic and others because of a non-OSI “open source” license change, while glossing over Amazon’s and the OSI’s roles leading to that change. It also makes a strange argument about bias, which almost comically contradicts itself at the end.<p>IMHO, the OSI, FSF, RMS and ESR have all done more harm than good to the open source community. I’m not saying they’re all equal, or even always bad, but I’m not a fan of bringing one-sided political or philosophical arguments into the hobby and career I’ve truly enjoyed for over 20 years. And no, my contributions don’t somehow mean I get to define what “open source” means for everyone.

The main problem the FSF runs into, over and over, is that they&#x27;re barking up the wrong tree if their goal is political change (which it&#x27;s at least stated to be).<p>Drew doesn&#x27;t really address this directly, although many of the things he points at I would say are related to this. RMS is a big reason why the FSF is the way it is ie. its why their site is a disorganized mess of philosophical ramblings, poorly organized (and often badly written, resulting in people believing things about their licenses that aren&#x27;t accurate[0]) legal FAQs and kinda poorly written predictive fiction attempts from Stallman.<p>Your average user isn&#x27;t going to give a shit about this. Your average programmer already knows and builds on top of FOSS - FOSS is the great portfolio establisher of the programming world at this point. You don&#x27;t need to convince them. Your average user deals with far simpler (and frankly far more dystopian) problems like &quot;my entire workflow broke because Google removed one of their apps and I was completely reliant on it&quot;, &quot;Spotify removed all music of my favorite artist and now I don&#x27;t have access to the music I paid for&quot; and &quot;Microsoft made it so that I can&#x27;t use my computer without a Microsoft account anymore&quot;.<p>The FSF has an extremely myopic view here that if it&#x27;s not invented in FOSS land, it&#x27;s not worth talking about. The GNU Project has an attitude that actively works against bringing people over to FOSS tooling unless they go all-in. Most people don&#x27;t... do that, they&#x27;d rather gradually replace things as they become an issue.<p>Your average user runs Windows and has an iPhone or an Android. Your average developer needs to target these platforms. What does the FSF provide through the GNU for developers and users? Preachy nonsense about how you should buy a Thinkpad and live like a digital hermit. Sure you can barely participate in modern society, but you&#x27;re at least free!<p>FOSS successes come when a project does attempt to bridge the user problem. LineageOS is an extremely useful Apache licensed Custom ROM that&#x27;s widely used as an Aftermarket OS for Android phones for example. LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice, MPL licensed) only became a household-ish tool because it openly was meant as an alternative word processor that strives to at least be compatible with Office (and most of its layout is basically borrowed from the last version of Office before they introduced the ribbon - aka the most production efficient version of Office). People gradually replace, but the FSF demands a total switch in workflows if you want to play on their turf, which for most people is frankly impossible.<p>They can call Facebook and Google silly names all they want, but grandma needs them to schedule her bingo club on Friday. And unless you want to take up the effort of teaching 10 octogenarians how to use a FOSS WebDAV calendar app and Matrix, how to set their devices up for it and more importantly, how that works when their tablet is replaced 3 years later. It&#x27;s basically unreasonable unless the workflow and experience is <i>exactly</i> identical to that of the tools it&#x27;s replacing. And it basically never is.<p>The FSF needs to start trying to work for FOSS being a reasonable option for end-users if it wants to live - the developer work is done, it&#x27;s been done for upwards of 20 years now. Their insistence to keep focusing on the dev side has just let Google et al. create the dystopia they warned about just by ignoring FOSS (ironically the very thing the FSFs proposition claims was easily avoidable if we just build the tools. - We build them. Then Apple and Google just steamrolled the entire relevance of FOSS through either having proper UX design or shoring it up.)<p>[0]: Anything to do with the AGPL.

&gt; The content for this site is CC-BY-SA. The code for this site is MIT.<p>This made me laugh a bit, given the arguments being made.<p>(I&#x27;m <i>not</i> calling him a hypocrite; it&#x27;s fine to use MIT licenses and make these arguments. It was just a funny concluding statement on the blog page)

&gt; despite the 16,000-word FAQ which supplements it.<p>Perhaps it is because of it ...

<i>The organization’s messaging is tone-deaf, ineffective, and myopic.</i><p>That&#x27;s putting it nicely. The FSF&#x27;s messaging is religious bordering on cultish. Frankly I&#x27;m amazed they&#x27;ve accomplished as much as they have despite constantly shaming developers for daring to ask to be paid for their labor.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

I have a theory that people who blog at a site named after themselves are the most authoritatively wrong bloggers.<p>Someone cannot really argue that something is failing without showing that it once succeeded at those goals. The FSF has never been very widely known or effective, except for creating a few pieces of software (gcc, emacs) and a few epic failures (hurd).<p>The FSF has already done enough. It created the GPL license, which is a huge achievement and enough that we can leave the FSF alone without trying to &quot;fix&quot; it or mold it into something new. If Drew wants an effective FSF, hey, you can go make your own. If your ideas are so great, it&#x27;ll surely rocket past the FSF and become the new standard-bearer in the open-source world. But ideas are cheap...

&gt; We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The present leadership, particularly from RMS, creates an exclusionary environment in a place where inclusion and representation are important for the success of the movement.<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of RMS, but this is the exact kind of left wing platitude that people think will revive an organization, but really just signals thats the organization is more concerned with the appearance of reform, rather than substance. It is the death rattle of an organization which has allowed itself to become ideological rather than pragmatic (which is funny considering how ideological the FSF is)<p>The problem with FSF is that it either hasn&#x27;t made its point clear, or has failed to convince people. People are naturally turned off by the GPL because they do not want to give their company&#x27;s code away; they see it as a risk to their businesses.<p>I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work, and we should compete on quality of service and frequency of updates rather than having a monopoly on our code base, but that&#x27;s simply not an argument that businesses <i>buy</i>.<p>It is an uphill battle convincing companies to give away their code to an ecosystem that they will, in the long run, potentially benefit from. The FSF fails to do this, and usually only makes ideological arguments presented by a long-haired, bare-footed, libertarian hippie with a history of extremely controversial takes on the topic of child molestation.

This article could be summed up with &quot;there should be a completely different free software organization that behaves the way I want it to.&quot; Ok? Go ahead and start it.

Why is everyone hating on Stallman, what did he do? Surely you can&#x27;t eject someone for being a straight white male?

There&#x27;s going to be a lot of negativity in these comments. I don&#x27;t have numbers and this is purely anecdotal observation, but there is a large contingent of supporters of the FSF that base their association to the foundation on their political positions (read: a very large number of communists, democratic socialists, and anarchists support FSF). Any criticism of RMS will be met with at least anti-corporate but most likely anti-capitalist rhetoric.<p>Full disclosure: I cut off my contributions to the FSF in fall of 2004. It was obvious it outlived its utility even then.<p>Now I ride to downvote hell...

&gt;It’s time for Richard Stallman to go.<p>&gt;We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides.<p>The FSF is dying. What we need is women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos to <i>lead the movement</i>.<p>There is nothing inherently wrong with diversity, but this is an attempt to spread an agenda, not save the Free Software Foundation.<p>A character like Richard Stallman is and have been a necessity for the movement to be what it is. We cannot let people of weak character lead the movement. We must reject non-free, proprietary software, not fall into a spiral of pragmatism until we are OSS.

This post is mostly wrong, wrong, wrong.<p>&gt; Hammering on about “GNU&#x2F;Linux” nomenclature<p>Linux is just a kernel, not an OS. It was bundled with the GNU system, which was missing a kernel. See explanation here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;gnu&#x2F;linux-and-gnu.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;gnu&#x2F;linux-and-gnu.html</a><p>For many years you could use Debian over the FreeBSD kernel, for example - having the GNU system, plus a bunch of non-GNU software, over another kernel.<p>These days, maybe we should call them GNU&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;Linux systems :-(<p>&gt; maligning the audience as “useds” rather than “users”<p>Nowhere on the FSF website do I see that term used (I checked with their search function).<p>I do see this term on GNU.org, applied to Facebook &quot;users&quot;. I think it is not maligning people, it is critiquing behavior, and that is quite appropriate in that context.<p>&gt; antagonism towards our allies in the open source movement<p>I hope you mean the Free Software (or FOSS) movement - right?<p>Anyway, which allies do you mean? I hope you don&#x27;t suggest that Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like are our allies. Or maybe your conception of &quot;us&quot; is simply different?<p>&gt; none of this aids the cause.<p>Ah, but what is &quot;the&quot; cause?<p>&gt; The pages and pages of dense philosophical essays and poorly organized FAQs do not provide a useful entry point or reference for the community.<p>It seems you disagree with the content more than you do with the website entry points. It is quite a useful reference; but again, perhaps your &quot;the community&quot; is different.<p>&gt; As for copyleft, well, it’s no coincidence that many people struggle with the FSF’s approach. ... over 1 million npm packages use a permissive license while fewer than 20,000 use the GPL; cargo sports a half-million permissive packages and another 20,000 or so GPL’d.<p>1. There&#x27;s LGPL, which is intended for libraries (and npm packages would typically be that).<p>2. &quot;Dedicating&quot; software to be free, in the GPL sense, is no trivial matter. Sometimes you just can&#x27;t do it because you don&#x27;t own the legal rights; sometimes its because potential commercial users you are interested in will avoid GPLed stuff; and there are other reasons.<p>But it is the direction we should be converging towards: Software as something that is fundamentally free, period. No more lock-ins and development siloing and other artificial sabotage of software development due to narrow commercial interests.<p>&gt; The FOSS community is now dominated by people who are beyond the reach of the FSF’s message.<p>To the extent that&#x27;s true - _that_ is the problem. And the author is part of that problem. But it&#x27;s really not that new: In the 1980s and 1990s most of these people were simply mostly interested in closed-source commercial software.<p>&gt; It’s time for Richard Stallman to go<p>No.<p>&gt; and the demographics [Richard Stallman] represents is becoming a minority<p>Richard Stallman does not represent demographics. His community and institutional positions are not representational, they are based on his theoretical and practical contributions.<p>&gt; reach out to emerging leaders throughout the FOSS world, and ask them to take charge of the FSF’s mission.<p>How is this different from how the FSF does recruitment right now? (I don&#x27;t know, I&#x27;m asking)<p>&gt; The message needs to be made much more accessible and level in tone, and the relationship between free software and open source needs to be reformed so that the FSF and OSI stand together as the pillars at the foundations of our ecosystem.<p>Let the OSI adopt the FSF&#x27;s positions, then, and we&#x27;ll have a &quot;level tone&quot; and everyone will &quot;stand together&quot;.<p>&gt; Decouple the FSF from the GNU project<p>Interesting. But - how closely are they coupled?<p>&gt; Develop new copyleft licenses<p>I&#x27;m not a license expert, for sure. But - to the extent that the author&#x27;s critique is of ease of reading and understanding what the license means, this is at least a worthwhile idea. But to the extent that the author suggests &quot;permissive&quot; licenses instead of freedom-preserving ones, that would be in line with the implied suggestion to just drop the free software philosophy altogether.

I&#x27;m not sure enough people believe that proprietary software is immoral to make the FSF relevant anymore. Rather the Open Source philosophy won out.

the &quot;problem&quot; with the FSF is the no-true-scottsman license. It just ends with, if you aren&#x27;t ideologically in line with GNU, you&#x27;re not free software. It&#x27;s like debian refusing to package firefox. It lacks the practicality and realpolitick one needs to make free software more widely used and understood.

Good. Stallman and by extension the FSF are agenda-driven radicals. Following their guidelines ironically leaves the user with very little freedom.