The Problem with the Free Software Community

I saw a post in another thread talking about the GPLv2 vs GPLv3 and I thought that it deserved it's own thread as this highlights the difference between the two "factions" in the free software community.

In short, I think the FSF is wrong. I think the approach that Stallman and the rest of the "GNU people" (for lack of a better term) take in spreading free software is wrong. Stallman has made the GNU project into a religion of sorts. Talking with an FSF member is a bit like talking to an anarcho-communist (often one in the same). The FSF has no concept of a compromise or even a concept of how you can realistically affect change in a community. Forcing people to adhere to your own strict code of morality is no way to change the world. You will never win over governments and businesses with this approach. In fact, many have completely rejected the concept of free software because of this.

The thing is, I agree with many of Stallman's arguments. I believe that we should collectively move away from unethical tracking and surveillance. I believe that a world running on FOSS is a world that gives more freedom to the end user (presumably something that we all agree is a good thing). Where Stallman and I differ is on the issue of practicality. The FSF acts as a screaming child wanting their way and their way only. How is it remotely productive to spend even a portion of your time arguing over whether the system should be called "GNU" or "Linux"?

Other urls found in this thread:

gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.en.html
youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU?t=4m47s
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Have you read this? It's a reply to exactly your concern.

gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.en.html

OP here. Yes, I have, but I would disagree that it addresses my larger grievance. The FSF has made compromises, yes, but the underlying problem of ideological purity remains.

One particular quote embodies my problem perfectly:

Stallman promotes his ideology under the guise of freedom. He wants everyone to accept his ideology rather than simply solve the problems we face. People simply don't work like that.

FSF may have its practical problems, but your approach is completely backwards if this is your criteria.

Governments and businesses make up a large portion of the market. It is also incredibly important to increase adoption of free software in business for it to become more widespread. If Google and Red Hat did not contribute to Linux, it would be nowhere near where it is today.

kill yourself. shit thread. sage

You do not understand what it takes to solve the problems we face. What it takes is for people to write software to replace proprietary software. If users are not willing to do that for the software they need in their life, then that's their own fault for choosing to absolve responsibility for their own computing.

Free Software merely enforces the idea that the user has a right to have knowledge of and control over the software running on his system. The only group for whom it makes sense to oppose it are those computing companies that happen to hold a monopolistic position in industry at the moment.

As such, it is important not to cuck and compromise with people who hold a totally unjustifiable position. Historically, an uncompromising attitude towards proprietary software has worked wonderfully. It is only in recent years with the growth of the corporate-sponsored "open source" movement that Free Software has begun to falter, as developers satisfied with a few scraps of free code abandon the fight for real software freedom and in some sad cases actively resist Free Software and act as apologists for proprietary software vendors.

Freedom matters.

But you wouldn't undertand, would you?
So drop your pants and bend over for you corporate master.

That's what happens when you confuse free software with (((GNU))) pseudo-free software.

Free software existed and thrived long before the (((FSF))) and will exist and thrive long after (((Stallman))) is forgotten.

The goal of the Free Software Foundation is to support and promote the use of Free Software, so obviously it is not in their interest to compromise. Some of its member might compromise for private use, but the FSF's stance is clear for a very good reason. Promoting the use of non-Free software would be an admission of failure.

nice meme faggot

Stallman never claimed to be the originator of free software. Stallman is the father of the free software movement which is a political movement to advocate for users to have freedom in their own computing. Stallman started the free software movement because the culture of freedom in computing was being threatened by corporations who would strive to seduce many users into proprietary software.

This is the reason why the open source initiative exists and why Stallman refuses to be associated with it. They intentionally opposed Stallman's ideals about users deserving freedom and they wanted to only promote the practical benefits of freedom while actively dismissing the importance of users who deserve freedom.

Considering all the sliding that has happened over the years, it is only the courage and stubbornness of people like Stallman that has kept the flag flying.

Without the FSF, without GNU, what would we have? Sure, *BSD would receive a lot of of the development GNU gets, but what about all the other GNU and/or Linux that is out there? Android, embedded systems, routers, etc. Everything would be 100 % proprietary and all the efforts to hack or implement them would be as hard as Wine.

Sure, most companies refuse to publish or make it easy for hackers to tinker with the software of their products, but stuff like Cyanogen, alternate router firmware, free printer drivers would be impossible.

Stallman is an impractical and opinionated guy; but he's also a really smart guy and the only one that has dared to think of computing as something to be morally aware of. We need more people like him, driven by ideals and morality, and less Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts and whatever five-letter word Silicon Valley """"startups"""" that only look to profit by fucking their users.

The real shame here is that Stallman is only the head o the FSF. A guy like him would have done much more good as a politician by shilling his pro-consumer agenda amongst the braindead reta
RDS that run the government. (Granted, he would have set back tech and innovation by several years, but I don't care.)

But BSD would not have been Libre without Stallman and the GNU.

Compromising in the case of software isn't desirable at all; there's literally nothing to be gained from software being proprietary, only inconveniences.

Sure, your typical tech-illiterate individual will get their shit done today, but instead of working to find a way to stop depending on it or drop it, they keep using proprietary botnetware and overlook the ways it bites them in the ass, or even rationalize them.

Forced updates, always-online, dropping compatibility deliberately (new CPUs only support W10, Office documents displaying like shit on older versions), non-upgradable obsolete/insecure systems (any obscure/non-recent android device, IoT crap), finnicky DRM (Keurig coffee machines, printers, especially HP), malware (Sony rootkit, Street Fighter V rootkit) devices made to cease to function (remember Nest thermostats?), media you paid for being purged remotely (1984 from kindles), etc.
No sane user wants those, but they don't do shit about it. They put up with it and they're fine with that. They don't look for alternatives. They don't even complain. They think it's the norm. And anyone who refuses to use it gets either mocked or called an extremist.

The point is, software is a tool, like a hammer or a lawn mower. You don't expect the maker to tell you how you can use it, who can use it, how to store it, that only they are allowed to fix it if it breaks, whether you're allowed to make money with it, or where you can use it, nor do you expect it to be designed to work against you. It's not insane to expect those things from software. What is insane is that people have been conditioned to accept the opposite, and that 'getting shit done' today and getting shit on later is fine.

you don't expect the maker of a tool to*

Absolutely this. People have become so used to computing being shit that they just don't care. It's like watching someone sitting in a rooms that full of old pizza boxes, piss bottles, the window is cracked and being held together by duct tape, worn underwear everywhere, the walls have mould, and when you try to help them out of that mess they scream at you. I have no idea how one could convince people that they should be expecting better.

That's pretty funny if they did that. Must have red-pilled some people.

Stallman does this. His logic and reasoning convinced me that freedom in computing is not only desirable but it should also be a right that's worth advocating for.

We should take the time to understand Stallman's arguments so that we are able to teach other people why freedom in computing is important. It is their own responsibility if they hear us properly but continue to live as subjects to the owners of proprietary software.

The problem with this is Stallman himself. While he may have great arguments about Free Software, he looks like the kind of man your parents would tell you to move to the other side of the road if you saw him.

Then should he shave and wear a suit?

the same could be said of any jew

The suit would be optional, but getting a shave, haircut and losing some weight would be good. He looks like the archetype of a computer nerd.


You got me there.

You know what's fucking inconvenient? When my FOSS music player takes 15 god damn minutes to rescan my music library, but the closed-source foobar2000 does it in seconds and keeps track automatically whenever new stuff is added in. Or how about when my FOSS filepicker doesn't actually display thumbnails so I can't fucking use it to post images on image boards without sitting there and scrolling through each and every single file to see what it is -- but my closed source filepickers have had thumbnails for something like 15 years now.

Or how about when my FOSS Octave doesn't have half the toolboxes that Matlab does and can't actually run Matlab files without heavy modification code despite claiming it can do just that.

Or how about PulseAudio.

Ideological purity is the only way to go if you're trying to change the world. Absolute truth is absolute truth, and that doesn't change based on political or economic expedience. Imagine if the ancient Christians had compromised with the Mithraists; Christianity wouldn't have survived to this day, at least, not while retaining its identity as Christianity. Imagine if the early American proponents of democracy had compromised with the folks who wanted America to be a monarchy; we wouldn't have democratic freedoms today. It's the same with free software: you can't combine free software with proprietary software and still have a free program. Can you think of even one single movement that compromised with its polar opposite and went on from there to change the world? No, because compromise means the practical death of your movement every single time.

rms is not a nigger. wtf are you talking about?

It actually happened

Now every country in the world is the US. Where I grew up we don't have niggers, but we have other people best avoided.

Whether a program is free or proprietary, it works the same, except in the latter case you're fucked if the program contains DRM/is infected with botnet/is made to rely on 'cloud' crap/etc. Hence only inconveniences.
You should seriously work on your reading comprehension, fam.

...

I need an argument with that meme.

The problem with the free software community is that they're all autistic turbo-nerds who think simplicity and usability shouldn't even factor into decision making, and then wonder why people prefer shit like Apple and Google who harvest their data but work out of the box instead of clunky pieces of shit that require you to install 47 different packages and 8 custom drivers just to get basic functionality out of the software but respects "muh freedums"

He's right, you moral relativism faggot. Without someone to say "if binary blobs are what it takes to run your hardware we'll make do without your hardware" Free Software would be slowly consumed by proprietary software and die.
Also, his post has absolutely nothing to do with Holla Forums you stupid leftist, go take your meds.

it's time to leave

Stallman is very well aware that he would not be very popular or endearing as a politician. He decided that it would a better use of his time if he dedicated his life advocating for something he understands very deeply: the freedom of users in computing. By focusing on something that he understands, it would make a much better use of his time.

youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU?t=4m47s
that image is not very accurate

Bullshit. The soviets were fucking terrible at fighting. 13:1 death ratio compared to the Germans. Also pic related.

...

They won anyway.

The Soviets won ww2, but since they lost 1/3 of their men on it, that victory cost them the cold war. The ones who really won, long-term, were the bankers (jews, the usual winners of any war) and the US since the war destroyed European industry.

The USSR beat the US into space, and expanded their sphere of influence more than the US did.

This discussion has been around forever. Some years back it was possible to look at OP's point and think 'yeah, that that could work'.
But ever since, Ubuntu came about and made it's rise.
It is the most practical thing imaginable, you can jump right on it coming from Windows and start using it without even knowing the definition of an OS. You can put it in your old aunt's computer, and if you just explain to her that she has to type some bullshit instead of going to a site to install new software, she will use it with no problems.
Yay, Ubuntu became the most used distro of all.

Then it start spying on everyone. Was it worth it, or should we just have kept listening to old Stallman all along?

I don't think you understand what is spying. Ubuntu did no such thing.

The only thing free software needs to be more widespread is to spread the meme that freedom is critically important in computing. Without this meme, the people will use the most convenient software without regard to how it affects their freedom.

Ubuntu literally packaged malicious and aggressively harmful amazon software by default, which in turn aggressively harvested user data for amazon to sell and advertise with. The one who doesn't understand spying is YOU, since you clearly don't see a problem with secretly collecting user information for the purpose of profit. I'm tempted to call you an NSA shill

All it did was send search queries done in the dash to Amazon servers. Anonimized, mind you.

It's also disabled by default in 16.04 onwards and doesn't even come preinstalled with Unity 8.

That Amazon software was neither malicious nor aggressive in the collection of user data. All it did was send search queries to Amazon. It had no idea who you were. You got a message that it was being installed and it was your choice to install it. Spying implies that you don't know that it was happening. This was all done in the open.

laughingwhores.jpg

You get to elect who is the leader after a fixed period of leading time. Anybody is free to be nominated as a candidate to be the leader. That's is democratic freedom in America.

Fix'd

considering amazon is holding strong against even jews with holocaust revisionist literature and related items,
I think most likely it was a redpilled employee trying to warn us, rather than an amazon corporate directive.

the is well made however. they can (and did) remove downloaded content at will.
even if the rogue employee theory holds, he would have still proven that random politically motivated company employees have that power.
wich is why you shouldnt get a dropbox account since their encryption keys can be reset by support staff, meaning any employee has potential access to your data. if you have valueable data it is very likely somebody is going to come and take it.

Contrary to what your conspiracy narrative would suggest, Amajew said copies of 1984 and Animal Farm were wiped because the books were still under copyright in Murica (as opposed to Canuckistan and Straya, where the books are in the public domain) and they didn't secure the rights to publish them.

bloo bloo elsewhere, jew.

every revolution or reform were idealist at first. It never going to fully happen. If you say 100% or nothing, you can reach the 50% or the 80%. If you say 40%-50%, you might get peanut.

thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, read some heggel

Simplicity and usability shouldn't even factor into decision making for the reason that you have the freedom to fix everything. If it costs $30000 to fix what is needed, then you should pay that cost to make your software "simple and usable".

Free software is for paranoid nutties

nice captioned facebook meme, welcome to the chans

the universe is a wave based interference pattern, the 3d world you think you perceive with your holographic brain is in fact an illusion arising from the 2d information field underlying perceptual reality. In this universe both matter and consciousness are quantized and nonlocal through the use of weaponized memes Holla Forums single handedly altered the cosmos

thanks

Stallman is a fat autistic manchild but you're a hypocrite that writes paragraph after paragraph without offering a solution.