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posted by martyb on Friday January 24 2020, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the speak-up dept.

Can the Linux Foundation Speak for Free Software?:

[Emphasis in original. --Ed.]

Although the Linux Foundation seems to represent Linux and the entire Linux user community, many community members have complained for years that the organization has defaulted to representing only the interests of its corporate membership.

This situation might not matter so much if organizations representing the community were strong enough to act as a counter-balance. The trouble is, they are not. In the last decade, the Free Software Foundation has backed away from its former activist tradition, while the Software Freedom Conservancy is almost unknown outside a small circle. Even Debian, while the dominant force among Linux distributions, makes fewer position announcements than it once did. As a result, the Linux Foundation has become the accepted public face of free software without any attempt to represent any except corporate interests.

The kindest interpretation of this situation is that the Linux Foundation has a public relations problem that it is unaware of and is overdue to correct. A more cynical interpretation is that, from its very start, the Linux Foundation has been a slow coup, gradually usurping an authority to which it has no right. Ask me on alternate days which one I believe.

Whatever the case, the solutions are the same. A concerted effort to get community members elected to at-large positions might help, although they would still be a minority. Many, too, might not want to legitimize the foundation by participating in it. A more promising response might be to see that community organizations are strengthened to provide a counter-balance, but that would be a slow solution if it worked at all.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @09:11PM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @09:11PM (#948149)

    I believe what we are seeing is also a response to the general economic downturn over the last forty years. Free Software is at its heart a hobby, and hobbies require both time and money from the hobbyist. The majority of people who would be driving it today simply can't afford it.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Friday January 24 2020, @09:38PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 24 2020, @09:38PM (#948162) Journal

    This confirms my biases, therefor must be correct.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 24 2020, @09:52PM (12 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 24 2020, @09:52PM (#948172) Journal

    I think the lone hobbyist coder is long gone. Major open source projects now get most of their code contributions from corporate paid full time developers.

    The world has changed. Big businesses see a real profit benefit to contributing to open source. Yes, it costs you something. But you get in return everyone else's contributions as well. So it's cheap at the price. And much more appealing than Microsoft.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:53AM (9 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:53AM (#948277)

      Cheap doesn't matter if you can't afford the price, which is what I was getting at. Production grade coding skills require a significant time investment to develop and the people who would have been doing it as hobbyists simply don't have enough spare time any more, so corporate sponsors are all that is left. This is a direct result of gutting the middle class.

      Liberty (of any kind) isn't free, and you only get it if you have a strong middle class demanding it.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:03AM (8 children)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:03AM (#948342) Journal
        One of the consequences is that open source has been co-opted. Look at how walled-in and insecure Android is - 2 years of updates and you need to buy a new phone. So much for the benefit of open source. So much for trying to reduce e-waste. And just try removing all the Google spyware.

        Same with Chromebooks. Co-opted by an advertising company.

        Open source stopped advancing years ago. There are far fewer options available than at the turn of the century, as fragmentation has taken its toll. And it's not going to stop, because there's no financial means to let developers earn a living scratching their itch without corporate overlords. So welcome to 2030, same as 2020. And 2040, same as 2020. There is simply no economic model that will change things. We've entered the long twilight.

        Until developers can make a living banding together to produce and sell software directly to consumers again, without predators trying to co-opt, or turn it into yet more software as a service spyware, nothing will improve.

        We see that to a small extent with games, but even that is now being turned into software as a service, and a vehicle for the advertisers surveillance economy. Maybe developers need to start boycotting the whole scam. But that would mean first realizing that open source has been co-opted and that the dream was merely that - a dream, an illusion, a lie based on the lie that "information wants to be free" and that the open economy would result in untold opportunities for the ones doing the heavy lifting.

        Maybe in another decade people will realize that they've been p0wned and that RMS was always full of shit.

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        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by r_a_trip on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:14PM (7 children)

          by r_a_trip (5276) on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:14PM (#948535)

          No RMS isn't full of shit. It's us who lack his unwavering resolve. We all let a little corruption in here and there. It was convenient to have blobs. It was convenient to take corporate money. It was convenient to get more "gratis" goodies. It was convenient to water down the ethos of Free Software to get corporations on board. So now we got what we implicitly asked for. An almost but not quite free system.

          • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:46PM (6 children)

            by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:46PM (#948549) Journal

            A little corruption? And how was RMS not also at least a little corrupt by attacking one of Epstein's accusers for no reason except that Epstein was a donor to the MIT lab? He's always been a fucking misogynist, so when he dies I'm going to repeat what he said about Steve Jobs [loopinsight.com]: "I'm not glad that he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."

            Richard M. Stallman, the furry, neckbearded goat-god of the “free software movement,” offered this comment on Steve Jobs’ passing on his Web site:

            As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

            This is the same guy who eats his own toe-jam while lecturing people on the wonders of free software

            Stay classy, RMS. Don’t go changin’.

            It wasn't convenient to pay for software ... but I did. I didn't bow to "convenience" by pirating. And the quality of the software I paid for was way higher than the shitfest we have today, where security flaws sit in plain sight for years despite the claim by open source advocates that "many eyes make all bugs shallow." Heartbleed should have been shallow, it was in plain sight for two years, but unless you have people paid to do the grunge work, bugs, unlike cockroaches, can hide in plain sight.

            You get what you pay for. And since it's the big corps paying for open source development, they get what they are paying for, even when it's to our detriment.

            Better stand-alone software and operating systems are anathema to them, because they make their money on software as a service and the surveillance economy. Once again, follow the money. What happened was the ultimate result of destroying the "build and sell good software directly to the consumers" model, which doesn't work if you give away your code. So RMS fucked over our privacy rights.

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            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:11PM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:11PM (#948586)

              Yep. A total misogynist. That must totally be why he has obviously put a great deal of thought into https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html [stallman.org]

              • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @10:08PM (1 child)

                by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday January 25 2020, @10:08PM (#948626) Journal

                Typical Stalman. Not just fucked up misogeny, but also blatantly anti - trans. And this is from 2018, with edits last year. The man is fucking clueless.

                There are those who claim that we have an obligation to refer to someone using whatever pronouns person might choose. I disagree with that position, on grounds of principle and grounds of practice. I think we should respect other people's gender identification, but which pronouns we use for any particular gender identification is a separate matter — a matter of grammar. We do not owe it to anyone to change our grammar according to per wishes.

                Society has settled on "they, them, their" for referring to a person whose gender is not specified. Nobody is going to refer to someone as "person, per, pers."

                Use the elegant gender-neutral pronouns "person", "per" and "pers". They fit into English smoothly. They are easy to remember, since they come from "person", and the last two resemble "her" and "hers". They are natural to use, since they work just like "she", "her" and "hers". "Pers" ends in a voiced consonant, just like "hers".

                Also, "per" is already used, in both "per person " , "per 1000", and "per se". "One free prize per per isn't gonna float.@

                The guy stopped evolving in the 70s. But thanks for pointing out yet another example of is poseur pseudo-intellectual crap that he has been using for decades as a passive-aggressive way of trying to look superior while only managing to be superficial. Same as his arguments on other topics. What a man-child.

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                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:20PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:20PM (#949007)

                  We should ship all the trannys and musrats to an island with minimal resources and forget to film what happens.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @12:51AM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @12:51AM (#949079)

              Probably a more likely explanation for the Epstein ordeal was that Stallman was defending his deceased friend.

              I'm not sure where the conspiracy of corruption comes from in this scenario. He wasn't paid by MIT and had no financial connections to the university. He never had any position of significance there. Never was a professor. Never was in any management position. His only real connection to the place was that they let him use one of the office rooms in CSAIL.

              He likely wasn't aware of who donated what and when -- because he was never involved in making decisions for the lab at any point. Even if he somehow did know, I wouldn't have been surprised, right or wrong, if he defended his friend regardless.

              • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday January 27 2020, @01:58AM (1 child)

                by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday January 27 2020, @01:58AM (#949105) Journal

                You're known by the company you keep. His lies in attacking one of Epsteins victims shows just how misogynistic RMS is at his core. RMS cultivates the image of the rebel antiestablishment idealist, but in reality he's a rebel without a clue. If he were an adolescent, he'd be diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder, something people usually grow out of as they grow up.

                Neither he nor Randy Andy (prince Andrew) have an excuse. Epstein was already found guilty previously, and new allegations should have been enough to give cause for prudence, not unqualified support of Epstein.

                In the end it doesn't really matter much - the open source movement is stagnant, not much in the way of new software is making waves of any sort, old software is in maintenance mode (if that), and in 2030 it will be more if the same. The same packages in an even more fractured family of distros, even more package formats, and more control of the direction of development by the big players to the detriment of any potential ordinary users.

                Microsoft could make a killing financially by simply ending any OEM pre-install deals. You want Windows? - Buy it at full retail. The simple fact is that Linux and free software in general is not what people want. They want Windows or OSX, and they're willing to pay for them. There will never be a year of Linux on the desktop or the laptop. As for phones, Android hides Linux, creating a walled garden, and iPhone has its own walled garden, with a much more profitable client base for developers to sell to.

                There's really nothing to get excited about from anyone - not open source, not Microsoft, not Apple. Linux is no longer seen as a potential disruptor. Certainly not by IBM. And not by Apple or Microsoft.

                So in the end, RMS is irrelevant , as is the FSF and the EFF. The latter two will now do the same as many other foundations, concentrate on fund raising to pay their salaries while not making too many waves. Same as the Mozilla Foundation. Same as the Linux Foundation.

                New operating systems and software ecosystems might come, but they will be proprietary. Innovation will avoid the whole "information wants to be free" thing because only ideas that want to starve to death will now go that route. Enough people are finally seeing the end game of free software for what it was - a stupid, impossible dream because there are no financial underpinnings and no way to enforce some semblance of cohesion rather than everyone forking and forking.

                More than 1,000 distros is a sign of failure. RMS standing up for his friend Epstein is just a footnote marking RMS ignoble legacy. Never before have so many laboured so hard for so long to accomplish so little of import.

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                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @11:08PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @11:08PM (#949646)

                  Consider a future where we have UBI (admittedly it would be much further in the future than your 2030 discussion but it may not be off by more than a few decades). What would your predictions for software be?

                  While I largely, but not entirely agree, with your guesses as to the world in the next 10 years, I think UBI could provoke something of a software renaissance and I believe that will be the world where free and open source software will thrive. I don't believe it will magically make free/open source software magically good or user friendly, but it will allow for massive projects like Linux to be created, developed, and funded without profit motives, corporate or governmental backing. (Hopefully in the future we can afford the standards to at least insist that things not be designed poorly from day 1 like the monolithic monstrosity Linux has and always will be. But that's a separate discussion and I think Linux could be a byproduct of a more fundamental limitation of our species in being able to make intelligent decisions and assessments in large groups -- this isn't limited to free or open source software, though)

                  The way I see it, UBI will happen. That or the species is going to have a dark age like history has never seen before. Or maybe we will merge with AI and the future will be more nuanced and complicated than our simple human minds could imagine. I suspect it will be eventually a mix of the first and third outcomes. Anyone who doesn't think the human mind is some divine creation outside this universe can see what I'm saying -- we will replicate all of human intelligence. So then what happens? I think that's the more interesting discussion. Not the discussion of what surprises Louis XVI is going to serve us next.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:01PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:01PM (#948447)

      > Major open source projects now get most of their code contributions from corporate paid full time developers.

      The barriers to contribution, and to software in general, are higher now than in the early hey days. A lot of large projects are now too large to easily maintain, understand or help with. Don't even get me started on how hard it is to build things now.

      The thirty million line problem [youtube.com] is as much a problem for open source as it is for software quality.

      • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:01PM

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:01PM (#948554) Journal

        And yet we have an easier time pumping out software now that we aren't stuck writing it in assembler. That software worked, and people paid for it willingly. Now we have shitty free bloatware, and a couple of generations who have zero experience with the design skills necessary to produce working software in assembler, or in many/most cases, even c.

        "Oh, but rust will fix that." Same as Java did???? Same as UML did??? Or Yourdon??? (Does ANYONE remember Yourdon any more)? Same as the shitty GoF book "Design Patterns" did? (can't believe I spent $70 for a hardcover copy, if it hadn't been sealed in plastic at the book store I would have spotted it for the bullshit it was immediately).

        Funny how trends change. When I first took a dump all over "Design Patterns", people were merciless. Now ... plenty agree it was over-hyped and just didn't deliver.

        We have people claiming decades of "programming experience" that is nothing more than 6 months experience cut-n-paste from stackoverflow, repeated 20 times. They are SO locked into "use a web server" as the solution to everything that they don't even think of finding a better way to solve a problem, and they wouldn't know how anyway. Hence they perpetuate the surveillance economy.

        The reason open source software is shittier now than at the turn of the century? Simple - constantly improving stand-alone operating systems and software would destroy the business models of the big boys - RedHat/IBM, Facebook, Google, Amazon. You would have intelligent agents that would be capable of going out on the net and finding what you wanted without hitting their servers and services. That was supposed to be the big thing that the net would enable - massively peer-to-peer for everything. They do NOT want that. And neither, apparently, do people who won't shell out for software but want everything free. You got it for free, but you gave up your freedom.

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