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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: 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.

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  • (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.