- A major fracture in the movement (arguably two, if you count GPL2/3).
- Actively turning people off (Keith Packard, for example, described why they didn't license X under the GPL: "we had met Richard, and found him a challenging individual"; he later admitted that Stallman was right and that he should have listened).
- Sidetracking of pointless issues ("GNU/Linux", "you should not be using hacker", etc.)
- Alienating of many people who are generally keen on most of the Free Software principles.
- Insisting on absolute freedom to the detriment of more freedom than the status quo.
According to this comment, he did better than any other leader in the World.
> Alienating of many people who are generally keen on most of the Free Software principles
Did donations went up or down during his leadership?
And what happened when he "left"?
How many people found out that Stallman was right in retrospect?
> Insisting on absolute freedom to the detriment of more freedom than the status quo.
That's the core mission of the FSF.
Our Core Work
The FSF sponsors the GNU Project—the ongoing effort to provide a complete operating system licensed as free software. We also fund and promote important free software development and provide development systems for GNU software maintainers, including full email and shell services and mailing lists. We are committed to furthering the development of the GNU Operating System and enabling volunteers to easily contribute to that work, including sponsoring Savannah the source code repository and center for free software development.
That last "Our Core Work" paragraph is hilarious and straight from 1996. The special mention that Savannah gets makes it double hilarious, since it's the worst code repository software ever created and was already stale in 2001.
If you want FSF to be some sort of "by hackers, for hackers" thing: sure, go for it. If you want anything more: lolno. The FSF is Free Software's worst enemy.
That's a bold claim, but since I don't have a horse in this race my opinion is that FOSS space is huge and one size fits all is not possible anymore.
They can't make everybody happy and it would be silly to even try.
If you don't like FSF, you can support other entities.
I believe it's perfectly fine to disagree, but I also believe FSF has never forced anybody to do anything they didn't want to do.
I personally would much prefer to see many others trying than changing what the FSF stands for simply because they are not trying to please everybody.
Anyway, I see people treating Stallman like a devil, while working for big corporations or happily using proprietary software, like Github (Microsoft), while accusing Stallman of being enemy of the free software.
it's a weird shift from the times when Microsoft was referred as M$...
I don't think RMS is "the devil", but we do allow him to frame the debate and priorities, and I don't think this is a good thing as I feel his priorities are all wrong. The more mindshare RMS takes up, the less there is for things that do matter.
Why aren't we using some Free Software platform to develop our software on? No really, if we can't get our own tooling together then what does that say about the movement as a whole? People use GitHub simply because it's the best platform out there; I did a review of many alternatives a while ago, and GitHub was the best by far. It's as simple as that really. The problem with the "RMS mindset" is that "it's Free Software" is enough of a "feature" that will make people use it, and turns out it's not except for quite a small group of people.
Imagine an alternative universe where the FSF had invested significant time an resources in developing a Savannah that actually, you know, worked well. Not only would people use it, and it would have been a great platform to spread the word about Free Software and why it matters. Instead, Stallman writes polemics about how SaaS is evil and you shouldn't be using these "Service as a Software Substitute". Okay, nice... But also missing the point and that's just not how software works today, or will ever work again. The 80s have come and gone.
I don't work for a big corporation btw; I've actually been work full-time on Free Software for the last 2 years, making about €700/month or so. At least I put my money where my mouth is :-)
> Imagine an alternative universe where the FSF had invested significant time an resources in developing a Savannah that actually, you know, worked well.
it works well enough for those who use it I guess
But I also like to imagine a world where projects like Savannah are backed by investors with very deep pockets instead of existing only out of the hard work of volunteers
Anyway, I use a private instance of gitea for my personal projects, it costs me 3 euros/month for the hosting and another couple bucks for the storage
I agree with what Stallman says about SAAS, I am not as radical as he is, not by a long shot, but SaaS platforms pose a big risk in terms of vendor lock in
I also share your frustration about what it could be, but it's not (yet, hopefully)
> I don't work for a big corporation btw; I've actually been work full-time on Free Software for the last 2 years, making about €700/month or so. At least I put my money where my mouth is :-)
you deserve my gratitude then for all the work that you do personally and as a part of the FOSS community
> - Actively turning people off (Keith Packard, for example, ... later admitted that Stallman was right
Packard did, but you're still blaming Stallman for Packard being wrong?!?
> - Sidetracking of pointless issues ("GNU/Linux", "you should not be using hacker", etc.)
And here you are, posting on Hacker News. Are you sure you could do that, without becoming a pariah among your peers if it came out, without Stallman's "sidetracking"?
- A major fracture in the movement (arguably two, if you count GPL2/3).
- Actively turning people off (Keith Packard, for example, described why they didn't license X under the GPL: "we had met Richard, and found him a challenging individual"; he later admitted that Stallman was right and that he should have listened).
- Sidetracking of pointless issues ("GNU/Linux", "you should not be using hacker", etc.)
- Alienating of many people who are generally keen on most of the Free Software principles.
- Insisting on absolute freedom to the detriment of more freedom than the status quo.
And so forth.