Re:Joint Statement on the GNU Project
by dvfjsdhgfv on Monday October 07, 2019 @03:19PM
(#21184868)
I completely agree with you. Moreover, I witnessed the same scenario in other projects, and it always ended the same way: once the charismatic leader was eliminated, people gradually lost motivation and everything dwindled. When people realized it was not worth it, it was already too late. Now that we lost Stallman it will be extremely hard to find a person even remotely as principled as he was.
One of Eric Raymond's innovations was to establish clear principles for the OSI at its outset, and then retire from the board out of a desire not to become one such "Jesus nut" for the movement.
The entryists have a response for this too: call for the removal and replacement of all the leadership of relevant organizations, as they have already done with the FSF.
That's the thing: "open source" is not a movement. And ESR wouldn't be a particularly charismatic leader (he's more of a controversial one).
Open Source would never be where it is now without the Free Software movement (which is an ideological one). Maybe some corporations would still promote the OSS approach due to its economic benefits, but probably not. It likely wouldn't have the same midshare among developers that it has today.
Re:Joint Statement on the GNU Project
by antisemiotic on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @10:53AM
(#21192935)
Stallman as the modern day st. Francis?
the standard is not "care", it's "gave as much of a fuck about software and personal freedom as Stallman did/does".
RMS used an absolute garbage computer because it was, in his words:
> the only laptop one could buy that could run a free initialization program and a free operating system.
i'm certainly not taking it on some contributor's word that these 20 or so odd people are as principled as RMS that i trust the project to be led by them. my guess is a large fraction are pragmatists (like most normal people) who use a nonfree BIOS setup for productivity, or have an iPhone/android because "normal", etc.
so, while certainly more like normal people, they aren't as principled. and what you want in a position like RMS's is someone so principled that they basically are immune to attack and inspire others to take on those principles. nobody's taking RMS seriously if he's giving talks from his macbook air.
as far as i can tell, RMS is so principled that it actually hindered the long term success of GCC. it would have behooved the long term strategic goals to make GCC the best/"only" compiler by making a BSD/MIT style version, so as to accept more liberal contributions, but he didn't.
he seems to be principled to a fault. is this group of 20 or so people as consistent as he was? i sincerely doubt it.