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.
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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.