People have raised these concerns. I have personally raised this concern directly to RMS at one of his conferences.

It gets ignored.

I believe it is for the same reason religions ignore issues.

The FSF totally acts as a religion. The church of his Gnusance St. Ignutiutus. And just like religions it pretends to hold an ethical position while making compromises for practical reasons.

Compare religions claiming:

- Killing is bad, unless it's about opponents in war. - Slavery is bad, unless it's outsiders who are slaves. - Blobs are bad, unless they are stored on chip flash.

The FSF gets criticized precisely for this hypocrisy. And just like religions ignore criticism about their inconsistencies so does the FSF.

>The FSF totally acts as a religion. The church of his Gnusance St. Ignutiutus. And just like religions it pretends to hold an ethical position while making compromises for practical reasons.

so is FSF dogmatic or is it practical? surely they cant be both

It's definitely both -- it's just that the dogma is broad, and they appear to very carefully and intelligently choose battles. The dogma is "long term software freedom." This includes occasionally accepting that there are battles not worth fighting (or better yet, fighting strategically.)

A really simple example is GPL violations. Pure dogma would require that they try to fight a whole lot of them, since they occur all the time and they're clearly in the legal right.

But they don't, and that's the MUCH SMARTER way to go.

Why this Guix thing strikes me as smart is that it's about "reinforcing modularity." They can't free up EVERYTHING, but they can make the software work different so that it's harder to pretend that everything is all the same.

then you must disagree with alexvoda who said that FSF "pretends to hold an ethical position"?

to clarify my previous post, i was using the term dogmatic in the context of some people claiming that FSF is a cult

To go big picture, I think all of this is rooted in the fact that "capitalism as practiced" has addled our brains into thinking that there can only be two kinds of organizations, companies that go for profit at all cost, and pure-of-heart non-profits that must be on some monk-like religious stuff.

What it can't conceive of is an organization with big picture goals that aren't "making a profit" that require strategy and even "real life experimentation." That's what's happening here; y'all are just confused because the FSF feels like "religion" because it's not going for profits, but somewhat acting like a for-profit, in that it's picking and choosing battles.

i dont think FSF is a religion. actually i am arguing against this labeling

Lots of people have tried to raise concerns such as this one with them. They've stopped listening.