I don't agree. For all his limits, Stallman maintained an ideological purity that is required to firmly signpost one end of the Overton window. Opensource licenses and projects can mix and match rights and regulations, but you will always have an unwatered GPL option, there to remind people of what the original ideal looked like.
Compare the trajectory of the GNU project with that of Mozilla, for example. Mozilla compromised ideals to gain popularity, and now that popularity is waning the compromise gets worse and worse (pocket, pop-unders...). GNU compromised nothing, ignored ebbs and flows in popularity, and will continue to do their thankless work for the good of the community at large.
The very existence of the FSF's offerings is necessary to understand what other positions compromise to obtain other benefits.
Eg, Stallman is reported as creeping women out in the link above. That has nothing to do with his uncompromising ideals regarding software.
So maybe Stallman could quietly retire to some sort of metaphorical ivory tower, and keep producing uncompromising ideology, which could be then evangelized by somebody less creepy. There's no need for compromise even. The same ideology just has to be delivered by somebody with better people skills.
I think that'd be a win/win.
This starts with simple things like not picking fights with the BSD projects only because they allow non-free software in ports and alienating many lead developers of the most successful project that uses your license (Linux).
FSF and GNU are not about compromises. If they were, they'd have stuck to the original Unix distributions and all their licensing grey areas. Instead they didn't, and the world is better for it. Why should they change now...?
So this is where we fundamentally disagree: I do not think the world is better off with an uncompromising FSF. I think the world and state of Free Software would have been significantly more advanced if they had adopted a more pragmatic attitude. I don't think that's "compromising" per se, but rather accepting that things don't change in a day.
Also consider an alternative universe where the FSF and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform and a system to setup payments for people developing software instead of the ecosystem rolling from one proprietary platform to another over the last 25 years.
> consider an alternative universe where the FSF and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform
FSF/GNU were created by nerdy hippies, expecting them to ever be great at running such a service is unrealistic. Besides, they did provide platforms, they just were never as good as commercial alternatives.
No credible allegation have brought forward against Stallman's behavior regarding women. It's all hearsay and we should avoid hearsay and rumors.
Can a person be ideologically pure and not be an asshole? Or do the two go together (as is alleged with Stallman)?
[0] https://redanianintelligence.com/2021/12/09/henry-cavill-add...
Also aside from that he was an enormous asshole to people, which damaged his own goals, and is just wrong.
And from an advocacy position, ideological purity almost never works. An advocacy organisation like the FSF should be pragmatically "climbing the ladder" one step at a time, not insisting on an instantaneous revolution. You might as well advocate for the moon to be painted blue: it's just not going to happen, no matter how right you are.
You absolutely can achieve short-term wins without losing the long-term picture. The idea that any compromise somehow diminishes the longer term ideals is just wrong. Consider a law that states that purchasing software must come with the source code (under any proprietary license/NDA) as a matter of "right to repair". This would be a complete non-starter for ideological purists because it's not True Freedom, but clearly it would be a huge improvement over the current situation. This is how the ideological purity is impeding progress.
The reasons for Firefox's decline are unrelated to "compromised ideals" (which have IMO been hugely overstated in the first place). Quite frankly, no one cares about any of this outside of a relatively small group of people. If Mozilla had been more "ideologically pure" they never would have implemented DRM and would be considerably more irrelevant today. If you think "oh, this new browser has more Freedom (a concept you need to spend 10 minutes explaining in the first place) but you can't watch Netflix with it" is going to convince many people then you're sorely mistaken.
The fact is: Firefox started declining as Chrome was just a better browser. That's all there is to it. Firefox Quantum significantly improved things, but it seems it was "too little, too late". All the cases where Free Software is a resounding success is because it's the best possible software for the problem, and the cases where it's not is because it's not the best software for the problem.
Free Software will succeed if it's the best solution, so that's where the effort should go, not the (frequently minor or even petty) stuff Stallman keeps banging on about.
Edit: the fact that this got downvoted in less than a minute – hardly enough time to actually read the post – is also part of the problem. I don't really care about downvotes, but it's indicative of the kind of hostility that makes these kind of internal community discussions hard. My article that I previously mentioned got posted to HN, where it was promptly flagged[1], seemingly because some pro-Stallman people were upset by it. Fine, whatever, I didn't even care enough to email dang about it, but it does make these discussions a lot less constructive than they can be. I received more emails and private communication about this article than everything else on my website combined, almost all positive by people who appreciated a more nuanced take than "Stallman == atrocious" or "Stallman == secondComing(Jesus)", so clearly it wasn't all that bad. But on HN it was "censored" – for lack of a better word. I'm not directing this at you – your comment was constructive and fine – but in general it can be hard to have these discussions.
Stallman has been right more often then wrong and has made his points forcefully, consistent and without compromise over decades. He's backed up his words with his deeds, has contributed an incredible amount of software and has been a very important factor in jumpstarting the free software movement. He has convinced millions of programmers to give away the fruit of their labor for the betterment of the world in general and the relationship of end users with software in particular.
I really don't see what else one could wish for in an effective advocate.
You don't need to persuade everyone, sometimes it's just enough to witness your truth. Ask christians.
Stallman had exactly zero influence on that shift.
I have spent too long being right but an arsehole. I never got my ideas into production that way, even though the existing codebase was patently a trough of piss. I learned to stfu and, generally, they came round. Don't rub people's noses in it, especially if they make decisions you care about.
There is almost no issue so black-and-white that a person can't find a technical justification for any given point of view. So don't drive people to oppose you from simple bloody-mindedness.
And to support that argument I bring three anecdotes.
1. He is much more attached to his own creation, the GPL, as a tool for driving software freedom and as a "hack" on top of copyright. As such, he is pro-copyright and pro-IP (intellectual property) in general (but against just software patents). Because without copyright the GPL could not exist. But without intellectual property, everything becomes reverse engineer-able and decompile-able and any available source code is effectively free. Copyleft and the GPL are not enforceable in a world without copyright but they are also not as necessary. I confirmed this position directly with him and also through the articles he wrote.
2. He is more attached to the GPL as his brainchild than any other variant. As such the AGPL (not created by him) has always been a bastard cousin and his organisation never bothered to create a LAGPL (like the LGPL and AGPL combined) even though it was requested several times. The GPL has allowed the rise of SaaS and the AGPL is unpopular because of how strict it is and therefore it was rarely used. A LAGPL would have been a middle option that would have forced SaaS corporations to contribute back to the community and could have had a grater impact than the AGPL.
3. With regards to microcode his position is asinine. He would prefer hardware for which the user is simply unable to change the microcode (even if it is broken) just to avoid blobs. He is not pushing for opening up the blobs. He is not pushing for Free as in freedom microcode. He is not pushing for reverse engineering the blobs.
As for microcode: IMHO Stallman is just wrong about it. He's okay with the logic being in hardware or non-volatile ROM, but uploading the code to volatile RAM when the hardware starts is a huge problem? I don't follow that logic. Of course it would be better if this was open, but it's much less of a deal than he makes it out to be.
Stallman will be Stallman in all his weird and egocentric ways.
This is a case of the ship choosing to go down with the captain.
The same way someone distributing a program that makes use of an LGPL library is only obligated to release the changes they made to the LGPL library, not the entire program. You are allowed to build your proprietary GUI on top of the LAGPL base and offer it as a service over the internet but you are not allowed to hold any changes to the base for yourself.
The line of what is considered a derivative and the line of what is considered distribution are orthogonal and one of the 4 quadrants is currently missing.
The goal is to effectively prevent the introduction of incompatibilities through Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. Weak copyleft like the LGPL has been effective at preventing EEE without discouraging all corporate use. Strong copyleft is actively avoided in corporate environments but weak copyleft is not. The goal would be to achieve the same but in a cloud environment.
The space it would be useful in is preventing cloud providers from introducing incompatibilities between their offering and the original FOSS project yet allowing them to build services on top (GUI's, billing, etc.) which allow them to differentiate.
How this gets encoded in legalese is their job as stewards of the GPL license suite, holders of the copyright over the text of the licenses and social gatekeepers of license proliferation.
"Another significant change in this release is that it was pointed out that there were error messages in Linux suggesting users to update x86 CPU microcode. Since such microcode is non-Free Software, such messages don't belong in GNU Linux-libre. We now have patterns to detect and clean up this sort of message. A number of them were introduced recently, relying on microcode changes to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown problems, but there might be others that go farther back. I haven't yet made my mind on whether to go back, check and possibly respin such earlier releases."
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002...
2. Nobody stops anybody from creating new licenses, in fact many many projects tried to do just that (MPL etc). Most of them fail simply because you cannot have your cake and eat it too, you either allow some things or you don't. You either require source code for programs users interact with on the network, or you don't; I'm not sure what middle ground is there to find. If you want to release certain parts of a website but not others, you can do it already in many areas - any SPA client-side code can be covered by GPL 3, for example. AGPL in many ways was a proto-GPL3, and it's to the FSF's credit that they didn't drop it, but actually updated it when v3 came about. They even try to explain the differences with dedicated documentation [0].
[0] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...
2. The popularity of FOSS licences to some degree depends on endorsement by FOSS organisations like FSF and OSI. Custom licences are actively avoided and criticised. The GPL3 does nothing to protect against SaaS because that is not a threat that was envisioned by Stallman at the time. He was more concerned (and rightfully concerned) about Tivo-isation. Tivo-isation is a Right to Repair issue and it is really painful today. But Tivo-isation and SaaS are just different sides of the same coin called erosion of ownership. By failing to more strongly endorse the AGPL and by failing to provide a LAGPL, Stallman and the FSF (Stallman's fanclub) neglected the threat of SaaS. The LAGPL would have probably had more impact than just complaining about SaaS at conferences. Eventually some projects like MongoDB switched to non-FOSS licenses and others like CockroachDB switched to the BSL which eventually reverts to a FOSS licence after a predefined amount of time. For all of these projects the AGPL would have resulted in almost no adoption, but the LAGPL might have been a viable option. The FSF failed at their main job of license stewardship by failing to provide the licences society needed while being one of the two gatekeepers of licence proliferation.
Note, by SaaS I am currently referring to PROVIDER HOSTED SaaS which implies a service provider doing the computing on behalf of the user. SaaS can also be just a licensing model like it is for Photoshop.
For software that is funded publically these requirements could be realistic for example. Consumers won't demand it of course, but especially when software goes out of maintenance, it would be a huge help to get the source. Unrealistic with copyright protections, but I see the new gang of questionable FSF advocates far more critically.
I didn't downvote you, but I believe your are just wrong here.
> I didn't downvote you
Just to clarify: I wouldn't mind if you did. It was just an observation about the knee-jerk response from someone who clearly hasn't even bothered to read the comment.
Lol. Windows source code has been available under severely-restricted terms, officially for academic purposes, for what, 20 years? It didn't do any good.
I've seen these debates for 25 years by now, they are always the same.
I have spent significant amount of time working around bugs and limitations in proprietary software that could have been fixed easily otherwise, and simply being able to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be beneficial.
This is so staggeringly blindly obvious that it pains me that this is even a point of contention. Of course things would be better if you can also share, but merely being able to repair is also useful in and of itself. This is exactly the sort of Stallmanistic attitude that's impeding any sort of progress, and why we'll still be having the same discussion 30 years from now with no significant movement in the grand scheme of things.
That's basically the old Unix model, in practice it was unsatisfactory to the point that... people just wrote their own Unix and made a point that fixes should be public - and we got GNU.
Companies could give you the old Unix model tomorrow, if they so wished; but it's effectively lose-lose, because they don't gain anything meaningful (if anything, their support costs are increased by having to deal with thousands of potential user-introduced variations) and you don't gain anything meaningful either - your fix is forgotten the minute you move on and you won't be able to use it with your next employer.
The default today is not the Unix model, it is the Windows model and increasingly the SaaS model. You have none of the 4 freedoms by default.
GP argued that by law by default you should have at least freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that it should not be legal to withhold freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that freedom 0 and 1 should by default actually be facilitated by providing source code. They are arguing for changing the status quo and that doing so gradually is more feasible than all at once.
(Source code is not actually necessary for freedom 1 but it makes it orders of magnitude easier.)
You are arguing that the law is fine because we can just make our own sandbox (GPL software) where we have all 4 freedoms and that is enough. You are arguing that the status quo is fine because you can ignore it while you are in the sandbox.
Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.
Your approach towards a world of free software might be to just grow the sandbox until everything else doesn't matter but the GNU GPL family continues to decline in popularity. For this approach you need popularity and for popularity you need effective advocacy and the FSF is not effective.
This has been argued over and over and over, and it has made no difference whatsoever. All the limited-rights licenses that have been tried from time to time (MPL et al) have simply fallen by the wayside: because, in reality, nobody is actually interested in this "right to repair" - it was around in the Unix days and it was discarded, because it did not effectively serve users nor businesses.
What have had an impact are effectively two licenses: the MIT/BSD ("do what you want") and GPL ("do what you want but your changes should be public"). By adopting and leveraging those two licenses, the world was slowly steered where we are now - which is a lot better than where we were in the '90s but also where we were in the '70s. We got here by being radical in a punk sense: creating a world of software developed in the open, and fuck what was there before. It's not by bowing to established interests that we ended up with Microsoft developing in the open, it's by bombing their commercial spaces with open software. The minute you stop doing that, they will happily retreat behind the firewall.
> Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.
The sandbox is the world at this point, closed software is retreating every day to smaller and smaller niches. You use browsers developed in the open, on websites built with opensource software. Even on mobile, the foundational frameworks are open - the most popular mobile OS is opensource. Obviously it's not a perfect state of things, but it's a world apart from the bad old '90s, and we did get here by keeping the Overton window firmly rooted at one end, thanks in large part to the FSF. It doesn't really matter how much software is GPL, what matters is that other licenses are defined in relation to the GPL.
The only open source browser with significant usage is Firefox and it is in the single digits. Chromium might be open source but it is not what people use, it's in the other category in statistics. People use Chrome and Edge and Safari and Opera and Vivaldi and none of them are open source. The number of people using AOSP is also vanishingly small. Most Android users use one of the proprietary variants of Android. The year of the Linux desktop never came. The most popular Linux variant after the proprietary Android is the proprietary ChromeOS. And, worst of all, many services that before didn't even involve a computer (ordering food, calling a ride, banking, etc.), now are done through closed source software. It is getting harder and harder to live without proprietary software.
So absolutely not, the sandbox is not the world, the sandbox is getting smaller and smaller in comparison to the world.
The argument was not to no longer hold the Overton window pinned. The argument was to advocate for consumer rights and protections in LAW. Free software advocates are vary much interested in right to repair because right to repair also counters tivo-isation. And the world is much more tivo-ized than it ever was. That the world became so tivo-ized is also a sign of how ineffective the FSF has been at countering a threat they were among the first to draw attention to. You can have all the free software in the world and it is of no use if you can not run it on any hardware.
When was the last time you booted up the Hurd kernel? I would be surprised if more than 10% of HN readers even know what that is. (Stallman actually summarily dismissed Hurd's lead developer when he dared to criticize the GFDL in public. https://lwn.net/Articles/59147/)
Stallman's abrasive and confrontational posturing is related to but distinct from his ideological goals. His rude posturing actually _damaged_ the chances of ever reaching those goals.
Even the GNU "copyleft" license -- the project's greatest success in terms of "actually impacting the world" -- has fallen more and more into disuse in favor of less restrictive licenses such as BSD and MIT.
There are still some important GNU projects though, GCC, GNU libc, and Grub being the most notable.
I don't know the details but, I mean, GNOME/GTK people themselves have been very good at alienating folks of all sorts...
Except he's pissed off most of those people too.
People demanding his resignation would probably have installed a far less effective and competent leader. I also thought about Mozilla here that tried to set a new course which is as pale as the next corporate environment.
People that tarred Stallman certainly would be insufficient in any leadership position even with Stallmans perhaps very eccentric flaws.
You can have good ideas and be a bad leader of a movement. These two things are not mutually exclusive. A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago.
[1]: https://www.arp242.net/rms.html