But the problem is none of those foundations can raise enough money and hire enough people to compete in that space. It is not the right model.
Free Software is about vision, leadership and a lot of talented people freely contributing. I saw Stallman once "preaching" live at an event and telling us about the code he wrote, it was quite the experience. He is a weird guy but 1 hour of him speaking would have more impact than any MBA or Bachelor of Art type being paid to fundraise and coordinate.
I don't know if that's actually true but it's clear what they're arguing here anyway.
So the ones in the field have passed a higher barrier and pressure and are more qualified than the p80 male.
This could be another spin on the topic ;)
After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
I'm not sure this is guaranteed. GNU and the FSF have absolutely provided an enormous amount to the concepts and implementation of OS software. No doubt about it. Without it Linux would not exist, but it doesn't mean that'd have resulted in a widely used GNU alternative.
BUT, GNU/FSF also has a long history of losing focus on coding and spending a lot of time on political and philosophical arguments. I think it more likely BSD may have headed to where linux ended up than GNU. Linux was successful because they moved forwards and arguments were settled relatively quickly (for better and worse), whereas Hurd got stuck in development hell as people argued over how pure the microkernel architecture should be, pushing away people who just wanted things to work - including volunteers. During the crucial period over the 1990s, open source software needed to get things done (kind of like a startup). There are videos out there of people speaking at conferences about their work on Linux, and RMS being in the audience interjecting that it's "GNU/Linux" every time Linux was uttered. Who wants to work in an environment like that?
Even today, people are looking at more and more alternatives to important GNU software because of stagnation or other technical merits. GCC has lately seen alternatives become more common, as an example.
This also ignores the hostility the FSF historically has/had towards the commercial industry. Torvalds largely accepted patches from anybody if the code worked as intended.
Maybe something could have come out, but my gut tells me that people would have gravitated to something else that worked.
Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.
Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
It doesn’t depend on external expression or validation.
Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.
But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
And this is how she behaves at conferences:
https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411
Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement )
This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
That there are non-technical leaders who lose the thread does not mean that leaders lose the thread because they're non-technical.
There are plenty of technical leaders who have also gone off on personal tangents and vendettas!
Maybe a more accurate appraisal would be 'some people suck at a job, and it's unfortunately difficult to dislodge a bad leader anywhere'.
Compare and contrast this:
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
Is it?
To answer this, just reverse the genders in the statement and see if it's still sexist.
"It's very masculine and obviously doesn't work that well"
If you have problems with some type of behaviour it’s much better to say exactly what they are rather than appealing to some platonic notion of sex characteristics, which is both offensive and poorly communicates your position.
0. https://fortune.com/2025/01/13/zuckerberg-says-companies-nee...
Criticizing a woman for failure because of femininity falls nonetheless more into sexism than actual criticism of actions taken.
You really can't pick up on your own casual sexism? That's just evidence that this kind of anti-woman "femininity=weakness" language comes naturally to you.
Given this response, I would retract the accusation that you made a sexist statement, and instead conclude that you are a sexist person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been posting tons of flamewar comments to HN and clearly using the site primarily for this, so I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Not really. https://replicant.us is an FSF-supported project. But it kind of died due to the lack of contributors.
IMHO, postmarketOS is better than Replicant or any other Android Rom, because it doesn't depend on Android.
This is where the Stallman hard, radical and long term vision make a lot of sense in retrospect. Because we see now Google is pulling the rug.
and concentrate effort on the components that don't have this (ie. drivers, hardware, codecs, whatever), but instead what we got is 20 more years GnomeJS and whatnot.
Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.
It's wonderful that you've been privileged enough to not need to understand the point of "social justice", but it's not a bogeyman preventing you from being a leader.
Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.
The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.
There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
... it seems to me that Stallman and the FSF got complacent by their relative (and out of my ignorance I'm now assuming that also unexpected) success, and also they completely misunderstood their value proposition, ie. the product, it was not gcc, emacs, or Hurd or whatever, it was the innovation to allow and foster technical public capital accumulation. (and still, it's absolutely a not solved problem to this day. the wheel is reinvented too fucking many times, even in software.)
... of course they do deserve credit, gratitude and a lot of respect and support for their integrity and steadfastness!
This is an exceptionally poor argument.
1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.
3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.
Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.
Programmers understand software ecosystems, of which free software is just a subset. I also see a lot of programmers advocating leaderships and other non-technical skills generally. If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
> Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following
The FSF has circular logic all throughout their ideology. They only want to argue if you let them frame the conversation with their own conclusions along with a full deconstruction of views they didn't come up with, like open source, which they explicitly work to discredit and do not represent. It is little wonder that their following is not wide nor strong because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity. They are eclipsed by the EFF and several other organizations built around open source applications in terms of fund raising at this point. Don't listen to me. Just go look at some financials. You'll see how little they represent these days.
Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.
> …of which free software is just a subset.
We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.
> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.
> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity
That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.
I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
Let me frame it another way:
Software is like soccer, big tech is the FIFA, free software is you amateur football team.
- The FIFA will always tell you they love amateur soccer.
- The FIFA can be run by MBA, manager but your local group of friend/team cannot.
- Someone (probably the FIFA) is telling you your local team need the manager types for you to play soccer with others.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer come to invite you to play soccer in the weekend for free you might not go. If Pele come you will go.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer offer you a job at FIFA you will probably accept because you love soccer and for the money.
- The FIFA is more interested in people watching TV and ads on Sunday than people playing soccer outside. Ultimately they want you to love soccer but it need to be their way. And their way is watching TV and buying their jersey.
This is probably why Theo de Raadt might be a big A-Hole and said no to the FIFA but he is a good player and still have a fit team having fun outside every Sunday.
I wouldn't have bet on this outcome 20 years ago.
All those open source now corrupted foundations with the beautiful websites and the big titles and leadership pages pretend to be something they are not.
In this instance John Gilmore is funding the work. He's not doing it himself.
I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.
I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
Those who are in the wider use have been started and kept people like RMS. There are hundreds of them in dustbin or with minimal use.
Focus on outcomes: mainline kernels, modem firmware, reproducible builds, verified boot, power management, app ecosystems, and sustained funding. Credit the projects pushing those fronts and press FSF to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
Please don't do that on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I haven't heard of the FSF since the RMS affair but just the post reads very corporate and sterile.
Here is the problem: the FSF is at least 15 years late to really launch something in that space, they announce it because an old man on their board gave up some money so they could hire someone.
The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.
Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
The FSF looks a lot like most big "Open Source" foundations now, it is the sterile NGO model with most of its focus on public image, money and "coordinating". It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
We really need a free software phone, I hope people will donate and contribute to projects who really did something about it so far (the one not mentioned in this article).