Slashdot Mirror
2006 - The Year the FSF Reached Out
nanday writes "Linux.com is running a story
about how the Free Software Foundation has transformed itself into an activist organization in the past year. From the story: 'At the start of 2006, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was largely inward-looking, focused on the GNU Project and high-level strategic concerns such as licensing. Now, without abandoning these issues, the FSF had transformed into an openly activist organization, reaching out to its supporters and encouraging their participation in civic campaigns often designed to enlist non-hackers in their causes. Yet what happened seems to bemuse even FSF employees.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
and touched someone, a big feat for geeks like us.
It is an interesting transformation, and one that took people by storm. I can't help but wonder if this doesn't introduce a conflict of interest between the anti-DRM stuff and supporting GNU in the future.
For those like me who have heard of the Free Software Foundation, but are not sure who or what they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundat ion
I've often wondered why the FSF hasn't reached out to the mainstream community before. The ideas and restrictions behind Treacherous Computing, DRM, and the Copyright Raiders should be enough to raise the hackles of any conservatives and libertarians out there. Until mainstream activists realized the dangers pointed out by RMS this will remain an uphill battle.
As an aside, if the common public are pirates, maybe we should refer to the **AAs as Vikings or Raiders or something. Successively stealing our rights and enforcing their business models..
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
DefectiveByDesign and other pressure groups are quite good, but I don't think the FSF has quite got into the swing of things. They seem to toot their horns about the latest organised action, and it seems to gain support, and yet people actually returning to the causes seems a little low... Maybe they just need to work on their PR, perhaps take a tip from M$? ^.^
Thank you Free Software Foundation,
You guys have helped spread the dream of free access, open source and non-proprietary software to the everyday consumer. You've dared to speak out against the media & industry giants in your quest to unmask the truth of rights-stripping DRM. Keep fighting the good fight, we are behind you 100%.
Penis with red balls sucking its thumb and holding its blankie to something else.
Damn that's funny.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Activist companies and organizations are a pain. U2U announced this year that it would not do business with any company in Israel. Pain in the ass.
How about a company or org that does what its business is, and leave the activism behind.
Oh, and boycott U2U.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
who was the idiot that set the tag "money" for this article ?
If they weren't an activist organization until this year, what the heck were they the previous twenty four years?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Have you tried that test where you look at ink blobs recently?
"Activist" is a dirty word among slashdot's largely libertarian audience. As if being branded "commies" and "hippies" wasn't bad enough, the FSF is now going to have to suffer being called "activists". Oh, the humanity!
The whole GPL 3 thing seemed pretty abstract to me until the Novell-Microsoft deal. That's when I appreciated the FSF's stand a whole lot more. So, yes, they did get some adverse reaction initially but I suspect a lot of that has turned around.
I agreed with most of the tactics of the FSF over the past few years. Then, I started seeing more an more propeganda (like their anti-vista site). I am still terribly troubled by the direction of the FSF and feel that my they no longer are working in my best interest. Just so we are on the same page, here are my opinions on the subjects they are dealing with.
Vista: I do not wish to port my apps to, purchase, or deploy a leacy operating system.
DRM: I do not wish to port my applications to legacy hardware platforms.
Propritary Licenses: I do no wish to relicense my applications using legacy licenses.
Notice the uber-troll passive aggresive use of the word "legacy". I hope other slashdotters here will pick up the word and add it to their everyday vocabulary when dealing with MS sales drones.
BBH
I am all for the idea of informing people about the dangers of Vista, trusted(sic) computing, and others. But, they all seem to have an amateurish feel to them. I signed up to recieve the DefectiveByDesign emails, and they just have this childish feel to them. One was to tag products on Amazon with defectivebydesign if they contained/used DRM. I mean, WTF?
This may backfire on them. You know, those hippies with the bad argument, or pretty shiny Vista that I got for free...
They need a backer, somebody like Google, for people to pay any attention to them.
Plus, their icon/logo thing is just plain stupid.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Good lord.
As if Geek-speak wasn't stupidly off-putting enough as it stands. Passive-aggressive indeed.
Vista on the boss's quad core 64 bit system isn't going to look or perform like a legacy OS and it is the boss the sales drone gets to see.
This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Right up there with stupid sayings like Treacherous Computing.
When will you get it through your heads that nobody outside of Slashdot and the tech community really cares about these issues? You just make yourself look like some moron with an axe to grind.
You're a geek. You understand these issues. Average people don't, and won't until it actually hits them. There is nothing you can do to accelerate this. They will always listen to their sales drones before they listen to one of their Bobs.
Weren't the FSF and the rest pissy about Microsoft co-opting the word "genuine"? How is this any better?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
The RIAA in contrast carries out its predations within the law, and therefore its mafia-style extortion, intimidation, and protection racketeering has the backing of men with guns wearing police uniforms. And thus we have no means of protecting ourselves again their actions, which have exactly the same purpose as the mafia's: to relieve people of their money for totally fictitious reasons.
The mafia kills a few people, but both organizations destroy people's lives and livelihoods. The more dangerous to the public is undoubtedly the RIAA because it has the backing of the corrupt laws that they helped to craft, and it feeds upon a far larger section of the community.
With a limited number of people they have to focus on what they see as important - and for now that is IP laws in the United States.
While 2006 was the year the FSF reached out, 2005 was certainly the year that the FSM did some reaching out (with his noodly appendage).
Missed putting the obvious in here - the resources of gnu really all shifted to the FSF, but they are seperate projects. The email was to gnu attempting to get some code they had on some of the old CDs the used to sell - sadly now lost for some reason.
Actually, as the article points out, the FSF isn't about encouraging anyone to use "open source systems" they want to teach all computer users to value certain freedoms for their own sake—the freedoms to run, share, inspect, and modify software. By contrast, the open source movement speaks chiefly to software developers and managers encouraging them to value a development methodology where programmers can more efficiently improve software. The two movements approve of some of the same licenses for software and sometimes draw considerably different conclusions based on their respective philosophical perspectives.
Digital Citizen
Yeah, I wonder if his penis has large horns, like a gnu.
GO FSF!
/. readers have bitched and moaned about DRM and M$, and for years nothing, nothing happens.
I have watched over the years as
FSF suddenly go for it, launch Defective by Design (they even do "protests" outside Apple stores!) and BOOM they get huge press coverage, and DRM now seems doomed, and everyone agrees.
Now they have launched BadVista, huge press coverage, and suddenly everyone seems to "get it" that Vista is a DRM platform, and it will be a nightmare.
More crappy activism like this please!
This smell of bullshits. RMS is a political activist. His issue are political. Free softwares are generally political statement. The Free software movement is alway a social movement, which mean it is a political movement. BS. FSF is alway an activist organization. And an organization I would gladly support.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-RMS
+1 Informative.
For those who are not sure who or what a tedious, bandwidth-wasting, sub-memetic wankfest is, please consult parent posts.
Telling people they shouldn't buy HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and "you should prohibit them from your home and your life.". Do the FSF people get out from their myopic community at any time and meet some normal people? Most of them couldn't care less about free software rights. They buy a PC from Dell, they pop their DVD/HD-DVD in and it plays the movie. It does what they want.
I have a lot of respect for Mark Shuttleworth because he actually has some understanding of the problem. That people want to do this stuff, and right now, Linux can't (or at least not without some rather grey legal areas). And his drive is to solve it, not pretend that you can make it go away or persuade people to restrict their lives for it.
The FSF are insignificant, blind zealots working in their own little world, unable to see that sensible compromise in the short term may be necessary in the long term.
The likes of Canonical are doing far more for free software than the FSF are.
GNU was started as a project when there was relatively little OSS and very little free (as-in-speech) software. It expanded into a kind of moral vacuum, and got adopted by default by many who care about free software. Now, there is FOSS, at some level of development, for just about everything and bringing up new or under-developed parts of the GNU collection is harder; they'd have to fight for mindshare.
If the GNU developers reason like RMS and FSF, then they will choose the course that maximizes use of free software over the course that maximizes GNU and use of free software. They won't add or revive projects that compete with established FOSS as that confuses new users. They might work less on GNU products and more on other FOSS projects. In an extreme case, they might wind up GNU altogether and putr their effort elsewhere. They can't go that far, of course, as the pervasive GNU products (e.g. compilers, GNU bits of GNU/Linux) have to be maintained.
Alternatively, if GNU carry on with "unnecessary" projects like HURD, or if they under-resource their critical, legacy products, then one can conclude that they're splitting away from FSF.
"Free" as in "Freedom", means freedom to say what you want outside the corporate diplomacy etiquette. Revolutionaries always use a language that offends the conservatives. Because the corporate system has build defence mechanisms which do not allow you the freedom to speak the truth because you are colored an immature troll. But artists do not restrict their words because they may offend some of their conservative supporters. The majority is most of the time sleeping.
Bye bye. It was good knowing you.
I've had this discussion so often. I see the whole Open Source movement as a tactical (i.e. 'now') path to the Free Software strategy.
:-), and knows exactly where he's heading. It irritates me that many don't seem to realise just how good the guy is - he really doesn't need to do what he's doing, he could jut pick up his pile of cash, invest it somewhere nice and drink martinis in the sunset for the rest of his life.
I can see some merit in sticking to your guns, but if you're not realistic you will never achieve anything and just end up alienating people and become isolated - and ignored.
Mark Shuttleworth has both feet firmly planted on the ground (except when he was collecting airmiles in a spectacular way
Instead, he does this. And yes, he's human so he sometimes says something in a way that can be mis-interpreted - well, tough. At least he's doing something positive and ethical with his money and his life so hats off to him - he's doing it right, including working together with the guys in Extremadura in Spain.
I'm not into hero worship and idolising people, I just think people that do things right instead of taking the easy route should be recognised - we've got enough Enrons and Andersens to show what happens if personal integrity comes last.
Insert
Thanks for your work, mates! :D :D
The Ryzon thing, and all others
As always:
Thanks!
-Woof woof woof!
The branded version did come back in neutered, ad-infested form at uproar.com for a while. It's still played occasionally on IRC channels here and there around the net. There was one semi-active one I visited a few months ago, but I can't remember what network it was on and my Chatzilla doesn't have any record of it. There are also several independent Acro clients scattered about the net, most (but perhaps not all) of which have an active membership of zero.
The Wikipedia article has some links to some clients and community sites. For me, the atmosphere of the original Berkeley client was what made it fun, but if the core gameplay is your thing, maybe you can find something worth your time.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
Oh, and I have to brag about my most brilliant Acro ever. It was late 1999, the Acro was "PARSK", and the category was "Celebrities." With about ten seconds left, I had an epiphany, and hurriedly typed the phrase "Pedestrian at risk: Stephen King".
:)
This was like right after he'd gotten hit by that car, so it was absolutely perfect. I got every single vote that round, and <joke begins here> retired from Acro that night so as to leave at the pinnacle of my career.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.