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After 30 Years of the Free Software Foundation, Where Do We Stand?
An anonymous reader writes with this interview with John Sullivan, Executive Director of The Free Software Foundation. "There is a growing concern about government surveillance. At the same time, those of us who live and breathe technology do so because it provides us with a service and freedom to share our lives with others. There is a tacit assumption that once we leave the store, the device we have in our pocket, backpack, or desk is ours. We buy a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, and we use applications and apps without even thinking about who really owns the tools and whether we truly own any of it. You purchase a device, yet you are not free to modify it or the software on it in any way. It begs the question of who really owns the device and the software?"
Restrictive open source licenses in general prevent collaboration with people who do not share that ideology, that is silly and intolerant. In fact that FSF intolerance is the very reason that Linux is staying GPLv2 rather than GPLv3, because Tivoization is good, it is about code contribution, not freedom. That is also the reason the GCC is being supplanted by Clang/LLVM because of the refusal to allow co-operation with potentially non-free software. Yet they know they cannot actually stand by their ideals steadfastly because if they did they would add a clause in the license to prevent the GCC from being used to build proprietary software but they know they would lose everything immediately if they did that.
Permissive open source licenses allow people to choose who they collaborate with and how much, that is how we have gotten wonderful software like Clang/LLVM, Webkit, Apache, etc. Yes there is a lot of hum drum and "slippery slope" conspiracy theories used in an attempt to support intolerant restrictive licensing but ultimately in this day and age that is rubbish, the intolerance is why restrictive free software is dying, even it's darling project Linux denounces the FSF's goals, it uses the GPLv2 out of convenience for "tit-for-tat" contributions only, not to further the FSF's goals.
Linux is not an FSF or GNU project, Hurd is a Turd and now the FSF is losing its one real claim to fame (the GCC) to permissively-licensed Clang/LLVM! The problem is the FSF did a bunch of work long ago to create some good software, that is now being supplanted and we are seeing that in the meantime they have been just religious advocates for their ideology rather than actually producing good software based on that ideology.