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The Free Software Foundation: 30 Years In
An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. To paint a picture of what computing was like back then, the Amiga 1000 was released, C++ was becoming a dominant language, Aldus PageMaker was announced, and networking was just starting to grow. Oh, and that year Careless Whisper by Wham! was a major hit. Things have changed a lot in 30 years. Back in 1985 the FSF was primarily focused on building free pieces of software that were primarily useful to nerdy computer people. These days we have software, services, social networks, and more to consider. In this in-depth interview, FSF executive director John Sullivan discusses the most prominent risks to software freedom today, Richard M. Stallman, and more.
Sorry. I just had to put that in there.
Right. "the most prominent risks to software freedom today, Richard M. Stallman"
Now, the most ubiquitous computing devices are completely under the control of corporations and the governments who use the people's money to litter the lot with all manner of backdoors.
Things have gotten worse, and that's because the FSF is more dogmatic than practical; Stallman should have made a viable business, not a giant soapbox.
C++ was only 2 years old in 1985, and hardly anyone had heard of it. It was nowhere close to "becoming dominant."
Microsoft and Borland didn't introduce C++ compilers until after 1990, which is when it really took off.
C++ wasn't becoming a dominant language in 1985. That didn't happen until the IDEs supported it about 5 years later. Turbo C became Turbo C++ and then Borland C++. Microsoft was recommending Glockenspiel until they could get their own support done. 1990 really.
Was there, got the T-Shirt.
In 1985 C++ was not becoming a dominant language. C was certainly high on the list of "dominating" languages, but so was ASM (often C and assembly language for critical sections were used together) and so was Pascal, Modula-2, COBOL, Fortran, Lisp, etc, etc, etc and a bunch of languages (some still very much in use today), but C++... C++ was a newcomer and far from becoming dominant. It might be accurate to say that C++ was gaining support. It might be accurate to say that C++ was encouraging or spurring on the acceptance of the OOP paradigm (whatever that is), but no... I don't think that C++ was beginning to dominate anything at all at that point in time.
Not really, I still live in a house, I still need to eat and sleep, people drive cars, or bikes, or take the bus. They listen to music, fall in love, kill each other.
Nothing's really changed in 30 years. So some people can manipulate more bits than before. That's a minor thing.
And just because he had a few good ideas, and was about some aspects of free software, doesn't make him not a jackass...
Perhaps you can name off the visionary people of our time who do not get called jackasses on a regular basis
The Linux kernel is now most often used with an OS that delivers software through a central, proprietary app store. Users are locked out of that OS by DRM-laden boot loaders. Updates are only available through the original hardware vendors for a limited time, if at all. The FCC will soon close the door to the software on anything with a radio, i.e. everything. For the users, there is only untrustworthy computing left: The hardware is programmed to betray its ostensible owners. Apple hands over messages to the authorities from a cloud backup, messages which had been "end-to-end" encrypted. Those companies are our last line of defense, if some people are to be believed. Happy anniversary, FSF.
Am I the only one who initially read "the most prominent risks to software freedom today: Richard M. Stallman, and more."???
Let the controvercy begin (dramatic music).
In 1985 there was a revolt against copy protected software, people would not buy it. Now Digital Restrictions Malware is everywhere, most people have turned into cattle that will buy whatever the corporations are selling. Call DRM what it really is "Digital Restrictions Malware"
http://gizmodo.com/5853729/ple...
This Sig does not Exist.
Agree with you there on software,services being free software. Are you sure there is absolutely NO cost involved with social networks?
Are you sure that your personal information is safe on the cloud? (These are rhetorical questions, btw). Yes, there is a cost involved. It is YOU.
I would have never thought that the free software revolution would have been brought down from within by the Visigoths who develop systemd.
FSF has definitely made the world a better place by given users choices, but also, ironically, by improving quality of proprietary software. I would hate to think how buggy SSL would be if every vendor rolled their own copy. If they could agree on a protocol standard at all without a mature free software stack that is.
But I wonder if nowadays software is really the most important thing that needs to be made more free as in freedom. How about free culture (copyrights that expire in time to share your favouring movies with grandkids)? Free food (planting seeds without Monsanto permission)? Free medicine (generic drugs would save millions of lives worldwide)? Free immigration/religion/politics?
Wish we had folks like RMS to achieve concrete progress in these causes.
And in 30 years what have they actually done?
Steve Jobs
Not every venture is a publicly owned business that is legally obligated to increase "shareholder value".
It takes money to pay for a sufficiently persuasive soapbox. That's why a viable business is valuable.
Software is worthless if you don't have the hardware to run it on; Stallman never appreciated the impending doom of closed hardware.
Or ... he realized that his own expertise was software and did as much as he possibly could to further software freedom, certainly more than any of us could have obligated him to do, working on his own dream of libre/freedom software by using the information age's infinite ability to distribute free software at nearly zero cost. He then, at some point, had to let someone else worry about the hardware, someone whose particular talents are in that direction, perhaps hoping that the growing free software movement would create a demand for equally free hardware on which to run it.
Unless you really took a look at the complexity of modern systems and expected a single man to radically change ALL of it... no, at some point you have to do what you're good at and encourage other like-minded people to do the same with their own skills.
I still don't have free beer.
The usefulness of Linux and the GNU software peaked for me some time ago. Like around 2010. Since then it has been down hill.
The desktop experience is lacking. The modern desktop environments are all mostly shit. KDE is slow and bloated and full of "semantic" crap. GNOME 3 is so goddamn awful in every way that it makes KDE look pristine! The smaller DEs aren't very usable.
Linux is still kind of shitty on laptops, even on those that are widely used by the Linux developers themselves. Suspend and hibernate rarely works well. The hardware support isn't always good, especially when it comes to graphics drivers, although this is shitty on desktops too.
Linux isn't even that good of an option for servers any longer. Systemd has caused me nothing but problems, and I know I'm not alone based on the many other complaints about it. I can't risk using a systemd-using Linux distro, which is pretty much all of them these days, for any server that's even remotely critical. I need to know that my servers will boot properly, and in the very rare case that they don't, that it will be easy to diagnose and fix the problem. Systemd, in my experience, is not compatible with those requirements. I've had it fail far more than any other init system I've ever used, and I've been working with many different types of Linux and UNIX systems for almost 3 decades now. Its problematic logging approach also makes it harder to figure out what is wrong.
These days I'm better off using OS X on my laptops and desktops, and FreeBSD on my servers. Both let me use the best of the GNU and other open source software, but without subjecting me to the worst parts of the current Linux ecosystem. I'd rather not use a proprietary system like OS X, but the Linux-oriented open source devs have left me no choice! What they've produced lately has been complete shit, from the init systems and service managers through to the desktop environments. I just can't bring myself to use it.
Somebody doesn't call Steve Jobs a jackass?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
How can you list off events from 1985 and leave off the most important one: Back To The Future came out and promised us that by 2015, we'd all have flying cars. Darn it, I'm still waiting!
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Back in 1985 I was learning 64K Tarbell BASIC on a Cromemco running CP/M.
Let's not forget Super Mario Bros. is also 30 years old.
Woz ?
Most software people interact with now is proprietary and runs on servers on the other side of the planet.
In the days of old, if you didn't have the source, at least you had access to the assembly code and data, but now there's nothing you can do. If you didn't like a particular aspect of the model 100, you could modify it to for example allow more text on the display at once, even though you didn't have the source code. If there's something about Facebook you don't like, there's nothing you can do about it.
And what forms the backbone of this proprietary ecosystem? Why, the FSF's GPL of course, without which Linux and much of the server software would never have been a thing.
Woz was not a visionary. He was a genius engineer. Not the same thing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes