Slashdot Mirror
The FSF Is 30 Years Old; Where Should They Go From Here? (fsf.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation is conducting a survey to gather feedback on where they should be focusing their efforts over the next five years. Should they concentrate on IP issues, UX issues, or something else? Is their stance on Free Software versus Open Source a battle that's already lost, and should they compromise? What do users think an ideal world would look like in 2020? And how miserable could things get? Without the FSF (and GNU), today's computing landscape would sure look a lot different.
I'm not sure how UX issues are part of their remit any more than child labour or bees dying are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And how miserable could things get?
Mobile-centric (we're already headed there) with mandatory identification tied together through the bullshit of a combined arms effort of Facebook-Google-Apple.
If UX of a free application is worse on the whole than UX of the more popular proprietary alternatives, improving free software UX may increase the user base. In more concrete terms, there might be more GIMP users if GIMP were as easy to learn as Photoshop. User base is important because only the economies of scale associated with user base can make hardware makers willing to ensure that their products are compatible with GNU/Linux or other free operating systems.
GNU/Linux: Let it go. We all know what GNU has done for FOSS, but your Branding sucks.
FS vs. OS: Seriously, let it go. Keep on fighting, but stop the infighting.
Your branding and marketing sucks big time, across the board. Get some professionals and listen to them.
FOSS Projects: E-Mail needs a replacement. Start building one. Encryption and anonymity as core of the specs. Build Branding, marketing, professional UX and proper Clients for all Plattforms. Yes, including Apple. Lets get going with this overdue problem.
We need a feasible distributed Facebook Killer. Diaspora is Meh, with shitty branding and UX and others are even worse.
Those two endeavors would have a huge positive impact.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The free software movement has been successful at achieving its goals over the last 30 years.
I mean no doubt open source has scored victory upon victory from cell phones to supercomputers, but the FSF's goals? Most users do not use a platform or applications that gives them the "four freedoms". Users in general do not see proprietary software as wrong. In fact much of their data has moved from proprietary code to proprietary services, which use open source including GPLv2 software in their delivery but don't distribute it. I don't know any service I use using the Affero license, the "GPL for SaaS" license. And with online services the DRM is more or less baked into the service, naturally it won't work without the server side and you get to do a lot more live cheat detection and bans.
A lot of the code that big companies has released is under the Apache 2 license instead of the GPL, things like Android and LLVM has gotten far more attention lately than the GCC. The lone exception is the kernel, but it mostly lives in its own "universe" not affecting user space and drivers have found ways to use blobs when they want to. In short, I don't think RMS is happy with the state of things, maybe not even the direction things are going. But I'm happy that open source keeps "hollowing out" proprietary software, if it runs on top of a LAMP stack or Docker container or whatnot they're interested in making the foundation stronger. Eventually the layer thins out to where OSS volunteers making something "good enough".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You hit the nail on the head, and I'd add that the leadership (namely Richard Stallman) is sometimes more of a liability to the FSF than an asset.
It's a group built around ideas, to be sure, but it's hard to sound reasonable when your leader is the definition of unreasonable: forcing people to refer to a product a certain way (it's Linux in real life, Richard, not GNU/Linux), refusing to accept that any use of closed-source software is okay, and so on. Paradoxically, he's more trapped and enslaved than many of the people using the closed software he rails against. If Stallman were around in Tunisia during the Arab Spring, he wouldn't have been out on the streets securing real, meaningful freedom (because that would involve using the "evil" Facebook and Twitter)... he'd be too busy asking the existing regime to use FOSS.
In other words: argue for free and open software by all means, but don't pretend as if your only options are to either switch completely to FOSS or else be forever tainted as a human being. The FSF needs a leader who is cool with you running open source apps on Macs and Windows PCs, and understands that it's the goal of free/open source code that matters, not how "pure" you are.