RMS: No Radical Changes In GNU Project

[fsfhfc2018]

It's crazy to support collective software and not support collective decision making.

There was already a witch hunt, and the collective decision making and protests are seizing that as a push in this direction. Summing that up as "collective decision making within a project" rather than a coup is-- well, either could be wrong, but this is not happening primarily within the project.

Outsiders don't get a say in any open source project merely by being a consumer of the product

Everyone else is talking about it, and the people you're referring to aren't "consumers" of a "product" but part of a movement that the leader of the project founded. So against, your summary is-- shall we say, peculiar?

they only listen to contributors, and three cheers for that.

In other words, the free software movement is irrelevant to free software development.

Yeah, cheers. Indeed.

[Guest]

S

They have submitted many patches to clang (which is permissively licensed).

FreeBSD is more than just a kernel and Sony has made many changes that are not relevant. They don't particularly want to maintain niche code paths for Sony.

However, even so, sometimes patches are relevant:

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/...ch/013744.html

An example AVX patch submitted by Sony.



Does Linux? As I recall, AMD is holding out an AMDGPU "Pro" proprietary driver on you guys .

The bottom line is, companies do unfortunately get around many of the restrictions of the GPL quite happily. I feel it needs to be modified to weaponize it a little more in the modern world for it to be more effective. I would also like to see AGPL used more.

Sure, they may have submitted a few patches here and there, and sure the PlayStation has a different and possibly weird architecture compared to the average device with an x86 CPU.

And yes, the Linux kernel does have decent support for AMD GPUs. Of course it has a lot of bugs, and is not as good as the Intel open source drivers, but it's there. In fact, FreeBSD itself uses the Linux drivers as an example for their own GPU drivers (Michael writes articles about this from time to time here on Phoronix).

[r_a_trip]

GNU / FSF which has governance, a board and members. All of these people are perfectly entitled to campaign for or against any office-holders, this is how organisations work. From reading lwn forum posts, which has actual senior gnu devs posting, there is indeed disquiet about the project, its leadership and directions, and this has not suddenly emerged. Of course, there is also support, and certainly a lot of respect. I doubt anything dramatic will happen, and the project governance looks strong and credible.

However, even if these people were motivated purely because of some non-tech agenda, it's their right, it's their project. It's crazy to support collective software and not support collective decision making. Outsiders don't get a say in any open source project merely by being a consumer of the product, they only listen to contributors, and three cheers for that.

Yeah, the old "this is not a democracy" bit. True. FSF can do what it wants. GNU can do what it wants. They don't exist in a vacuum though. What they will do now, will affect how favourably other non-FSF and non-GNU entities view them and how much support they are willing to lend to what these organisations put out.

Effectiveness purely rests on how much respect they can earn and that depends on how they present themselves and how true to their ideals they are. For me, a few GNU people already have lost any and all respect they could have gotten from me, by perpetuating the lies from the smear campaign against RMS.

Yes, I'm a nobody, but get enough nobodies together and see how much silent power they have.

[kpedersen]

FreeBSD itself uses the Linux drivers as an example for their own GPU drivers (Michael writes articles about this from time to time here on Phoronix).

Well you said so yourself; the Linux drivers are pretty good so that means that the FreeBSD drivers are also decent if they share the same code.
(and remember that Linux also benefits from a fair share of BSD code, especially when it comes to server related stuff (those companies contribute to FreeBSD a lot both in patches and money))

However, I certainly see what you are saying but the AMDGPU stuff in Linux isn't really due to the license used in Linux. For example look at the absolute sh*tshow that NVIDIA is putting its users through with locked firmware and binary blobs. AMD should be given credit for that. They were not forced (possibly a weakness of all free licenses in my opinion).

[phoron]

Mixxed feelings on this, but at this point, I say this is a good thing.
Not only is Stallman aging, but he hasn't been directly involved in the technical development of GNU in a long time now. In fact he doesn't do much programming anymore. He also doesn't use a GUI or a cellphone, so doesn't really understand probably one of the biggest hurdles of our day, Smartphones, and how they are generally the least Free, without much of the attention of the rest of the community to remedy the situation. Cellphones are quickly becoming the most popular ubiqitous computer used, and certainly most abused. This should be made a bigger priority. We need someone who understands modern priorities.

The only reason I didn't speak earlier is because I find media lynching so despicable that it somehow cancels itself. Since Stallman has already the age of retirement I thought I was hardly able to encourage him to deal with a society that has all the tools to be rational but bigotly decides to be unfair to those who help them try to save themselves. I mention this now because I believe the reason the society is like it is, is the manipulation by social networks and mobile phones. But since you link the Stallman witch hunt with mobile phones you've set me a-ranting. Sorry about that.

I know there are many issues on mobile phones that could be technically solvable with hardware, software and legal development, and I welcome any (not small, not easy) work there because there will always be usecases. But cellphones have inherent problems that can only be solved by not using them. I believe the most common usecase is damaging beyond reform. One problem is the well known tracking device capability that is unfixable because networks must be able to find you to deliver calls. But I think, although I can't prove it because it is not my speciality, that the psychological effects are much more severe.

Companies just optimize for profits, they don't bother damaging people, but they don't bother avoiding damage either. Phones and apps (specially social apps) are designed in a way that sucks up attention and prevents people from rational thought as much and as long as possible. They're addictive in bombarding people with useless overwhelming information, and exposing them to others. Overtime this turns people into zombies that are quick to react, slow to analyze and reluctant to search for evidence or learn. Since everybody is the same, they need to be seen as conforming to whatever trend is popular in their bubble and stick to it with violence against anyone outside their bubble (spying on users helps to put them in more effective bubles). This is more or less how hunters would behave under stress: Reflexes instead of analysis, mob mentality instead of impartiality.

If you had a cellphone with internet, no comfortable keyboard, small screen, some way to get frequent messages from diverse contacts, that are necessarily small and hardly in context and received at incovenient times for devoting thought to them, but with expectation of instant perfect attention, even if you remove the influence of corporations filtering content and calibrating inputs to your brain to hook you up, even if all hardware and software was open and legal, I think the peer pressure would still keep turning the society into an unlivable zealot bloodbath. It's like the monkeys that keep fighting newcomers who climbed to the stair to get to the banana even when no longer any of them had been punished for trying. The smartphone functionality is socially wrong. The current implementation is so big a nightmare that it can easily hide this other problem.

Now to vent fully I'll leave some random links (sorry for any paywalls):

Humans used to have more attention span than goldfish... before smartphones

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smart/

Perception errors under distractions

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-09-distractions-distort-real.html

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/tuod-aoi041119.php

You'll score less by just having your smartphone around, even if you don't use it

https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your-smartphone-reduces-brain-power/

Brain changes in kids with much screen time

https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/screen-time-changes-structure-of-kids-brains-60-minutes-says

Correlation between high screen use and difficulty in complex knowledge structure reading (tbh quite over my head - oh, the irony...)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-47176-7

Facebook experiment to automatically "depress" people (would they have the same influence if people used social networks only a couple of times a day instead of carrying a device to control them all day?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#User_influence_experiments

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

Political influence from facebook

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/09/1510231/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conservative-news?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

https://qz.com/1203637/facebook-likes-are-a-powerful-tool-for-authoritarian-rulers-lawsuit-says/

Founders regret manipulation and addictivity

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society

https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html

Racist attacks linked to facebook penetration

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html

Allegations of Facebook helping genocide (their editorial control is ineffective and censorship, but I don't think free software alternatives would help if they keep similar functionality and user base)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook-idUSKCN1GO2PN

Facebook-accelerated violence

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html

And I know witch hunting and mobs existed before smartphones. They were just digitalised for efficiency.

I don't try to discourage any progress on free software for phones. I don't even try to suggest people to stop using smartphones (at most plead that people stop assuming everybody else should have one or more), basically because being the only one left who is not a retarded peripheral of their phone has the inconvenient of eventually realising you're surrounded by mutually brainwashed fools who just won't listen, but I just try to point out that maybe RMS not using phones is a feature, not a bug.

Like most people from the 20th century, Stallman did in fact hold some objectionable views, but overall the good outweighed the bad. The fact we even have as much of a platform to debate this here, right now on the internet, you can probably give thanks to GNU, the GPL, and GCC which carried a Free and Open internet for decades.

Amen. And yet the philosophy behind it should by now have much more backing that it really has, I'm afraid.

I just wish people were outed from their jobs in a more objective process ressembling fair trial, and not on alleged opinions and shitstorms. But I can't help thinking RMS must be somehow relieved not having to deal with this crazy world where conformance has replaced argument. We may no longer have the intellectual capital to carry on civilization, with or without RMS. Leading GNU is at least a lighter task than fixing the world.

[moilami]

I personally think Stallman is an absolute dumpster fire of a person and his philosophies are utterly asinine vs those behind permissive licensing. I am firmly in the Open Source rather than Free Software camp, but even I think this is bullshit. If people want to break away from the GNU project that's their prerogative, but I would prefer the toe fungus eater to have stayed in charge of the FSF and GNU. They were ultimately at the end of the day his projects for better or worse and pushing him out is nothing more than a hostile takeover of his organizations.

I was wondering has the black helicopter picked you up since haven't seen you posting anything. Yeah, was interested on what you have to say about the issue.

[fsfhfc2018]

I'm a nobody, but get enough nobodies together and see how much silent power they have.

It's deeply disingenuous (not you, the thing you're arguing against) for outsiders to claim that outsiders should have no say in what happens-- particularly when this whole mob was built built up by outsiders going after the person being attacked and forced out of / down from projects he leads.

[Luke_Wolf]

I was wondering has the black helicopter picked you up since haven't seen you posting anything. Yeah, was interested on what you have to say about the issue.

I'm a busy person and I mean... Which comments should I respond to? The incorrect notion that corporations aren't willing to submit code to permissively licensed software? (LLVM, Apache, heck Android itself all beg to differ) The idea that the GPL is the sole thing responsible for Linux being where it's at? Especially with claims about drivers where the licenses are actually permissive? I've been down this path enough times.

The problem with the people who uphold Stallman is they never actually paid close attention to what his ideas really were or why he believed them. I don't mean it to denigrate him but he's a narcissistic and heavily autistic man stuck in the 1970s who is obsessed with notions surrounding his old MIT computer lab, and I imagine the fact that he's been shoved out of MIT in particular is devastating to him more than anything else. The man is on record with a lot of frankly awful opinions, in part because he doesn't believe that computing resources should be private property (just look up the whole su 'wheel' controversy, or the schools shouldn't block porn rant)... but... even so, even though I am very much not a fan of him, or GNU, or the FSF, I would never have asked him to be removed... like it or not he was the FSF... and he is GNU in the same sense (Though to a much greater degree) that Linus is Linux... To take that away from him... well what do you have left? A bunch of lawyers (at the FSF), and some coders that aren't really all that high profile (at GNU). The whole purpose of their existence is effectively ripped away with him.

[timrichardson]

It's deeply disingenuous (not you, the thing you're arguing against) for outsiders to claim that outsiders should have no say in what happens-- particularly when this whole mob was built built up by outsiders going after the person being attacked and forced out of / down from projects he leads.

Opinions when you don't have a stake are cheap talk, without either relevance or consequences. If ranting makes you feel better, of course, that's nice.

[fsfhfc2018]

Opinions when you don't have a stake are cheap talk, without either relevance or consequences. If ranting makes you feel better, of course, that's nice.

Apart from how condescending your post is, I was pointing out the double standard involved-- in people who aren't developers telling other people who aren't developers that their opinion doesn't count for anything. Of course your snipe ignores the other points made, though they are really just variations on pointing out similar hypocrisy. If that's "ranting" so be it, I think it's calling out dishonesty for what it is, but to each their own.