Free Software Foundation Celebrates Its 35th Birthday

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Free Software Foundation Celebrates Its 35th Birthday

The Free Software Foundation on Sunday marked thirty five years since its founding by Richard Stallman...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Free-Software-Foundation-35

[wswartzendruber]

How about an LGPL that's compatible with the App Store and anything else that requires static linking?

[Ximion]

How about an LGPL that's compatible with the App Store and anything else that requires static linking?

How about an App Store that doesn't limit user's rights to modify the software their receive (or at least the (L)GPL'ed parts) and run the things they want to run the way they want to run them? Or one that doesn't explicitly disallow certain licenses to be used?

[ddriver]

What is there to celebrate? Helping M$ become a bloated monopoly all the while pretending to be an entity that opposes it? Building a corporate wall around the usefulness of FOS software? Enabling another milkage vector that goes around M$?

No one has done more for M$ than the GPL, that plague that discouraged end user software vendors to support alternative OS platforms. We owe it to the FSF that FOS is mostly useless to creative independents. It really grinds my gears how the FFS is pretending to be some sort of software champion of humanity, while in reality all it did was create an alternate business model for big corporations that were not M$ and did not want their margins cut into.

About as annoying as the notion that FOS is developed by some independent developer community, acting on its own human interest. The vast majority of the work on FOS software is planned, commissioned and paid for by greedy big corporations, and inspired by their corporate needs and motivations, the ultimate goal of which boils down to "extract even more money from society and invest it into an even bigger money extractor".

The GPL sure did backfire spectacularly, I suppose the "force to share" was deemed needed back in the days when they had a lot of M$ advantage to catch up to, but it ultimately ensured that FOS is mostly useful to big business, and despite its technological superiority, it is fragmented, complicated and nearly useless to the vast majority of people on the planet. By the time the more permissive, yet still far from optimal LGPL came about, it was already too late.

And it is precisely because a great chunk of income around the FOS model comes from support, it comes to no surprise that Linux is so user-unfriendly. You definitely do not want to make it manageable to people that use computers for other things than to "geek with Linux", because you immediately lose a major revenue stream. It seems that even M$ it taking a lesson from that, and quickly butchering system manageability to prop up its personal "platform as a service" agenda.

35 years of good work - the result is that while Linux dominates pretty much every field, it is still pathetic in the end user space, and hilariously, that arch evil that the FFS was created to oppose - M$ - is now on the Linux board, and it makes better and more profitable use of FOS than the entirety of the end user space combined.

Great going, pat yourselves on the back FFS! You helped forge a world in which people are used through computers to a far greater extent than people use computers themselves.

[ddriver]

How about an App Store that doesn't limit user's rights to modify the software their receive (or at least the (L)GPL'ed parts) and run the things they want to run the way they want to run them? Or one that doesn't explicitly disallow certain licenses to be used?

Making the software do something it wasn't originally programmed to do goes both ways. If it is changes that add or improve user functionality - then great, and you should definitely share than on your own initiative, rather than say... being forced to. And it is even in the interest of the software vendor itself to improve that product, even if you are not allowed to directly mange changes, they are likely to incorporate one that does improve the product. But logically - a change, motivated by nefarious purpose intent is just as likely.

I suppose the "you are free to modify and forced to share" is somehow naively expected to magically filter the negatives, and that would probably work if people were mentally ideal, but in the world we live it, and especially the current day and age, there will be many, many (if not the vast majority) instances of reverse engineering and changes that do not seek to improve the program, but to compromise it with the intent to capitalize on its vendor and/or its users.

It is usually something inline with "Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose" - that's great, that means I am allowed, by the software authors and intellectual owners, to use their software to create humanity exterminating army of robots... Balance is important, there is no value in being too open or too permissive, that's just a harmful extremity, there is no liberal moral virtue but cheap populism in adopting such a stance.

[Alexmitter]

What is there to celebrate? Helping M$ become a bloated monopoly all the while pretending to be an entity that opposes it? Building a corporate wall around the usefulness of FOS software? Enabling another milkage vector that goes around M$?

No one has done more for M$ than the GPL, that plague that discouraged end user software vendors to support alternative OS platforms. We owe it to the FSF that FOS is mostly useless to creative independents. It really grinds my gears how the FFS is pretending to be some sort of software champion of humanity, while in reality all it did was create an alternate business model for big corporations that were not M$ and did not want their margins cut into.

About as annoying as the notion that FOS is developed by some independent developer community, acting on its own human interest. The vast majority of the work on FOS software is planned, commissioned and paid for by greedy big corporations, and inspired by their corporate needs and motivations, the ultimate goal of which boils down to "extract even more money from society and invest it into an even bigger money extractor".

The GPL sure did backfire spectacularly, I suppose the "force to share" was deemed needed back in the days when they had a lot of M$ advantage to catch up to, but it ultimately ensured that FOS is mostly useful to big business, and despite its technological superiority, it is fragmented, complicated and nearly useless to the vast majority of people on the planet. By the time the more permissive, yet still far from optimal LGPL came about, it was already too late.

And it is precisely because a great chunk of income around the FOS model comes from support, it comes to no surprise that Linux is so user-unfriendly. You definitely do not want to make it manageable to people that use computers for other things than to "geek with Linux", because you immediately lose a major revenue stream. It seems that even M$ it taking a lesson from that, and quickly butchering system manageability to prop up its personal "platform as a service" agenda.

35 years of good work - the result is that while Linux dominates pretty much every field, it is still pathetic in the end user space, and hilariously, that arch evil that the FFS was created to oppose - M$ - is now on the Linux board, and it makes better and more profitable use of FOS than the entirety of the end user space combined.

Great going, pat yourselves on the back FFS! You helped forge a world in which people are used through computers to a far greater extent than people use computers themselves.

Preventing specifically Microsoft from having success with services around FLOSS is not the intention of the GPL. No one ever claimed that and it is your full own fault that you believed so. No one ever claimed that big companies should not take part of FLOSS software development, especially if they respect the users four freedoms.

If Microsoft plays by the rules and provides the four freedoms where the GPL applies, they can make as much money as they want with it.

[Alexmitter]

How about an LGPL that's compatible with the App Store and anything else that requires static linking?

Yea, thats exactly what the LGPL wants to prevent. So if you wanna publish on the App Store, you gonna have to write that code yourself.

[HEL88]

Yep, 35 of weakening the technological advantages of the West.

If some day Westen Civilisation colapse one of the reason will be open source .

[DanL]

Yep, 35 of weakening the technological advantages of the West.
If some day Westen Civilisation colapse one of the reason will be open source.

WTF?
Oh, I now see by looking at your posts. We have another "You're all a bunch of lusers and Linux sucks" troll. Do us a favor and go away.

[marting]

Yea, thats exactly what the LGPL wants to prevent. So if you wanna publish on the App Store, you gonna have to write that code yourself.

I sympathise with this view, and to a large extent I agree.

However, I believe this is one of the factors pushing more and more people to use MIT and similar licenses instead. I've even found myself occasionally releasing library code under MIT license instead of LGPL for this reason. (for code owned by my employer, not personal stuff)

It's a difficult problem, and it pains me to say it, but I'd rather have a static linkable version of the LGPL that more people actually use and accept, than the existing one that people are decreasingly using and instead choosing licenses that have no freedom protection at all.

(Also, for clarity, I'm replying only about the "static link compatible" aspects here. I don't care about or have an opinion about the "App store")