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Free Software Foundation Celebrates Its 35th Birthday

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  • #11
    Originally posted by ddriver View Post
    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.
    The rest is already hilarious as it is, but this paragraph puts your posts firmly in the platinum tier of sadness: suggesting that a software license is above the law, above common sense and, most importantly, that an organization willing to create an army of human-killing robots would care about software licenses anyway.

    That said, cheers to the GNU movement and the FSF for making history, to the betterment of humanity!

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    • #12
      Originally posted by DanL View Post
      Oh, I now see by looking at your posts. We have another "You're all a bunch of lusers and Linux sucks" trol
      "I now see by looking at your posts. "

      You are poor at looking. I said linux is good.

      "Do us a favor and go away."

      Another fan like BLM want have own zone.

      ""You're all a bunch of lusers and Linux sucks""

      You say that. I don't.


      I say that open source code is woth billons of dollars and eg. China has this code for free.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by wswartzendruber View Post
        How about an LGPL that's compatible with the App Store and anything else that requires static linking?
        Pretty sure you can statically link with an LGPL library. You just have to provide a way for the user to relink the program with a modified version of the library.

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        • #14
          What is China doing with GPL code? Where is their OSX/Windows clone? oh that's right, they don't have one. The best they've done so far is release Linux distros and some cleaned up mobile phone OSes. Who cares what China does with Open Source code? The trade war is going to push companies towards India and away from China anyway. The majority of users are still using closed source code every day. Linux isn't struggling on desktop because it's open source. It's struggling on desktop because X11 is hard to run multi monitor on multiple vendor's GPUs, there's a severe lack of all the little 64kb-2mb utilities that Windows has had for decades and Linux will never have. E.g who's going to port some modding app for a game that's 20 years old? Where's the 3d model viewer that auto-refreshes on focus for easy texture editing etc. There's a thousand small applets that Windows has used by artists/creators that Linux isn't getting. Not because Linux is bad, but because the developers who write those apps have no incentive to make them on another platform. A large part of that is because Win32 didn't change for 30 odd years, and for the first 10 of those years, there was no alternative for an affordable desktop OS. GTK and QT both evolved/changed and Linux got better, that's fine.
          Last edited by DMJC; 05 October 2020, 05:19 AM.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by DMJC View Post
            A large part of that is because Win32 didn't change for 30 odd years, and for the first 10 of those years, there was no alternative for an affordable desktop OS. GTK and QT both evolved/changed and Linux got better, that's fine.
            Linux was quite OK already around the mid 90s when I found it, and not significantly harder to set up than DOS+Win3.x. Yes, the lack of a standard toolkit (thanks UNIX vendors) was probably a problem for getting random GUI programs written. Also hardware support (esp. around display adapters) could be a bit spotty. Not that it was totally solid on the DOS/Win side either. At the time there weren't many games though which probably meant many young folks (called early adopters these days) weren't interested.

            I would also point out that for most of its early life DOS+Win was in practice free since you just copied it from a friend. And the same extended to programs/games as well. I doubt many "hobbyists" would have started with eg. Photoshop if they had to buy it with their own money. So yeah, free is very much affordable

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            • #16
              What I'm going to say is probably going to piss a lot of people off, but it doesn't mean that it's any less true.

              The FSF is an exercise in what happens if you don't get on with the times in a pragmatic way even when you start out at the top of the figurative world. The FSF, like Stallman himself, is a once very prominent trailblazer who showed that open source is the way to go, but go so badly stuck being entirely inflexible as to be totally left behind more pragmatic and forward looking people and entities like Torvalds and the OSF.

              Working with businesses in a productive relationship, rather than expecting them to figuratively get down on their knees before you like Stallman and the FSF does, turned out to be the way to go and the results speak for themselves. No matter how much FSF and Stallman fanboys try to talk up GCC, glibc and other pre OSF projects, nothing anywhere near as prominent as those has come out of the FSF ever since the OSF founders got tired of Stallman's total lack of pragmatism and left to found an organisation with the same basic mission, but went about it in a pragmatic way.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by Ximion View Post

                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?
                And How about an "app store" that is run by the community, guarantees freedoms and takes advantage of those freedoms to integrate apps in a coherent functioning system?
                Like lots of people use the same version of the same applications together, and test and chase bugs together, so you don't have to risk your system to a random app written by nobody knows who with opaque code and compromised libraries, that nobody has properly tested, but hey, was uploaded to a multinational oligopoly and pays a part of their income to them?.
                Ops, wait, open managed repositories of freedom respecting "apps", that's not an "app store" anymore, that's a superior concept that we had long before: a free software distribution !
                App Stores were created just to restrict what users can do with software. User control of their devices and collaboration between users was sold as too cumbersome. "Here, come, forget all that trouble, don't think about rights and choices, just trust us and buy our cool aid. Fine, now get your friends to do the same. Good boy."

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                • #18
                  So many trolls here complaining about LGPL. Sometimes I don't even use LGPL for libraries and go with GPL.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by L_A_G View Post
                    What I'm going to say is probably going to piss a lot of people off, but it doesn't mean that it's any less true.
                    Nope. Just your opinion. Real, flesh and bones people are enjoying their freedom-respecting desktops and don't get pissed off that easily, as don't all the people that are employed to engineer, implement, test, verify, audit, review, and support libre software.

                    Originally posted by L_A_G View Post
                    The FSF is an exercise in what happens if you don't get on with the times in a pragmatic way even when you start out at the top of the figurative world. The FSF, like Stallman himself, is a once very prominent trailblazer who showed that open source is the way to go, but go so badly stuck being entirely inflexible as to be totally left behind more pragmatic and forward looking people and entities like Torvalds and the OSF.
                    Nope. They showed that software freedom is a just goal to pursue and defend; openness of source code was seen merely as a "requirement".
                    The bastardization of that openness came later. The ones that have been left behind on a technical level, as well as in terms of market share, are the "open source" purists who wouldn't want anything to do with the GPL.
                    Citing Torvalds is authority bias at play, and besides, Linux being GPLv2 instead of GPLv3+ doesn't mean that it's not libre, quite the contrary... who knows how many people's gears are grinding hard because it's not permissively licensed, thus nefariously exploitable!

                    Originally posted by L_A_G View Post
                    Working with businesses in a productive relationship, rather than expecting them to figuratively get down on their knees before you like Stallman and the FSF does, turned out to be the way to go and the results speak for themselves.
                    Not at all indicative of their real behaviour over the years, or even what they stand for. The FSF, for example, has defended libre software against companies who wanted to treat it as proprietary while selling products based on it... I'd say those companies are the ones setting a bad example for productive relationships, right? The FSF has never expected companies to kneel, just to be cooperative. Wow, so much to ask! Be cooperative if you want to use quality, properly engineered, libre code in your products!

                    Originally posted by L_A_G View Post
                    No matter how much FSF and Stallman fanboys try to talk up GCC, glibc and other pre OSF projects, nothing anywhere near as prominent as those has come out of the FSF ever since the OSF founders got tired of Stallman's total lack of pragmatism and left to found an organisation with the same basic mission, but went about it in a pragmatic way.
                    Yeah, I don't think any single permissively licensed piece of code has ever been more impactful than those, except maybe Android stuff. And in fact, Android developers have been so adamant in catering to the needs of exploiters that the only freedom-respecting code left in Android-powered devices is... Linux, sans some drivers. That's the way of "pragmatism": at some point, the users' rights get stripped out completely. Wouldn't you agree that libre software is at least more Pareto-efficient?

                    Ideals come at a cost.
                    For many people, this fact is too scary! The sheer amount of courage it takes to be so simply incorruptible in this world is too much for them. In time, libre software will eventually offer a proper computing environment that they will be happy to use... until then, don't shame those who shoulder the weight of those ideals as their mission.


                    Cheers.
                    Last edited by chocolate; 05 October 2020, 09:05 AM.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by chocolate View Post
                      Nope. Just your opinion. Real, flesh and bones people are enjoying their freedom-respecting desktops and don't get pissed off that easily, as don't all the people that are employed to engineer, implement, test, verify, audit, review, and support libre software.
                      All 5 of them? Or are we doing the usual "Open source is libre when it's convenient for us and evil open source when it's not" nonsense?

                      Nope. They showed that software freedom is a just goal to pursue and defend; openness of source code was seen merely as a "requirement".
                      The bastardization of that openness came later. The ones that have been left behind on a technical level, as well as in terms of market share, are the "open source" purists who wouldn't want anything to do with the GPL.
                      You do know that saying something doesn't make it true? Nothing the FSF has created since the split with the OSI has gained any major market penetration. That's just a fact you can't try to deny like you're Trump or something. You can't just try to claim ownership of OSI and other non-FSF projects because they use some variation of GPL.

                      Citing Torvalds is authority bias at play, and besides, Linux being GPLv2 instead of GPLv3+ doesn't mean that it's not libre, quite the contrary... who knows how many people's gears are grinding hard because it's not permissively licensed, thus nefariously exploitable!
                      The fact that they haven't moved to GPLv3 says heaps and the fact that they're still on GPLv2 says nothing when the GPL is set up in a way that makes it near impossible to license a major project like the Linux kernel that has been licensed under GPL. Even just a move to another version of GPL is an absolute nightmare, as that VLC experienced few years ago when they had to go around trying to contact every contributor to ask for permission and having to re-write a whole bunch of code when they couldn't get in touch with the authors, they refused or were deceased.

                      Not at all indicative of their real behaviour over the years, or even what they stand for. The FSF, for example, has defended libre software against companies who wanted to treat it as proprietary while selling products based on it... I'd say those companies are the ones setting a bad example for productive relationships, right? The FSF has never expected companies to kneel, just to be cooperative. Wow, so much to ask! Be cooperative if you want to use quality, properly engineered, libre code in your products!
                      Nice try at "We're not robbing the bank, we're liberating the money" kind of thinking there, but the un-pragmatic nature of Stallman and the FSF is well documented. They're known to not budge an inch on anything, requiring companies to open source literally everything and intentionally antagonizing companies who won't do as they say. With the FSF it's genuinely a case of "Do exactly as we tell you to do, nothing else is sufficient" and the OSI split apart because of this non-productive and needlessly antagonistic attitude.

                      This is also the reason why the FSF is for the most part academics and hobbyists working on projects with no or very limited commercial use mostly for their own use while the OSI has gotten loads of industry and major corporations like IBM to come into the open source space. In other words the OSI understands that academics can't possibly win alone and that you need to get industry involved to win against proprietary closed source software while the FSF refuses to be anything but a bunch of academics fighting against big bad industry, taking jabs at them and antagonizing them at every opportunity.

                      Yeah, I don't think any single permissively licensed piece of code has ever been more impactful than those, except maybe Android stuff. And in fact, Android developers have been so adamant in catering to the needs of exploiters that the only freedom-respecting code left in Android-powered devices is... Linux, sans some drivers. That's the way of "pragmatism": at some point, the users' rights get stripped out completely. Wouldn't you agree that libre software is at least more Pareto-efficient?
                      Again, the fact that something is GPL licensed doesn't make it something the FSF can actually take credit for. As for permissive licenses, there's plenty of very prominent software under permissive licenses like Apache (still the #1 webserver) and BSD with derivatives.

                      Ideals come at a cost. For many people, this fact is too scary! The sheer amount of courage it takes to be so simply incorruptible in this world is too much for them. In time, libre software will eventually offer a proper computing environment that they will be happy to use... until then, don't shame those who shoulder the weight of those ideals as their mission.
                      Pig headed adherence to ideals does come at a cost as shown by how the FSF has more or less been a joke for the last decade at least. A few bitter academics writing code mostly for their own personal use complaining about people less hostile to business being more successful and, like you, trying to take credit for their success when confronted with their lack of any new successful projects after the FSF-OSI split in the late 90s.
                      Last edited by L_A_G; 05 October 2020, 09:47 AM.

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