If I was better at remembering names, I would have connected earlier that the guy spamming the FOSDEM mailing list with his political peeves is none other than the last FSFE Fellowship winnier.
FSFE seems to have held the last election in 2017, before it was yearly. I'm not up-to-date on my FOSS drama, but I seem to recall that after the election, there was some kerfuffle about the results? Or I'm imagining that..
Sadly, this confirms my recent opinion about FSF(E). I wish it weren't so.
FSFE seems to have held the last election in 2017, before it was yearly. I'm not up-to-date on my FOSS drama, but I seem to recall that after the election, there was some kerfuffle about the results? Or I'm imagining that..
Sadly, this confirms my recent opinion about FSF(E). I wish it weren't so.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•I think that actually comes down to a fairly reasonable mechanism, but that's a quick side topic I'll skip for now.
The point is, a lot of FOSS drama is unfortunately not about the topics, but the personalities involved.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•However, right now, it seems as if almost every organization that did something outstanding for FOSS in the past has proceeded to shit the bed.
I'm not even going to bother naming names or incidents. You guys know them better than me, in many cases.
It's just really hard to throw support one way or another when everything seems terrible.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•I mean, I'm one degree removed from them. I tend to get more inside views on ASF drama than I get from anywhere else, and I still have that view.
Some days I wish ASF would just quietly switch over to GPL, and we could move on.
Not gonna happen, I know, but I can dream.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•That means the most vocal proponents of outlier ideas are extremists - literally. That doesn't need to make them violent or whatever, just far outside the norm.
Holding one extremist view surely helps pave the road for others.
The trouble is, some views are extremely good, others extremely bad. 🤷♂️
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•Michael T. Richter
•Bob Mottram
•At the beginning of one of Darwin's book is a quote which goes something like "the commonly held belief is not neccessarily the correct one". At the time the normative belief was in scalum naturi and that the ecosystem was immutably defined by God.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•But merits are also personal. As an animal rights activist, I approve of more vegan foods in supermarkets. I also approve of meat-producing companies selling vegan foods. I know a bunch of vegans who would never buy them, because the money flows back in the slaughter machine.
Now, it's not that they're wrong. But are they right?
It depends on whether the goal is to increase the ratio of non-meat consumption, or to punish animal killers. Both contributes to animal rights, though.
Jordan :debian::sway:🇺🇸
•Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•But something that is already ubiquitous doesn't need a cause. It doesn't need belief. It's already there.
You're right that not all minority or outlier ideas are support-worthy causes. But by definition, all support-worthy causes are minority views (some more than others).
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•That is, there is absolutely no immediate connection. But the avalanche effect it has is probably the only way to get there over time.
Simply put, copyleft forces corporations to co-operate with communities rather than dictate terms. This isn't about software. It's about changing everyone's relationship to software.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•Public money, public code should probably become public money, copyleft code, so that it will remain public forever *and* feed into this long-term effect.
I (and a few others here) like to talk about communal software to distinguish it from free/libre and open source; the point is precisely to feed the benefits into the community.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•You see this in recent years in how Python (PSF) is taken over by RedHat's concerns. By how Microsoft manages to insert proprietary tooling into FOSS communities, making them dependent. By how docker is removing more and more community features and turning them proprietary.
Good corporate-community relationships are less exploitative.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•FOSS already is relevant to everyone, in exactly the same way. It already is in every gadget, appliance or convenience. It's also exactly as invisible as the plow blades are on the dinner plate.
I've sort of come to accept that people...
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•Best to approach them via intermediaries. The best, most convenient products also happen to be entirely open. That's the way to get them.
That is, of course, hard to achieve.
ar.al🌻
•https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
mobile operating system
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•j@mastodon
•Microsoft goes beyhond inserting proprietary software, they insert they own people as managers, even in governments. This is a political issue, Microsoft is lobbyied for by the US government and imposed on other countries forcefully.
They lobby to break open standards and make sure they aren't used, and make the public institutions are dependent on them so the US can spy on other countries and maintain a monopoly on IT.
ar.al🌻
•ar.al🌻
•j@mastodon
•Licenses are a powerful tool can and have been used to defend Free Software.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•I mean, I can't exactly expect leadership in any movement to fully align their views with mine. That would be arrogant.
I would like to at least be unaware of their more toxic views, however. I understand that that is somewhat willfully blind. But is it too much to ask of leadership to stay on topic when voicing their thoughts in public?
@aral @openrisk
j@mastodon
•Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•This isn't just a lack of discretion. It's effectively an abuse of their leadership position.
I don't think we can expect to come together if we let our leadership get away with this.
Then again, protesting this amplifies the issue.
@aral @openrisk
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
•@aral @openrisk
j@mastodon
•I think it's important to be aware the Free Software movement is always under attack, without the Stockholm syndrome.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
After the mess happened I know that Debian has been considering legal action², and that usually means being strongly restricted in what one can say in public, I don't know if that's the case also for the FSFE.
I agree that there are plenty of other cases where what you say is sadly very much true, however.
¹ https://lwn.net/Articles/814508/
² https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20211117
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•Elena ``of Valhalla''
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