
The Party of Gno - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7806
======
koeselitz
This is an interesting article, but it's a bit surfacey, I think. This bit
near the end is a good encapsulation of the idea, I think:

"What will work, for folks concerned with protecting software freedom?
Providing solid and useful free software alternatives. Finding ways to make
those alternatives sustainable businesses (or non-profits, like Mozilla) so
that contributors can be paid to keep those tools free and functional. The FSF
should be at the center of this effort instead of trying to hold users back to
the stone age of computing. But if they won’t be, then it’s time for others to
solve these problems rather than joining the Party of Gno."

What I think Joe Brockmeier doesn't realize (maybe I'm wrong) is that this has
been precisely the central aim of the Free Software Foundation for the past
half a decade at least. They may have gotten some things quite wrong - I think
it's clear now that the GPL 3 was a mistake - but they've taken up and
published the latest draft of of the Affero license, which is _the_
alternative for developers seeking to build free and open-source software-as-
a-service. Listening to clips of Stallman's evangelistics may lead you to
believe that he's being purely negative, but the fact is that the FSF has
offered and supported what's probably the most viable and practical solution
to the problem.

Also, it seems to me that one reason we really can't write RMS off is the
simple fact that he's turned out to be quite correct in some of his
predictions. He stood against ESR's change in nomenclature to "open source,"
saying that calling it "free software" was the only way we could be sure that
we were understood; at the time, it seemed like a silly pronouncement about
unimportant vernacular, particularly because RMS is given to silly
pronouncements like that. But in fact he's turned out to be absolutely right:
now, with "open source" in its ascendancy, _everyone_ calls their products
"OPEN," whether they're _actually_ free or not. Every MS press release is an
opportunity to read that particular four-letter word at least a few dozen
times, though it never means much of anything; and companies like Apple and
Google (for all the good that Google has sometimes done for free software)
like to brand their products as "open" when they're often anything but.

RMS may seem like a bit of a crank, but he's always seemed that way - and yet
he frequently proves to be right. I don't think we should write him off just
yet.

~~~
flogic
The FSF needs a good Joe Sixpack visible flagship "product". Most programmers
respect code before the message. I think a decent flagship product would go a
long way towards increasing the visibility and understanding of the message.

~~~
jerf
OK, so pick one: <http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/>

Where the hell is this meme coming from that the FSF just talks the talk?
Sure, that list contains a lot of incidental stuff too, but in order as they
strike me, I see aspell, autoconf/autogen/automake (for better or for worse),
bash, bazaar, ddd, dia, djgpp, ed (ed is the standard text editor), emacs,
g++, gawk, gcc!!! (worthy of an exclamation point or three), gdb!!, gettext,
gimp, glib, gmp, gnome, GNU fdisk, grub, gnumeric, gtk+... and I'm getting
tired now so I'm going to stop. Except to honorably mention the last line in
my browser as it now shows, the critically-important GNU Hello World.

I suppose the natural next objection is that it isn't people in the employ of
the FSF who wrote every line of code of all of those programs, but I'd submit
that that would be a very silly accusation to level against an aggressively-
open-source organization.

You're sort of ambiguous whether "Joe Sixpack" in your post is a programmer or
not, but if so, gcc and if not, Gnome are certainly in the running. FSF has
more backend than frontend stuff but "Gnome" encompasses rather a lot in one
word.

~~~
flogic
Those are all nice things and represent countless man hours or work and
dedication however none of them are a good flagship. Firefox is a flagship.
Gimp is close but somehow took a wrong turn. The FSF needs something to say
"use this it's awesome! btw free software is why it's awesome!" And they need
to be able to convince at least the average power user.

~~~
jerf
Gnome is the primary interface of Ubuntu, the flagship Linux distribution and
frequent choice of power users. How much more flagshippy do you need?

------
sprout
This is a good call to action, but at the same time, I think the problem is
not really the FSF. We are the problem, and by we, I mean Hacker News, Reddit,
Slashdot, and a variety of other community sites.

If you look at <http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/>, for pretty much every negative
campaign, there's a positive one. The problem is that the positive campaigns
don't really make the headlines. People want controversy, and the FOSS
community communicates through echo chambers where people who yell louder win,
so it's natural that the positive marketing sinks to the bottom.

The day before this article went up the FSF announced they were holding a
planning meeting for a GNU social network. I only saw it thanks to
<http://reddit.com/r/gnu>

[http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-to-host-gnu-social-
ar...](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-to-host-gnu-social-architecture-
meeting)

Yes, more positive campaigning would be good. But I think it's unfair to blame
the FSF when their positive campaigning falls on deaf ears. It's a property of
the Internet and mass media more than a failing in the FSF. They have positive
campaigns, we just don't see them as much.

~~~
joe_the_user
There's also the point that the positive plans have to succeed. If they
release clearly useful software, that will make headlines too.

------
kiba
The more I learn about this world, the more I am totally sold on "code make
the difference" rather than the license that protect users from "EVIL
CORPORATIONS". Then a guy made 43000 USD in a few month from a public domain
game.

That when I finally said "Copyright is dead! Long live the public domain!".

The way I look at it, is that software freedom will prevails over the long
run, even when entire industries try to conspire to strangle it. Even when
copyright lobbys pressure for the most draconian measures possible.

Incidently, ESR is thinking along the same lines too.

*GPL is not needed: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=928d>

And he also fear that intellectual property abolitionists might be right after
all: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1337>

------
saint-loup
What strikes me on Stallman.org is headlines like "don't use Facebook" or
"don't buy Harry Potter books". How do you convince anyone with such
agressive, patronizing statements ? This is plain ignorance of the simplest of
psychology, rhetorics and marketing rules.

------
danbmil99
RMS is the Mao of FOSS

