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blueflow

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using!

> Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter?

You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

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> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

Yes?

This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.

You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.

An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".

Youtube and Twitter are not Society. They are like the dark corner where people shit on each other.

I think you've fundamentally missed the point. You can call for more open platforms on a closed platform, there's nothing hypocritical or problematic about that. It's just accepting the reality of where people are.

Like it or not, YouTube and twitter are enormous with huge audiences.

> And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using!

Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

But yes, GCC is very nice.

> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

> GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.

I mean, most of what GRUB provides is completely unnecessary under EFI.

You can even boot Linux from EFI directly, I think, you just need to hardcode the kernel parameters, which is not ideal. So a very minimal loader is still useful, but way simpler than GRUB.

But you have to implement GPT with its mixed-endian UUID's (standard-nonconformance copied from Win 3.1), link the kernel into a windows executable (Which is hacked on top of a MS-DOS MZ .exe) and write that to the ESP, which is a floppy file system from the 80ies. And of course its relying on the VFAT extensions from windows 95.

I don't know how Microsoft managed to design a boot scheme that is conceptually better than boot sector booting while including a similar painful amount of legacy in it.

And then there are the people who celebrate that 'advance' of modern software while their kernel now has a 16-bit real mode "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" stub.

> If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

Twitter has been in the news for banning accounts for doing that.

Yeah, since Musk took over. There was plenty time to do this before that then.

And when the ban time comes, milk that for all it's worth.

I dislike GRUB - it is way overcomplex - but it is ubiquitous and very much in use.

I think it's obvious that the implicit question is: Why is the FSF so bad at spreading their gospel?

They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.

I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

>The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.

FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software.

It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say.

This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.

Please elaborate in a couple examples how you think one could have done better if suggesting it is straw man. It feels like an effective logical conclusion of what the critiques usually say.

One way would be not having Stallman do the advocacy.

His ideals is just fine. His social manners not so much, and that highly limits the effectiveness.

As someone else posted in the thread earlier, FSF has professional staff that work on PR etc. Please note that it is a small non-profit and they cannot afford a big marketing department, partially because their ideals hinder growth to a huge degree (e.g. even Linus is on record suggesting you should donate to EFF not FSF.) It is not surprising that big corporate donors will also avoid donating when they have pages undermining Netflix, Spotify, Google, FB, even Canonical/Ubuntu and pretty much everyone with deep pockets.

There's no need for any corporate conspiracy. RMS does a good job of looking bad on his own, and the FSF barely shows up on Linux sites. I don't think the likes of Netflix even know the FSF exists at this point, let alone bother allocating any effort towards fighting back.

All FAANGs have lawyers thinking about GPL, copyleft, AGPL, and have policies what to use by default for their own code, so you can be damn sure they are fully aware of FSF and what they are doing when they invest in LLVM and change the default shell to zsh and encourage Apache 2.0. The "Open Source" movement is explicitly a conspiracy to avoid using the term Free Software.

LLVM by the way happened in a good deal because Stallman refused to have GCC dump the AST. This created an area where LLVM could provide extremely valuable functionality which GCC just refused to offer at all.

And with that sort of maneuver, GNU lost exactly what made their stuff popular in the first place: that they provided better tools than what commercial Unix used to come with.

They are also a bunch of geeks terrible at communicating with normal people.

"Knights for hot ladies", "eating skin parts of own feet on video", "..."

And this is about the front face, so what do you expect?

Because they invariably prioritize ideological purity over coming up with solutions that meet people's practical needs/wants. Which is commendable in some sense - I respect sticking to principles. But good or bad, the reality is that most users (even technically savvy ones) don't care about the ideological principles of RMS. They just want shit to get done.

Is it really that unreasonable a question to ask?

The purity inherent in insisting on using only free software is laudable, but evangelizing is only effective when there's reach. (It's also much more compelling when it demonstrably makes folks' lives materially better, but reasonable people will disagree on the particulars there.)

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