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Comment by Brian_K_White

5 years ago

I always forget which are the actual free software guys and which are the businesses that use linux guys... I think FSF are still the good ones right?

Though that thing about the FSFE office in Germany yesterday... Hopefully it's just a dude and the office he runs rather than the organization as a whole.

9 comments

Brian_K_White

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vclp  5 years ago

It is better to keep unrelated issues separate. The alleged FSFE issue you mention has little to do with trusting the FSF to accurately evaluate a free software stack.

If anything, slightly grumpy old school guys (again, alleged) are much better at rejecting corporate influence than the new people whose politics are literally bankrolled by corporations.

  • a1369209993  5 years ago

    > [again, alleged] slightly grumpy old school

    I'm not associated with FSF specifically, but as a card-carrying grumpy old-schooler, I object to your vaguely-defamatory characterization of them[0] as "slightly" and "alleged".

    Edit: 0: RMS et al, that is, not the business linux people.

  • wizzwizz4  5 years ago

    That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of non-grumpy people who are good at rejecting corporate influence. I know of hundreds.

mattl  5 years ago

FSFE is a legally distinct entity from the FSF.

  • wizzwizz4  5 years ago

    If the FSFE has problems, it's likely the FSF has them too, and vice versa. I don't want to get into this, really, but the cultural issues that allow these things to happen aren't one-offs; they're a known failure case of the specific, somewhat toxic brand of hacker culture that's been in Free Software circles since the early days.

    (I think hacker culture in general is great, but, to use an analogy, there's a buggy implementation going 'round.)

    • wizzwizz4  5 years ago

      By this, I mean: it's likely just a handful of people, max, being an immediate problem, but when the whole “looking past your friends' flaws” thing extends to when your friends are hurting other people, you're standing by while other people get hurt. Geek Social Fallacies[0] #2 and #3 don't combine well.

      It's not just an FSFE problem. It's also not intrinsic to hacker culture in any way; it just tags along, causing problems.

      [0]: http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html