> The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.
This is an exceptionally poor argument.
1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.
3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.
Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.
> Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
Programmers understand software ecosystems, of which free software is just a subset. I also see a lot of programmers advocating leaderships and other non-technical skills generally. If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
> Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following
The FSF has circular logic all throughout their ideology. They only want to argue if you let them frame the conversation with their own conclusions along with a full deconstruction of views they didn't come up with, like open source, which they explicitly work to discredit and do not represent. It is little wonder that their following is not wide nor strong because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity. They are eclipsed by the EFF and several other organizations built around open source applications in terms of fund raising at this point. Don't listen to me. Just go look at some financials. You'll see how little they represent these days.
Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.
> …of which free software is just a subset.
We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.
> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.
> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity
That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.
I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
This probably explains a lot of the problem then. IME those who are good at writing code are pretty bad at the social parts of running an organization.
This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
Spoken like someone who has zero experience developing open source software.
I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.
I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
The whole purpose of the Free Software movement, expressed in the GPL, is to protect the rights of end users above all others - even above the rights of the people creating the software in the first place and contributing to it.
A great deal of free software is developed by employees. Except in the most reductive sense (the employees could all quit) the decisions are made by the employers.
In this instance John Gilmore is funding the work. He's not doing it himself.
This take is gatekeeping and sexist. Coding is not the job description for FSF leadership; policy, licensing, and funding are. The previous, highly effective former FSF executive director was a poet, not a programmer.
Focus on outcomes: mainline kernels, modem firmware, reproducible builds, verified boot, power management, app ecosystems, and sustained funding. Credit the projects pushing those fronts and press FSF to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.
I personally think it's unfair to accuse this person of sexism. I didn't even know he was talking about a woman until you pointed it out. It's possible that this comment comes from a place of sexism, and it's possible that it doesn't. It's uncharitable to just assume the former.
This post was fine up until you decided to be sexist for no reason. If you're using "feminine" as an insult, professing "obvious" connotations, you need to reflect on why you have these associations.
Feminine? What on earth? How can an NGO have a gender? And more importantly, why does it need one? I like your comment, but the word "feminine" is really sexist, as if everything female was of less value.
people followed Stallman because the GNU stuff was interesting and good, then we got decades of endless dick-measuring about whose freedom is more free, GPL2 or GPL3 or MIT or AGPL or ...
and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
The GNU stuff was precisely what FSF managed to do. They didn't manage to do more because they had a fraction of the resources large corporations had. People wanting more just doesn't create more by itself, they were reliant on our contributions and we failed them.
Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
that we failed them might be true, but mostly they did their things and the times changed, and lots of those things are not what users want/need, so the FSF/GNU got almost completely weightless.
... it seems to me that Stallman and the FSF got complacent by their relative (and out of my ignorance I'm now assuming that also unexpected) success, and also they completely misunderstood their value proposition, ie. the product, it was not gcc, emacs, or Hurd or whatever, it was the innovation to allow and foster technical public capital accumulation. (and still, it's absolutely a not solved problem to this day. the wheel is reinvented too fucking many times, even in software.)
... of course they do deserve credit, gratitude and a lot of respect and support for their integrity and steadfastness!
It is how the times are nowadays. You don't get the CEO throne of any org without chest-thumping your social justice initiatives. The FSF is merely following fully up2date standard operational procedures of Western civilization. How can you blame them for following the de-facto standards ?
Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.
It's time you stop blaming social justice initiatives for your own failures. The projection is clear.
It's wonderful that you've been privileged enough to not need to understand the point of "social justice", but it's not a bogeyman preventing you from being a leader.
the smart strategy is to put effort into projects that have a fork failsafe option
and concentrate effort on the components that don't have this (ie. drivers, hardware, codecs, whatever), but instead what we got is 20 more years GnomeJS and whatnot.
FSF could finally take a look at webOS / Open WebOS and release it for devices.
Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.
The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.
There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
> The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.
This is an exceptionally poor argument.
1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.
3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.
Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.
> Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
Programmers understand software ecosystems, of which free software is just a subset. I also see a lot of programmers advocating leaderships and other non-technical skills generally. If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
> Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following
The FSF has circular logic all throughout their ideology. They only want to argue if you let them frame the conversation with their own conclusions along with a full deconstruction of views they didn't come up with, like open source, which they explicitly work to discredit and do not represent. It is little wonder that their following is not wide nor strong because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity. They are eclipsed by the EFF and several other organizations built around open source applications in terms of fund raising at this point. Don't listen to me. Just go look at some financials. You'll see how little they represent these days.
> Programmers understand software ecosystems…
Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.
> …of which free software is just a subset.
We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.
> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.
> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity
That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.
I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
In free software those who write code decide what is done and nobody else matters in the end.
This probably explains a lot of the problem then. IME those who are good at writing code are pretty bad at the social parts of running an organization.
This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
1 reply →
Spoken like someone who has zero experience developing open source software.
I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.
I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
1 reply →
Stuff like this makes me embarassed to say I write free software, which is already a niche position that will have you pigeonholed as it is.
The whole purpose of the Free Software movement, expressed in the GPL, is to protect the rights of end users above all others - even above the rights of the people creating the software in the first place and contributing to it.
A great deal of free software is developed by employees. Except in the most reductive sense (the employees could all quit) the decisions are made by the employers.
In this instance John Gilmore is funding the work. He's not doing it himself.
Telling anyone with opinions on your code to bug off as you disregard any outside input is a fine way to make sure no one uses it.
This take is gatekeeping and sexist. Coding is not the job description for FSF leadership; policy, licensing, and funding are. The previous, highly effective former FSF executive director was a poet, not a programmer.
Focus on outcomes: mainline kernels, modem firmware, reproducible builds, verified boot, power management, app ecosystems, and sustained funding. Credit the projects pushing those fronts and press FSF to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.
I personally think it's unfair to accuse this person of sexism. I didn't even know he was talking about a woman until you pointed it out. It's possible that this comment comes from a place of sexism, and it's possible that it doesn't. It's uncharitable to just assume the former.
I think it’s referring to this line:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
2 replies →
This post was fine up until you decided to be sexist for no reason. If you're using "feminine" as an insult, professing "obvious" connotations, you need to reflect on why you have these associations.
[flagged]
You started an entire flamewar with a gratuitous and offtopic provocation in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Librephone is reverse engineering project that attempts to remove remaining proprietary binary modules, not a competing project.
> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
Feminine? What on earth? How can an NGO have a gender? And more importantly, why does it need one? I like your comment, but the word "feminine" is really sexist, as if everything female was of less value.
people followed Stallman because the GNU stuff was interesting and good, then we got decades of endless dick-measuring about whose freedom is more free, GPL2 or GPL3 or MIT or AGPL or ...
and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
The GNU stuff was precisely what FSF managed to do. They didn't manage to do more because they had a fraction of the resources large corporations had. People wanting more just doesn't create more by itself, they were reliant on our contributions and we failed them.
Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
that we failed them might be true, but mostly they did their things and the times changed, and lots of those things are not what users want/need, so the FSF/GNU got almost completely weightless.
... it seems to me that Stallman and the FSF got complacent by their relative (and out of my ignorance I'm now assuming that also unexpected) success, and also they completely misunderstood their value proposition, ie. the product, it was not gcc, emacs, or Hurd or whatever, it was the innovation to allow and foster technical public capital accumulation. (and still, it's absolutely a not solved problem to this day. the wheel is reinvented too fucking many times, even in software.)
... of course they do deserve credit, gratitude and a lot of respect and support for their integrity and steadfastness!
It is how the times are nowadays. You don't get the CEO throne of any org without chest-thumping your social justice initiatives. The FSF is merely following fully up2date standard operational procedures of Western civilization. How can you blame them for following the de-facto standards ?
Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.
FSF is a social justice initiative.
It's time you stop blaming social justice initiatives for your own failures. The projection is clear.
It's wonderful that you've been privileged enough to not need to understand the point of "social justice", but it's not a bogeyman preventing you from being a leader.
> the FSF is at least 15 years late to really launch something in that space
Not really. https://replicant.us is an FSF-supported project. But it kind of died due to the lack of contributors.
IMHO, postmarketOS is better than Replicant or any other Android Rom, because it doesn't depend on Android.
Yes we should have seen (me included) that going the free android distribution path was a long term trap.
This is where the Stallman hard, radical and long term vision make a lot of sense in retrospect. Because we see now Google is pulling the rug.
the smart strategy is to put effort into projects that have a fork failsafe option
and concentrate effort on the components that don't have this (ie. drivers, hardware, codecs, whatever), but instead what we got is 20 more years GnomeJS and whatnot.
FSF could finally take a look at webOS / Open WebOS and release it for devices.
Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.
The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.
There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
LOL.
Compare and contrast this:
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
8 replies →
[flagged]
3 replies →
[flagged]
It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
26 replies →
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
And this is how she behaves at conferences:
https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411
Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement )
This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
1 reply →