Some thoughts on the comments on Discord:
I can understand most of the arguments against Discord, and there are some problematic communies on it of course, but I’m not sure I understand how using Discord over an alternative puts someone more at risk of exposure to those communities. People are free to join and leave servers at will, so is the issue that these servers built around FOSS projects have toxic communities? If so, how would being on any other platform solve this?
Speaking from experience, just about all the servers I’m in have some kind of “no politics” rule, a very inclusive “be nice” rule, and a pronoun selector. Maybe it’s just the servers I join, but hate speech gets people banned pretty quickly.
Anyway, there are plenty of arguments that can be made about discoverability, lack of control, privacy, and the non-FOSS nature of the platform to justify its presence on that list.
and a pronoun selector.
Which is sort of silly because Discord profiles themselves have a place for pronouns and you can customize them per server (without needing to pay for anything unlike other per-server profile customizations). So, if anything, that shows that these servers are trying to be inclusive.
Perhaps the concern is that you are raising the barrier to entry for people you want and lowering it for people you don’t.
- GitHub, and to a lesser extent GitLab. These platforms commodify the FOSS community and minimize the social aspects that matter – people over stars. They are proprietary (or open core) and consequently encourage a consumption culture with respect to FOSS: users consume GitHub, rather than participating in it; and this culture fans out to the broader culture associated with projects and people that work with it.
Yes, though I like stars as a feature. Forgejo is just as good, so use that instead; I also hear that they’re working on adding federation support, so it’ll work like the Fediverse at some point.
- Open washing, which is to say the proliferation of licenses that look FOSS if you squint but don’t work if you look closer, and practices related to these licenses. Here we have big players like Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and numerous smaller cases as well. The practice of building off of the lavish advantages of being in the FOSS ecosystem, then pulling the rug and seeking exclusive commercial monopolization of the end result.
Yes. The GPL is still king in my book, but less protective licenses have flourished after corporations conceded the superiority of our development model and encroached on our space.
To address this we need to better educate people on how money and free software can co-exist in a way which does not threaten FOSS, and for people to learn and grok the social and economic dynamics of free software. The commercialization of FOSS is not a bad thing – so long as the critical provisions that all users are equally entitled to share that wealth and capitalize on it on equal terms is upheld.
Yes.
- Discord. This is another proprietary platform and many of the same arguments regarding GitHub apply here. It’s an incredibly popular platform, and it’s no surprise to find it landing on our shores. However, it is especially toxic for FOSS in many respects: it seeks legal action to prevent anyone from attempting to build software on top of it. It’s a walled garden: Discord is an incredibly exclusionary platform which has countless accessibility issues for the disabled, poor, and many others.
Yes, the FOSS community settling there is just baffling when alternatives exist and could use the attention and polish.
It’s also exclusionary, and even unsafe, for many other marginalized participants. Many Discord servers are infested with far right recruitment and campaigns of hate and harassment. Many harassment campaigns are launched from Discord and racist, sexist, and queerphobic sentiments go unpoliced. It’s an issue with the platform, which retains ultimate control and refuses to use it to moderate this behavior, and with the culture, who develop small monarchies where these problems go unanswered.
Yes, but that’s also going to be the case on any FOSS alternative that attracts attention, so not sure why he’s singling out Discord here; this is especially true if it’s a decentralized solution, where the chuds can host their own instances. The problem here is lackluster content moderation and not the platform itself; the tools exist—they just need to be used.
Worst of all, it’s really good. It’s simply outcompeted the FOSS market. This isn’t like GitHub, where the alternatives are equally good or better on technical merits. To solve Discord we need to both take the approach of committing our own projects to free platforms, but also investing in our free chat platforms to make them even remotely competitive with Discord.
Yes it did, lol. Matrix is the most viable alternative at this time, but the jank is pretty noticeable. That being said, it still has millions of users so it seems to be in “good enough” territory, especially for tech nerds. Just gotta give it some polish.
- Lack of diversity in FOSS. Yes, I mean the culture war sort, but also others besides. Most of the people reading this post still fit the mold: the relatively affluent white male cishet computer science major. We live in a time of struggle and if we don’t foster solidarity with other political movements it’s going to break down our doors sooner or later. We need different perspectives and backgrounds among our peers and leaders, and so far they’re mostly relegated to users if even that.
We need to deal with bigotry. In particular we need to acknowledge the quiet sort, especially sexism and the behavior of problematic men in our communities. For all of our advances in other domains (in spite of the loud pushback against these advances), sexism remains an important flaw in the FOSS community.
Always a good idea.
Moreover, we need more people than just programmers. You know why we don’t have an answer to Discord? A big part of it is that we don’t have people doing visual design, translations, marketing, etc. Learn about people who differ from you and your expectations: their struggles, their victories, and their needs and what’s important to them. Become a student of the other, and take your skills to your leadership and moderation roles, to make safer and more inviting spaces.
I’ve been saying this for like 10 years. People don’t seem to design UIs/do marketing for fun though in the same way that we program for fun, so not sure if there’s actual people to pull into our projects here, but we do need this. Maybe we should crowdfund hiring designers.
- The Free Software Foundation.
The one thing all of these issues have in common is that the FSF has no answers for them. The EUPL and MPL are doing a better job of facilitating copyleft than the GPL family. Savannah isn’t a match for Codeberg, let alone GitHub. Most egregiously, the FSF has utterly failed to address diversity and social issues, especially sexism, and with RMS’s position restored and maintained at the helm that is never going to change.
The FSF is dead, but its message cannot die. Free software is the philosophical superior of open source, and its lost a lot of ground due to the FSF’s negligence and incompetence that we must recover. We need to underscore the political and philosophical meaning of free software independent of them and reclaim our movement so it can succeed without them.
I’m not convinced that the FSF is still culturally relevant in the FOSS ecosystem outside of Stallman memes; they fell off pretty hard even before Stallman got cancelled for being a neckbeard. I agree that the FSF’s message needs to persist, but I think the problem here is that corporations have encroached on our space and they’re better drivers of inertia since they have more resources to funnel into this stuff.
The way we need to do this is through decentralization and solidarity. We don’t need to restore a heiarchical vision of the movement, instead we need to foster a distributed culture of mentorship in not only our techniques and practices but also in our values, our philosophy, and our culture. Stand up to be a leader, to empower burgeoning leaders around you, and to take personal responsibility for the issues enumerated in this thread.
I don’t think that’s going to be enough to solve the problem here. Tech companies need legislation to reign in their power and influence, especially big tech since they seem to have accumulated so much that it’s not realistically feasible to compete with them anymore.
Just this morning I thought to myself, what software does the FSF have as a flagship and its basically GIMP. GIMP which when asked about an Android version a year or so ago, said they couldn’t do and they’ve made no movement in being able to do it. It’s sad that their relevancy in tomorrow’s world will be limited.
Huh? How did you narrow it down to just GIMP? Are you excluding all non-GUI software or something? GUI has never been a big focus for GNU (which I assume is what you’re referring to when you say FSF), though they do have a couple of projects like GIMP and GNUCash. Most notably as far as GUI is concerned, they instigated the GNOME project, though they later split off. But yeah, they still maintain extremely important tools, especially for developers and UNIX systems, such as glibc, coreutils, gcc, emacs, gdb, make, bash, grub, octave, guix, etc.
Here is the list of GNU projects to choose from:
https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs
I consider GCC to be the GNU flagship. There are are certainly other candidates ( Emacs has fans ) but GIMP is not an unreasonable proposal.
I don’t know if I would say “they” instigated GNOME depending on who “they” are. The free software movement certainly inspired GNOME ( hence the name ) but GNOME was started by Miguel de Icaza while he was still a University student. I don’t think RMS or anybody else at the FSF ( or GNU ) really had anything to do with it beyond inspiration. Miguel wanted an Open Source desktop to counter KDE which required Qt ( proprietary at the time ). He chose GTK instead. Despite that, Miguel and RMS were never completely on the same page in my view. As you say, GNOME is explicitly not a GNU project now. The FSF never really managed the GNOME project. Not long into its history, GNOME started its own foundation ( back in 2000 ).
Miguel has started multiple “for profit” software businesses including one expecting to make GNOME software ( Ximian ). Miguel founded the Mono project to make an Open Source .NET implementation originally to make GNOME software. Richard Stallman wrote essays telling people not to use Mono and the FSF even started a competing initiative ( DotGNU - went nowhere ). Miguel allowed the Mono Project to become corporately backed ( Novell ) and started his own .NET company ( Xamarin ) after Novell let the Mono team go. Xamarin was a for profit software business which was eventually sold to Microsoft. Mono is now a core part of .NET from Microsoft and Xamarin forms the basis for MAUI, Microsoft’s cross-platform app framework. Miguel works at Microsoft now. All this Microsoft stuff is also Open Source ( .NET, MAUI, Mono ).
I would argue that Richard Stallman and the FSF played just as big a role in the chain of events that led .NET to being Open Source as they did in “instigating” GNOME. That is, they are hugely important historical trail-blazers but not direct participants.
Isn’t Grub moot now? You’re right in that I’m being unfair with my GUI based mindset.
there are many non-systemd distros
What do you mean with flagship software of the FSF? Why not krita, ardour, kdenlive, darktables, wine,…?
Because none of the projects you mentioned are GNU projects.
Mhm in that case: Emacs, grub, tar, screen. And damn, did you know about GNUHealth? Thats pretty dope.
Forget screen, all my homies use tmux
Mobile will never replace desktop. I would never do graphic art on a mobile device
not everyone agrees, but that’s ok
They can both exist
It depends what you mean. The FSF does not provide much software directly. However, if you credit them as the authors of the GPL, without question their flagship achievement is Linux.
The FSF did not create Linux of course. And Linux has kind of rejected the “pure” GPL license. That said, credit where credit is due in terms of not just influence but the supporting software and the license that allowed Linux to build momentum.
The Linux Project deserves just as much recognition in reverse of course. Linux is the main reason most of us have even heard of the GPL and / or the FSF or GNU.
Oh, and on this subject: AWS is not really a threat to FOSS, if anything it’s mostly been a boon for us. Any time someone cites AWS while taking any of the four freedoms away from you, you should start asking some pointed questions.
Lol… I’d say anybody saying AWS is not really a threat to FOSS has a blind spot for them or is somehow affiliated with them.
Amazon is certainly interesting for open source. They’ve caused me and my friends a fair bit of trouble but they have made some real contributions. I feel like they only do it when they have to though. They are quite happy to take others work and give nothing back.
They just feel very disingenuous. Opportunistic. A bit sleezy. But some of my favorite open source hackers work there and do good work. It’s hard.
That’s exactly it. They’re taking advantage of open source as a business decision. It’s not about the ethics, morals, or any of that touchy feely stuff to improve the world. It’s all about money for the company.
They do have many good contributions as you said, but as soon as they have to choose between expense with little benefit to them (that includes little benefit to marketing too), and abusing open source for business, it’s always the latter.
this is the vast majority of all businesses though.
Open washing, which is to say the proliferation of licenses that look FOSS if you squint but don’t work if you look closer, and practices related to these licenses. Here we have big players like Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and numerous smaller cases as well. The practice of building off of the lavish advantages of being in the FOSS ecosystem, then pulling the rug and seeking exclusive commercial monopolization of the end result.
Someone help me understand why this is a problem. I am willing to accept that I’m missing something. As I see it,
- Strong copyleft licenses like GPL attempt to put restrictions on what you can do with the software because of ways that corporations have exploited more permissively licensed FOSS projects.
- Examples include the “TiVo” stuff in GPL v3 which forces users to not lock people into specific executables or AGPL which prevents a loop hole of wrapping GPL software in something to allow usage over a network and not be considered distributing.
- Some FOSS advocates go so far as to call permissive licenses derogatory things like “cuck licenses” because of how they potentially allow corporations to exploit your work.
- Mongo, Elastic, and now Redis felt exploited by companies and that AGPL (what I believe is generally accepted as the most restrictive FOSS license) was not restrictive enough to meet their needs and switched to SSPL. Mongo in particular was even already using AGPL.
- The SSPL was rejected by the OSI because it allegedly discriminates against would-be SaaS providers which would violate OSD #6. I don’t see how that’s any more true than saying GPL v3 “discriminates against DVR manufacturers” because it had a clause specifically to combat what TiVo was doing or even saying AGPL “discriminates against SaaS providers” because it requires network use to be considered distribution (Google specifically warns against it).
- AGPL closed a loop hole in GPL. That’s a fact. I don’t think that’s debatable. I believe SSPL is closing a loop hole in AGPL and I am confused why others disagree.
- Mongo, Elastic, and Redis are available under the SSPL but the requirements are strict enough that no SaaS providers want to use them. They are also available under commercial licenses which lift those restrictions for a price. The goal of this is to allow the benefits of open source without being exploited. While people disagreeing with me about SSPL being FOSS might say that this is intended to make it difficult for SaaS providers, I’d point out that dual licensing is common and acceptable. Take Qt for example. You can either use Qt and be bound by GPL (which means it is difficult for you and you have to release some of your would-be proprietary code) or you can pay for a commercial license and not be bound by GPL.
So… My question is, what’s different about SSPL?
- Why is SSPL not considered FOSS while other restrictive licenses like AGPL and GPL v3 are?
- How are companies behind FOSS projects meant to prevent their code from being exploited by SaaS providers?
- Is there some hypothetical lesser version of SSPL that still captures the essence of it while still being more restrictive than AGPL that would prevent exploitation by SaaS providers?
Why is SSPL not considered FOSS while other restrictive licenses like AGPL and GPL v3 are?
So I have an answer for this. Basically all of the entities listed that relicensed their projects to the SSPL, also relicensed their projects using the dual licensing scheme, including one proprietary license. That’s important later.
The SSPL’s intent is probably that the deployment framework used to open source this software must be open sourced. I like this intent, and I would consider it Free/Libre Software, but it should be noted that another license, the open watcom license, which requires you to open source software if you simply deploy it, is not considered Free Software by the FSF. I don’t really understand this decision. I don’t count “must share source code used” as a restriction on usage cases. It seems that the FSF only cares about user freedom, whoever is using the software, and views being forced to open source code only used privately as a restriction.
Now, IANAL… but the SSPL’s lettering is problematic. What is part of the deployment system? If I deploy software on Windows, am I forced to open source windows? If I deploy it on a server with intel management engine, am I forced to open source that? Due to the way it is worded, the SSPL is unusable.
And a dual license, one proprietary and one unusable means only one license — proprietary. There’s actually a possibility that this is intentional, and that the intent of the SSPL was never to be usable, but rather so that these companies could pretend they are still Open Source while going fully proprietary.
But, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume the SSPL’s intent was benevolent but misguided, and that it’s intent was not to be unusable, but rather to force companies to open source deployment platforms.
Of course, the OSI went and wrote an article about how the SSPL is not an open source license but that’s all BS. All you need to do is take a look at who sponsors the OSI (Amazon, Google, other big SAAS providers) to realize that the OSI is just protecting their corporate interests, who are terrified of an SSPL license that actually works, so they seek to misrepresent the intent of the SSPL license as too restrictive for Open Source — which is false. Being forced to open source your deployment platform still allows you to use the code in any way you desire — you just have to open source your deployment platform.
Is there some hypothetical lesser version of SSPL that still captures the essence of it while still being more restrictive than AGPL that would prevent exploitation by SaaS providers?
AGPL. There’s also Open Watcom, but it’s not considered a Free Software license by the FSF, meaning software written under that wouldn’t be included in any major Linux distros.
I think in theory you could make an SSPL that works. But SSPL ain’t it.
Of course, there are problems with designing an SSPL that works, of course. Like, if you make it so that you don’t have to open source proprietary code by other vendors, then what if companies split themselves up and one company makes and “sells” the proprietary programs to another.
word
Unrelated: I had a temporary bout of dyslexia and read, “Dr. Drew on the biggest threats to FOSS” and got quite confused for just a moment.
I don’t know why Drew is advocating for AWS here. If I read between the lines correctly, he’s probably talking about someone like Elastic who changed their license and AWS “took over” the FOSS. OpenSearch and other projects AWS has picked up are fucked. I’ve gone back and forth for months on those projects with AWS employees who have no fucking clue about the underlying software or how it’s used on AWS. Since they’re gatekeepers, changes outside their use cases (which often exclude normal or more secure profiles) rarely get through. Drew is right to attack people taking away control. He’s wrong to say because people take away control, AWS is good. They exert control in different ways.
I find it ironic that people like Drew that add a bunch of stipulations and requirements on top of open source support orgs like AWS who do the things copyleft champions claim open licenses like Apache or MIT will cause. Copyleft tells people what to do with code just like AWS does when it takes over a project.
