02.22.20
Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux at 8:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Original blog post by the FSF's interim co-president
Being cancelled is no fun. In my case, it was for standing for a friend who got canceled for defending someone else from an accusation that was later proven false.
Occasionally, however, an opportunity to make fun of such a sad and frustrating situation arises, and then trolling the oppressors becomes irresistible.
When my friend got canceled and asked me to take his place in our organization, I and my colleagues there got a copy of Orwell’s 1984 from an anonymous donor (thanks!, mine was falling apart).
The organization has just announced the schedule for a conference it organizes. I submitted a speech proposal, but I didn’t even get a response. I’m told by people in the know that my speech was selected, but that there was concern I might speak in favor of the canceled person instead of the proposed topic, a freedom-compatible revamp of the portable telescreens nearly everyone else carries in their pockets or purses, so I got preemptively canceled as well. So much for an organization that fights for freedoms and human rights.
Anyway, when announcing on social media the schedule in which I was disappeared, the organization published a picture of last year’s conference, at a keynote that took place on 2019-03-25. There was I, very big guy at the front plane, sitting on the second row in a very discrete, barely noticeable (not) chromakey-green T-shirt I got from the Tor Project (thanks!), like a big green canvas in the audience just waiting to be replaced in the picture.
I couldn’t help the thought that this was indeed what’d happened to me in the conference schedule, and so the orders to Winston Smith’s job at Minitrue, in Orwell’s book’s NewSpeak, came to mind.
So I posted a response in NewSpeak:
lptimes 25.3.19 misprint 2nd row tuxfree malchromakey duckspeakful unperson rectify
In the language currently spoken in Oceania and elsewhere, that translates to:
A misprint in the Mar 25, 2019 issue of lptimes shows a canceled person of unorthodox opinions on the second row, not wearing a tux, poorly and incompletely edited into a chromakey background color. Undo the poor attempt to add to the picture a person who could not possibly have been there, since canceled people never existed, reprint the issue with the restored original version of the picture, and throw the remaining copy of the picture into the memory hole.
If you were hopeful that “tuxfree” could mean something else, allow me to remind you that Linux-libre’s “Free as in Freedo” slogan does not make sense in NewSpeak: in the process of eliminating the possibility of subversive thoughts, NewSpeak stripped from the word “Free” the meaning of political freedom, leaving only that of of absence or lack of something. A Freedom-free language for a Freedom-free society.
See you where there is no darkness. Or not. If you get this, you are the brotherhood (or is it the resistance?) (see slides 9
and 10). Otherwise, maybe Big Brother is ”patching” you.
So blong…
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, OSI at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
By figosdev
Summary: “We simply need to make the movement less corporate, and more grassroots.”
As someone who writes Free software, discourages non-free software (and other setbacks in software freedom) and considers “open source” a corporate bait-and-switch tactic, I consider myself part of the Free software movement. I think Free software is important.
I also consider the Free software definition important, as basically our constitution. I think the FSD is more important than the FSF who maintains it, in the same way that I think the U.S. Constitution is more important than Donald Trump. I don’t think swearing an oath to defend the FSD is necessary, but there are certainly a handful of people at the FSF who would be in violation of that oath if they had.
And given that I believe the founder more honest and instrumental than the FSF lately, I consider the founder more important than the FSF as well. It would be nice if the FSF survived RMS, but only if it continued to serve the same purpose as it did previously.
Maybe if the new FSF wasn’t focused on glib soundbites and photo ops, and didn’t remain dishonest about what happened, I would feel differently. But if the FSF doesn’t stand for Stallman, it’s hard to believe it stands for us. If Stallman is disposable, we are all pawns to them as well.
If I wanted to be a pawn, I’d just use Windows. And if I wanted a system more or less dictated by IBM and developed on Microsoft’s own servers, I’d just use Windows. I went to a lot of trouble to get away from that sort of thing. For some reason, a lot of people suddenly don’t understand what used to be obvious to so many of us? Who knew the movement was so pliable?
I’m speaking very broadly, but this article is as much about the fine exceptions as the disturbing rule. I know the exceptions — I believe there will be more of you. That’ll be nice. I would prefer that Free software not be infiltrated and taken over, but I think the infiltration has already happened — which doesn’t mean it won’t continue or get worse.
My hope is that it would be like the purchase of Sun and OpenOffice that resulted in LibreOffice (albeit only for 64-bit these days — don’t you guys realise fighting e-waste is one of the reasons I love and rely on Free software? OpenOffice still offers 32-bit) and OpenOffice was a failure for Oracle, so they unloaded it on Apache. I think we have nobody to thank for that except the LibreOffice developers, so thanks. Now stop moving towards Github, please. Microsoft controls enough of our software already.
But Roy said (or quoted?) today, that good organisations that abandon their mission never really go back. There may indeed be a point to trying to hold off the coup — the principle of the thing, and buying time. I agree with those and likely more. However, I also agree that a movement ought to consider the long term. So as when I talked about Stallman being cancelled, I’m talking about the future.
We probably aren’t going to win the FSF back. Most people don’t realise that it needs to be won back, and that lack of awareness is the perhaps the second greatest loss of all. The FSF is still seeking pawns to support the shell of what it was previously. But what does it do to support the user? Less and less all the time. When they talk about freedom, I don’t believe them. Like with open source, their actions don’t match their words.
The takeover of America and of OSI, Debian, Red Hat, not to mention FSFE — these happened in the same five years. Whether they’re related or not, people should be able to learn from these experiences. I’m sure there are other takeovers that are similar, if unrelated — similar enough for people to understand.
Not everyone is going to give up. For some of us, this is just the beginning. I was once quite happy to promote Debian and Free software (without the non-free repos) but they certainly put a damper on that. When they stopped providing a good distro, I looked for alternatives. When I couldn’t promote Free software with Debian anymore, I figured maybe we could try to get more people into coding with Free software. But first, to make it easier…
It’s actually quite a thing to try to find an alternative to one of the best, oldest, most “universal” distros there is — but Debian isn’t universal anymore. I don’t think it is, and neither does 2nd-ever-DPL, DFSG author Bruce Perens. Why when you live up to that sort of hype, would you want to abandon it and even discourage the people who believe in it as a standard? Nonetheless, that’s exactly what they did.
I’m still looking, but I believe more in what Hyperbola is doing than anything else. It used to be Hyperbola and Guix, but it’s obvious that Guix is letting absolute scum gradually take over their project as well. Well, Guix is a nice idea at any rate.
Free software isn’t a cult for me — despite my admiration for Stallman, I agree with those who thought he should be taken down a notch. The fundamental difference is what constitutes just a notch. I didn’t want him gone from the FSF, I didn’t want him voiceless, in exile, I didn’t want some traitor spouting absolute bullshit in the style of a corporate boardroom over his legacy. If I wanted that, id just join OSI.
No, one notch would be plenty — just one notch small enough for them to build up to run Stallman-free for the day when he can’t do it anymore. Doing it with dishonesty and trial-by-media in a tech press that loves “open source” but not freedom — that’s unacceptable and traitorous.
This man is like Einstein — you know, Einstein had a few rough edges. Did you see what he wrote to his wife? Divorce used to be less common, and what Einstein decided was that she could remain married and living in his house, essentially as long as she didn’t bother him.
I mean, that’s sugar-coating it slightly, but I guarantee that judged by today’s standards, Einstein could have gotten kicked out of some prominent associations related to physics. The world is still in debt to his brilliance, and I don’t think he was any sort of monster (though I wasn’t there.)
The point is, we can judge him. we have that power, at least on a social and philosophical level. Whether we use that fairly is up to us, isn’t it? That’s not at all what happened in September, and the people who sat by, knowing the truth, while one of the better people on earth was driven out from something he built to help humanity are people I want nothing to do with.
I also note the double standards at play with Stallman’s ousting, as well as the feminist who came out in his defense and dispelled some of the rumours and outright lies (thank you, by the way.)
Like Stallman, and indeed every genius that ever lived, Einstein wasn’t right about everything even if he had few (if any) intellectual equals. He was absolutely wrong about string theory! Of course Einstein never planned to be a household name (it was Buckminster Fuller who predicted that, before Einstein was the sort of person you could read about on Wikipedia.) Expecting him to be a posterchild for IQ itself, or an authority on every subject was never in the cards as far as he was concerned.
As to whether Stallman still matters… Stallman will always matter. He’s neither too old to learn from nor to contribute. People talk about discrimination, while ageism runs rampant in Free software and narcissists try stupidly to beard-shame. Isaac Newton still matters. Thomas Jefferson matters. And per my taste in languages, Grace Hopper has a lot more influence on my coding than Stallman, though it’s Stallman’s activism that I’m most inspired by.
One of the great things about history is that we can still learn more from these people, even though they aren’t around to add anything. But Stallman is still here, and letting him go to waste is just stupid.
As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing the least bit ironic about grouping him with Einstein, Hopper and Jefferson. They were important, but they were still people. And most people quickly abandon their own understanding of just where we would be if the Free software movement hadn’t started in the first place — this is largely a side-effect (or simply an effect) of open source constantly rewriting history to marginalise the people who actually cared about freedom.
In every way that they have accused Stallman of countless times, these people have grown obsessed with details and avoided the larger picture — and the truth. Then they have mistaken those details for the picture itself, and asked us to join in their numbing, absurd superficiality.
I’m not at all impressed by the people who have stolen his seat. That should have gone to someone who earned it — only to someone who could do better. As it is, that seat is going completely to waste. I’ve spent years keeping track and only know a handful of people worthy to even try it. What do I mean by worthy? Someone fit to do the actual job!
People have spent literally decades trying to unwrite Stallman’s legacy — corporate sellouts who rewrite history to serve their agenda. Disgusting, but not the least bit new. It’s not like such tactics were invented for Stallman in particular.
You can help Free software by learning history and helping keep the record straight despite these scheming revisionists. The history of Free software is the history of what we do, and wise people learn from history to serve the future — they don’t alter it to serve the short term — that’s what fascist and other power-corrupted regimes do. Most of what I’ve noticed from the FSF lately is just gloss, no substance. When there are exceptions I note them and share them.
Despite all this, I agree that the movement matters more than the founder. I really mean it, too. But the people who think hurting Stallman on this level is going to help us at all are liars, fools or both. If you count everybody involved, it becomes ridiculously obvious who benefits the most from this — and it isn’t Free software.
Spread among the ranks are people who have spent years undermining software freedom, for any excuse they can find. I admit that I’m very sad and a bit surprised that Ian Jackson is among them. That one doesn’t make a lot of sense, but he is just one person on the list. He really doesn’t seem like he belongs there.
What to do about the FSF would be so much more relevant if it weren’t the fate of most non-profits to ultimately sell out and abandon their mission, even betraying their members. At a certain point, members are little more than donation fodder. They will promise them the moon, and deliver next to nothing. I did like ShoeTool — for one, I’ve spent years and years protesting the FSF’s mixed, almost Janus-like relationship with Free culture, and ShoeTool is another important step in the right direction — as are the LibrePlanet videos. Overall, I’m not happy with the direction LibrePlanet has taken, but putting the videos under a free licence is a good thing.
No one should be fooled by the exceptions that prove the rule. 2019 was by far the worst year the FSF (and Free software) ever had, and if 2020 isn’t worse it will not be a long respite. They have no business asking people for money now, except of course that it’s one of their primary reasons to exist as a 501c3 corporation.
Like Charity Navigator (who have smiled on the FSF 7 years in a row — 6 of those with Stallman at the helm, 6.5 when you figure he was only ousted 5 months and about a week ago — but suddenly it’s so important… Look at us! Next they’ll be jumping up and down about a good BBB rating…) I have no qualms about how the FSF spends its money.
Unlike Charity Navigator and more like the Green Party US, I take more issue with who they get their money from than where it’s going. I care about who has the FSF by the pursestrings — and if you care about Free software, I think that should matter to you as well. Especially since there is more than a likely coincidence regarding when they started to change and when they got more funding from these dubious sources — dubious to freedom, not to Charity Navigator. Are they a Free software organisation? No, they only care about transparency in funding.
But Charity Navigator doesn’t care if the FSF or FSFE are funded predominantly (as in the largest share, not necessarily a majority) by companies literally trying to destroy Free software with patents and other nastiness.
If you think members get any real say for their “majority” funding, think again. Members have no say at all what the FSF or FSFE does. When that means the FSF does a better job defending Free software, I can hardly complain about that. But when people start lying to you and throwing the fight against Free software, you still have no say.
I don’t think members should be able to tell the FSF to abandon its mission, but that’s very hypothetical. What’s not hypothetical is the fact that you can’t force the FSF to be honest, except by leaving. And when you do, they will just find more donation fodder. You’re powerless, but the FSF has got your back! (Unless you’re Stallman. Or really, not at all.)
For the rest of us, who still care about Free software no matter what the FSF does, or what they tell us — I (almost) don’t know why more people aren’t creating their own organisations yet. The way Free software was built was through activism and writing software. The way it will be carried on is through activism and writing software.
I still think it’s very likely the Free software movement will survive. One of the advantages of leaving the FSF behind (not what Stallman wants, I realise) and moving forward would be providing him with more venues and support.
Of course it will be gradual if it happens; the FSF and the GNU project are already moving towards what at least looks like an eventual legal separation. A spinoff organisation would be good, if that’s what happens. Which isn’t to say I assume they know that’s the direction they’re headed in, or that I’m sure of it myself. I was more or less right about Red Hat, and we practically predicted Stallman’s ousting.
What I’m saying is, it’s going to take more than the FSF to put things right again. And the rest of us would benefit from something that actually defends our freedom — while the FSF continues to lie and put on a show.
Lying to us and treating us like naive fools hardly endears me to them. Their main claims to fame were creating the GNU operating system, and having Stallman, and a few people like him. What have they got now? A coup they won’t say anything about, for self-serving reasons (we are supposed to believe it helps in some way. That’s another lie.) We have some talks on video of people who have abandoned and excluded their founder, and some other people trying to take over the last refuge of someone who did more for freedom than they ever will. And they’re still trying to subvert the GNU project, because “The World is Not Enough” (for greedy corporate assholes.)
But they’ll have funding, don’t worry about that. “National” “Public” Radio was taken over by corporations, and sheep still pull out their chequebooks and fall for that old “Listener-supported” line.
Corporate “indie” cred, aplenty! The world isn’t short of people who are happy to dole out a dollar or two to hear DJ Sullivan play that old song on the radio one more time, while Satya Nadella and Jims Whitehurst and Zemlin sing along. Still waiting for earplugs with the FSF logo; they probably only cost 50 bucks.
As for fond memories for old time’s sake, remember those days when if you hated a piece of software on your supposedly freedom-respecting operating system, you could “just uninstall it” and just as easily put something else (also free) in its place?
Completely unlike Internet Explorer before the antitrust lawsuits? And it didn’t typically take five freaking years to get a stable, reliable system after that not-so-giant change either.
Exactly what the hell happened to that, anyway? I’m not even 50 yet, but I’ll take out one of my Dyne:bolic earplugs so you can speak into my “good ear” and explain it. Go ahead, I’ve probably heard this one…
Even without the FSF (pretending they’re) fighting for us, Free software still has a chance. But it’s never easier to get good work done among too many traitors, liars and backstabbers.
I don’t believe in the McCarthy approach to this sort of thing — that’s basically what drove Stallman out in the first place, a good old-fashioned McCarthyist tribunal. We simply need to make the movement less corporate, and more grassroots. No more of this (increasingly well-funded) astroturf bullshit, please! █
Licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (public domain)
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Posted in Debian, GNU/Linux at 9:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
My desk photographed an hour ago
Summary: A little personal story and recommendation of Debian “Buster” (10) or Devuan (whose developers persist)
THIS year started slowly due to two machine failures. First it was my wife’s and then (weeks later) it was mine. The hard-drive wasn’t aging well (it’s 11 years old) and risk of severe data loss had grown greater by the week. I had to reboot several times because the root filesystem kept locking up (to avert critical failure) and at that point the battery wasn’t working, the screen had not worked for more than a year (I’ve an used external one on this laptop) and even the keyboard was defunct (so I’ve used an external one). The reboots are a pretty big deal because I ran some important things on this laptop (IRC logging for instance), on a 24/7 basis, and reboots were like an annual thing. Uptime was really good until the disk kept failing (becoming read-only until a file system check).
“Uptime was really good until the disk kept failing (becoming read-only until a file system check).”Due to hardware issues earlier this year we bought two used (refurbished/”preowned”) laptops and put Debian 10 on them. It was pretty spectacular that everything worked well out of the box and was simple to set up. Configuring a printer took less time than it took to feed it paper (my wife did all that on her own yesterday).
The hardest thing about Debian wasn’t setting it up as a system (post-installation). The installer still uses a lot of jargon (remember the old joke about the meaning of the word “Ubuntu”) and if one needs firmware (binary blobs) to get Wi-Fi going, then things can get tricky. In the name of freedom and FSF endorsement, of course…
“Due to hardware issues earlier this year we bought two used (refurbished/”preowned”) laptops and put Debian 10 on them. It was pretty spectacular that everything worked well out of the box and was simple to set up.”After she had set up her laptop with Debian 10 (and included were all the desktop environments available) my wife installed it on mine as well. She didn’t struggle, she was technical enough and all I needed to provide was a password.
Debian GNU/Linux does not spend billions of dollars on marketing; it does not bribe sites like ZDNet to totally control them — even their "Linux" section.
Up until the start of this year I did OK under GNU/Linux with never a computer that had more than 2 GB of RAM. I did all my work just fine with such minimal specs.
In my experience, setting up GNU/Linux (major distributions and their derivatives) in 2020 is very easy. The last time I actually installed Windows I think I was using floppy disks, but people say it’s still a difficult experience because one must pursue drivers and deal with various compatibility issues, sometimes licensing issues as well.
“In my experience, setting up GNU/Linux (major distributions and their derivatives) in 2020 is very easy.”Debian now uses systemd, which some prominent Debian figures oppose and I cannot blame them. Devuan is still available for those looking to dodge systemd.
We’re still planning to migrate the site to another operating system, maybe Devuan. A migration isn’t as simple as initially hoped for various technical reasons and lack of spare hardware (one physical server and hypervisor). But we’re still working on that whenever time permits. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, OSI at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The OSI has accepted people from companies that actively attack Software Freedom and there may be more on their way
WHILE it’s true that quietly Microsoft 'left' the OSI's Board (it's still very dominant in many other aspects, including financial, decision-making, hosting etc.) the OSI does not show signs of recuperating. It seems to have fallen into an attractive trap of money and manners. It wants money and it wants to be seen exceedingly polite — to the point of self-harming moves.
“I don’t want to comment on it myself; many people have already done so online.”There’s already much discussion online about this new ‘incident’.
I don’t want to comment on it myself; many people have already done so online. IRC channels, forums and so on…
Here’s what I think would be a noteworthy, generic observation:
Institutions change over time, for better or for worse, sometimes by infiltration (for better or worse).
“Deviation from mission statement assures self-destruction or making oneself obsolete.”But they rarely get any better if or when they change profoundly.
Deviation from mission statement assures self-destruction or making oneself obsolete. See OSDL and remember what happened to it. We covered it before.
A combination of infiltration, ‘cancel culture’ and censorship leads to outsting of people true to the original cause. Then an organisation gets hijacked, mission inverted, and harm is done to the original goal.
As a crucial reminder, earlier this year the founder of OSI resigned in protest against openwashing. He too must have realised that they had become the next Linux Foundation i.e. an institution hostile towards GNU/Linux users and towards their very mission statement.
“There’s no Bruce Perens left to speak for the OSI, just as there’s no Stallman for the FSF or Torvalds for the ‘Linux’ Foundation (it is no coincidence that he has been so quiet ever since he got painted/portrayed as an angry old sexist).”The OSI’s future — if much is left to it — will be determined by those who are still in it without hostile interests (such as Microsoft’s and its proxies’).
There’s no Bruce Perens left to speak for the OSI, just as there’s no Stallman for the FSF or Torvalds for the ‘Linux’ Foundation (it is no coincidence that he has been so quiet ever since he got painted/portrayed as an angry old sexist).
Please note that I make no remarks on the individual above. I think that the comments in the screenshot sum it up politely. █
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!['I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years,' 1994 and '[E-mail] spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time,' 2004](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gates-genius.jpg)
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