Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 41
Still leading the pack as "the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project"
A year ago the Free Software Foundation had a ceremony to mark its 4-decade history-making trailblazing and slice some cake (Stallman/RMS had the "honours"). There are some photos from these celebrations.
GNU recently turned 43 and it's still growing or going strong like an ox. Sure, the "Rust People" (their own term) hope to replace GNU encryption and other programs with Microsoft GitHub nonsense (openly rejected by GNU). Lousy clones are advanced by young, overambitious spies. They're younger than GNU.
We are not too worried about these "Rust People". They won't succeed, it'll just irritate people. 2 days ago I saw the odd suggestion that to "Rust People" it is considered "bullying" to not let veteran developers replace their code with new one (coded in another language for no practical reason). This was said in the context of Microsoft staff trying to shoehorn Rust into Linux, ensuring the most important Linux developers can no longer read or understand critical modules.
Rust is seen by us as a phenomenon related and sometimes deeply connected to slop. Immature (untested, unaudited) code or code produced by proprietary (outsourced) LLMs is a fantastic facility by which to covertly interject back doors into lots of programs, remotely and without immediate detection. If they're detected, they'll say "blame the AI" (read: no accountability).
People who want humans and communities to maintain their software chains (and by extension their digital life) will back GNU. █