Forty years of GNU

Posted Sep 21, 2023 17:13 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Forty years of GNU by coriordan
Parent article: Forty years of GNU

"Please write free software to do these jobs"

I think this is where things have fallen down. The FSF started as much as a developer of free software as an advocate. That gave it a lot of influence, both by proving it was possible to write great free software and by making tools other people wanted to use. It was important to have your new tool play nicely with GNU, which often convinced people to use the FSF-preferred licenses even when they weren't compelled to. Over time, though, FSF has gradually moved out of writing software. Now they're mostly an advocacy organization, with a secondary role as home for projects developed elsewhere and gifted to them for one reason or another. What was the last great piece of software that was written primarily by people from FSF?

That failure to produce its own software anymore has cut into FSF's moral position as an advocate of free software. People tend to respect and respond to the free software developers who write the most and best new stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of that has now been taken over by big companies who release "free software" mostly for their own purposes and don't really want to cede control to users. Some of that is a response to free software's success and the fact software as a whole takes much bigger teams to produce than it did back in GNU's heyday. Whatever the cause, it means FSF has lost a lot of its influence. Instead of the leading light of free software, it's mostly a bystander making less and less relevant criticisms of the real leaders' choices.