Impressions from the GNU Project's 40th anniversary celebration

An anniversary like this, one might think, would be an occasion for a fair amount of introspection and planning for the future. That was not the case here, though. There was almost no looking back at GNU project history, little evaluation of strategy or tactics, and no planning for the coming years. The GNU project, it seems, is happy with what it is and feels no need to talk about where it is going as a whole.

The one exception, perhaps, was Panos Alevropoulos, who works on the Free Software Foundation's efforts to end software patents. Some good things have happened in those 40 years, he said; free software exists for almost every purpose, free social networks (including the fediverse) are rapidly growing, the quality of the software is high, and it is supported by a community of passionate people. On the other hand, he said, many features and capabilities still come to proprietary software first, there is no 100% freedom-respecting hardware, no prospect of regulatory action against digital rights management or software patents, and free software is still either unknown to or misunderstood by the general public. In many ways, he said, the project has failed to meet its goals.

This failure, he said, shows that a strategy centered around the development of software is not enough. What is needed is a way to make free software the default for more users. That might be done by creating applications that achieve industry-standard status; VLC, he said, is a good example of how that can work. Working to ensure that software developed with public money is free (something that, as Matthias Kirschner emphasized earlier in the day, the Free Software Foundation Europe is pushing hard for) is another step. Eventually, he said, consideration could be given to banning proprietary software entirely; not everybody in attendance was convinced that the GNU project should venture into advocating for changes to copyright law, though.

The discussion moved on quickly and Alevropoulos's talk did not echo through the rest of the meeting.

The ostensible highlight was an address by Stallman himself. His appearance may have been a shock to many in the room; he disclosed that he has been fighting cancer, and he looks the way cancer patients often look. That fight, he said, is going well, and there is every reason to be optimistic; he added that the community is going to have to put up with his presence for many years yet.

Stallman's talk did not look back to his original announcement at all. Instead, he wandered over a number of topics, seemingly disconnected from each other. For example, Red Hat's changes with regard to access to (and redistribution of) source code were deemed to be "nasty", but he sees no basis for a copyright suit against the company. He said that he had no conclusive answer on whether Red Hat's policy violates the GPL, but it is clear that it is antisocial; Red Hat should change its approach.

He also spent a little time on generative artificial intelligence and the concerns that these systems might constitute a violation of the copyrights on the works used to train them. There are many uses of these systems that run counter to freedom, he said, and those uses should be illegal. But the way to get there is through legislation, not through licensing. Restrictions on activities should be the result of democratic processes and not one person adding rules to a license; no one person should have that power.

The part of the meeting that seemed to resonate most with the attendees, though, was the considerable amount of time given to the presentation of a number of projects that are being developed under the GNU umbrella. The utilities that the GNU project is most widely known for — Emacs, the compiler toolchain, command-line utilities — were notably absent from this gathering; there was almost no overlap with the attendees of the GNU Tools Cauldron, held just a few days before, for example. Much of the energy in the GNU project, today, is focused on rather different projects:

• Martin Schanzenbach presented the GNU Name System, an attempt to create an alternative to the domain name system that lacks central servers and control points.
• Florian Dold talked at length about Taler, an electronic payments system that is trying to solve current problems while avoiding many of the mistakes made by others. There are no offline payments, no blockchains, no unregulated radical privacy, no smart contracts, and no reliance on big tech companies. Taler is meant to provide buyer-side anonymity while maintaining transparency and auditability on the seller side. The talk featured cameo appearances from a member of the Swiss parliament who has tried to create an awareness of Taler in that forum, and from the founder of the NetzBon regional currency, which is looking at integrating Taler.
• Luis Falcon discussed GNU Health, a hospital information system with active deployments worldwide. This project is working to make state-of-the-art capabilities freely available while, of course, adding protection for the privacy of medical information.
• Sébastien Blin works on Jami, a communications platform focused on privacy and a distributed implementation.
• Luca Saiu is developing GNU Jitter, a system for the creation of highly efficient virtual machines.
• Tobias Platen presented Libre-SOC, a project that is working toward the creation of a fast, secure, and 100% free system-on-chip.
• Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor was arguably closest to the GNU project's roots with his presentation of GNU poke, an editor for binary data that has been covered here in the past.

The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that, without actually saying so, the GNU project has moved on from the task of creating a free operating system. That has been done, and done well. But there is a long list of other problems — urgent problems — that can be addressed with free software, and today's GNU developers are putting their effort into many of them.

There are plenty of easy criticisms to be made regarding the GNU project and its founder; those have been reiterated many times, and it is your editor's hope that readers will avoid doing so yet again in the comments here. But, those criticisms notwithstanding, it is true that, 40 years ago, Richard Stallman saw something more clearly than the rest of us did, expressed a compelling vision of a better world, and changed how we deal with technology. Perhaps free software would have eventually found success without the GNU project, perhaps not, but there is little doubt that it would have come much later. We have all benefited hugely from the GNU Project, and its 40th anniversary is worth celebrating.

Much of the GNU Project's stated mission is arguably obsolete, by virtue of having been accomplished, even if we never did quite get that Empire game that Stallman promised. But there is still a lot of work to do. The GNU Project needs to refocus itself on current problems while continuing to pursue its goal of software freedom. As can be seen, GNU developers are busily doing exactly that; arguably, they are leaving the GNU Project behind in the process. We desperately need freedom and privacy-protecting solutions to a wide range of problems, far beyond the operating system.

The GNU Project has laid a good foundation but, as Alevropoulos said early in the day, it has not created a world where free software solutions are the default. It has not, yet, made the case for free software to the world as a whole. Some new thought into how to solve that problem, along with an intensification of the energy being put into projects like those described above, could cause the GNU Project's next 40 years to far overshadow the last 40.

Meanwhile, we at LWN, like many others in the community, hope that Stallman's health situation continues to improve and that he is able to see the GNU project's course over the coming years.

[Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for supporting my travel to this event.]