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freedombentoday at 11:21 AM3 repliesview on HN

The FSF/FSFE are often criticized for being too ideological to the point of impracticality (and yes I do lol at the pictures of RMS' laptop), but the more time goes on, the more correct and important that ideological stance seems to become. We are headed for a tech dystopia, and we must fight it. If not for us, for the rising generation that may never get to experience the hacker delights that we got to. Kudos to them for fighting the good fight.


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piyuvtoday at 11:54 AM

Due to the Overton window shifting so much, FSF should not be considered radical anymore. It’s the absolute minimum, even.

noirscapetoday at 12:08 PM

The FSFE isn't nearly as impractical as the FSF is. Unlike the FSF, they're actually getting results, typically by lobbying politicians and trying to get governments to require that the code made for them is publicly available. From everything I've seen of them, they're much more capable of meeting people where they're at; take this lawsuit as an example.

The FSF wouldn't participate in a lawsuit like this because from the FSFs ideological perspective, the mistake is allowing Apple to have a closed source system to begin with (because they declared victory in the 90s and since then have shifted towards blaming users for not using Free Software); at most you'd see a head-up-ass press release after the lawsuit is settled, because that's what the FSF usually does; probably easier than actually putting in the effort to do anything to advance Free Software politically. The FSFe from what I can read in this post is actually cognizant that Apple actually has a market share and that opening up application development on Apple devices is a major step to ensuring a healthy Free Software ecosystem.

The FSF these days is a decrepit organization whose primary purpose in practice is to enable Richard Stallman to not have to participate in modern society and to host his philosophical screeds. It's issues are so specific to it that in terms of FOSS, they're a historical artifact at most. Even in the US, the SFC does more for the average free software developer (ref. the recent Bambu incident where they stepped up to help a developer from getting legal nastygrams from the company in question.)

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Tomtetoday at 11:55 AM

FSFE distanced itself from FSF at one point: https://fsfe.org/news/2021/news-20210324-01.en.html

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