I personally don't need the FSF or RMS to be a Free Software person that promotes the merits for Software Freedom.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

I personally don't need the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or RMS (Richard Stallman) to be a Free Software person that promotes the merits of Software Freedom. Back in the days I was part of the first court case in Germany that established the GPL (v2 at the time) as a valid and enforceable license under German law. We won that case without needing any help from the FSF(E). I have always focused on ideas, never on "heroes" and personification, because people fail. Ideas are bigger than people.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

This means that I have zero problems criticising RMS behaviour and supporting victims of his behaviours, criticising the FSF for not doing more, while still promoting Software Freedom. I will however (as I have been doing for many years) focus more on the latter.

silhouette

@jwildeboer has he actually done something or is this another smear job because he said something people find distasteful

Eloy

@jwildeboer yeah

I can name zero leaders of the Python Software Foundation and that is a good thing

silhouette

@jwildeboer fwiw I'm in full support of distancing yourself from abusers and bringing the full force of the law against them if they committed criminal offenses. In my opinion people like Till Lindemann should be in jail.

What I'm against is anonymous libel against someone because of questionable things they say or "i don't like him because he's weird".

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@silhouette I think I made my position clear. I have decoupled Software Freedom as a concept from RMS as a person for a very long time. I focus on Software Freedom, not RMS. If he did something wrong, he should be held responsible. But I will not get involved in that "debate".

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

To those that want to have a "debate" on the merits of the report on RMS — that's fine. Just not under this thread, please?

paulasimoes

@jwildeboer I agree with your point on personification, but not on organizations. You took GPL to court because there was an organization that created the license, and you won because that organization maintains the license's legal text. I would say that unless you're a lawyer with lots of free time to check every jurisdiction in the world, it would be quite difficult for a single person to create a law enforceable license.
Some years ago, we had a law proposal that would make some changes in copyright law here in Portugal. Creative Commons had still local licenses and if the proposal was approved that could make the PT license invalid. Fortunately, we had someone from CC in Portugal that made the effort to update the legal text so even if the proposal was approved, the license would still be safe to use. It's not a small task. 1/2

paulasimoes

@jwildeboer We also need organizations/associations/foundations to set the definitions, just recently there was a news of a company calling their software open source, which was not, so people call it out and they could do it because there is a definition. If we compare FLOSS to Open Access, we see there is no foundation/organization/association and no specific license, this means we have different definitions of OA, the common characteristic being the gratis one (yes, it was a mistake). So we get these weird situations where we can have a OA paper (just gratis) where we can't do anything with it beyond fair use/exceptions (like a full copyright work) and a non-OA paper with a CC BY because it's being sold. Worse than that, we can have exactly the same paper bot OA and non-OA, for instance a CC BY that's being sold in a website and gratis in another. It's insane.
Of course, organizations must have elections and transparent decision processes to make them do the right thing.
Yes, let's refrain from creating heroes, but let's not kill organizations in the process. F/LOSS and F/LOSS culture (OA, CC, Public Domain) are always being attacked (because abundance), and without organizations we wouldn't stand a chance. 2/2

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@paulasimoes yes, we need trustworthy and strong, transnational organisations. And that’s where I have a problem with the FSF leadership that refuses to distance itself from RMS. But that’s my personal opinion.