The Free Software Foundation is dying
&gt; We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The present leadership, particularly from RMS, creates an exclusionary environment in a place where inclusion and representation are important for the success of the movement.<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of RMS, but this is the exact kind of left wing platitude that people think will revive an organization, but really just signals thats the organization is more concerned with the appearance of reform, rather than substance. It is the death rattle of an organization which has allowed itself to become ideological rather than pragmatic (which is funny considering how ideological the FSF is)<p>The problem with FSF is that it either hasn&#x27;t made its point clear, or has failed to convince people. People are naturally turned off by the GPL because they do not want to give their company&#x27;s code away; they see it as a risk to their businesses.<p>I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work, and we should compete on quality of service and frequency of updates rather than having a monopoly on our code base, but that&#x27;s simply not an argument that businesses <i>buy</i>.<p>It is an uphill battle convincing companies to give away their code to an ecosystem that they will, in the long run, potentially benefit from. The FSF fails to do this, and usually only makes ideological arguments presented by a long-haired, bare-footed, libertarian hippie with a history of extremely controversial takes on the topic of child molestation.