Playing the Open Source Game
I really really really wish the FSF-haters all the luck in the world in their quest to thread the needle between bigcorp-hostile, GPL-style copyleft and user-hostile, bigcorp-friendly open source.I'm sad they can't learn to love GNU projects. I for one do. They just... work. Whenever they don't, invariably there's some freedom-hostile hardware in the way. This makes me want to move closer to FSF-recommended hardware.I wish them all the luck because the FSF just seems cursed at this point. They do absolutely essential legal and advocacy work and the world wouldn't be what it is without them, and virtually nobody has a deep enough sense of history to recognize that. They will still get my donation dollars for the foreseeable future, and I hope they can rehabilitate their image.I do sorta think this whole thing will end up working out well overall for the FSF's mission of building a software domain that's solidly out of the clutches of proprietary predation. I've never seen the FSF, the distinction between open and free software, in the public mind more than the last year. I can get really snarky about how all these people who never cared before suddenly come out against the FSF. You didn't care before, you still don't care, good job expressing the total lack of impact you insist on wanting to have.Are more free software foundations a good thing? Probably. It'll dilute the impact in the short run, these new projects will have to spend time and effort solving run-of-the-mill nonprofit stuff that the FSF worked out decades ago, but it also means more people will get invested. Eventually the new blood will learn to work with the old guard and we can all build a new order together.Color me optimistic about the future of free software.