On Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:03:03 +0200 Simon Tournier <zimon.touto...@gmail.com> wrote: > Today, Richard is 71 years old. The question isn’t the past but the > future: What will be GNU in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 40 years? > What does it mean being part of GNU once Richard will be “retired”? > Please do not take me wrong, I wish all the best to Richard and a very > long life! Being just a human implies becoming older and older and > passing away. For one, not a personal opinion. ;-)
An big practical problem I saw in discussions on the gnu-linux-libre mailing list (which is a mailing list meant for coordination of all FSDG distributions like Guix, Trisquel, but also non-GNU/Linux distros like Replicant) is that RMS's opinion enable to close a discussion. This means that without RMS people are probably not able to collectively take decisions on controversial topics. Another issue related to this one is that we also do need both to have ways to grow strategic capacity on our own and also to have experience in taking collective decisions. The first would mean to understand better things that RMS knows well and be able to take strategic decisions for GNU and/or free software. For the second, while I would have liked to slowly ramp up the GCD (try it with more consensual decisions first, to see potential issues and limitations of the approach and fix them), it is at least a step in the right direction as it enables to do exactly that. Both are different because we can also take bad collective decisions if we are not correctly informed, even if there is (at some point) a good process for reaching consensus and/or taking decisions. Another longer term issue I see is that we also need multiple people to step in individually or collectively to be able to write the kind of articles RMS was writing because this is something that is extremely strategic: it defines and unify the free software movement. Without that I fear that it would produce too much infighting. It might also be possible to do it somewhat collectively as there are historic examples where that worked (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Charter) and the big advantage here would probably to have a more robust and inclusive movement. So we could probably try to write articles (like the ones written by RMS like the "JavaScript trap", etc) in case new threats or opportunities arise for free software. > I think the question “leave GNU or not?” is empty. Because it asks to > look back when we must focus on look next. It's also probably the wrong question being asked, as it's probably implied that leaving GNU will lower freedom standards. So the real question should rather be with that directly: "Please don't lower Guix's freedom standards" or "Please don't leave the FSDG" or similar. There might completely different reasons to join, not join or leave GNU and that has probably not be mentioned despite the Subject of the thread. Many distributions that follow the FSDG Guidelines are not GNU at all, and some probably can't become GNU (Replicant, Hyperbola BSD) because they are not even GNU/Linux distributions, and joining would cause too much confusion (For Replicant it would be an Android distribution which is not GNU/Linux joining the GNU project while not using the GNU userland, that would look very strange, Hyperbola BSD also doesn't plan to use the GNU userland). Beside FSDG guidelines there are things like hosting requirements for GNU (https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.en.html), or other implied requirements, and all that could be discussed instead for instance. Or maybe the subject should be "Please don't leave the the GNU (freedom) standards". As for practical reasons for Guix, for instance, present or future regulations in the USA could be good reasons to leave GNU with no intentions to lower the freedom standards or to change anything to its architecture. > After 40 years, when people are still putting the founder in the > middle of the project, it means either the project failed, either the > project is going to fail once the very founder stops their > activities. Or, slippery slope – without any willing to be harsh –, > either people devote a cult of personality to the founder. No? > After 40 years… I think it's something like "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.": too much centralization on one individual allows to go faster, but then the movement becomes less robust, with bias (so it reaches less people, misses a lot of opportunities), etc. Retrospectively I don't have the knowledge to understand if it was a good or bad choice (free software had got a lot of threats, from Microsoft to software patents, etc), but we have to deal with the consequences (both good and bad) of this choice now. And the fear I have is that we don't find ways to continue doing what RMS was doing and that we end up being stuck without ways to evolve. And the problem is that we need to do that in a world where resources will probably shrink. For instance if the unique maintainers of projects start dying (because they are old), how do we find people to replace them when everybody has a hard time finding more time to contribute already. Here we might need to think about novel ways of organization as well, to see if we can get resources and self-manage them. Historically there have been organizations like that at large scale and nowadays there are still some (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Campesina) so maybe there are lessons to be learned from them (and vice-versa). > To be honest, I do not mind about Richard. I mean, I am very grateful > to all Richard’s contributions – and _grateful_ is probably too weak > here – I’m very grateful to all the heritage, and for sure, I don’t > want to throw away anything. We have received all this heritage as a > gift, the question is what do we do with the heritage? The answer is > fully independent on who did the gift, no? The fact that some of the early designs choices (the 3 or 4 freedoms) still make sense today, even with "AI"(LLMs, bullshit generators, deep learning, etc) so is extremely impressive, and that is also extremely powerful (it keeps people around, avoid infighting, etc). Just something like the GPLv2, despite its bugs, is extremely impressive: We manage to do something that looks like an international agreement / law on the way to collaborate to do software development, and it somehow works (despite different jurisdictions, huge power in the hand of software companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc), and it's not controlled by companies or countries. And we even involved people and organizations in doing the GPLv3. The low infighting compared to other movements is also extremely impressive: we can go forward even without agreeing on many things. In contrast many other movement are counter productive or inefficient because of infighting. But I don't think we have received the full heritage yet: We have something that works now, and we probably do understand some of the choices, but we also need to understand much more to be able to manage ourselves a movement like that. Do we really know why all that works? Do we understand why it was made in this way? Can we change things if we need to without breaking it completely (knowing that a lot of people put a lot of effort in it and that the results are really needed and that people depend on that)? The FSF can help a lot I think at least in the short/medium term as there are also people there which in practice are thinking about longer term strategic decisions like with "AI" (LLMs, Bullshit generators, etc). This can be seen in the presentations of the last FOSDEM where FSF staff was involved (and RMS wasn't there). But they can't probably think about everything or do everything at once, so personally I would also like the free software community as a whole to be able to think about all that as well, and at least be able to take strategic decisions for projects that also impact free software at large, and also try to somewhat include people affected by the decisions. This might be more complex with people that don't share this philosophy but that also run projects with high impact on free software, but this could also be solved with the right way of handling resources and not much change within these projects. Doing that is probably a huge challenge though. An example I see is that in some cases projects like systemd or GRUB can have deep reaching impacts on the community if they have issues and/or take decisions that favors their project at the expense of the bigger community, so finding ways to provide them resources to avoid consequences in the wider community would be a good idea. Sometimes like in the case of GRUB February security issues, they just didn't have the resources to do a release, so in that case a question might be how can we organize to help them doing that if we deem it is important enough? Another example is if some project change APIs, database format, config file format, and that it's cheaper (in time) to write a tool to do the migration automatically then having to workaround in all the downstream users, can we organize to do that somehow? > Tomorrow, how will GNU’s ideas survive? There is also a problem today: I see is also that GNU's ideas are not well understood, and free software is criticized for things GNU already has an answer to and already put that answer in practice, by long time users of free software that are even involved in the community. An example is practical freedom vs software complexity and bloat. I often ear that free software is too complex, so you can't expect users to really use the freedom to change the program and so on. This was even discussed in one of the Guix mailing list years ago. GNU provides some answer to that, which requires a bit of time investment, but enable users to really customize things, Emacs and Guix are good examples, and that also works on older computers, can be adapted to many uses cases (life without a permanent Internet connection, etc). This also address many criticism against technology itself (like the tool that take away knowledge, because well written tools can even make the knowledge it encode easier to learn). Another good example is how GNU manages the relationship with companies, like in the case of the toolchain (GCC, binutils, etc): we can somehow profit from the work of companies while retaining some autonomy. But the thing is also that beside the technical unity of various GNU packages (basically using the same standards to lower the investment to master of the use or contribution to one package or another), all these things can probably be applied to free software at large just by understanding and following and/or adapting what GNU does. For instance, given the landscape today, we can probably not expect to have all code written in programming languages vetted by GNU, with the GNU coding standards and so on. But that doesn't prevent other projects from reusing lessons learned in GNU over the years, hoping that they don't use that knowledge to go against users freedom. > It appears to me much more fruitful to discuss what’s the next 40 > years of the humanist project dreamed by GNU 40 years ago rather than > nitpick about belonging to some GNU trademark, IMHO. I also agree with that. While trademarks are important (there are many lessons to be learned here too), we also need to be able to recognize when projects become problematic and put in motion one or more plan B when it happens (this is also an issue we have as proprietizing free software has become a business model with things like Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Vagrant, etc). Though here as I understand the question raised by this "Please don't leave GNU" thread was implicitly not the trademark but what GNU currently stands for, and/or the supposed will to potentially not respect the freedom requirements for being a GNU package. But it could also be me that misunderstood because I didn't read all the thread yet. If there is one thing I can encourage to remember from this mail, it is for people to start by learning from GNU and or the free software movement why we did certain strategic choices, why it works, and also trying to learn that from other movements with somewhat similar goals, and so on. This way we could make free software really go further (instead of just faster). Denis.
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