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Re: State of the GNUnion 2020
From: |
Alexandre François Garreau |
Subject: |
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020 |
Date: |
Sun, 23 Feb 2020 01:08:25 +0100 |
Le dimanche 23 février 2020, 00:02:27 CET Samuel Thibault a écrit :
> Alexandre François Garreau, le sam. 22 févr. 2020 23:32:13 +0100, a
ecrit:
> > giving a link to GNU coding standards (actually even packaged into
> > debian), for instance, would be pretty reasonable mentoring.
>
> Sure (but also telling which piece is questioned in the contribution,
> e.g. "there are missing spaces in function calls, see the corresponding
> part of the GNU Coding Standards").
Sure, if there’s enough time (otherwise it is anyway good to read it from
the start to the end anyway, isn’t it?)
> Providing a link may not even be
> necessary, the contributor can easily find it with a webcrawler.
GNU existed before they did. And I dislike them. We actually can easily
do without, when they’re not needed. And now they’re not needed.
> > > So the new generation will have to learn by itself? Do not be
> > > surprised
> > > if it doesn't wish to pick up the software that was produced by the
> > > previous generation, and will just rewrite everything with non-free
> > > tools etc.
> >
> > If they do non-free, it’s not because “they are not teached”
> > appropriatedly, that’s the fantasy of the “homo homine lupus
> > est”. If they ever do, it’s actually because they were *teached*
> > into non-free software, or tricked into it, either by bad teachers, or
> > by bad laws.
>
> No: in many juridictions it's simply the default if you don't explicitly
> make it free.
That’s precisely why I said “tricked” and “bad laws”.
> I see my students not think that much when they put software on github,
> if I don't discuss with them. When you create a repository on github,
> it proposes to set a licence, and it happens to list essentially free
> licences (it may not be so long-term wise on github). But if you
> don't explicitly make a choice, no license is set, and thus in many
> juridictions the software is not free.
This is bad of github, but this is a bad copyright law trick (that all
States favoring copyright (that is, imho, all of them) do), and people
should be warned against.
So we need education… but only because work is done *against us* in the
other direction! Wouldn’t the State instantiate such tricky laws, in a
world where everybody publish stuff and don’t expect it to have special —
and technically obvious to circumvent— restrictions, we wouldn’t need to
do that.
We have to be ambitious, and look forward for a world where there’s no any
special work to do for everything to be free.
We shouldn’t expect that a society where it is to be said to everybody
that murder is bad and torture is bad is the end goal of improving
society.
> > We shouldn’t be defending free software because it is good but because
> > it gives freedom, so we shouldn’t try to make it good *just* for the
> > fantasy of it to be considered as such so then people agree on free
> > software. People need to be *politically convinced*.
>
> Sure. But if your software is unknown, it will not attract new
> contributors, and you will not have the opportunity to discuss with them
> about the politics.
It’s not with contributors that you should discuss about the politics but
with the users.
And by “user” I nowaday actually mean the physical people you find out
there, AFK, not the few one who will think to come to you, if they use
your software. It’s more like “potential user” or “people needing to do
things with computers”.
> But anyway the matter I was discussing was not about the software being
> "good", but about welcoming contributions. Some software might be very
> good, if it is not welcoming new contributors they will just rewrite it,
> even if that'd result with a much less good software.
Okay, but that can’t be accused of being the cause of proprietary
software.
> > So people will want to uphold freedom anyway. Maybe fewer, and that
> > would be sad, but then we’d need to give them *political*
> > hand-holding, not technical one.
>
> But they'll most often come from a technical door.
Personally I’ve more seen the opposite. As most people aren’t technically
skilled, or programmers anyway.
If we (like, actually, more: States) started to teach *everybody* about
programming, so that most of population would try to contribute, *then*
that question would be really urging… but it is not the case, and I’m
really doubtful that the current discussions about welcoming or dying
would occur if that happen. Given a such wave of new contributors, there
would be necessarily some that would be content with current state of
things (so our software would grow as well anyway), or who would fork and
either stay wrong, or technically prove they were right so to be merged
again (but then it’s not as bad as our software would be slow and lacking
in comparison, the effort wouldn’t be duplicated, but only, at first,
happening somewhere else).
> We often see this kind of situation in the community-driven ISPs of
> FFDN: people often come with technical questions to help some people
> with Internet access, and they come home not only with technical
> answers, but also political aspects of why e.g. network neutrality is
> important etc.
Do people join *before* knowing about political aspects, in areas where it
is already possible and even common to use commercial ISPs (just as it is
already possible to use proprietary software most of the time as it stays
the most used software)?
That’d be different if people started by knowing and being able to use only
free software… I could see how it’d happen if the only computer available
runs architectures on which no proprietary software run, or have computer
so old and bad that only very old or light free software would run… but
the “github community” you are willing to attract is very different from
that.
Anyway, as I’ve told before, these local ISPs are way different, and a
really good example of the opposite: they are local, thus a limited number
of people can participate, and we can physically check their number and
existence, so we can vote, we can avoid company-sponsored entrism, etc. so
in the end it *can* be democratic, and as it is targetting users and not
developers, it *should* be (I need to post a message about that).
> If we were not nice/welcoming on the technical questions, they would
> just not listen to whatever politics we'd like to talk them about in
> addition to the technical parts. Because they have no idea that these
> questions are important. We have a similar situation with free software.
My current ISP is part of FFDN. And like others, it is exclusively set up
in areas where internet is already available, commonly with commercial
ISPs (but who offer fiber). It has even a more democratic constitution than
yours (it doesn’t have a all-powerful “collège”, but everybody have equal
vote power on all decisions, who are meant to be transparent).
However it is ran in a quite undemocratic way by people who care only
about internet neutrality and IPv6 availability, who don’t at all about
software freedom, who are against concepts such as copyleft (and emacs,
but it’s a joke). So politically it’s pretty bad, and I’ve learnt that
it’s people who make democracy, not texts. That words never have any
meaning nor even exist at all without interpreters. That it is all about
people, people disagreement, people ability to disagree and keeping
disagreement and yet be able to arbitrate between them.
And then, actually because of that, I wouldn’t be able to get any
technical help, not only because (especially sometimes when I’m tired) I’m
too verbose, and bad at explaining, and sometimes at understanding (not
even technical things, but at some point I become unable to understand
unambiguously to what refer each pronoun >< and the more pronouns get
used, the less I understand), and it creates endless misunderstandings
such as I end with my technical problem being still there, and no more
help than “google it, it is obvious”, but also because as we use two
completely separate sets of software (they use only OpenBSD stuff), I would
be unable to set up network-manager or a multihoming setup on GNU/Linux
because they use different stuff and mine would be considered as a “newbie”
thing and wouldn’t help someone they would, after so much useless effort,
only consider as a troll :) so in the end you can always decide that
someone you don’t understand or don’t agree with is a troll and whatever
the current status, if you have enough power it’ll just look justified.
It has been proposed to do stuff with Debian, do do stuff with free
software, but it has been refused as they “need to provide appropriate
uptime” with things a few would master as them such as getting expensive
ring--1 hypervisors servers (got “in the street” “from a friend”) that
couldn’t run free-software, with things such as RAID-
i_forgot_the_number_but_it_involved_4_disks, and several hundreds of VMs
(who bring half the money of the charity… the other half being… their own,
used to rent a dedicated server for personal use) to all too often help
their users set up “financially-critic applications” (proprietary or at
least centralized SaaSS), and they don’t trust anybody to be able to
provide such “uptime” as theirs (yet actually the uptime is bad, but then
they bark about “0 downtime” and “almost being there”, and excusing all
along about downtime while nobody ever complained, because it’s a charity
anyway ><), and they don’t want anyone to touch “their baby” that they
carefully setup… except they setted up it for others, actually, in the
first place! but too late…
But we can’t vote to change that, or to change config, or to changing
pricing (actually we’ve got 1 or 2 *gratis* *transit* links, but nobody
except them knows why, apparently it’s a “favor” but we ought “not to
abuse of it”, so we shall not lower the prices…), or responsability
charges (they don’t want anybody to being able to tweak anything without
giving juridical responsibility (because “downtime” and “financiary
expectations” and “professionalism”), which, from what I’ve been
explained, is the opposite of FDN (who aimed to let beginners tweak, and
sometimes break, everything, but then to learn how to fix it, and FDN would
take responsability for this process)) because otherwise since they got
their signature on the last statuses that were given to the mayor, they
would just go and tell nothing has changed, that they’re always in charge,
and if we try to do would say we lied, or at least they say we couldn’t
get it accepted…
So here, in the end, you could think it is like GNU, a bunch of expert old
hackers who control everything because they were here from the beginning…
…except actually it’s not, pretty much the opposite:
— these weren’t there from the beginning, they just happened to arrive in
the middle, and were enough “skilled” and “meritant” to set up a
completely informal meritocracy (like what was argued for since several
months), by doing the right things in the right time;
— statutorily it is democratic, so it is a proof constitutions proves
nothing (it just takes from people who gave their name to the states, who
reserved domain names or who are root on the right machines to do whatever
they want if we let them, and them justify themselves);
— constitutionally, it is upholding free software, as FFDN statuses
require to, so it shows how people can be hypocritical about free software
(they just happen to deem GPL “proprietary” and “against freedom”, while
setting up proprietary software and hardware that couldn’t run free
software, even for others’ usage, is their “personal choice/freedom”);
— they justify themselves with “professionalism”, so that to block what
they don’t like or don’t find common enough (recently jokes (usually
defended by the fact GNU (ie. rms) is against “professionalism”) from (not
only the abort one) were deemed as “inappropriate” by maintainers (who
happened to be… professionals!), so the abort one was removed as an
“extreme” exemple of it).
- Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, (continued)
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Kaz Kylheku (gnu-misc-discuss), 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Kaz Kylheku (gnu-misc-discuss), 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Samuel Thibault, 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Alexandre François Garreau, 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Samuel Thibault, 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020,
Alexandre François Garreau <=
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Samuel Thibault, 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Kaz Kylheku (gnu-misc-discuss), 2020/02/22
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020, Alexandre François Garreau, 2020/02/22