Good article, imo the FSF doomed itself when it decided to not work with anyone else due to minor philosophical differences. If you look on the FSFs website you won't find a single mention of projects like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc despite them being some of the most popular free software projects out there. The reasoning is because these distros include nonfree firmware and therefore are encouraging users to stray from the one true path ™️. In the eyes of the FSF, Ubuntu is in the same category as Microsoft Windows, despite being so much better and helping a lot of people make the switch to Linux and free software. If you look at the real world, buying a computer that doesn't use nonfree firmware is difficult and requires you to settle for a 10-year old laptop (The X200 officially recommended by the FSF) or pay thousands of dollars for a power-9 or maybe RISC-V based desktop from a specialty company. Either way, this is not something that normal people will do. And the whole point of a social movement like the FSF is to help the general public, not a handful of enthusiasts. The reason the FSF was initially successful with the "no proprietary software" mission was that there were a lot of tech workers with free time, and since 90s era software sucked it was really easy for one of them to spend a couple weeks coding a free alternative and then share it with the community. It worked because there was a clear call to action: if you need to use a specific proprietary software, why not spend a month making an alternative instead? All it required was coding knowledge, which its tech audience already had. Contrast that with the proprietary firmware situation. What is the message? "Dont buy a new laptop, instead start your own hardware company and create your own completely open hardware stack"? That's obviously out of reach for just about everyone. "Write a strongly worded letter to the Intel corporation/the US govt asking for free firmware in all chips?" There are strong market reasons for them not to do this, plus FSF members make up roughly 0% of their customers. So there isn't anything that you can do, and the FSF has basically become a small club of hardware enthusiasts who talk about how cool their old laptops are. And I dont have anything against hardware enthusiasts, I just think that if you're going to do this you should change your name to something like "The Libre Hardware Club" and stop pretending to be a social movement aimed at helping the general public. The FSF are theory purists, in order to be an effective organization they need to look at the real world and change their tactics (which doesn't require changing your principles) to be effective. This means accepting that nonfree firmware is necessary to get people into the Linux ecosystem, where they can be radicalized into FSF members thus growing the support for the movement. As Linux gains more users, the FSF should be dumping money into improving the desktop experience, improving accessibility, etc to broaden it's appeal (the general public will probably not want to have to use the terminal, as much as I love cli programs 😢). Once accessibility is in a better place and Linux is mainstream, then they can use their new popularity to push for free firmware
Good article, imo the FSF doomed itself when it decided to not work with anyone else due to minor philosophical differences. If you look on the FSFs website you won't find a single mention of projects like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc despite them being some of the most popular free software projects out there. The reasoning is because these distros include nonfree firmware and therefore are encouraging users to stray from the one true path ™️. In the eyes of the FSF, Ubuntu is in the same category as Microsoft Windows, despite being so much better and helping a lot of people make the switch to Linux and free software. If you look at the real world, buying a computer that doesn't use nonfree firmware is difficult and requires you to settle for a 10-year old laptop (The X200 officially recommended by the FSF) or pay thousands of dollars for a power-9 or maybe RISC-V based desktop from a specialty company. Either way, this is not something that normal people will do. And the whole point of a social movement like the FSF is to help the general public, not a handful of enthusiasts. The reason the FSF was initially successful with the "no proprietary software" mission was that there were a lot of tech workers with free time, and since 90s era software sucked it was really easy for one of them to spend a couple weeks coding a free alternative and then share it with the community. It worked because there was a clear call to action: if you need to use a specific proprietary software, why not spend a month making an alternative instead? All it required was coding knowledge, which its tech audience already had. Contrast that with the proprietary firmware situation. What is the message? "Dont buy a new laptop, instead start your own hardware company and create your own completely open hardware stack"? That's obviously out of reach for just about everyone. "Write a strongly worded letter to the Intel corporation/the US govt asking for free firmware in all chips?" There are strong market reasons for them not to do this, plus FSF members make up roughly 0% of their customers. So there isn't anything that you can do, and the FSF has basically become a small club of hardware enthusiasts who talk about how cool their old laptops are. And I dont have anything against hardware enthusiasts, I just think that if you're going to do this you should change your name to something like "The Libre Hardware Club" and stop pretending to be a social movement aimed at helping the general public. The FSF are theory purists, in order to be an effective organization they need to look at the real world and change their tactics (which doesn't require changing your principles) to be effective. This means accepting that nonfree firmware is necessary to get people into the Linux ecosystem, where they can be radicalized into FSF members thus growing the support for the movement. As Linux gains more users, the FSF should be dumping money into improving the desktop experience, improving accessibility, etc to broaden it's appeal (the general public will probably not want to have to use the terminal, as much as I love cli programs 😢). Once accessibility is in a better place and Linux is mainstream, then they can use their new popularity to push for free firmware