Free Software Foundation Does Not Endorse Haiku

Which is exactly why I use Haiku and OpenBSD.

No :smile: if you dig the forum you can see me defending the free software movement. It is just that an era passed since Stallman was a programmer for the GNU project and now FSF is mostly a philosophy foundation.

2 Likes

As do I. I also see FSF as trying to dominate and maintain a monopoly on that mindshare and defining free software as our way or the highway. I don’t know about you, but I refuse to let such a monopoly have control over how I think about computing.

But see it as something functional to the world. In past various philosophies were utopistic for the time. Think of Illuminism or better Socialism. Many can agree that it is an utopistic idea, but over the last 200 years this idea helped workers to get freedom and achieved better conditions for people. Similarly, Free Software is utopistic but makes way for a hypotetical future where we have more freedom.

I see it as functional in the world too. I also see it as an extremist view. As much good as it does, it also hurts because it adheres to the philosophy that there is only one correct way to view free software and all other views are inherently wrong.

1 Like

Free software it is a way how progressive ideas make own way in the monopolistic economic system, by denying it. Main economical problem of the system is monopolistic proprietary financial system, which distorts all financial flows to benefit some people. In truelly free economic system there is no need in free software, I can say more, that in free economic system can not exist free software as a thing. Of course open source software can exist in free economy. Free economy is the future. Actually socialism or capitalism ideas were created to hide idea of free economic and free money systems. In which only can exist real democracy and progress of human kind.

1 Like

When OSHW developers and engineers release an actual OSHW GPU… and other OSHW to build a completely open system… then we can go use that, until then their griping and refusal to use proprietary GPUs in the interim is laughable.

It’s the same as GNU HURD… it hasn’t progressed barely at all in the 15+ years I’ve known about it. Rather than bludgeoning people into using your free software license… the right thing to do is spread the mentality of free software being beneficial… then when people develop new things they will be more likely to license them that way.

Also, you can’t just go out and demand someone else licenses their product to suit you, (well unless you have a big wad of cash)… if you want something to exist and be licensed a certain way you have to become part of making that happen on your own. Effectively becoming and software and hardware hermit… will not accelerate you on your way to doing that.

The closest anyone has come to a real Open GPU these days is https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/686/esperanto-exits-stealth-mode-aims-at-ai-with-a-4096-core-7nm-risc-v-monster/

I’m tempted to reply “don’t feed the troll” here. We have 17 years of writing a fully MIT licensed operating system behind us, and we’re called pro-proprietary :joy:

I’ve already said it 2 or 3 times: it’s just some wifi firmwares. We can’t replace them. Don’t blame us, blame the device manufacturers for not giving us the specs to their hardware so we can write our own firmwares, or not releasing the sources to their firmware. And blame the FCC for not allowing them to do so, maybe.

We are not going to tell our users "ok, we have this great fully Libre OS, except it runs only on this 20 year old machine that does not need any firmware and runs Libreboot (after you desoldered the BIOS chip and replaced it, of course).

The goals the FSF have set themselve are nice, but currently unreachable for us. So we made a tiny compromise by bundling some wifi firmwares. It’s not that we like it. It’s a source of confusion for our users (especially when we can’t actually bundle these firmwares and they need to be downloaded after installing). It prevents us from being called Libre software. We tried, at least.

Now if you look at HaikuDepot, there as well we have non-free software available (in most caes, people published the sources but forgot to specify a license). There is ongoing work to 1) backup these sources and 2) try to contact the authors and get them to pick an appropriate license. We had some success with this. Don’t you think this does more for free software than going on a destructive quest to erradicate these from our repos and the surface of the earth?

Proprietary things may become open source someday. And that’s probably the best way to get more open source software available.

10 Likes