Many FSF Priority Projects Still Not Progressing

[Kamikaze]

Guys please keep it civil. You are all better than this. Phoronix is doing a fantastic effort for the GPL projects of this world, and PTS uses GPL. The accusations made in this thread is not doing anybody any good.

Good to see someone trying to steer the thread away from turning into a thread of spiteful comments and personal attacks. Some of the previous comments made are exactly why I was a lurker here so long before deciding to start commenting in the forums. Criticism is useful, but comments like 'asdx' made that the site admin here is "a fucking moron" doesn't help the situation and just makes you look like a tool.

[jhansonxi]

The FOSS general 2D CAD tools are a bit lacking. I bought the QCAD commercial version for ordinate dimension support but its interface is rather ugly and less efficient to use than AutoCAD (which I despise) or Autosketch. I remember trying LibreCAD a while back and found it lacking but it appears to have progressed since then and I need to give it another try.

Autodesk competitors have joined the Intellicad effort but it's an expensive option ($32K to $57K USD). I've used DraftSight which is based on Intellicad, has a native Linux version, and is freeware. I hate it almost as much as AutoCAD because its interface is very similar. It's not freedomware but for most business users it's good enough. With the number of corporate backers of Intellicad (supposedly 50), and the critical mass of usage, there isn't much industry incentive to back a separate FSF effort.

I'm not sure what the 3D CAD situation is (Blender is all I've heard about). On the EDA/PCB front, gEDA and KiCAD seem to be progressing well but I haven't tried them in a few years.

[susikala]

Good to see someone trying to steer the thread away from turning into a thread of spiteful comments and personal attacks. Some of the previous comments made are exactly why I was a lurker here so long before deciding to start commenting in the forums. Criticism is useful, but comments like 'asdx' made that the site admin here is "a fucking moron" doesn't help the situation and just makes you look like a tool.

While I don't agree with the language used, you have to admit we've had this article before with the exact same results, it's seems highly recycled (i.e.: nothing better to write about). Phoronix (please pay attention I never use personal names and almost always say phoronix, since I take the website, not anyone personal to be responsible for the content here) tends to pursue a certain agenda and many times articles are rather populist in tone than anything else. It's really hard to tell downright that phoronix spreads any lies, but the formulation of sentences, the language used, things implied, are often controversial half truths. I guess that's what pisses off many people here. But it's also a double edged sword: many people getting pissed = many replies = many page impressions = more ad money = more shallow articles. Think of it like in psychology, the beaten woman who gets back to her husband to get another beating all the time. Though in this case I'm not sure whether the users are the woman or the website, it's kind of a vicious circle.

Then with all the iEvil coverage growing, it's really becoming unbearable here. Now, I've been on this website for a few years. Sometimes I read an article, enjoy it, and tell myself -- hell, you should invest the few bucks and support this site so it doesn't (feel the) need to place ads, worry about the future, etc. etc. But then I see such populist bollocks or iEvil related articles or even phoronix itself using software by that company I personally despise (I mean, no offense, but if I were a fanboy of that company, there is really a handful of related news website I could visit), and I change my mind. And you know what, I'm not even sure that if enough people donated, the ads would ever get removed. For me, it's logical to donate only if it secures barrier free (i.e. not just with firefox/chromium + adblocker) browsing of the site.

So let's be honest. There is good stuff here, there are (or were?) many good commentators on the forums, sometimes good or thoughtful articles (the benchmarks I hardly ever read), and recently a lot of rubbish.

I can only disclaim here that I run a site myself which doesn't have any ads and runs only on donations, and what I get monthly is around 120% of the actual costs (but the server really doesn't cost a lot and I optimised a lot of processes). I realise not every website is wikipedia though and can fully rely on donations, but I think ads are a broken paradigm too. At least, webmasters' belief that if someone uses an adblocker then they are 'stealing' from them is broken. Those people have to realise they'll never be able to force advertisement into people's brains, the best they can do is offer it.

[alcalde]

While I welcome a critical look at open source projects, including ones sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, Phoronix has proven to be nothing but negatively critical towards FSF while either ignoring the GPL license or treating it in the same way as they treat the FSF. In other words, the Phoronix website is full of blantantly biased reporting on these subjects, and I can only infer that the same applies to some other subjects which I don't follow as regularly. It's a shame, since these projects need to have the publicity in order to attract new contributors and keep existing ones. It is not healthy for any type of project to have a constant negative focus from some outside party like this website. It is entirely possible to on one hand be critical of a project but at the same time remain positive, and it is obvious that this distinction is lost by Michael for whatever reason when it comes to FSF and the GPL.

The GPL license is not some sort of sacred cow that needs to be free of criticism. The site is not full of "blatantly biased" anything. Biased has been redefined by pundits today to mean "anything that does not agree with me". The implication is quite egotistical: there are those who agree with me, and then there are those who are too emotionally swayed to agree with me.

>It is not healthy for any type of project to have a constant negative focus from some outside party like this website.

Boo-hoo. If the project's dead, reporting on that fact is more likely to encourage someone to try to revive it than ignoring it would.

Michael makes a great point, but all those who are upset that he's being "negative in the freedom dimension" are ignoring: what the &%^# does the FSF actually do? Apparently Richard Stallman dips a quill pen into a bottle of ink, adds these projects to a list, and then that's the end of their involvement. What are they doing about locked bootloaders on Win8 ARM devices that threaten to introduce an entire class of computers (ARM laptops) that won't be allowed to run Linux? They held a cartoon contest, with the prize being... the FSF using the cartoon on their website. Apparently the EFF will be our only hope in regard to this issue, because they know how to threaten lawsuits, file friend of the court briefs... actually do things. Where does FSF money go other than to supporting Richard Stallman? Shouldn't there be a breakdown published of how the FSF spends its money if it's non-profit?

The message of the article is that the FSF is impotent... being on their list doesn't amount to squat. They don't bring money to projects, they don't attract developers... in a cruel bit of irony, unlike the goals of the GPL, they don't seem to contribute anything back to the community. Maybe it's time we consider for the hundredth time "forking" the FSF and getting an organization that has some connection to reality and knows how to get things done rather than give speeches. Personally I'd love to see the EFF subsume the FSF, get rid of the ideological/cult elements and view open source as another means to support the rights of users to control their own devices - things real people can actually care about. If Stallman was an effective leader or spokesman, the iPad wouldn't exist much less be beloved. He and the FSF and their rigid quest for ideological purity (spending more time worrying about de-blobifying distros and giving us an open source Google Earth than about the real priorities of open source) have failed. The only thing he's done in decades is make the rest of us look bad and inspire a small cult of personality. On the Trisquel message board they didn't want their distro reviewed by the Linux Action Show because they "hate freedom" and opined that they would just point out "its weaknesses compared to proprietary software", namely lack of wifi drivers, 3D drivers or flash support so "what was the point"? Another poster suggested that members avoid any interviewers who "don't love freedom" because they'll argue with you, but if you find ones who do you can "basically take over the interview" and use it to discuss the goals of your organization (nice way of putting ramble on about the GPL rather than talk about the distro).

These attacks on Michael are groundless - they don't dispute the facts he reported regarding the status of any of the projects mentioned. I'm sorry that Stallman fans find this negative in the freedom dimension (for those who don't know, this is what Stallman described one of the Linux Action Show hosts as being during an interview) but it's the truth. The implication that we should all "remain postive" even when discussing a problem is troubling. This article didn't insult or attack anyone... unlike the forum posts (including mine). It stuck to the facts and described what we can all agree as being a sad state of affairs. One can dispute the facts (although these seem quite clear), dispute the conclusions or the recommendations, but to characterize this as something other than fact-based and honest reporting is terribly unfair.

[alcalde]

And the DSP trend can already be heard on the Atari Falcon.

I think you should get a special reward just for mentioning the Atari Falcon.

[DeiF]

So, Coreboot is supported by Google?
Then how come it wasn't selected for GSoC this year?

[Linuxhippy]

So - whats the reason behind telling everybody how much FSF sucks?
(and again and over and over posting completly unrelated stuff like the Chernobyl photos)

[elanthis]

Yeah, it's not like he is giving lots of coverage to the Apple sponsored llvm/clang development...

Knock that off. LLVM predated Apple by many years. It was created at the University of Illinois as a research project and you can find references to it on LWN and such from many, many years ago. I recall first hearing about it when some folks were thinking of making architecture-neutral RPMs back when everyone still thought the consumer CPU world might have more than two players. Clang was originally an in-house proprietary codebase at Apple created for the purpose of improving the code intelligence and refactoring capabilities of Xcode (GCC was and still is utterly incapable of being used for these purposes by intentional design; there was an article just published on LWN.net about this very topic, iirc), which they explicitly chose to Open Source out of the goodness of their hearts thank you very much because they sure didn't need to. It now has many paid developers working on it from companies like Red Hat, Google, Facebook (yes, Facebook pays people to work on a C++ compiler), AMD, and many others, not to mention a large swarm of hobbyist and freelance contributors with no corporate affiliation. Continually labeling Clang or LLVM as "an Apple product" does not make the project look bad, but it makes the fools who keep repeating it look bad.

[Sonadow]

*snip*

I'm with you on this. The ridiculous ideology that RMS and his goons are propagating over at the FSF is probably the single biggest obstacle to the success and acceptance of open-source s/w.

All that guy can do is open his mouth and complain about how 'so-and-so is not free that's why you should not use it' without even doing anything to fix the situation. For example, he spends more time complaining about how the inclusion of binary firmware in the linux kernel is an attack on freedom when these firmware blobs are the exact firmware that would have otherwise been burnt into ROM on the hardware themselves, the latter situation of which the FSF has chosen to conviniently remain mute on. They do not even realize that any device that is built with some form of intelligence MUST have firmware of sorts (example: WinPrinters which have all rendering and features offloaded to Windows, and typical printers that feature their own built-in processors to handle such tasks) residing within the firmware are company secrets (every business has its own internal secrets that are strictly guarded; you don't see NASA, the CIA etc etc releasing the source code for their missle tracking / criminal forensic software) such as optimized algorithms and whatnot that can destroy a business's competitive advantage if released. Linus recognized it right from the get go, and made it so that binary firmware is allowed into the kernel, as long as it has a freely redistributable license. Everybody gets working hardware with a free driver that plays nice with the firmware, the company gets to sell more h/w and keep its secrets, while the OSS community can improve on the driver if it's not up to snuff. Everybody wins. And the company's job is to deliver a proper firmware, because a crappy firmware will affect not just Linux, but every other operating system that it is intended to be used on.

He also scorns the creation of an open-source Skype compatibile client and believes that the community can sway the rest of the world into using a free VoIP protocol and client when so many businesses, institutions and individuals rely on Skype for their daily work and communications with clients and partners.

More importantly, he wants people to accept feature-incomplete, subpar alternatives to established, full-featured proprietary applications, tools or programs just on the basis that 'proprietary software is EVILLLLL'.

Get real; this is not going to happen. Software adoption only happens when a party has something that can offer clearly defined tangible benefits to its users. People are slowly coming round to the idea of Linux on the desktop because of its modest footprint, speed and supposed security over Windows or OS X. Telling a user to drop Flash for the joke that is LightSpark or Gnash, or Photoshop for GIMP, or Final Cut Pro / AVID / Premiere Pro for Kdenlive just because the latter is 'free and open' is just plain stupidity.

[randomizer]

For example, he spends more time complaining about how the inclusion of binary firmware in the linux kernel is an attack on freedom when these firmware blobs are the exact firmware that would have otherwise been burnt into ROM on the hardware themselves, the latter situation of which the FSF has chosen to conviniently remain mute on.

Stallman has commented on this topic himself (in fact I've heard him do so in person). Blobs in non-programmable memory are not considered a threat to freedom as defined by the FSF. The manufacturer didn't put licensing or DRM barriers in place to restrict the freedom to alter the firmware, it's physically impossible (in any practical way) to alter it, and as such it's considered by the FSF to be more of a hardware component than software. However, programmable firmware like most BIOS software is considered a bad egg.