| >seems like it ties you very strongly to the FSF's political opinions Some are happy to be associated with the opinion that all software should be free. >in particular Richard Stallman's political opinions (e.g., eugenics) Richard Stallman's opinions, outside of the realm of free software, are irrelevant in the context of the GNU project. Throwing out eugenics like that feels manipulative to me. >restricts your technical decision-making options The next few paragraphs will explain why what you see as restrictions aren't seen the same way from the perspective of GNU developers. >limited plugin architecture You are of course referring to exposing the AST of GCC to other (possibly proprietary) programs, which was a GCC-specific issue. It doesn't broadly apply to everything. I help maintain GNU Guix, a project designed from the ground up to be as extensible as possible, and there has been no such issue. Nor does GNU Emacs have an issue with extensibility. >limited support for non-free OSes I think this is distorting the truth a bit. The point is that the focus of the GNU project is to develop a fully free operating system, and maintainers should focus their efforts accordingly. That doesn't mean that GNU software shouldn't work well on other, proprietary operating systems, and maintainers shouldn't reject patches from contributors that add or improve such support unless it adds a significant burden. Bottom line is: GNU software should work the best on the GNU system, which seems sensible to me. The GNU maintainer guidelines go into more detail about this topic. >mandatory support for things like GNUTLS Software in the GNU project should work well with or use other software in the GNU system. Again, those that participate in the GNU project think this is positive, because GNU should form a cohesive whole, just like MacOS or Windows should. >while not giving you very much in return GNU and the FSF give Guix a place to host many Git repos, space for a website, several mailing lists, a bug tracker, they colocate our hardware in their datacenter, give us virtual machines on their own servers, handle donations, and promote our releases. I think it's a pretty great deal given the project is philosophically aligned with the free software movement. >With the existence of GitHub and a wide variety of competitors I wouldn't call GitHub a competitor. GitHub is just a code hosting site, GNU is a unified project with a political mission. >What am I missing? Hopefully I've helped answer this question. |
But his entire point is that free software is a moral imperative, and that it is morally better to have no software at all than non-free software. How can you separate morality into parts?
And, if you do, where do you divide it? Are politics that affect what copyright laws may exist relevant? Are meta-politics like voting rights or styles of government or campaign finance relevant, if they affect how copyright laws get decided?
> the focus of the GNU project is to develop a fully free operating system, and maintainers should focus their efforts accordingly
Right. It seems to me that becoming a GNU project means that you are required to focus your efforts in certain ways. You are completely free to focus your efforts in those ways without being part of the GNU project, though. It simply restricts your options.
If you trust the GNU project to be better at you at finding the morally right thing to do, then it makes sense to ask GNU to restrict what you can do. As a churchgoer I totally understand why you might want to outsource your morality to a larger organization consisting of more people than you who think harder about things - but it matters a lot that you find the right organization, and that you can trust the people who run the organization to be making good moral choices in general. There are a number of churches where I do not, and I don't associate myself with them, no matter how much I agree with most of their views. Similarly, I find it hard to trust the future moral decision-making of someone who supports eugenics. If I support their current moral stances on free software (and, as it happens, I agree with the vast majority of what Stallman says about free software), I can always just adopt those stances as my own.
> I wouldn't call GitHub a competitor.
Sorry, that was unclear - I meant GitHub and GitHub's competitors (in case you philosophically disagree with GitHub). It gets you a lot of stuff self-service that years ago was much more easily had through affiliation with GNU, or Apache, or Red Hat, or someone else.
I concede that donations and marketing are things you get from GNU that you wouldn't get from GitHub etc. (Although I think many projects find that being on GitHub gives them visibility in a way that seems likely to make up for the lack of explicit marketing, depending on the project.)