[pjmlp]

I am confident that after GNU generation is gone, everything will fold back as it used to be.

We are already living it due to the rise of non-copyleft licenses, return to the shareware model only with another set of marketing names for newer generations, return of timesharing with thin clients only with newer set of nomenclature for newer generations, most relevant FOSS projects are sponsored by big corps for their own purposes as PR don't buy food and shelter, ....

[shadowgovt]

The largest challenge the free software movement still faces is philosophical.

The original underpinning of the Four Freedoms is "I own this hardware; how dare someone else dictate how it operates?" That assertion falls flat in the Cloud era, yet Cloud services are way too convenient and useful to just ignore them or try to tell everyone the One True Path is up the mountain to the hermitage of traditional desktop, offline, disconnected software.

I look to the Fediverse as a potential next good model: the idea that if you run a part of the cloud, you have a vested interest in it, it's yours, and how dare someone else dictate etc.

... but it's a fundamentally different challenge than the original pioneers of the movement fought against corporations and monopoly manufacturers and sellers.

[zelphirkalt]

I hope it doesn't come to that, but some indications are there.

The problem is, that nowadays manufacturers and big tech giants can or do lock down their devices much more than when the Free Software movement started out. Also the hardware is way harder to reverse engineer, if possible at all. It is difficult to imagine "a new <word for freedom> Software movement" to be initiated in our times. What hardware can they rely on? How would they break the shackles of proprietary software and hardware?

[tomrod]

<word for freedom>

Right to Repair just about covers it, IMO. You can't repair something if you can't either have access to the source code or flash the source code, or otherwise access the internals.

[noufalibrahim]

That's sort of my point. I don't want it to come to that but a huge of part of why it's come to that were tactical mistakes (esp. in communication) on the part of the FSF.

[j-bos]

Been thinking about this, and imagine a solution being force multiplying the power of free hackers with LLMs, faster and faster iteration. But I don't know much.

[cies]

> I am confident that after GNU generation is gone, everything will fold back as it used to be.

Nah. The wheel of enlightenment has been set in motion and is beyond stoppable.

The issue I see is corporate involvement. They (corps) like free stuff too, and has helped enormously in the adoption (most code FLOSS on most servers, AND on most mobiles!). But corps has different agenda's than activist individuals, leading to BSD/Apache/etc over (A)(L)GPL(vX) and hosted opensource-derived services like what the cloud corps offer. Patents, non-copyleft-licensing and hosted are some big obstacles to the GNU/FSF end goals.

[phkahler]

>> But corps has different agenda's than activist individuals, leading to BSD/Apache/etc over (A)(L)GPL(vX) and hosted opensource-derived services like what the cloud corps offer. Patents, non-copyleft-licensing and hosted are some big obstacles to the GNU/FSF end goals.

The battle between copyleft and "more permissive" licenses is going to be long and slow. There is a place for MIT/BSD licenses, but there is way too much software moving that direction IMHO. Some big popular projects will need to get consumed and effectively hijacked by commercial interests before anyone sees this as an actual problem rather than a hypothetical. But first there will need to be such a project under one of those licenses.

[pjmlp]

I covered that on the rest of my comment as well.

[jimmaswell]

I'm glad to see non-copyleft get more popular, personally. Copyleft comes off to me as sanctimonious in its attempt to strong-arm anyone who uses the code into following its philosophy for the entire codebase. I could be wrong, but my intuition is that no company is going to GPL their entire codebase just to use some library, so it only results in wasted developer energy when employees have to duplicate the library closed-source. (Or they just use it anyway and hope they don't get caught.)