Honest question, I don’t know a whole lot about the FSF. Heard the announcement from RMS and a snippet on the dangers of webapps and such. But do they introduce solutions to these issues regarding proprietary software or mostly point fingers and tell us what’s dangerous to use?

What’s your favorite FSF contributions?

    • linkertOP
      5·
      4 years ago

      Okok, the GPL of course. How did I not think about that? ;)

      Last release was 2007 - what else tangible have they produced?

      • newhoa
        10·
        4 years ago

        They also enforce their licenses and have a legal team to enforce violations of those licenses. They enforce violations on their copyrighted code, but I think also provide legal assistance to others using their licenses if their code is abused.

        Edit: info on that

        I believe they also fund the development of the GNU project (GCC, Bash, C Library, coreutils, etc). They maintain the copyrights to that software as well.

        • k_o_t
          2·
          4 years ago

          also provide legal assistance to others using their licenses if their code is abused

          damn, that’s pretty cool, didn’t know about this, i wonder what’s the track record outside of europe and north america for that tho…

    • uhoh
      4·
      4 years ago

      Hell yeah, the invention of copyleft!

      • je_vv
        71·
        3 years ago

        deleted by creator

        • linkertOP
          4·
          4 years ago

          There is no one in this post claiming the FSF or the GNU project is evil?

          Only an examination of what the FSF does.

      • not_a_cop
        4·
        4 years ago

        aside from what’s already said, do you use programs like ls,grep,sed,cat,etc? all of those are part of coreutils and unless you’re using alpine or android, all Linux distros use GNU’s version.

        I’m sure you’ve heard about bash, emacs and gpg.

        When compilers used to cost hundreds of dollars, GCC was released entirely for free.

        The G in GNOME, the G in GIMP and the G in GTK are all the same and stand for GNU.

        Do you think having full control over software you buy is a necessity? guess who popularized this idea.

        if you want to see how much stuff depends on GNU’s utilities, just remove a single package called glibc and use your computer.

        You can find a list of software associated with GNU here:

        https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

    • Blattstruktur
      1·
      4 years ago

      In my opinion, it is a very good thing to see diversification. GNU was a project to get a fully free operating system, and thanks to that project we have that now. From now there is time to develop new solutions and to choose between them freely. It can, in my opinion, be partly contributed to the FSF and GNU that there are now other solutions like musl, which are also free.

  • whitehatbofh@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    Without the FSF, we would not have Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Whatever his faults, RMS and the FSF were the pioneers who introduced the first free software license, the GNU Public License. All that followed built upon that first step.

    Without the FSF, we would not have Linux. While Linus Torvalds started the kernel (what Linux really is) and he has since managed the direction and build of the Linux kernel, the Linux operating system could not exist without the GNU suite of user-land tools and libraries that form much of the foundation of the Linux operating system.