On previous article I began to argue my opinion that the GNU Project failed. In this one I will go further since I'm going to talk about the GNU project and the failure of free software since I believe there is a relationship between the two and it is the responsibility of Richard Stallman.
Can we talk about the failure of free software? If you're reading this on your mobile, you're probably reading this on Android or iOS, not FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Touch. You probably heard about it from Google Discover, Google Group notifications, Twitter or Facebook, not from Mastodon. And, if you are using an open source browser, it is either based on Chromium (de facto standard imposed by Google under penalty of denying compatibility with its services) or Firefox which is more interested in political correctness than in making a good browser. I would say yes.
About the GNU project and the failure of free software
LAt this point you can make two objections to me.
- That the free software movement never intended to be massive.
- That Linux dominates in servers, supercomputers and the cloud.
Let's look at one objection at a time.
Although it was born with the aim of giving legal protection to the tools of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation soon extended its actions to campaigns to boycott proprietary tools and replace them with free ones. Since most people still use Google Docs on their Windows, buying books on Amazon and using Apple hardware don't seem to have had much success
2) The success of Linux is not due to people being convinced of the advantages of being able to access, study, modify and distribute the source code of a program. I eat very well explained Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky. IBM and other computer service providers to the corporate market discovered that they could offer their consulting and support services based on the Penguin operating system without having to pay expensive licenses. of software to a third company.
Stallman's responsibility
Now, the time has come to prove or fail to prove the statement that I have been making for an article and a half.either. Stallman's responsibility.
Richard Stallman He is a programmer who all he wanted was to be part of a team in which information flowed freely so that the work was done regardless of the hierarchies on paper. It is what Canadian author Henry Mintzberg calls an adhocracy.
The problem is that as the Free Software Foundation grew, it needed a more formal structure and, Stallman, as the founder, was assuming a task for which he was not only not prepared, nor did he like it, that of leader.
The free software movement needed a Jobs, or at least the Shuttleworth of the early days of Ubuntu. The GNU project needed Stallman.
A Jobs, or even a Shuttleworth or Bill Gates would have had the instinct to know what people needed and convince them that it was what they wanted. A Stallman would have transformed that into well-written code and would have convinced the best developers to publish their work under free licenses
But, the political Stallman beat the programmer Stallman. And since except for Firefox (when Google, for its own convenience, promoted it on the search engine's main page) almost no free software project became widely known, there were never enough independent funds to compete with commercial developments. Open source projects resorted to corporate sponsorship and, as the CentOS case shows us, that sponsorship is never disinterested. We have already seen cases of some projects that ended up changing their license.
There is no doubt that there are free software programs of equal or superior quality to the proprietary ones. That there is no free software project that people massively love to use like TikTok, Google Docs, Canva or ChatGPT too.
And, blame that on the political Stallman who was more interested in demonizing the software and hardware that people liked to use. than in giving free rein to the programmer Stallman to work his magic.
Would it have changed anything if the GNU operating system had been terminated? In my opinion yes. Stallman was a much better programmer and had much more experience than Linus Torvalds when he created Linux. And, with a good leader in the FSF, capable of understanding the needs of the market, GNU would have taken the place that Windows ended up taking.
But, everything is open to opinion and there is the comment form below.
