Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The weirdest thing for me about the continuing existence of the Free Software Foundation is that by one metric (the propagation of libre free software licenses as part of the global computer ecosystem) they've been wildly and completely successful, and yet by their own metric they've been so overwhelmingly defeated that the GNU fields have basically been sown with salt. And it's all their own doing, as well; if the FSF had spent the last decade or so being more than an 501(c)(3) vanity project to entertain RMS, then maybe they could have helped the actually useful organizations fight against the world of proprietary, closed, non-federatable systems, in which the actual threats have nothing to do with eeeeevil open source, non-libre licenses, but have to do with a massive world in which all that FLOSS software underlies surveillance capitalism and horrific concentration of capital. They could have fought more effectively against a world where instead of hooking up your libre RSS reader and your libre chat client, you have to install proprietary tools to do the simplest job, if they didn't think there were few greater sins than collaborating with someone using a *gasp* Apache license -- or worse, a proprietary software package a user is required to use to do their job.

Anyway, as I've pointed out before, RMS once said, when someone asked about accessibility in free software,

"the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."

tl;dr the FSF can eat my shorts, emacs sucks, and vim is great.