MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-02-12 |
| FROM | Alexandre =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois?= Garreau
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] about the GNU promise
|
Le mercredi 12 février 2020, 13:58:44 CET Samuel Thibault a écrit :
> Alexandre François Garreau, le mer. 12 févr. 2020 13:53:38 +0100, a
ecrit:
> > Le mercredi 12 février 2020, 13:51:14 CET Samuel Thibault a écrit :
> > > > not so much for the boy who would be king of GNU.
> > >
> > > He never even thought of anything like that, on the contrary, the
> > > whole point is *not* having to have a "king".
> >
> > Results don’t always follow will or thoughts.
>
> So what? Just do nothing toward the goal you have, even when it's
> targetted to the goal?
I’m just tired of seeing people doing and talking about speeches and
political positioning (unsure about it: positionnement politique), rather
than actually doing stuff or speaking about stuff (like it keeps doing on
the official GNU mailing lists). Democracy, or anything political or more
generally social, should be done and worked, not spoken about.
(I shall note that therefore I should also just shut up: I’m blatantly and
likely uselessly speaking out, and I’m going to do way too much, but if
that just dilutes the aggressivity of ruben…)
Like to me socially there’s little to improve except changes I’ve yet to
see like more merges or collaborations between the various redundant and
competitive/overlapping projects (especially languages) within GNU. Such
as Guile and Emacs, as initially intended. But I’ve not heard of anything
more than bip (forgot his exact nick) working alone and sparsely on a
slowish guile-emacs. Nor anyone willing to research into integration of
positron’s VM. Nor ending integrating GCL into gcc. Nor clisp libs into
gcl, etc. nor implementing any other language (be it at least tcl) in
guile, etc.
And I’m not under the impression rms position is doing more harm than good
for this right now. He may have issues, these stay valid as well for many
other valuable members of GNU (who, in the end, stay really similar
between them… whatever side of opinion in this story: be it you, me,
etc.).
I recall discussing, a while ago, at Jean-Phillipe’s, the strong feeling
under which I am, that people within GNU happen to be all really similar,
such as everyone ends staying in his corner instead of trying to
understand and comply with each other… among with other social issues,
that happen to be what are too often criticized about rms, but stay valid
for other people (whatever side or opinion herenow) within GNU (even
myself, or yourself, really likely).
Nobody is trying to fix that, rather the opposite: we’re more and more
deepening the issue.
If we were to listen the polishing discourse or the vague and approximate
promises of Ludo&al, I don’t see how we’d avoid to end with a “democratic”
consortium of companies’ employees (x% redhat, x% microsoft, x% canonical,
etc. you could buy and sell labourforce like you do with market shares, as
democratic as capitalism itself and as how much current economy (be it IT)
is influenced by plutocracy), who’d take decisions as consensual as “remove
all lisp and most C and replace with javascript, python, java and c++” or
as greatly advertised as W3C’s ones (who for sure isn’t in this situation
and has nothing big to be criticized against), such as “DRM and
proprietary software are shit let’s not use them for 1 day out of 356” or
“let’s forget semantic web, XML and XSLT/functionnal programming and put
ecmascript and json all the way to pave the way for javascript trap, SaaSS
and DRM” (and pretend accessibility is not a question of design and
meaning but of individual (not social) effort, like if switching off the
lights when exiting a room could prevent global warming) or “let’s remain
under GPLv3 but outsource more stuff to LLVM” (case not taken into account
by Ludo’s social contract (but for which I can easily pression to happen),
as it actually won’t and can’t be because you never can cover all cases in
advance, because words can be twisted and people can be dishonest… which
are actually to me the main conclusions of the last rms’ events)…
Maybe Ludo thinks good, Stalin has likely done too, but how does he
believes lisp could stay a thing if something spatially undelimited became
“democratic” in a capitalism-ruled society? if he likes to speak about
social contracts, does he knows about Lambertism? or Maoists? In a future
what he proposes (because he has been a main proponer until now) gain
traction, what would prevent his own ideals and likes to be preserved
(like, what prevents GNU to become a GNU without —or with less— lisp?).
To me a “more democratic” GNU wouldn’t be a GNU where rms has less power
(because power doesn’t necessarily concretize, and it has been already
noted that maintainers have already the greatest latitude of action,
except details (for whose immho it wouldn’t be hard to maintain a patch
for (such as: make a patch-set called “professionalism” removing all
jokes, politically uncorrect according you, or not, as you wish, then
package both into Debian (hence also gNewSense and Ubuntu, hence also
Trisquel) and ask popcon what users prefer (that’s more democratic that
letting mostly-salaried maintainers vote), instead of introducing chaos,
thus confusion, thus opacity (thus non-democracy) by forcing stuff against
rms (be it jokes removing, mail-harvesting, other nongnu domains, other
infrastructures, etc.)))), but a GNU with more contributors and easiness
to hack (not just “feel included” or “welcomed to participate”), and to me
that’s actually more because of either the outside world (for instance the
gender balance has been rightly pointed as being more dependent of the
country or the social class than anything else), or maintainers
themselves… or rather: software itself (to me emacs stay one of the most
popular and contributed GNU packages not because of rms’ speeches, but
because of lisp)
Well, to put it simply: I love democracy, so much that I’m really
pessimistic. It can be implemented (but not easily, sometimes not at all,
I have too many memories of that, it’s difficult) but in something else I
like: locality… like show FFDN ISPs, or FDN as for you… though this last
one is a good example locality too can be hard to implement…
And the fact is I can’t see any way to implement democracy over internet
(except through feudal-like state-based centralization (which can end in
tyranny) or as capitalism (plutocracy)). And GNU is over internet, it’s
international, it’s not anything local. If anything democratic was to be
invented for it, it would more look like a federation of local, urban,
regional, national and then continental GLUG rather than anything like “a
(technical) project” (which GNU is).
So I won’t further argue against “just do nothing” more than against
anyone claiming measures have to be taken against terrorism, and then take
great effort to put the banners and flags of “democracy” behind what won’t
be democratic, throwing at any criticism that “so what? just do nothing?”.
*unsure of it: positionnement politique
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