This is a bit genuine red meat and perhaps a little sensitive for some people but it does raise a point that deserves discussion. A shorthand for that point is the title of today’s post. A more descriptive way of describing it is, “Is the FSF’s demand for purity actually harming the users they’re striving to protect?”
Some people obviously think so: that’s why we have the OSS movement. I don’t know anyone who doubts the goodwill or sincerity of RMS and the FSF. I certainly don’t. But it’s still worth asking if the policies they’re pursuing are helping or harming the goal to which they’re devoted.
Ash, over at gay robot noises, has a post that explores how she thinks RMS and his insistance on purity are hurting the Free Software movement. She, as do I, has tremendous respect for Stallman but worries, as the title suggests, that he’s fighting a war that’s no longer going on. I disagree with her conclusion that the FSF has lost the battle. I believe that while they haven’t won it, they certainly haven’t lost it either. Take a look at her post and see what you think.
Ariadne Conill makes a similar case for hardware. She says that strict adherence to the FSF’s Respects Your Freedom program means that you’ll be using only obsolete and probably broken hardware. No one but a Free Software Aesthete is going to do that so the FSF is crippling their crusade for free hardware.
I have my own data point in this discussion. Back in May, there was a long thread on Emacs-Devel about removing ns-do-applescript from the Next Step branch. The problem, according to the instigator, was that applescript runs only on macOS which is not a free operating system—although it does represent over 25% of Emacs users—and therefore ns-do-applescript should not be in Emacs. Notice that code was already there so the poster was proposing more work just because of a purity issue. When I objected on the grounds the code wasn’t hurting anyone, was useful to Mac users, and that it didn’t make any sense to make Mac users lives more difficult, I was told that the FSF was not interested in making Mac users lives easier. On the contrary they wanted to make it more difficult so those users would abandon macOS and move to Linux. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. If you’re particularly masochistic, here’s the start of the thread on Emacs-Devel.
I understand the FSF’s insistence on “no inch given” but I do think that it may be time to explore how well that’s working out.