I don’t try to hide the fact that I think that FSF’s continuous stress over “GNU/Linux” is a huge ego stroke toward GNU that tries to deny that there is other Free Software beside GNU. But even considering this I don’t usually take stance against GNU for the sake of it. I disagree with some of the ways of Free Software Foundation (the original one), and I have said that I like Free Software Foundation Europe better (because they take positive approaches toward Free Software rather than negative approaches toward proprietary software), yet I don’t think this should deem me a bad person for what concerns Free Software.
And those who could still doubt of my caring for Free Software against proprietary software can take a look at my Ohloh page — keeping in mind that Ohloh only tracks assigned commits, and thus does not count most of the patches sent around the world of Free Software, where DVCS are not used, and thus are committed without my direct attribution. You thus only have my own word that there are many of those, as well.
With this on the table, would you still believe that I’ve been slandered before to be an anti-Free Software activist? Would you believe that when I criticised the quality of GNU’s code somebody went out of their way to say that my approach is “mining it [GNU’s code] to improve your work” (because wanting to use fold’s code and then release an utility based on it as GPL-3 is not giving back, it seems, unless I sell my soul and blood over to FSF, maybe?).
I know I’m getting boring with quoting Bill Maher, and re-using his own criticism strategies in my blog posts. And I also already used this line but never on this blog so I’ll use it again:
We’ve got to worship principles, not people.
With this I mean that even if I agree with the idea behind FSF and the GNU Project, I don’t have to see either Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds as my personal God, nor I would have to accept the GNU project as the owner of all good software in this world. There is more to that. The same principles apply to other situations, even situations where GNU is laughed at, even situations where GNU’s code is laughed at but their license is used. Because what makes me dislike some of the GNU project’s applications and in general the FSF (America) approach, is not the license, otherwise I wouldn’t be using it extensively for my own projects, both personal and work-related.
When I criticise the over-engineering status of an utility such as fold, I’m not attacking either the idea of Free Software nor the GPL license. I’m just stating that the fold.c code is utterly a piece of crap, as it jumps through a ton of hoops, and is unreadable and impossible to re-use, to do something as simple as what fold is supposed to.
When I say that the groff code is a real mess, it’s because the code itself is messed up if you try to follow it; when I further add that requiring C++ (but not the STL) to do something as simple a what groff does is like shooting oneself on a foot, I’m not saying that Free Software sucks and proprietary software is always better. I’m just trying to find a better Free Software alternative. And I’m not entirely sure Heirloom’s doctools are the way to go, by the way.
When I find FSF’s negative approach excessively bad then I’m criticising their way to support Free Software, not detracting on Free Software altogether. Although I start to think this is simply the American way of getting your points through: you don’t show your best side, you try to point people at the others’ bad sides; another thing that I should probably learn from Bill Maher, when he talked about the way Political elections and Oscar nominations go in USA.
But this does not obviously cover all of GNU’s code… although I guess it does cover a lot of that; the fact that GNU project is now comprised of loosely connected smaller packages doesn’t make it much better. You have projects that are doing very connected work that keep separated (autoconf and automake), others that are developed behind closed doors without a public repository of any kind, and totally different code styles or development practises every two projects.
So GNU’s not perfect; what’s your solution? Keeping your eyes shut and screaming “GNU’s perfect”? I still prefer mine: saying that GNU’s not perfect, when it’s not, and either improve it or make something better. With the best tools available; with the best knowledge available; with the best license available (which, most of the time, will be the GNU General Public License, of some sort, but doesn’t mandate that).