So it looks like my quick, but on-the-spot renegation of FSFE last December made the round much further than most of the blog posts I ever write. I think that, in comparison, it made a much wider range than my original FSFE support post.
So I thought it would be worth spending a little more time to point out why I decided to openly stop supporting FSFE — I did provide most of this reasoning in short form on Twitter, but I thought this is better summarised in a blog post that others can reference, and that I can point people at.
So first of all, this is not all about the allegations. It was very easy to paint my post, and all the other critical outbursts against FSFE, as a position taken on hearsay. But as I already said, this was just the “flash trigger” of me calling back the support for an organization for which my feeling cooled down significantly for years. Again, I said already in the other post that I got in touch with Matthias a few years ago already about my concerns with the organization, and it was Public Money, Public Code that kept me as a supporter since then.
The reason why I decided to write renege my support when the allegations were extended, and I even changed my posts schedule for it, is that I didn’t want my (much older) post on supporting FSFE to be used as an excuse to support an organization that was in the middle of a controversy. I have been a strong supporter and have been talking people about FSFE for years, including about their more recent REUSE initiative last year, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be used as a shield from criticism.
I had an entire draft complaining about the way FSFE made me feel most like I was supporting FSFG (Free Software Foundation Germany), and that doesn’t seem to have changed that much since I wrote it two years ago. Both the news page and the activities page at the time of writing are clearly highlighting a tight focus on German issues, including talking in very broad strokes about how the German Corona Warn App doesn’t need Google – strokes so broad that make it feel like a lot of smoke and no meat underneath – and still more focus on dealing with router lock-ins (missing a lot of nuance).
I do understand that, if most of the volunteers engaging are German they will care about German issues the most, and that if the “wins” come from Germany, obviously the news will be filled with German wins. But at the same time, an organization that wants to be European should strive to have some balance and decide not to use all the news coming from a single country. Looking at the news archive page at the time I’m writing this post, there’s seven references to «Germany», one to «France», and none to «Italy», «Ireland», «United Kingdom», «Great Britain», and so on.
And it’s not that there’s nothing happening in those other countries. COVID Tracker Ireland, to stay in the topic of Covid tracing apps, is also Free Software (licensed under MIT license), and a number of other apps have been literally built based on its code. Public Money, Public Code to its best! But nothing about it on the FSFE’s website, while there’s a number of references to the German app instead.
And again speaking of Public Money, Public Code, Italy doesn’t seem to be represented at all in their list of news, with the only reference being a two years old entry about “FSFE Italy” asking for support to the project by political parties. This despite the fact that the Italian Team Digitale and the established pagoPA company have been also releasing a lot of Free Software.
Once again, if you want to change the direction of an organization, joining directly and “walking the walk” would help. But there’s a number of reasons why that might be difficult for people. While I was working for Google – a cloud provider, very clearly – it would have been fairly difficult for me to join an organization with loud complaints about “the cloud” (which I anyway disagree with). And similarly given the amount of coverage of privacy, even when not related to Free Software directly, it would be hard for me to be an activist given my current employer.
Before you suggest that this is my problem, and that I’m not the target to such an organization, I want to point out that this is exactly why I didn’t go and say that they are terrible organization and called for a boycott. I just pointed out that I no longer support them. I did say that, out of my experience, I have no reason to disbelieve their accusation, and even after reading their response statement I don’t have any reason to change my mind about that.
But I also have been a Free Software developer and advocate for a long time. I believe in the need for more Free Software, and I agree that government-developed software should be released to the public, even if it doesn’t benefit directly the taxpayers of the government that developed it. I made that case in Italian over ten years ago (I should possibly translate that blog post or at least re-tell the tale). I would enjoy being an activist for an organization that cares about Free Software, but also cares to get more people onboard rather than fewer, and would rather then not build “purity tests” into its role.
Another big problem is with the engagement method. Because of the abovementioned purity test, FSFE appears to only be engaging with its community in a “write only” media over Twitter. If you want to be an activist for FSFE you need to use email and mailing list, or maybe you can use Mastodon. In-person meetings seemed to still be all the rage when I discussed this a few years ago, and I do wonder if with 2020 happening they manage to switch at least to Jitsi, or if they ended up just using an Asterisk server connected to a number of landlines to call into.
I’m still partially comfortable with mailing lists for discussion, but it’s honestly not much of a stretch to see how this particular communication medium is not favorable to younger people. It’s not just the lack of emoji and GIF reactions — it’s also a long-form medium, where you need to think careful about all the words you use, and that persists over time. And that counts double when you have to handle discussion with an organization that appears to have more lawyers than developers.
I joked on Twitter that for a Gen-Z person, asking to use email to partecipate is the equivalent of asking a Millennial (like me) to make a phone call. And I say that knowing full well how much time I used to spend on the phone when I ran my own company: it’s not fun to me at all.
But that means you’re cutting out two big categories of people who could have both the intentions and the means to help: younger people with time on their hand, who can actively partecipate in programs and organization, and professionals who might have the expertise and the contacts.
And speaking of the professionals — you may remember that I came to the REUSE tool (which I contributed a number of fixes to myself) after complaining about having a hard time contributing while at Google because projects, among others, often didn’t provide a proper license that I could refer to, to submit patches. At the time of writing, just like a few years ago when I first tried correcting something on the website, the FSFE Website repository does not provide a license or SPDX headers (to comply with REUSE).
What would I like is for an actual European-wide organization, focused not on government policy, but rather on making it possible to have a sustainable ecosystem of Free Software development, particularly when it comes to all of those nuances that differ from a discussion of Free Software and licensing that is always too USA-centric.
The organization I have in mind, that I would love to provide monetary contribution to (if not outright be an activist for, time constraint being a thing), would be spending time in universities and high school, showing the usefulness of Free Software to learn new things. Convincing both professors and students of the usefulness of sharing and receiving, and respecting the licensing.
This is not as obvious: back when I was in high school, BSA was the only enforcement of license compliance in schools, and Free Software advocates were explicitly undermining those efforts, as they were working for a few proprietary software manufacturers. But as I said before, undermining proprietary software licenses undermines the Free Software movement. If people are trained to ignore licensing requirements, they are going to do so for Free Software, and that’s now you end up with projects ignoring the limits of GPL and other licenses.
And this connects to the next problem: for the movement to be sustainable, you also need people to make a living off it, and that requires taking licensing seriously. It’s a topic I come back over and over: business-oriented Free Software is already lacking, and people need money to survive. When the option for more experience developers, project managers, community managers, … is basically to barely make ends meet or go work for one of the big companies that don’t focus on Free Software… well the answer is obvious for a lot more people you may imagine. Not everyone gets to be the “star” that Greg KH or Linus Torvalds are, and get paid to pretty much keep their Free Software engagement — most others either do it as a side hustle, or have a side hustle.
The Document Foundation found out the hard way that there’s need for actual business plans if you want to keep maintaining big, complex Free Software projects. And even Mozilla, once shown as a core pillar of Free Software paid development, has shown this year how hard it is to keep “running the show” without a sustainable plan on the long term.
An organization focused on sustainability in Free Software should, at least in my hopes, focus on providing this kind of support. Providing blueprints for business engagements, providing outreach on license compliance to the benefit of Free Software, but also providing the pragmatic tools for Free Software enthusiast consultants to engage with their customers and take down the market barriers that make it so hard for single developers to find customers.
FSFE has lots of public policy engagements particularly with the European Union — and some of those are extremely valuable. They are required to level the playing field between Free Software developers and big corporations with entire organizations of lawyers and marketers. But they shouldn’t be the only think that an European organization focusing on Free Software should be remembered for.
