Hi Paul,
Am Donnerstag 30 August 2018 21:56:58 schrieb Paul Boddie:
Thank you for indulging me in this discussion which has probably covered more ground already than many previous discussions on some of these topics. My apologies if this is a long message.
no problem, you are welcome! Thanks for caring for Free Software. Given the heated tangled discussion on this list, please take my apologies for a brief answer. There is probably more time for longer exchanges at a later point of time.
== FSFE offerings of personal blogs
Still, one might hope that the blogs act as that "conversation starter", with discussion possibly moving to places like this list, but we don't really see much of that, either. So it seems that regardless of the technology employed, the FSFE does not necessarily provide a particularly effective forum for driving Free Software discussions, development and strategy. At least from the perspective of a distant collaborator or outsider.
What worked best in many years were to bring people together at event, supporter meeting, local group, conferences and so on. People that already had an connection to each other via FSFE. If you want to become more involed in this, try to go to one or organise one yourself.
It is true that we haven't found a cool response to the challenges that new electronic media has brought to high quality exchanges. Should be wo more micro-blogs, social medias, chats or what else? What keeps the coherency. We are not the only group that has this problems. Combined with more topics in society generally, less political actions by young people and growing success of Free Software worldwide leading to growth problems we do have a combination of challenges. The best inspritation I've found is the book of Tina Rosenberg, called "Join the club".
== Preserving knowledge
I don't think that the scope of what the FSFE would need is anywhere near to what archive.org does, either in their Web archiving role or just for cultural artefacts. It just needs to keep its published content in place, which is admittedly something that many organisations fail to do as they "refresh" their Web sites. (Even supposed custodians of knowledge such as universities are surprisingly appalling at this, I find.)
Keeping our contents and history in place is something that we do (as far as I know). Not every revision of course, but everything significant. Do you have examples of what contents you are missing.
the organisation does need to avoid the trap of outsourcing everything because people do then rightly wonder about the value provided by the organisation.
And we don't however, FSFE's aim is not to directly produce software, we want others to be able to do it in several aspects. For many is much better if there are several choises of service providers that are not FSFE. It helps us to be in a position to evalutate those providers.
I could make observations about other organisations in this domain. For instance, the Python Software Foundation chose SourceForge for repository hosting back when people were still using CVS/Subversion. It then switched to self-hosting using Mercurial, but people started to clamour for Git usage and then GitHub usage with all the usual dubious assertions that this entails.
This always is a hard question for an organisation: What does this contribute to our core mission? A question like this has to be weighted for each case. If the core missiong of the PSA is to further Python, they may profit from the lower entry barrier of github and live with the drawbacks. Just like the FSF took advantages at some time of computers with proprietary compilers, proprietary operating system, proprietary microcode on chips and other stuff in order to raise the chances to have more Free Software in the future.
Personally I had hoped that the PSA would have decided differently. (I am one of the co-maintainers of an old issue tracker technology they are still using, called roundup. We have a hard time competing with a development based on proprietary software money like github, bitbucket or gitlab.) But if Python lost important young people because of the higher barrier, the github move may contribute for them being there and relevant in 2 years and not leaving the field to languares more geared towards the interest of large corporations like Swift or Go (meanwhile both Free Software languages and technically good, the influence of lage computing companies and their needs is still very strong.)
I understand that people don't want to do their own hosting, but at some point someone has to do the hosting, and then one needs to consider the burden on individuals.
In my eyes a long term solution needs professionals running them, otherwise there is a too great risk of not having the necessary stability (for support, security, updates, maintenance). FSFE could run this, like any organisation could, but why should it. What is bad about buying bread from a professional bakery, produce from a farmer, news from a journalist and get thaught by a teacher? I could probably do each one of this myself, but not everything together.
It is a bit like discussions about "social media" platforms, but I doubt that anyone participating in this list would advocate moving everything to Facebook and have fsfe.org redirect to some Facebook URL.
Facebook's service is far away from FSFE to be considered a vendor. Still we may need to go there to talk to people who we want to get educated about Free Software and we could only reach there. (If only for telling them why they should not be on Facebook.)
Meanwhile, there are arguably dormant organisations like Qi Hardware which still manages to maintain all its Web resources, and it may even be the case that most of those resources are still fully usable and not read-only archives. Although I acknowledge the challenges of hosting services, sometimes I think that people make arguments based on those challenges to pursue another agenda.
There are many very interesting approaches not just Qi Hardware. I like them. We need more of them. And they need more buyers.
FSFE is about making it possible they can get more fraction and stay allowed. Think about the radio frequency initiative, that would just outrule to use some devices, no matter how clever they be constructed. Think about how we try public and private procurement to make it possible to prefer Free Software (or other open resources) or at least buy it at all.
This extends to arguments about using more "agile" tools for communication. People seem to think that e-mail is too much effort and that forums would be better, and so on. But this is often motivated by people wanting to spend as little effort as possible on their interactions (hence observations about messages sent from people's phones). The result is often low-quality "tweeting" of opinions and unsustainable collaboration.
(Given your own considerable experience, I imagine that you have also seen situations where advocacy for "low-threshold editing" on things like wiki services, to pander to people who want to do "quick edits", ends up with incoherent content and spam that is someone else's job to tidy up.)
A low barrier does not guarentee good contents, however a high barrier also does not. A low barrier to me means that I could contribute more in many situations, so I do prefer a low barrier to contributors and well supported tools. Github has developed some advances in this field, just as Sourceforge did. And of course with many people supporting them with their attention and feedback. What can we do to keep Free Software tools to keep up with those improvements, how can we make other advantages of Free Software more popular (think decentralised communication where XMPP with OpenPGP was way ahead of many messengers, but still failed to get the large traktion)?
Professionally I stay away from Github as much as I can, but I cannot fully, because otherwise I cause trouble for people I am developing Free Software for, which would mean that I couldn't to it up to the extend that it wouldn't be Free Software in the end.
== Places to discuss
Indeed. And we lack mechanisms to take such discussions further. Here, the Python community provides another lesson. Up to about ten years ago or so, the concept of "special interest groups" was actively cultivated.
I'm a big fan of Python and its decision structure. Still they are also having problems to maintain the consistency and the rate of innovation. And were using a single person as technical lead (Guido van Rossum). The main point is: Their mission is quite different from FSFE's.
However, another phenomenon emerged which involves people promoting specific solutions and denigrating others. Instead of reaching a consensus, the goal of some people was to try and dominate others and persuade the audience to pick their solution as the winner.
I believe that some competition is good. Having several solutions to chose from is good. Hopefully people will select on merits and not just style of presentation of course.
== Groupware
But it is interesting to see how some of the software somehow lost momentum and relevance, meaning that people were no longer considering Kolab (version 2 and earlier) as a competitive solution.
For historic reasons I am still using it each day and it is old, but quite stable. Missing a number of features and so on. I still have customers who use it with surprising stability. :) But its old and not competitive anymore for a new installation. My story about this is, that together with others I had to hand over the torch to somebody else. It did not turn out how I had hoped it would, but as the former coordinator, I am not in a position to criticise my followers in detail, they did the best they could and followed what they perceived was the right way.
[..]
it became apparent that there was a gulf between what we wanted to suggest to potential adopters and what was available and acceptable to them.
And again, this is where organisations like the FSFE have to be able to substantiate and support their advocacy with activities that make their claims a reality.
I've learned many lessons about this the hard way. I don't think this would work. If we ever meet, we should have a beer over this conversation.
== Funding Free Software
A huge structural problem that has increasingly been noticed is that no-one wants to fund Free Software in general. For the most part, companies will fund things to get their products out the door, Free Software or otherwise, and if they can avoid paying for "infrastructure components" then they will. Here's a recent apt commentary with some strong language about this phenomenon:
https://carlchenet.com/foss-passive-consumerism-kills-our-community/
(Sorry, stopped reading the link very soon, as it does not promise a thought out contribution to the debate.)
My assessment of the situation is different, I believe more and more companies are funding Free Software development, in some areas it is the only way now to stay competitive. Examples Google with Android, Chromuim, Angular, Go. Facebook with React, Twitter with Bootstrap, Microsoft with Visual Code, and many many others like IBM, Redhat with Linux.
Now, I don't necessarily expect the FSFE to directly fund software development. Meanwhile, since the FSF wishes to see software development done, I would expect it to pay people a decent wage for the work it wishes to see done.
The funds of FSFE and FSF are soooo little compare to what it take to do anything of medium significance in software engineering. We may be able to do a few very important missing links, small stuff at the maximum.
Unfortunately, there is a culture of people doing work "for exposure" which means that people are tempted into doing things for free to get their name known.
It is one of the motivations for people to work on Free Software, but we need more professionals and thus we need more money for Free Software which means more companies and customers of companies that want this.
The consequences are often (1) nothing actually getting done, (2) people burning out as they try and fit their volunteer work in around everything else in their lives,
To any volunteer, my advise as a volunterr is: Always prepare for the long run. Don't overstretch.
(3) the perception that Free Software is a product of hobbyists who can be paid with pennies.
This perception is fuelled by people who do not want to see the number of professional offerings or who do not want to pay for software or service at all.
So while I accept that policy activities are vital to allow Free Software to be deployed, it also must be recognised that without a sustainable development culture there will be no Free Software to deploy.
FSFE does foster development culture and we may even do more. Still it is more important that if a person starts a Free Software business he or she is allowed to do so and get a fair chance to win over business.
== license compliance
For some of the activities see: https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/legal-conference.en.html
My problem with this is that it doesn't seem very transparent. And again, there are individuals who have sought to mischaracterise other organisations who have tried to discuss general matters of compliance openly. Meanwhile, a vacuum has formed around licence compliance that has been exploited by various opportunists.
This maybe a area we need to get into the details. Within FSFE we had a number of discussions about this lately and they have also been tied with specific persons more often than I would have liked. Being effective on such a topic means that we find, hold and motivate people and sometimes for personal or other reasons there are gaps. (I consider this a daily operational question where a public debate about it would just be unhelpful.)
What this communicates to outsiders like myself is that other organisations are (1) more likely to offer practical support and advice below the level of formal legal consultation (which is, to be honest, where most developers want to be operating), (2) more open about the legal and regulatory challenges facing Free Software, and (3) more active with regard to upholding Free Software licences and defending well-intentioned Free Software usage in Europe.
Again, this may be an unfair impression, but I can only work with the visible facts I have to hand. And when an organisation solicits support, it surely falls on that organisation to make a clear and convincing case for such support. On this particular matter, and in contrast to the outreach done by other organisations, I have difficulties seeing such a case.
You maybe right in that FSFE has been less public about what it does in recent years. We believe that we need to help that more people understand, can follow and come to their own conclusions about licensing "enforcement" and how the different players interact. Otherwise FSFE too much becomes the organisation who forces decisions, which has long term disadvantages. If people like us to put in more resources on this topic, it is good to get this as feedback.
Once again, my apologies for a long message which still didn't discuss everything it needed to. However, I hope it provides another perspective that, to some extent, maybe some other people also share.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and giving me a chance to respond.
Best Regards, Bernhard