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Famous programmer Drew DeVault says that "the Free Software Foundation is dying" and needs "more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others". Hacker News and /g/ disagree.

https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html

Comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524297 [178 comments]

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/12ijhs4/the_free_software_foundation_is_dying/?sort=controversial [19 comments, removed]

https://archived.moe/g/thread/92712732 [367 replies]

https://archived.moe/g/thread/92716274 [still active, so far 57 replies]

https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/110180214217072221

There was some pushback, so Drew addressed the haters on HN:

Many people in this thread take offense at the calls to (1) remove RMS because of his problematic behavior and (2) promote diverse people to leadership positions.

I will reply to all of these comments at once: get a fricking grip.

No one, including myself, is calling for RMS to be removed because he has the wrong skin color or s*x. He needs to go because he acts as if his demographics are the right demographics, and those who don't have those traits feel unwelcome and uncomfortable under his leadership. That's a problem with RMS, not with his demographic identity, and someone possessing his demographic traits (which, I presume, are probably shared with most of the commenters upset about this), but lacking his problematic behaviors, would be a welcome change.

As for the inclusion of more diverse leaders:

1. There is more than one leadership position at the FSF.

2. I am not calling for non-proportional representation, or for forcing proportional representation either.

If you feel threatened because someone called for a jerk who looks similar to you to be kicked out of a project, that's a personal problem. If you feel threatened by the prospect of being led by people who look dissimilar to you, that's a personal problem.

Again, to sum it up: get a grip. Jesus.

That's right, do better, chuds! :marseyhesright:

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Brought to you by the creator of SourceHut, who's apparently still looking for any attention after said git hosting platform completely failed to capture any user base and resulted in the few projects that tried to switch from GitHub being bullied for making the contribution process way harder for no reason.

Just in case anyone's wondering why the clickbait

Edit: Oh and the guy also worked on Wayland specs, so add another failed project to the list lmao

:#marseyhesright:

Drew DeVault is a collosal loser who hasn't done anything of value for the FOSS ecosystem.

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Wayland!

:#marseyraging:

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What do anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers, and anti-Wayland activism all have in common? All of them are characterized by a blithe rejection of facts to embrace a narrative of victimization by a vague authority. In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you. “Wayland sucks!” is a conspiracy theory with no basis in truth, and its supporters have spent years harassing Wayland maintainers, contributors, and users. And it’s time for it to fricking stop.

Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore. I’ve tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that some Wayland detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but it didn’t work. So my new approach is “frick you”. None of the Wayland detractors have a clue. They don’t understand Wayland, they don’t understand X11, they don’t understand Linux graphics or OpenGL or Vulkan or anything else in the stack. They don’t even understand what it’s like to use Wayland, because at most they might have spent 5 minutes installing it, realized that something was — gasp — different than X11, and then uninstalled it and wrote their angry Reddit comment.

It has a real cost, you know, being a peepee to maintainers. It’s not good for our mental health. We’re out here trying to make things better. Wayland fixes unfixable problems with X11, and might have invented some new, fixable problems in the process — most of which have been fricking fixed already, and years ago! We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fricking butthole.

If you really want to live in your propagandized world of Wayland lies, then fine. You’re gonna maintain Xorg yourself, because we’re not going to volunteer our time, sacrifice our weekends and evenings staying up late for your sake, just to maintain that broken pile of shit. You know what, if you fork it and prove that you know what you’re doing for a while, we’d probably just give you the keys to upstream so you can maintain it yourself. If you do know what you’re doing, though, you’ll soon realize you want nothing to do with that shitty codebase.

Wayland works for almost everyone, and works for more people than is even possible with X11. Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to yourself, butthole.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.html

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you're fricking bananas if you think I'm reading all that, take my downvote and shut up idiot

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Fricking anti wayland bot, frick off u piece of shit

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:marseynpcmad#:

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a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you

>today I will make a new thing with marginal benefits and high costs in terms of laborhours and user experience

:#marseyclueless:

Reminds me of that comic of the burger women soccer player basking in the glory of self-righteousness while her team loses. :marseywholesome:

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sway and wlroots are nice enough

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Usable sure, but nice is a strong word. The only Wayland project that doesn't completely suck is Smithay imo, but it's unproven until COSMIC launches.

The fact Pipewire was able to become the new standard in ~5 years yet Wayland is still DoA for most users speaks volumes on the protocol's quality.

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yeah wayland sucks butt but it's going to be slowly dragged over the finish line simply because it's still developed and x isn't. Just this year or so it got fractional scaling and the ability to disable vsync (lmfao), and good color management is planned. All of those should have of course been day 1 features for something intending to be "modern" in 2008, but it won't matter in the long run unless there is something to compete with it.

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I'm kinda hoping Arcan: https://github.com/letoram/arcan takes off, but tbh that's just me huffing pure hopium.

:#marseyhope:

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