Free Software Foundation Considered Harmful

The FSF advocates some very particular positions, especially that software businesses should be funded by user groups for improving software.

What happens when a business is deciding whether to do this? They receive no encouragement, no assurances that it will work, no market research, no nothing.

What happens when a business actually attempts to do this? They receive no support whatsoever, whether financial or logistical. Anyone who attempts to do what the FSF says it wants them to do is left out in the cold.

So does the FSF actually do anything to bring about the scenario it advocates? Nope, it does diddly squat.

In fact, does the FSF actually follow the criteria it advocates for others? Nope, the FSF's funding doesn't come from user groups for improving GNU software. Rather, it receives funding largely for its political activities.

The FSF advocates a business model that it has never researched, that it never supports, that it has never implemented, that it has no need nor intention to ever implement. The FSF is entirely hypocritical.

No wonder anyone who makes a living creating commodity software thinks free software is evil. The FSF is evil.

(Note: I do believe a service software business model can be made to work. The FSF is not evil for advocating it. It is evil for doing nothing but advocating it. It is evil for hyping something good in such an ineffectual manner that people will become sick and disillusioned of it. It is evil for sending the implicit message that its model is completely impractical and impossible. It is evil for saying "Justice would be great, but of course, it could never work.")

>>40
Proprietary software writers write the software first then sell cheap EULA licenses to users. They feel that amortizing the cost over a period of time would attract more users to purchase the software. The FSF recommends that programmers will negotiate the financial terms BEFORE doing any work.

>>41
The fuuuck? Tell me one OS that did such a thing. Oh I know, Plan9. All others had a product before they started selling. Even most F.O.S.S. is Alpha state before its sold.

>>41
Your description of FSF matches a generic contracting company. That's exactly what they do. They find their customer (usually other companies) and negotiate the scope of the project, high level design, cost, and time line.

The other model described, where a product is researched and slowly released, is used by companies, universities, and groups of foss developers that are creating an original product.

>>41
The FSF recommends that programmers will negotiate the financial terms BEFORE doing any work.
That's what Bill Gates did with IBM. He didn't have time to write an OS so he bought some hacked together CP/M clone and sold it to them as MS-DOS.

>>42
I've never seen an OS that was written from scratch as a work for hire. Given the flexibility of Unix and associated tools, there is normally no need to write one when it's easy to bring together a few Unix tools together

>>43
I was demonstrating the worker for hire approach to selling software as opposed to the standard model of writing a program then selling a EULA to the user.