Re: feeling intimidated for endorsing the GNU social contract
Hello Mike, On Mon 24 Feb 2020 04:58, Mike Gerwitz writes: > We've had a few people in particular that have been especially > problematic, and one person in particular that has many different > aliases and has even gone so far as to create a separate list that the > person has forcefully subscribed people to. I condemn this > behavior. But there's little we can do to stop it. I am very sorry, but this is simply not true. The best solution to the problem is a public mailing list whose subscribers are limited to GNU stakeholders. This would go a long way towards discourse civility, and is what was asked for in the beginning; you have the power to do such a thing. It is possible to ban people who have a pattern of problematic behavior. It too would go a long way to solving this problem. You have the power to do this, also. It is possible to be more vigorous in moderating. You and Brendan took it upon yourselves the task of moderating this list, so this also is within your power. And yet for some reason you used this power to let the message referred to in https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-misc-discuss/2020-02/msg00441.html go through. In a message to Andreas Enge (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-misc-discuss/2020-02/msg00433.html), you write: > But coming to this list, raising an inflammatory topic, and then > demanding that moderation be used as a tool to reduce tensions is not > acceptable either. Here you have chosen instead to blame the recipients of harassment for the harassment that they have received: it says "you deserve it", in pretty much those words. Honestly I hope that one day we are able to look back on these days and laugh at our foibles, but I get the feeling that a lot of water will have to run under the bridge for that to happen. In the meantime I think that GNU maintainers that are unhappy with the present situation have to effectively treat the more official leadership lines as damage, and route around them. Regards, Andy
Re: State of the GNUnion 2020
Hello Eli :) On Wed 12 Feb 2020 19:13, Eli Zaretskii writes: >> From: DJ Delorie >> Are we DONE producing that operating system? No? If not, why not? >> Aren't all those developers who finished their packages working on >> other, new packages? Why aren't the package counts continuing to >> increase, if the developers are otherwise unoccupied? > > Those are very important questions Glad you agree! > and they should have been investigated, analyzed, and answered I agree also! This sort of activity is natural in a project that engages in self-reflection. If a project has leadership, then naturally leadership would be conducting the exercise. > _before_ showing us a bunch of naïve graphs and drawing conclusions > from them (which unsurprisingly coincide with the opinions the author > expressed long before showing those graphs). I know that we may disagree on interpretation of the data, and that neither you nor I can avoid starting this kind of investigation with preconceptions, but please believe that I did the analysis in good faith. I started with an open question about what it would mean for GNU to be a project in good or bad health, settled on using project release data as a base, and in the end thought active projects could be a good measure. There are other ways to interpret the data; again, if the data have problems, corrections are welcome, or fork the repo and do your own analysis... seriously. If we admit the possibility that GNU may be in a bad state, then we should certainly look into it. I have my conclusions which I stand by but which are certainly not set in stone. > If someone wants to try answering this question: > >> If a set of developers finish a package, and don't start on a new one, I >> think that says something interesting about the health of GNU and its >> community. I agree entirely, it's a very good question. > Why wasn't such (or similar) analysis done before coming up with this > "state of GNUnion"? I think such anecdotal studies can speak volumes > more than those graphs. This could be! Please do go out and ask. > And then we have Guile, whose development pace leaves a lot to be > desired, if we really want it to become the GNU standard extension > languages. Strangely, the Guile developers, including Andy Wingo, > don't seem to do anything about that. There are no discussions about > making the project more active, none at all. Does that mean the Guile > level of activity is OK with Andy? If so, how does that live in peace > with the seemingly grave outlook for the rest of GNU? Honestly this argument is beneath you. You do not believe my conclusions about GNU -- which is fine -- but instead you try to shift the focus to the project I maintain, claiming that it is in poor health -- something that which would not invalidate the argument -- but, with no data or analysis to back it up, which is the aspect that you criticise about my conclusion. WTF. We can never know what might have been, but I believe that without my work on Guile, it would certainly be dead now. If you believe otherwise, it's an interesting discussion, but not germane to the current one. > Last, but not least: I'm not at all sure that statistics of the kind > we were presented, which is based on various measures of package > activity, tells anything about "the health of GNU", because GNU, at > least as I understand that term, has almost nothing to do with > development activity of GNU packages. The development activity is > determined solely by the project's development team and its abilities > to draw contributions and find worthy development goals. GNU as an > organization doesn't have any impact on that, because they almost > never interfere into these matters (unless there's some sort of > scandal, which happens only very rarely). Thought experiment: what would GNU be if all of its packages stopped developing? Dead, right? I understand that some GNU developers feel that things are fine. I heartily encourage you to come up with criteria by which to understand the health of GNU and to make an associated investigation. I have done so for myself and the results are not satisfying. Regards, Andy
Endorsing GNU Social Contract v1.0
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Hello, I, co-maintainer of GNU Guile, Guile-GNOME, and Guile-OpenGL, and developer of a number of other GNU packages, endorse version 1.0 of the GNU Social Contract, as written here: https://wiki.gnu.tools/gnu:social-contract I think that this process shows that GNU developers are capable of collective decision-making beyond the realm of API and ABI, and I look forward to future efforts in this direction. The GSC process has been a needed breath of fresh air into the mature project that is GNU. Yours in free software, Andy -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEET9TSiNRFk04KFPmlqIA3MuRDaIUFAl5KvusACgkQqIA3MuRD aIWmRw//X1M1rk8tQq7J2t/srcj+R12yiVY3thpKSHOnwFlTiPm0qy4IyQyzDSHJ GXU7vdt4Nn6rJs+indLA/BQ6LqhXYlW05Xgk1enCDKvsfMZESXghFFt4DQLn0fIr y3Py7s7nlyUPyZYlRQtCUK4seMUfyfA0KBkXi0WcgDhKe18PyX3BCILgsdduNeIV 89DS1yXTrr2blR44x9Dc+UJpQuKngfh0vhMUKTIzVpbKZ0eDy1Rzei5YNseaVNxE CVnRQ76haVNpznv2EsMN+0R5mG/YLKCoXojeYzVtv3HBB8X1Ac90ar1b5XYNMB0X eDtESbC8eN6mqLGEzGzzs4va3l1cnO1WSpSpmR282pjmnxBk+stTYDHRKdG8fUUb uxpyMfN3CSoOkSJMGcOS6ZIqFr3ycayUQSU+KCQQOq0p/mBLocgipcVDZmScQbMA 2FqOdTl4evgzPR4goQztwVhA2BK/jrCljs1W2Vnxq8yoj3zAAYofa5C/uMgciPCN JK6bqxovs2iwIWCL9XBze/v8WiDO0Dk8mbtl/BnL9XvcIz/SpVOLxRzXXmzNTYXM WQ/jwYuHJ6fEN8Ut7Gv9uouG3h95K135SYiUXRTjs98kNlSXu2FJlO3Wn2NrtuQn iEIEz+twNuK5pLC4WR7MY5o3SPrOI5EaKkdhdvMp3f2Io26BLGs= =MSlw -END PGP SIGNATURE-
State of the GNUnion 2020
Hello Alfred, On Mon 10 Feb 2020 18:46, a...@gnu.org (Alfred M. Szmidt) writes: > You make grandiose claims about the demise of the GNU project and the > FSF, but you do not back up it with anything of substance You see, if GNU had effective leadership, I would be able to point to some discussion of project health, backed up by metrics of interest. This discussion would be a periodic time to reflect on the recent past and plan for the future, and energize a collective of hackers to act in such a way that GNU would be better in the future. But, in the absence of effective leadership, we have to take on responsibilities ourselves. Recently I put dozens of hours into analyzing past GNU releases. The result is here: https://wingolog.org/archives/2020/02/09/state-of-the-gnunion-2020 I will simply paste the body here, as it seems that you do not read planet gnu. Regards, Andy * * * Greetings, GNU hackers! This blog post rounds up GNU happenings over 2019. My goal is to celebrate the software we produced over the last year and to help us plan a successful 2020. Over the past few months I have been discussing project health with a group of GNU maintainers and we were wondering how the project was doing. We had impressions, but little in the way of data. To that end I wrote some scripts to collect dates and versions for all releases made by GNU projects, as far back as data is available. In 2019, I count 243 releases, from 98 projects. Nice! Notably, on ftp.gnu.org we have the first stable releases from three projects: GNU Guix GNU Guix is perhaps the most exciting project in GNU these days. It's a package manager! It's a distribution! It's a container construction tool! It's a package-manager-cum-distribution-cum-container-construction-tool! Hearty congratulations to Guix on their first stable release (https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/gnu-guix-1.0.0-released/). GNU Shepherd The GNU Daemon Shepherd is a modern dependency-based init service, written in Guile Scheme, and used in Guix. When you install Guix as an operating system, it actually /stages/ Scheme programs from the operating system definition into the Shepherd configuration. So cool! GNU Backgammon Version 1.06.002 is not GNU Backgammon's first stable release, but it is the earliest version which is available on ftp.gnu.org. Formerly hosted on the now-defunct gnubg.org, GNU Backgammon is a venerable foe, and uses neural networks since before they were cool. Welcome back, GNU Backgammon! The total release counts above are slightly above what Mike Gerwitz's scripts count in his "GNU Spotlight", posted on the FSF blog (https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/gnu-spotlight-with-mike-gerwitz-16-new-gnu-releases-in-january). This could be because in addition to files released on ftp.gnu.org, I also manually collected release dates for most packages that upload their software somewhere other than gnu.org. I don't count alpha.gnu.org releases, and there were a handful of packages for which I wasn't successful at retrieving their release dates. But as a first approximation, it's a relatively complete data set. I put my scripts in a git repository (https://gitlab.com/gnumaint/gnumaint/-/blob/master/release-dates/process-dates.scm) if anyone is interested in playing with the data. Some raw CSV files are there as well. # where we at? Hair toss, check my nails, baby how you GNUing? Hard to tell! To get us closer to an answer, I calculated the active package count per year. There can be other definitions, but my reading is that an active package is one that has had a stable release within the preceding 3 calendar years. So for 2019, for example, a GNU package is considered active if it had a stable release in 2017, 2018, or 2019. What I got was a graph that looks like this: What we see is nothing before 1991 -- surely pointing to lacunae in my data set -- then a more or less linear rise in active package count until 2002, some stuttering growth rising to a peak in 2014 at 208 active packages, and from there a steady decline down to 153 active packages in 2019. Of course, as a metric, active package count isn't precisely the same as project health; GNU ed is indeed the standard editor but it's not GCC. But we need to look for measurements that indirectly indicate project health and this is what I could come up with. Looking a little deeper, I tabulated the first and last release date for each GNU package, and then grouped them by year. In this graph, the left blue bars indicate the number of packages making their first recorded release, and the right green bars indicate the number of packages making their last release. Obviously a last release in 2019 indicates an active package, so it's to be expected that we have a spike in green bars on the right. What this graph indicates is that GNU had an uninterrupted growth phase from its beginning until 2006, with more
Feedback on the FSF and GNU
Hello, This mail is intended to provide feedback related to https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-and-gnu. I will start with my understanding of what we offer each other. My background is that I maintain some GNU software but have never been a part of the FSF in any way. - GNU gives the FSF a kind of "hacker credibility". Besides the FSF's own independent long history, the GNU being close to the FSF allows the FSF to e.g. fundraise for new things using the GNU brand. Many people have historically donated to FSF because of GNU. - Many GNU packages have their copyrights assigned to the FSF; it has costs in admin time to both projects. I think the benefits are small here, but they mostly derive to the FSF as copyright holder. Because GPL foes prefer to rewrite software these days, legal defence of GNU is less important. - The FSF has the right to update the GPL, which is the GNU license. This is a large and important responsibility. - The FSF gives GNU a lot of administrative help: copyright assignment, servers, sysadmins, and so on. I should note that the all activity of GNU is by volunteers. It has no paid staff. (Some people do contribute to individual GNU projects as part of their jobs, of course.) The FSF has some volunteer and some staff activity. There is a natural synergy here. In the early days this was all there was: the FSF's activity was essentially GNU. But now the FSF is bigger, and GNU is relatively smaller, both relative to a few years ago and relative to the wider world of free software. So is it important to the FSF to support GNU? The question becomes more poignant when we consider the events that led to the leadership change in the FSF. What liabilities does GNU present to the FSF? Clearly the historical identification of the FSF with the person of its founder has been a boon but also more recently a burden. Many people have stopped donating and cancelled their associate memberships due to this association. With the leadership change, perhaps this will pick back up, but probably the FSF will have to make other steps. It is also clear that GNU as a brand is aging. I say this with some personal chagrin, because projects that I have spent a lot of time on and are attached to have this collateral association. Conversely from the GNU side, sometimes it seems like the FSF is drifting away: it is difficult for projects to request resources, even via the "working together" mechanism, for example, especially when we compare to colleages' experiences with resources managed by other foundation structures. In summary, I think there is a natural affinity, and a natural way in which GNU and the FSF help make each other better, but that the relationship now is not ideal: neither of us is giving what we should. As a GNU maintainer, I think the fault is mainly on the side of GNU leadership. I do not think that RMS is effectively leading the GNU project. If things continue as they have in the past, I suspect we will continue to see a decline in active GNU projects. Faced with this problem, instead of addressing it, this winter RMS and his delegates have attempted to stifle internal discussions of the problems: - A request for a public mailing list for GNU stakeholders only was denied. Therefore the only public gnu.org discussion is on gnu-misc-discuss, which includes non-stakeholders (people who are not developers of GNU packages). - Moderation of gnu-misc-discuss was seized, with the policy being to allow the only public forum available to GNU to become quite unpleasant. I would apologize for the mails you may receive in followup, as it is on Cc, but it is a self-inflicted wound. - A request for a wiki was denied. A similar request to the FSF for a VM was denied. - Requests for various forms of experimental collective decision-making were denied. Now, ordinarily these would be just internal politics within GNU, but the FSF bears some responsibility enabling them. In the recent update: https://www.fsf.org/news/gnu-fsf-cooperation-update the authors take Richard Stallman as the only voice on the table from the GNU side. This does not give me confidence as to the outcome of this feedback process. If the FSF wants a healthy GNU project, it should support efforts to make GNU a better place -- and existing GNU maintainers are the best placed to make these changes. * * * In the world we all want, there is a healthy GNU and a healthy FSF working together. We should learn from the past, yes, but focus on the future, and make decisions that create the future we want. Regards, Andy
Re: A summary of some open discussions
On Mon 06 Jan 2020 15:05, Brandon Invergo writes: > Ludovic Courtès writes: > >> As a side note: I think authority is not something one should take for >> granted. We’re a group of volunteers, and each one of us has just as >> much authority as the others consent to give them. > > No. When you join an organization, you implicitly or explicitly agree > to work within the existing structure of that organization. No. (Isn't a lovely discursive pattern? Sheesh.) More seriously, I think that when you join an organization, you implicitly or explicitly agree to work for the *goals* of that organization. At any given time, the strategy that an organization takes may no longer correspond to its goals. In that case it is the responsibility of the members of the organization to change it to better fit its needs. I am not sure why you think that a literal argument from authority will succeed in convincing those GNU developers and maintainers that think a different governance structure is a better strategy. Regards, Andy
Re: Proposals for the new GNU/FSF relationship
Please refrain from reposting the same arguments over and over again on this list, you've made them before already. Please also stop pretending that you speak on the behalf of the GNU project and GNU maintainers.
Re: Setting up a wiki for GNU Project volunteers?
On Tue 10 Dec 2019 19:25, "Carlos O'Donell" writes: > Wikis are useful software that allows developers to work > collaboratively and quickly on informal documents that are part of the > day-to-day running of the packages or project activities. > > This includes documenting such things as: > - Email thread summaries > - Status updates > - Meeting notes > - Summaries of discussions around best practice activities > > In researching this kind of wiki setup I have discussed the issue with > various GNU Maintainers and the consensus seems to be that such a > system should have the following qualities: > - Based on a VCS e.g. git > - Uses a supported wiki platform e.g. dokuwiki > - With a sensible markup e.g. markdown plugin for dokuwiki > > What do people think about setting up a wiki? This makes sense to me. My instinct would be to restrict access to GNU stakeholders: maintainers, developers, and volunteers in the various GNU teams. In this way we would mitigate some "wiki risks" like defacement and some kinds of bad faith edits. Probably the wiki project would need a maintenance structure to manage responsibility and to mediate disputes, like in other GNU projects. I think given the general interest for a wiki, we can expect for this to eventually be at wiki.gnu.org, though it may take some time for the sysadminny things to come through so it could make sense to start off gnu.org, depending on FSF sysadmin resource availability. Regards, Andy
Re: A GNU “social contract”?
Hi :) On Sat 09 Nov 2019 18:44, Andreas Enge writes: > On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 09:46:56PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote: >> Thanks, Andreas, for this new version! Some comments below. > > They are integrated into the attached new version. For good measure, > I have capitalised "GNU System" as you did and thrown in a few italics > as suggested. > > Andreas I finally took a look and this document looks good to me. I guess a next step would be to specifically elicit feedback from all GNU stakeholders such as maintainers. One nit, regarding the first line :) For me the document is essentially a contract with each other, rather than to any abstract third party. Even in the absence of a "broader free software community" with whom we could profess a contract (and what would they agree to in return?), we would be doing these things. Andy
Re: list moderation
Hello, On Sun 03 Nov 2019 22:34, Ludovic Courtès writes: > Brandon Invergo skribis: > >> For the past month or so, every message to the list has been subject to >> moderation, so-called "emergency moderation". It has become clear that >> the moderation was being used in a biased manner. We have decided to >> remove Mark and Carlos as moderators/admins and to turn off the >> emergency moderation. We will not place any restriction on the topic of >> discussion beyond what is outlined in the pre-existing list guidelines. > > Who is “we” in “we have decided” above? I don't think this question has been answered. Brandon, could you clarify please? > Can you explain how “moderation was being used in a biased manner”, > giving specific examples? I am also interested in answers to this question. For what it is worth, until now I could understand that you were operating in good faith in your various roles in GNU, that you were genuinely working for the benefit of GNU, even if we disagreed on the advisability of different options. I am sad to say that I no longer feel this way. It's not impossible to work together, but something has broken. Andy
to what extent is the gnu project philosophical?
Greetings, comrades :) In the context of the recent discussions about what it means to be GNU, how GNU should be organized, and about the virtues and risks of building a more bottom-up governance structure for the GNU project, I started wondering a bit more about the nature of GNU. I think we all recognize that one of Richard Stallman's strong points is a kind of strength of principle; of stubbornness, and of an ability to put together inspiring, coherent arguments for free software. However in the intertwined history of GNU and of the FSF, it's never been quite clear to me when this work corresponded to GNU, and when it corresponded to the FSF. There is https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.en.html, hosted on gnu.org, but administered by the FSF, which RMS was also the head of. Indeed some of those articles are written by people affiliated with the FSF but not with GNU, for example the excellent https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-software-isnt-practically-superior.html, written by Benjamin Mako Hill, who was an FSF director and now AFAIU is still a voting member, but not a GNU maintainer. So my question is: is GNU fundamentally about producing coherent, empowering free software systems, or is it fundamentally about developing and propagating an inspiring, liberatory philosophy? Of course the two of these exist in a kind of dialectic; one without the other is not effective at writing a new history. But they are different kinds of work. The answer to this question bears upon the future organization of the GNU project. If you consider GNU to be essentially a kind of moral beacon, then it's less important how much and what kind of free software you're producing. On the other hand if you think that GNU needs to focus on software production, then you might be willing to focus on the practice and the product of GNU, without so much focusing on its practitioners. Some people argue that the ultimate strength of GNU is in the moral rectitude of RMS, and to an extent they are right. I am sure RMS inspired all of us to join GNU, even if there are currently diverging perspectives on how GNU should run in the future. But do we need to have the same kind of purity as RMS to continue the work of GNU? If the work of GNU is fundamentally philosophical, then perhaps yes -- maybe no developer who uses a smartphone is suitable to be a part of GNU decision-making, as someone who willingly accepts the compromise to use a system having non-free software perhaps shouldn't be trusted to expound the vision of a world in which all software respects the user's freedoms. * * * If you will forgive the military metaphor, for my part I have always seen GNU to be to the FSF what the People's Liberation Army of Namibia was to the South West Africa People's Organisation: the armed wing of a liberatory people's party. The realm of ideas pertains to the FSF: theory, organization, advocacy, and so on. GNU, on the other hand, is about action in the software domain: the construction of an ever-growing software commons, putting the theory of the FSF into practice, and lending validity to the FSF's work. If my description corresponds to what other think -- your thoughts welcome! -- then the problem of identifying who is capable of participating in the governance of GNU is made much clearer. All you need is a history of producing free software and a will to continue to do so. GNU and the FSF would remain closely linked regarding questions of what would be nice to build and what must not be built, from the perspective of enhancing software freedom, but the set of people that might be good at organizing GNU might not be the same as those organizing the FSF. Thoughts? Yours in free software, Andy
