but this has just happened:
https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/2026-02-01-social-change-is-not-democratic.en.html
@lxo quite right.
But, I do question if atleast some initiatives aren't just hubris without understanding what people want (my pet peeve is me-too projects - GNU Sather?). Sure, there are many initiatives with ulterior motives, like proprietary software, and highlighting their inadvisable aspects is welcome. But implementations supporting the alternative always miss the train. Contrast that to the endurance of something like Emacs, which wasn't me-too material once it got ported to Unices.
GNU has met its initial goal of a complete freedom-respecting operating system (whether with software contributed explicitly to GNU, or free software developed independently that happens to work with GNU), enabling people to use computers in freedom. that was long ago, but the software still needs to be maintained, because users keep on relying on the software, and because needs evolve. besides the core operating system, new developments have taken place in applications. one of my recent favorites is GNU Jami.
nowadays, one of the greatest challenges was the change in the form factor of the most common computers, now dominated by a duopoly of heavily proprietary suppliers that lock the computers down and seek control over all the programs that users are allowed to install, to the point of prohibiting freedom-respecting software in their app stores. the empire struck back, and this has been a very hard nut to crack. I had a plan in 0G but fate laughed at my plans and made it clear it had different ones for my life.
@lxo mobile software is hostile to user moddability, and its hardware follows laptops in locking down the bootloader except tighter. Alternatives have no chance, unfortunately, even more so now that many websites refuse to remain websites on a mobile browser and push the app instead.
Neither GNU nor 0G can be expected to surmount these. Thankful even if just websites remain, with open laptops to access them on.
I still think 0G and GNU could provide us with a way out if people were to use their dissatisfaction with the growing pile of enshittified stuff to migrate en masse to an alternative that enabled them to run the stuff they want on hardware that's not locked-down and that doesn't track their every move; make and install and run and share apps of their choice like we did on PCs back in the day. it's the only way out AFAICT, but (i) we don't really have that kind of hardware available and affordable all over, and (ii) I see no evidence that people would even get to know about such an escape route. now, crossing subthreads, I don't think pursuing it is hubris either 😉
we can't count on websites remaining available. banking in Brazil has moved on, for one, and government is doing so. lots of "mandatory" communication platforms (WhatsApp, I'm looking at you, but thinking of Signal as well) are also (at least in part) locked to mobile devices. we're surrounded, and they know it.
@lxo oh, GNU and 0G are definitely not hubris! It is disheartening to hear websites have already started going away. BTW, #DeltaChat and #MonoclesChat have a leg up at this with in-chat #WebXDC apps.
now, IIUC its history, it started elsewhere, and then it was contributed to GNU. it would probably not make much sense for GNU to reject that kind of contribution. if people want to do that kind of computing (programming in an Eiffel-like language), they should be able to do that in freedom, and that's what GNU aims for. but that gripe doesn't seem to bear much relationship with the point of the blog post, does it? if it does, I couldn't see the connection.
@lxo it was more about Sather, less about GNU, an example I wanted to call hubris-driven social initiative (no real need out there). I think the sort of social change that has democratic impediments probably is hubris rather than an actual alternative.
I agree GNU wasn't hubris-driven, and also that it succeeded. I never understood why people expected it to solve later challenges too! At best, GNU could have explicitly supported others tackling those challenges, like the #4opens criteria.
I don't think it's fair to label Sather as hubris. The way Rust is pushed is more like it, because Ada is already there. But even when it comes to Sather, we're looking at it from an advantage point of hindsight. When you start working on something that could be really useful if it gets adopted, but for whatever reason it isn't, one might think it shouldn't even have been tried, but truth is that we never know what is going to gain adoption. If whatever fails to gain it gets labeled as hubris, you're teaching people never to try, never to take such risks. There was great potential in Sather, just as there was great potential in the Hurd. The potentials were not fully realized, but that doesn't translate to hubris, they were and are worth the shot.
Just like drives against enslavement have never been hubris, eve if they haven't quite succeeded everywhere.
@lxo To explain my Sather-bashing bent of mind, I would rank project ideas by need in the GNU era and see if the needy ones got worked on.
A C compiler, libc, either Hurd or Linux, desktop environments, code forges. I think the first 2 worked out well (for society, but also for corporates). Maybe it should have been HaikuOS for the 3rd (better suited to society)! GNUstep was the right way for the 4th, since Apple didn't (couldn't) trip up libobjc. I guess it was a problem of plenty on the 5th.
@lxo it is a healthy success rate for a volunteer-driven movement!
But Sather et al never fitted into the big picture. And there were a multitude of them in free s/w, mimicing the scratch-an-itch nature of OSS. All that volunteer energy organized towards, say, GNUstep or Haiku might have made a difference; they could have written GNUstep(-only) apps in Sather/SmartEiffel/GNU Smalltalk. This not happening is what I was terming hubris, a lack of the care that made big parts of GNU work.
@lxo I think such care seems to have great advantages down the road. e.g. Emacs packages simply have no equivalent.
for one, diversity and the choices that come with it are a big part of what makes free software attractive to me. if we were to focus on a few things, we wouldn't have that. and if we focused on one thing and another turned out to succeed, what then?
and then, there's the issue of herding cats. even if we tried to set a focus, GNU is made up of volunteers: chief GNUisance, committees, workgroups, maintainers, contributors, it's all volunteers. it's amazing when we can get them to align on any set of guidelines. an inspiring vision can get you so far, and so can good examples, but ultimately people will contribute what they fancy, what makes sense to them, and our choice is between accepting or rejecting it. unless it's clearly misaligned, rejecting contributions is usually not the greatest stance to take IMHO.
exploring multiple fronts may seem inefficient, but it makes sense as hedging; single focus seems to only work under authoritarian regimes, which GNU couldn't really be. dealing with volunteers is a lot more like bargaining than directing, as useful as directing might be.
@lxo a long-winded way of suggesting that constructive initiatives should start at where people were before destructive initiatives took hold. GNU seems to have done exactly that in the Lisp Machine times. What else has done that since?