Danny Spitzberg <stationaery@gmail.com> wrote:
> this article <https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/> on the "failure" of free software ran last month (long before the recent scandal) and offers what could be an important wake up call — especially in light of the wild hand-wringing about RMS.

> As we look forward from this RMS fracas, I wonder how other folks here feel about this article.

Well, I am not much aware of that fracas, and probably missed the connection.  From a sideways glance, it looked like yet another malevolent hype started by professional SJWs, completely unrelated to software freedom.  If I am wrong, please enlighten me.

> The following quote feels prescient:
>
> “Free software pioneers like Stallman tended to approach the issue from an individualized perspective, drawn from the 1970s-1980s hacker culture that many of them came from: if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world. This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context.”

I am not that familiar with RMS’s views to say whether a claim that “if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world” may be really attributed to him either.

But if you could change _how_ hackers write software, you could change the world.  Free software + bazaar development is exactly about that, not about quantities.

And I do not observe any failure on that front.   Unfulfilled expectations for immediate and huge success (did anybody really share them?) != failure.