April 22nd, 2019

The Great GNU/Linux Division

With or without the nod to GNU, desktop Linux is still the same under the hood

“Nonsense prevails, modesty fails

Grace and virtue turn into stupidity

While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise.”

– Elvis Costello, “All This Useless Beauty”

When I started selling articles regularly, I was careful to always talk about free software and GNU/Linux. The time was a few years into the millennium, not that many years after the term “open source” was coined as a more market-friendly term than “free software,” and whether it would win out was still in doubt. Moreover, the Free Software Foundation’s argument that the GNU Project deserved equal billing with the Linux kernel made perfect sense to me. Eventually, though, I had to admit that what was originally a noble cause had become a lost cause.

Unfortunately, that’s a realization that has yet to hit a small cadre of purists. You know who I mean — those whose main contribution to FOSS is to attack other advocates of the cause they claim to support and aggravate everyone with their punctiliousness.

My objection is not based on the idea that using proprietary software should be overlooked in the name of software freedom. Proprietary software was never part of the context of software freedom. I suspect that the paradox of tolerance applies: just as freedom of speech cannot tolerate those who speak against free speech, so software freedom cannot tolerate proprietary software. At best, proprietary software is a sometimes necessary evil for those who need to interact with other people, and using it should only be tolerated until a free-licensed alternative is available.

Rather, the continued insistence on purity of language seems a willful denial of the obvious fact that times have moved on. The days are long past when free software advocates refused to go to Linuxworld because it wasn’t “GNU/Linux World.” For example, six years ago I met Eben Moglen, the framer of the GNU General Public License, version 3, and the founder, president, and executive director of Software Freedom Law Center, at non-FOSS and non-GNU (but open source) OSCON — which shouldn’t be surprising, because many of his clients probably talk about open source.

When John Sullivan, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, has a Twitter account, and FSF employees and long term contributors can be talked to on Facebook, it seems clear that the old standards for advocacy no longer apply. Probably few of the free software supporters on social media prefer such sites, but if they want to communicate they need to go where the people are. To condemn them for a lack of purity seems short-sighted — what should matter is their contributions over the decades.

Prescriptive Vs. Descriptive Language

Another reason for my change of language use was that I view grammar as descriptive, not prescriptive. By that, I mean that as a working writer I maintain that proper usage is based on how the majority use the language. It is not my role to tell people how they should talk or write. Instead, I need to write so that most people will understand — and by about 2009, I was tired of constantly explaining why I used “GNU/Linux,” or that what I referred to was what they call “Linux.” Similarly, while I was aware of the difference between the philosophies of free software and open source, I recognized that they had more in common than they had differences, and began to refer to “free and open source software” — which I always abbreviated to “FOSS” after the first mention in an article.

Admittedly, I was not pleased at such changes. But the battle was lost, and I was not going to be like Bonnie Prince Charlie and spend the rest of my life drunk and begging cash and bemoaning my permanent exile and the fact that the world had moved on. Richard Stallman might believe in prescriptive grammar, as evidenced by his refusal to accept “they” as the indefinite personal pronoun and recommendation for artificial pronouns, but if you look at history, prescriptive grammar has rarely — if ever — won out against common usage. To keep insisting on usages that stopped making sense a decade ago is only to add another hopeless cause to prescriptivism’s long list of rear guard actions. Nothing is more frustrating than futility.

Missing the Trends

Still, the purity testers would only be a minor annoyance, except that they can be harmful to the cause that they claim to support. By that, I mean that their dissections of other people’s behavior causes flame wars among people who ought to be allies. Their pettiness and lack of respect distract those who are adding to the FOSS ecosystem through code, documentation, or publicity.

But what really matters is that the insistence on purity often results in overlooking new technical developments that need to be addressed. For instance, in the last ten years, while Richard Stallman has dwelled on what he insists is the proper use of language, the organization he created, and its supporters, have been extremely slow to address the problems of new technology. Cloud applications, social media, encryption, open hardware — all these trends have been ignored by free software as a whole, long after the rest of the technology sector realized that these things were here to stay.

Admittedly, in the last few years the FSF has started to respond to these changes. Yet I can’t help thinking that software freedom would now be much better protected if the responses had happened several years earlier. Too often, worrying about terminology has had a higher priority than responding to new developments. That delay has only weakened free software as a whole.

Living in a Divided World

I have not abandoned the language of the purists altogether. For instance, I still refer to my distribution of choice as “Debian GNU/Linux,” because that is what project members prefer. Similarly, if an FSF employee asks that I use their preferred term, I will usually agree if I think the story I’m covering is one in which people should know the difference.

What has changed is my refusal to be overly-concerned about such matters of language. While language issues were worth discussing 20 years ago, the inability to move beyond them is obsessive and crankish today. If the purists really want to help free software, they would be more useful contributing to the project of their choice than clinging a cause that was lost years ago.

Editor’s note: FOSS Force’s policy is to generally use the term “Linux” to describe desktop Linux distributions. However, when the term might be confused for referring to other non-GNU Linux-based operating systems such as Chrome OS, the term GNU/Linux is used.

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