> nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF. It wouldn't be hard. GPL 2.0 hit a better sweet spot than 3.0. Nobody has stepped up to the plate.
Is there a current need for the FSF or alternatives? There's a wide variety of licenses already developed and between GPL2 and 3, LGPLs, AGPL, BSD/MIT, Apache, Mozilla, and normal commercial licenses, plus or minus PATENTS files, I'm not sure we need an organization that is developing another license, plus advocacy, plus developing a collection of fairly unrelated software at this point. I guess you could say the Apache foundation almost does the same thing, although I don't think they did much advocacy to use their license.
Yes, FSF was important, but when it winds down, it will not be replaced by one organization.
I suspect we agree that, in all there world, there might be literally a single-digit number of people who would found the FSF. If it doesn't look like a good idea now, it looks like an even worse idea when Stallman did it. Nobody believed there was a possibility of it working, let alone that there could possibly be a need.
The issue I have is the people who are confident that cancelling that person is a good idea. It seems like a mistake.
Is there a current need for the FSF or alternatives? There's a wide variety of licenses already developed and between GPL2 and 3, LGPLs, AGPL, BSD/MIT, Apache, Mozilla, and normal commercial licenses, plus or minus PATENTS files, I'm not sure we need an organization that is developing another license, plus advocacy, plus developing a collection of fairly unrelated software at this point. I guess you could say the Apache foundation almost does the same thing, although I don't think they did much advocacy to use their license.
Yes, FSF was important, but when it winds down, it will not be replaced by one organization.