# An elegy for GNU and RMS | gay robot noises

<https://catgirl.ai/log/elegy-gnu/>

- Host: [catgirl.ai](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/catgirl.ai/)
- Saved: October 3, 2022 (2022-10-03T07:54:38Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d9561d13ce57/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d9561d13ce57.json

## What Jamie wrote

The world owes a lot to GNU and the Free Software Foundation for all it has made happen. I think we need to support, donate, and help these organizations that have gotten us so far, however, I completely agree with Ash on this point:

> There's a saying that generals always fight the previous war. I'm not a military historian, so I can't say how true this is. But I think the FSF is _absolutely_ fighting the free software war of the 80s. The requirement to assign copyright to the FSF for enforcement purposes doesn't make sense in a world where megacorporations that want their own editor they can control have enough resources that they can just write their own. Insisting on not adding functionality because someone evil might use it is pointless when the evil people have enough budget to just write their own compiler.

I've shared previously my own personal story of meeting [Stallman](https://stallman.org) in the 90's when I was at the U of MN. He was completely uninformed on the intersection of the Web and Free Software. While the FSF has done great work for Unix, they have been fighting the previous war for decades and desperately need new leadership to determine how this incredibly mission should be represented in the current era of technology.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT229: Weekly Thing #229 / Time, Zolatron, Maigret](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/229/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://catgirl.ai/log/elegy-gnu/