I don’t feel the FSF’s statement benefits the movement against this bill as much as the EFF or ACLU or Fight for the Future statements.
The FSF is stuck in the 80s on everything - whether it be dealing with Stallman or specifying acceptable ways to load firmware, and has failed to accomplish almost anything since GPLv3 in 2006. And after recent events, I’d almost consider dismissing them from involvement in the movement.
I don't think you understand or appreciate the work that FSF does and the comment about Stallman is irrelevant in this regards. I don't see you advocating for MIT to be closed down.
Bug fixes, sure. They managed to alienate a bunch of people from gcc, which was fun. Their anti-DRM campaign is over a decade old and is running on fumes with no accomplishments.
This is the same organization that when Windows 8 came out, they protested outside Microsoft stores and handed out copies of GNU Trisquel - an OS with only FOSS code back in 2012, which to this day runs on very few systems and likely caused everyone who got copies to look on open source as a buggy flop and actively undermined the cause.
That thread is pretty persuasive, but I don’t know if he’s attacking a straw-man. Sadly, as seen in some comments here, more than a few people have an irrational animosity towards the FSF. Can anyone present a steel-man of the FSF position?
Free software has never been about demanding corporations open source their intellectual property. For example, Stallman didn't bring a bunch of protesters to Digital Equipment Corporation and the Bell System to beg that they relicense PDP and UNIX as GPL. What Stallman did was create an entirely new operating system that is not UNIX which let freedom loving people use UNIX while escaping the restrictions that were imposed upon users of UNIX.
Richard Stallman wrote at length in the past about how he feels it's ethical to use non-free systems to build free systems if there's no viable alternative. But you can only do that if there's a clean division between what you're doing and what the hardware vendors are doing. Unfortunately it's messy in the embedded world. These makers don't abstract the products they build like Intel does. They rely on legal means instead to secure their advantage. While many corporations might view an agreement to access those bits under restrictive terms as a good thing, it can lead an open source dev to feel like the proprietary stuff, which they intend to decouple themselves from and ultimately escape, is instead being rubbed in their faces. No one wants to be constantly reminded of all the freedom they don't have.
So in other words, it's just a compromise. I'm sure if they could find someone willing to manufacture a truly libre phone, they would have used them instead. I think the FSF has a good understanding of the open source developer's needs / wants / desires and this compromise is perfectly in keeping with that. Perhaps one day they'll attain the obvious end game of a libre phone, which would be a ham radio that looks like iphone with unfettered access to ss7. It will be anarchy. https://youtu.be/eXnvTwRBrgc
The FSF is stuck in the 80s on everything - whether it be dealing with Stallman or specifying acceptable ways to load firmware, and has failed to accomplish almost anything since GPLv3 in 2006. And after recent events, I’d almost consider dismissing them from involvement in the movement.