Pictured: deep-nesting in mailing list form.

Not pictured: This thread actually goes all the way back to mid-october.

In particular, quotes from this email have been making the rounds recently

as a hypothetical example: if i live in a territory that permits slavery, and by law i am granted sole ownership of the products of that forced labor, and then i use that to create contributions to gnu emacs, complete with copyright assignment, and it is technically correct, and, above all, you, the emacs maintainers are aware of how this was produced, would it be ethical to accept those contributions?

Our answer must be YES.

Any other answer is a first step towards splitting our community along the many lines of political and ideological divides that have nothing to do with software freedoms. Right now we have contributors from all over the world, despite the differences in their regimes and political systems, differences in ideologies, and even in the very interpretation of the notion of “freedom”. You are suggesting to subject the contributors to some examination of the principles they uphold, the ethics of their day-to-day activities, their views on matters of policies and important international events, etc. This will immediately fracture our community into many different enclaves. And that’s exactly my point, and the main reason why I must reject the “Human Emacs” initiative, as it is presented to us.

Dawg, the “splitting our community” ship has sailed. It’s fucking gone. The battle lines throughout the entire ecosystem of Free Software have been growing more and more entrenched for months. Dozens of projects have already been forked. Countless people have abandoned software that they are familiar with and have been using for decades to reduce their exposure to slop. A lot of maintainers have ditched projects they’ve contributed to for years to find another niche for themselves, or leave Free Software entirely. You have one of the most active channels on libera.chat discussing and preparing for a fork depending on the GNU project’s decision here. It is time to choose a side, or be swept into eternal irrelevance. Even the libertarian dweebs in Rush understood this.

it is my worry that the fsf and gnu’s apparent narrow focus on legality and technical correctness in the framing of llm contributions ignores the much larger issues with supporting human freedom, and, as such, becomes hypocritcal: free software is free in name only when it is used for subjugation or created from subjugation.

There’s no hypocrisy here, only the realization and understanding that we cannot fix everything in this world, even if we tried, not via developing and distributing software. So we limit ourselves to solving a few of the problems, and leave the rest to other communities. (Of course, people who contribute to Emacs can well be members of those other communities as well.)

this example is hypothetical and not intended to display any real or imagined link to how llms are created and operated. it is only intended as a philosophical point on how a narrow focus on license legality and technical correctness are, at times, inadequate in the pursuit of the larger goal of liberty for all humanity.

The Free Software movement doesn’t pursue the goal of “liberty for all humanity”. If you think it does, you are gravely mistaken. Our goals are different, and are well described elsewhere.

Well, maybe it fucking should!

As I wrote on Mastodon, you couldn’t ask for a more concise summary of why the movement has failed. Why the entire world is being crushed under the boot of surveillance tech, and its applications in marketing, propaganda, social manipulation, and weapons systems, while one percent of the computing public plays around with their linux distros like toy trains.