FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software.

It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say.

This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.

Please elaborate in a couple examples how you think one could have done better if suggesting it is straw man. It feels like an effective logical conclusion of what the critiques usually say.

One way would be not having Stallman do the advocacy.

His ideals is just fine. His social manners not so much, and that highly limits the effectiveness.

As someone else posted in the thread earlier, FSF has professional staff that work on PR etc. Please note that it is a small non-profit and they cannot afford a big marketing department, partially because their ideals hinder growth to a huge degree (e.g. even Linus is on record suggesting you should donate to EFF not FSF.) It is not surprising that big corporate donors will also avoid donating when they have pages undermining Netflix, Spotify, Google, FB, even Canonical/Ubuntu and pretty much everyone with deep pockets.

There's no need for any corporate conspiracy. RMS does a good job of looking bad on his own, and the FSF barely shows up on Linux sites. I don't think the likes of Netflix even know the FSF exists at this point, let alone bother allocating any effort towards fighting back.

All FAANGs have lawyers thinking about GPL, copyleft, AGPL, and have policies what to use by default for their own code, so you can be damn sure they are fully aware of FSF and what they are doing when they invest in LLVM and change the default shell to zsh and encourage Apache 2.0. The "Open Source" movement is explicitly a conspiracy to avoid using the term Free Software.

LLVM by the way happened in a good deal because Stallman refused to have GCC dump the AST. This created an area where LLVM could provide extremely valuable functionality which GCC just refused to offer at all.

And with that sort of maneuver, GNU lost exactly what made their stuff popular in the first place: that they provided better tools than what commercial Unix used to come with.