this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Can you elaborate a bit? The blog post is a tad overdramatic but doesn't seem to have anything particularly bad in it.
TL;DR: Rant about the FSF as a whole and why they annoy me with their puritanism
The problem I have with the FSF is their stance on this "good enough" solution is, as always, that it cannot be accepted. Their "purity" is pointless as I don't find it at all useful in furthering free software, while Anubis is doing actual work against mass scraping by AI companies, their choice is to outright disavow it because "it acts like malware", and performing "useless computation". And then they have the gall to beg for even more donations when the solution to their DDOS problems is right there. I hate them for being so ineffective at what they're supposed to be doing. "The same calculations as cryptominers", fuck off.
It's so fucking annoying having to deal with their puritanism, especially after I tried their ways of running 100% free software as by their own guidelines! Genuinely I need to do more investigating on this part, but they really do seem like a Trotskyist org to me more and more and I'm glad I'm out of fanboying over them.
I mean, Anubis would do a pretty bad job in their case anyways, and their attitude kind of makes practical sense there. Almost all code fetching tools (from git to ftp to curl) don't run any external code (and I think we can agree it would be a horrible idea to do so); as such, proof-of-work solutions like Anubis won't work for code hosting (which is what the article is about).
But yeah I agree that in more human-oriented use-cases Anubis is great. Still, I can also see FSF's point that it's somewhat close to what an annoying proprietary system would do, even if I think it's a good compromise given the circumstances of the modern web.
You in particular don't need to deal with them in any way at all. The code they host is free software and has plenty of other mirrors all over the web. If you want to contribute to any of the projects for which they are hosting upstreams you can almost always just send an email with your patch to authors directly. Save your anger for capitalists.
I don't really care about whether Anubis would make a good use case for them, the problem is that even if it did they wouldn't have used it as stated in the post. I get angry and irrational easy when I see bullshit about things that I care about, and that tends to me overlooking actually important parts.
I'll keep interacting in a way that points out "hey maybe this isn't the best course of action" because I will keep caring, even if I hate them. My hate must be pointed out, shown why it exists. Because even if I hate capitalism and capitalists, I hate ineffectual action even more.
It won't work through patches, if the rot is fundamental. I'll probably contribute to other projects, Libreboot is now more enticing after Leah cut away from their type of bullshit.