We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

Meanwhile, Windows is still pretty much the only desktop OS for 99% of people, Nvidia has stolen large-scale compute with a holistically proprietary CUDA, and Google has hijacked the ecosystem and culture with Android and ChromeOS (the former by having vendors use the incredibly destructive model of forking the kernel and stuffing it with binary blobs rendering it stuck to that version on whatever device you have, and the later replacing userspace with Google's web properties exclusively).

> So it's hard for a generative OS to support whole stacks of hardware below and software above.

Is only true because of how Google broke Linux. If we had gotten all these garbage phone vendors to upstream open drivers rather than shove proprietary bullshit into every Android handset, Cyanogenmod would not be the only group even remotely capable of keeping up with legions of arbitrary kernels with tons of broken proprietary bits littering the market.

This post is more about the mindshare effect Facebook and Google properties have on people, but there is actually and honestly nothing we can do about that at this point. No killer feature or guarantee of privacy or distributed solution is going to break the network effect of Facebook or Twitter now. As long as we keep the social network alternatives like ostatus and diaspora alive and we can claw long and hard to pull some users there just to keep them afloat we can't really expect to do more.

But we can do a lot more on the hardware front. We are still crippled by proprietary firmwares everywhere[1], rampant with backdoors, and there is no mindshare there to worry about - all it takes is a concerted effort and focus and within several hardware generations we can reverse this dire course, and the consumers do not even need to notice it happening. But if we can get at least some viable computing platform without any trade secreted proprietary freedom-crippled bits that could be spying on you, stealing your info, or just not operating how you want, we could at least sit in our silo and preach from a hardened rather than rickety tower of ethics.

[1] http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-April/01...

PS: Considering this is about the Linux anniversary on Linux Journal, it is worth mentioning the gross negligence in enforcing the GPL with Linux has contributed a lot to the ability for corporate market dominators to seize control. All those Nvidia CUDA servers depend on the passivity in addressing Nvidia's proprietary kernel modules, and all those Android phones depend on the apathy of Linux developers to ever go after the hardware manufacturers for obviously and blatantly violating the GPL on almost every Android handset by forking the kernel, integrating proprietary driver software, and then going so far as to modify the free parts in some ways incompatible with upstream to make it work with the proprietary parts. The day Linux GPL enforcement is a thing is one step closer to curtailing the power abuses by many of these large enterprises over their users because that is actually a straightforward way to do it.

I can appreciate why you are expressing the negativity you are... but that's not going to help us either.

So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something.

So, instead of deciding to do nothing but accept this as inevitable... do something. Contribute to Diaspora. Convince your friends and family to use email instead of Facebook. Explain to others outside of the HN echo chamber why the world we're heading towards is bad, and how to change it.

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.*

Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

It would be more accurate to say Linux thrived because of them! Samba IIRC predates Linux too, as does the GNU project, Apache is based on the original httpd which was built on... Drum roll... NeXTStep. In 1990, before Linux existed.

I page through, knowing already that there's a problem, to see what he's thinking in terms of solutions.

At the bottom I catch a reference to ProjectVRM. I follow the link and what I find is all bloggy and vague. If there's anything concrete in there, it's not brought together in front of the new visitor.