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

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

#71

Post by eli_gottlieb »

dasil003 wrote: post #48
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

I'm with you except the very last assertion: > Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products. I understand DRM in great detail (as CTO of a streaming film company), and though I would in principal like to reject it, I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy. Theoretically if all the customers stood up and boycotted DRM we could have an ef…

As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my media computer. My friend brought over a Blu-Ray copy of "The Social Network". It turned out that we could not play the film in the drive without paying an additional fee for a proprietary, DRM-enabled Blu-Ray video player application.

This is particularly bullshit because I paid for the hardware. They could have just built the appropriate crypto keys into there. Hell, they could have built a whole update-and-revocation scheme into the drive's firmware, something that much smaller and weaker devices than Blu-Ray drives can still afford in their electronics and firmware.

They could have built it all so that buying the hardware would enable me to play the media, no further questions asked. They did not need to sell me a piece of hardware that is outright unusable for its intended purpose without further payment for proprietary software whose primary job is just to license the appropriate crypto keys.

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

#72

Post by batbomb »

Retric wrote: post #14
pvg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache was a fork of NCSA httpd, not CERN httpd.

NCSA httpd also predates Linux. NCSA httpd released version 0.1 was June 1991. http://www.w3.org/Daemon/Features.html Amusingly: http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_do... "3.5) Why doesn't NCSA HTTPd work on my Linux system? NCSA HTTPd is not crippled. Linux may be crippled. NCSA HTTPd uses a standard BSD4 and SYSV feature known as file descriptor passing. NCSA HTTPd supports both the BSD and SY…

That's CERN httpd release notes for 0.1 @ 1991, not NCSA. NCSA didn't join the web until much later.

In fact, SLAC was first to the web in the USA, and Marc had originally approached my boss, who wrote MidasWWW, to see if he'd want to collaborate on the web browser which would become Mosaic.

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

#73

Post by qbrass »

cm3 wrote: post #53
gaius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Samba IIRC predates Linux too Not quite, actually. Samba => sometime in 1992 Linux => October 1991

http://www.rxn.com/services/faq/smb/samba.history.txt

It wasn't invented for Linux, but Samba exists today because of it.

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

#74

Post by vetinari »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #37
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

** > There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. RE: 1 - Yes they do. Look at your little sister/brother/niece/nephew aged 13-18. They want to gossip and flirt on Instagram and take selfies as a way to promot…

Peugeot will a well-known brand in Europe (French, after all). Chevy, on the other hand ;)

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

#75

Post by jsprogrammer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #52
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

> An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. Government agencies aren't even the interesting example. The argument we usually get is that not everybody is going to be a programmer. Which, OK, sure, but maybe 10-20% of people are going to…

10-20% seems high; even right now, programmers make up about 1% of the US workforce and computer and mathematical occupations combined account for less than 3% of the US workforce (halve the numbers to get percentage of US population).

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

#76

Post by ethbro »

stormbrew wrote: post #23
deng wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has no lineage in common with Linux. That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

Also most of the early adopters of osx that I knew at the time were actively seeking out a unixy desktop because they worked on software eventually destined for Linux servers and didn't like the available desktop options for Linux. Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

This is a critical point. There are probably people on this board who were born after Ubuntu/Linux desktop UX received attention.

For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

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

#77

Post by thinkcontext »

zanny wrote: post #2

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, an…

> No killer feature or guarantee of privacy or distributed solution is going to break the network effect of Facebook or Twitter now.

This is a key point. The reason free software and the open Internet have been able to achieve what they have was due to their first mover advantage. TCP/IP, email, and Linux itself all benefited from network effects. Absent that we would have likely wound up with something like AOL owned by a Baby Bell.

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

#78

Post by massysett »

"So what's our next fight?"

I don't have a next fight. If I'm going to fight for something, it's going to be something a whole lot more important than computer software. Free software is here to stay. Success has occurred. I'm not going to grope around for another fight. Instead I'm going to harness my software freedoms to write software that does what I need it to do.

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

#79

Post by vetinari »

stormbrew wrote: post #23
deng wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has no lineage in common with Linux. That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

Also most of the early adopters of osx that I knew at the time were actively seeking out a unixy desktop because they worked on software eventually destined for Linux servers and didn't like the available desktop options for Linux. Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

In the beginning (10.0 - 10.2 timeframe), OSX was pretty much broken if you wanted to work on software that was destined for Linux. Even the existing software was PITA to get running on OSX, you were fighting both autotools and OSX linker and libraries at once.

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

#80

Post by legulere »

dasil003 wrote: post #48
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

I'm with you except the very last assertion: > Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products. I understand DRM in great detail (as CTO of a streaming film company), and though I would in principal like to reject it, I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy. Theoretically if all the customers stood up and boycotted DRM we could have an ef…

DRM doesn't prevent privacy, it only professionalizes it. At some point the data is decrypted and crackers will take the data from there. You can only make copying harder, but not impossible. Pretty soon after release everything lands on the pirate bay.

The only people that are hindered are legitimate costumers. The playback might not work, because the monitor/projector because it doesn't support HDCP. With movies on Blurays they can't make copies for backups/to play the movie without a disc spinning/to play the movie on a device without a bluray drive. My sister cuts music pieces together for dancing, you can't do that with drm'd music. Pirating media often is hassle-free compared to the legal way.

The problem for customers is that compared to buying analog media or digital media without DRM you are restricted to simple playback and also in certified settings (certain programs, devices etc.). With streamed media the issue is not as bad, as you can compare it more to renting, but there are also issues (e.g. I need crappy silverlight to use amazon prime video in Safari).

My hope is that movie and series content owners will wake up the same way as music studios and book publishers. Selling music without DRM didn't hurt the music industry. Selling ebooks only with DRM led to the strong market position of Amazon with the Kindle.

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