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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

#81

Post by toyg »

davexunit wrote: post #44
legulere wrote: post #12

I think the problem is that the FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The actual situation is that we have two groups that care about different things: Users and developers. Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. They care about restrictions like DRM if it hinders them in doing w…

>FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The FSF does not believe that everyone should be a programmer. Much like freedom of the press matters for those that aren't journalists, freedom of the software matters for those that aren't programmers. I care about the right to repair even though I'm not a car mechanic. >The actual si…

> The tech industry reinforces the "user and developer" separation and I think that's a real shame.

It's also a losing strategy, which is why concepts like dogfooding and support duties exist.

Developers must be users at times, and users have a lot to gain from occasionally being developers (hence all the brouhaha about "learning to code" and so on).

Seeing the world in terms of users and developers is a throwback to 1970s waterfall cathedrals, something the Free Software movement is quite clearly set against.

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

#82

Post by MrTonyD »

gaius wrote: post #6

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

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some earlier work with the existing BSD port to i386 (in particular, memory management had been done in one of the ports, and using that as a starting point was very helpful.) As for GNU - we spent an incredible amount of time fixing bugs in both the C and C++ compilers. Really, GNU wasn't really considered "production worthy" before the NeXT project - and it was more of a toy until we fixed it. Steve was committed to using GNU to try to to compete with Apple based on low cost open source. As a programmer, it wasn't open source that helped us, - we were fixing and helping open source. I've always found it ironic that the open source community ignores the role of the rich and powerful in allowing them to succeed. (Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel. It was missing many system calls and a lot of functionality. Speaking as a kernel engineer, Linux was almost useless. Larry decided to use Linux as a way to price compete against Microsoft - shouldn't be too surprising since Larry and Steve were good friends and shared ideas. I wrote the original white paper for Larry analyzing the state of the Linux kernel.)

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

#83

Post by 794CD01 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #71
dasil003 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's nothing wrong with selling hardware and software separately. This is the kind of laziness that gave Windows a desktop monopoly.

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

#84

Post by vetinari »

simonh wrote: post #31
deng wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact if Linux had never happened Solaris would probably still be around and we'd be arguing about how much OS X owes to Solaris Hardly. How would have Apple developed a full userland and development toolchain with the resources it had at that time? That's exactly the point of the article: OS X wouldn't be where it is without Linux (read: GNU/Linux), not because it was technically the best Unix (it wasn't), but b…

You do know that OS X was just a rebranding of NeXTSTEP which dates back to 1985 and so had all those things (dev tool chain, userland, etc) 6 years before Linux started, right? How much did NeXTSTEP owe to Linux, say in 1990?

NexTSTEP didn't have a lot of stuff that OSX had. Samba comes to mind. Another are autofs, bash, curl, less, libxml2, libxslt, screen and countless others.

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

#85

Post by ethbro »

davexunit wrote: post #44
legulere wrote: post #12

I think the problem is that the FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The actual situation is that we have two groups that care about different things: Users and developers. Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. They care about restrictions like DRM if it hinders them in doing w…

>FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The FSF does not believe that everyone should be a programmer. Much like freedom of the press matters for those that aren't journalists, freedom of the software matters for those that aren't programmers. I care about the right to repair even though I'm not a car mechanic. >The actual si…

I think in practice it's a user / tinkerer / developer trichotomy. Or to put it another way blind user / configuring user / developer.

With the ability to take a change someone else has made and apply it to something you purchased (e.g. Cyanogenmod) being exercised far more frequently than individual development.

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

#86

Post by astrodust »

massysett wrote: post #78

"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.

Precisely. Why do you need to stay in a perpetual state of war? What's wrong with peace?

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

#87

Post by kardashev »

From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr:

Free software won. Yay! However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services? Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized. Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty. Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again.

-------------------------------------------------------

Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations. Guess who lobbies to create these laws in the first place? (It's not the little guy) The biggest problem is Intellectual Property (IP). Because of it we have DRM and many companies have very literal monopolies (enforced by government) on things. Apple has a patent on rounded rectangles for heaven's sake.

What we need is a decentralization of power, and a turn towards distributed systems. The best way to do that will be to eliminate IP. That will take some time, but we should do it gradually. By allowing people to "copy" it will create competition and weaken the monopoly-like position many of these companies hold. Power will fragment and decentralize. That should be the goal.

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

#88

Post by astrodust »

lmm wrote: post #55

We lost Linux. The big thing about Linux was that you could swap out pieces of it for better ones if you wanted. "Linux is about choice" - vi or emacs, KDE or Gnome and so on. OSX doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. And in these days of systemd, Linux doesn't even have that any more.

If you hate systemd that much make your own distribution with blackjackd and hookersd instead.

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

#89

Post by ktRolster »

MrTonyD wrote: post #82
gaius wrote: post #6

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

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel.

Seriously?

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

#90

Post by fit2rule »

vetinari wrote: post #79
stormbrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not strictly true, it was quite possible to write code on OSX that could be run on Solaris and Linux easily enough. You just had to not depend on autotools too much, and understand how to use the OSX linker/libraries properly in your project.

(Disclaimer: I am one of those programmers who only switched to Apple because of the tiBook, which was a damned sexy Unix workstation in spite of the fact it was also a damned sexy laptop.. and I used it for developing apps for Linux and SGI Irix without much hassle.)

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