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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

#151

Post by varjag »

feld wrote: post #141
kazinator wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1994 I did contract work for a serious businesses that ran commercial pay-for-click information website that ran fabulously on Linux, 1.2.x kernels. Since I first started using Linux in 1993 (0.99 patch level 12), it has always been a functioning kernel.

Anyone can write a functioning kernel. The question is if it provides all the functionality required to run complex modern software -- especially big databases, which was pretty much your defacto benchmark back then. "Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks wi…

I personally know at least a dozen Linux kernel contributors. Some of them are among the most competent, prolific and enthusiastic developers out there who would code until their fingertips bleed. Most work or worked at the usual suspects, yes, including Oracle.

It's the first time however I hear anyone claiming as much credit. Oracle didn't even start dabbling with Linux until 21st century, and it was already a decade old project dominating Internet server deployments at that point.

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

#152

Post by bifrost »

kazinator wrote: post #110
ktRolster wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In 1994 I did contract work for a serious businesses that ran commercial pay-for-click information website that ran fabulously on Linux, 1.2.x kernels. Since I first started using Linux in 1993 (0.99 patch level 12), it has always been a functioning kernel.

Thats pretty relative to be honest. I remember using a variety of Linuxes back then and being pretty unhappy with the results. Stability was barely a possibility. Compared to SunOS it was like Windows 3.x

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

#153

Post by MrTonyD »

feld wrote: post #141
kazinator wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1994 I did contract work for a serious businesses that ran commercial pay-for-click information website that ran fabulously on Linux, 1.2.x kernels. Since I first started using Linux in 1993 (0.99 patch level 12), it has always been a functioning kernel.

Anyone can write a functioning kernel. The question is if it provides all the functionality required to run complex modern software -- especially big databases, which was pretty much your defacto benchmark back then. "Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks wi…

Exactly. When I started doing the port of Oracle to Linux I had been reading the newsgroups - and they had been claiming POSIX compatibility. But system calls were missing many options, and entire sections of library code were missing. I'd run POSIX compatibility testing, so I knew that something didn't make sense. I kept posting to the news groups - mentioning that I was trying to port some software and hoping that they would notice my Oracle email address and take me seriously. Eventually, after trying several branches, somebody admitted that they had never actually run the POSIX suite, since it was too expensive. As long as you only wanted to do simple programs, Linux was fine. It was nowhere near being able to run Oracle, and it was nowhere near being able to run it well (with any of the then-modern features such as async I/O or direct memory paths or scheduling for long runnning processes or efficient large memory allocations.) It was a toy.

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

#154

Post by vidarh »

bifrost wrote: post #152
kazinator wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1994 I did contract work for a serious businesses that ran commercial pay-for-click information website that ran fabulously on Linux, 1.2.x kernels. Since I first started using Linux in 1993 (0.99 patch level 12), it has always been a functioning kernel.

Thats pretty relative to be honest. I remember using a variety of Linuxes back then and being pretty unhappy with the results. Stability was barely a possibility. Compared to SunOS it was like Windows 3.x

I had a bunch of Linux servers in the mid 90's that we only rebooted once in 3 years, because of an office move. I'm sure there were ways of making Linux crash back then, but stability was easy as long as you got hardware that was known to work.

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

#155

Post by Animats »

tanker wrote: post #129
kardashev wrote: post #87

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. --------------------------------------------------…

Consumers are like water seeking the path of least resistance. It takes lots of engineers to reduce the resistance. Someone pays these engineers. That money comes from the users. Users don't like to actually pay for things if there is a free alternative, so users pay indirectly with their information. A Facebook clone wouldn't pull many users due to network effects. I think decentralization is opposed to network effe…

The open source social crowd does not get this at all. Federated social networks exist, and their user-facing sides suck.

Here's the home page for joining Diaspora.[1]

Here's the home page for joining Urbit.[2]

Here's the home page for joining GNU Social.[3]

Any questions?

[1] https://joindiaspora.com/ [2] http://urbit.org/ [3] https://gnu.io/social/

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

#156

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #75
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

That's the current percentage of professionals, which is likely to increase. It doesn't include many "programmers" whose occupation is listed under engineering or finance or management or security, or anyone who does it as a hobby instead of an occupation.

And why do you expect the students and retirees who constitute the non-working half of the population to have a different long-term composition?

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

#157

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Ace17 wrote: post #113
kardashev wrote: post #87

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. --------------------------------------------------…

The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies. This simplistic view as a "property", which is a very familiar notion for most of us, confuses people into thinking that they could, and should be able to "own", for example, a joke, an idea for a business, or any k…

> The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

It also lumps together many unrelated things. There is no big trouble with trademarks. Copyright itself isn't even a problem, the problem there is DRM. But software patents are unredeemable. They aren't all the same.

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

#158

Post by davexunit »

Delmania wrote: post #120
davexunit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think so. Canonical has proven to be a poor leader of the free software community.

> I don't really think so. Canonical has proven to be a poor leader of the free software community. Why is that? They set out to make Linux more accessible. If you're complaining about the level of control they exert on Ubuntu, there are good reasons for that.

Ubuntu has been the user friendly introduction to GNU/Linux and free software for many people, it was for me, but in recent years Canonical has made many harmful decisions. They have a purposely unclear trademark policy, have had multiple GPL violations, opted users into sending desktop search data to Amazon, market proprietary SaaS (Landscape, defunct One Cloud, and AFAIK the Snappy server is proprietary), and sell and encourage the use of proprietary software in their Software Center. It's time to move on from Ubuntu.

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

#159

Post by lfowles »

simonh wrote: post #109
bryanlarsen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the software is open source, you can relatively easily find somebody to do it for you for $100/hour or so. That's within the scope of many individuals. $100 000 000 is outside of the scope of pretty much everybody.

Relatively easily. Really. Your solution is for ordinary non technical people to become development managers and hire someone they don't know to do something they don't understand at their own financial risk.

The time even just to come up to speed with a code base at $100/hr is beyond what most people would want to pay to fix a problem.

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

#160

Post by dragonwriter »

Ace17 wrote: post #113
kardashev wrote: post #87

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. --------------------------------------------------…

The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies. This simplistic view as a "property", which is a very familiar notion for most of us, confuses people into thinking that they could, and should be able to "own", for example, a joke, an idea for a business, or any k…

> All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

All "property" is government enforced monopolies, and much of it outside of IP (and especially much of the broader class of intangible personal property of which IP is itself as subclass) is also either temporary or conditional in nature.

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