Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

fosspost.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#61

Post by thinkfurther »

Boothroid wrote: post #55
geff82 wrote: post #33

I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free. As software does not get consumed, everyone's assets rise.

Because what we have now has no socialist elements? Last time I checked the US military was a pretty large part of the economy, and I would hardly class that as a purely capitalist endeavour.

The military shifts a whole lot of tax payer money to private corporations. And as Smedley Butler pointed out, without the impetus of private corporations there'd be a whole lot less war for the benefit of private corporations. From the taxpayer perspective, a bomb dropped into the middle of nowhere is just wasted money, a bomb dropped on people in a war of aggression is money wasted on murder. From the standpoint of the corporation the sold the bomb, both are highly profitable. And that's even before we get into the the spree of fucking countries to allow access to US corporations.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#62

Post by Asooka »

scandox wrote: post #51

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but…

> So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising.

I'm afraid that such an organisation will gradually be taken over by people looking to make money more than to help open-source software, and in the end we'll end up worse off than not having anything, because most donations to that organisation will get used for "internal expenses".

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#63

Post by s0l1dsnak3123 »

scandox wrote: post #51

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but…

I just donated to Arch after reading your comment as I've been using Arch for well over 7 years now, and it's by far my favourite Linux distribution.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#64

Post by b4ux1t3 »

fny wrote: post #52
jordigh wrote: post #6

This is a starry-eyed blog post. I like it, and I miss not having more of these. We need more starry-eyed dreamers because they get good things done. I just spent some time with the Debian crew at the last Debconf here in Mtl. I've always liked their attitude and I love their operating system -- and so does everyone else who has ever created a Debian derivative. Others at Debconf felt the same. Bradley Kuhn even said…

Why would someone have to apologize for being a free software supporter? I consider my FSF membership a point of pride.

I'm all for free software. Really, I am. I just have a problem with the idea that free software is absolutely the only way to go. I have no problem with people who refuse to run non-free software. I have a problem when they insist that I'm doing it wrong by running Windows.

Sent from my Fedora-running laptop.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#65

Post by lin_lin »

scandox wrote: post #51

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but…

Haha! I didn't believe you about them leaving Ireland so tried it for myself and sure enough you're right! Pathetic. I see San Marino, Vatican City and Monaco et al are represented... guess, they're big players.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#66

Post by marrs »

Asooka wrote: post #62
scandox wrote: post #51

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but…

> So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising. I'm afraid that such an organisation will gradually be taken over by people looking to make money more than to help open-source software, and in the end we'll end up worse off than not having anything, because most donations to that organisation will get used for "internal expenses".

I think this attitude is holding FOSS back. The most successful projects are the ones that are funded: Linux, Blender, and Ubuntu to name 3. On the other hand we have projects like Gimp, which steadily makes excellent progress and gets better with every release, but the rate of change is glacial because the team are all working on it in their spare time.

That's not to say that the motivation of profit can't also be corrupting. Gnome 3.0 and the associated libs was a complete disaster IMO, and a lot of the stupidity came IMO from a fear that Windows Vista would leave the Linux desktop behind, but the net gain of monetary investment is clear to me.

The silly thing is, I'd much rather pay for software that is free than software that is proprietary. I won't use Adobe Suite on principle, especially now that it is subscription only, but I'd pay a subscription to Gimp in a heartbeat. I may not be in the majority, but I'm sure there are enough of us that we would generate enough income to make the difference.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#67

Post by b4ux1t3 »

atomlib wrote: post #31

I wish it was that attractive to just switch from “expensive and evil proprietary software” as the author suggests. 1. The article claims that Microsoft Office 365 is $100 a year. In reality it's about $70, home license for up to 5 users is $80. 2. The article does not mention that every Office 365 user gets bunch of additional services. For example, a tebibyte of space in Microsoft OneDrive for each user, 60 Skype m…

> But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.

Er. . .no, that's not true. AV and AM are very important to this day. You just don't have to pay any money to get them, between things like AVG, Avast, and MalwareBytes. These aren't Free as in freedom, but they are Free as in beer for very reliable AV.

And on an enterprise network, you're probably going to be pretty well served with an enterprise edition of Symantec Endpoint Protection (or its equivalent elsewhere), which lets enterprise solutions like BlueCoat ProxySG and CAS prevent problems for your users.

AV is good. Don't not install AV just because some of it costs money.

I largely agree with you, but I am a stickler for AV. If you'd like more of an explanation of why it's important, feel free to ask.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#68

Post by roberthensing »

peterwwillis wrote: post #17

Free non-commercial and non-free commercial software are both wildly different products in practice. I installed some package recently that fucked with my X config, or my kernel modules, I don't know. But my hybrid graphics is now fucked and I have crazy artifacts all over my screen. The default install of this distro does not result in a working config, and I had to spend three days to figure out the insane set of s…

Doesn't solve your support problem, but...

Re "revert to a last known good working system state": some distributions provides this capability. For example, in NixOS, your system is similar to a git repository in the sense that every package is identified by a unique hash. You can choose to boot any version of your system configuration until you decide to have it garbage collected.

If you're not interested in the "declarative, reliable, DevOps-friendly"[1] approach of Nix, you may 'emulate' this behavior a bit with the bulkier approach of snapshotting.

If you're into LISPs and FOSS-only systems, you may prefer Guix instead of Nix.

[1]: https://nixos.org

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#69

Post by jordigh »

b4ux1t3 wrote: post #64
fny wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone have to apologize for being a free software supporter? I consider my FSF membership a point of pride.

I'm all for free software. Really, I am. I just have a problem with the idea that free software is absolutely the only way to go. I have no problem with people who refuse to run non-free software. I have a problem when they insist that I'm doing it wrong by running Windows. Sent from my Fedora-running laptop.

I don't think you're doing anyone any harm by running Windows. I just wish you didn't have to.

Re: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

#70

Post by VLM »

scandox wrote: post #51

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years. They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on. And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but…

Careful with re-invention. I was going to suggest SPI, but funny enough they're already on the list at:

https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/

I see the arch linux web page links to "click to pledge" service as reported, which apparently is extremely limited in legal coverage area, but the SPI Inc web page for arch links to a paypal link, and paypal seems to "work" in most countries on the planet.

Back when it took 5000 bitcoins to buy a pizza and my 486 software miner was generating about 100 coins per week, I donated 5 BTC to the FSF who promptly wanted no part of the accounting and legal problems so they got rid of my 5 BTC. At the time that 5 BTC was worth like 50 cents but now would fund somewhere around 2 or 3 gradstudent-years of development, Oh Well. Anyway BTC should be a viable transfer mechanism.

Post reply on HN