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What comes after open source

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: What comes after open source

#51

Post by zanny »

steveklabnik wrote: post #30
astazangasta wrote: post #25

>What I am saying is that refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop because there aren’t free drivers helps basically nobody, and only harms yourself. This is wrong. Doing this forces you to confront the deficiencies of free software, the lack of available free software, and strongly encourages you to support development of alternatives. Just like being vegan encourages the growth of a market for vegan product…

I also was strictly vegan for a while, and lost that religion too. For sort of similar reasons! I think it's too focused on the ethics of one part of the situation, and misses the whole.

The value in strictly adhering to religions like software freedom or veganism isn't so much to cause any meaningful change yourself - you are actively harming your own experiences and potential in restricting yourself in most any way dogma would limit you - but it projects to those around you an adherence to that belief that can inspire and promote the change in those you directly interact with.

This happens in all manner of things - politics, old school regular religions, intellectualism, scientific literacy, rationalism - for the ideas to spread you need prophets and priests to spread the word and adherents to project legitimacy to attract converts. But pretty much any belief system, followed dogmatically, is not for your own personal empowerment - its self sacrifice for the cause.

Re: What comes after open source

#52

Post by steveklabnik »

zanny wrote: post #45
Townley wrote: post #16

I recently wrote a piece of software and wanted to make it open source. GitHub's helpful dropdown of license choices gave me more pause than I expected as I struggled to choose between MIT and GPL. "I definitely want someone to be able to modify, fork, and publish better versions of this code. Do I also want them to be able to commercially license their derivatives?" On one hand, this code was contributed to the publ…

> is a boon to creativity. Its a boon for one generation of creatives, but then the buck stops there and you are right back to proprietary everything no creativity left for the masses such as on mobile platforms. Copyleft guarantees creativity for all who touch the software, not just the first developer to commercialize it. > good for them! Made this comment[1] that Steve even replied to a week ago, and imagine that…

> imagine that whole discussion thread inspired this blog post

It's part of it! The original genesis of these ideas was a comment I made on HN back in 2017. It took me a while to sort out some of my thinking here, and that post was me trying to set up this one, and that conversation certainly played a part.

Re: What comes after open source

#53

Post by heathjohns »

I think we need to zoom out more, even. The focus on freedom is too narrow - freedom at the cost of becoming disconnected is a raw deal.

What we want is power. In the desktop era, having source code gave us power, so we associated the two and demanded the former - but this obviously hasn't translated to the cloud.

You can't download a Facebook profile and then re-upload it somewhere else and still be connected to all your friends etc. That lock-in gives Facebook power over its users: proportional to how much they need what Facebook gatekeeps (e.g. "all the news about my grandkids is on there").

When I want to stop using something, but I can't, that's power someone holds over me. In my case, that's Google search, GMail, and Android. I actually hate the latter two, and I've tried leaving them all, but here I am. What they've got in common is that they're all protective layers over what I need to stay connected to the outside world despite being highly dysfunctional (i.e. discoverability on the web, email spam, and phone hardware).

Because of this, Google's got me in a way that - because of open source - Microsoft never could. Whatever comes after open source needs to address that power delta directly. We need choice, but also connection.

Re: What comes after open source

#54

Post by meditate »

steveklabnik wrote: post #30
astazangasta wrote: post #25

>What I am saying is that refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop because there aren’t free drivers helps basically nobody, and only harms yourself. This is wrong. Doing this forces you to confront the deficiencies of free software, the lack of available free software, and strongly encourages you to support development of alternatives. Just like being vegan encourages the growth of a market for vegan product…

I also was strictly vegan for a while, and lost that religion too. For sort of similar reasons! I think it's too focused on the ethics of one part of the situation, and misses the whole.

Veganism might have been a fad for you, but for others it is a necessary undertaking to remain healthy. I can't blame you for finding some choices difficult to make, but at the same time it's disheartening to see these "anti-religion" arguments brought out to dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices, for their own purposes which are not explicitly approved by the vendor.

Re: What comes after open source

#55

Post by steveklabnik »

zanny wrote: post #51
steveklabnik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also was strictly vegan for a while, and lost that religion too. For sort of similar reasons! I think it's too focused on the ethics of one part of the situation, and misses the whole.

The value in strictly adhering to religions like software freedom or veganism isn't so much to cause any meaningful change yourself - you are actively harming your own experiences and potential in restricting yourself in most any way dogma would limit you - but it projects to those around you an adherence to that belief that can inspire and promote the change in those you directly interact with. This happens in all m…

I agree with this, and I think that what I'm getting at here is more of "I don't believe that these actions are inspiring nor promoting that change, and so it is not effective as a tactic."

Re: What comes after open source

#56

Post by steveklabnik »

meditate wrote: post #54
steveklabnik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also was strictly vegan for a while, and lost that religion too. For sort of similar reasons! I think it's too focused on the ethics of one part of the situation, and misses the whole.

Veganism might have been a fad for you, but for others it is a necessary undertaking to remain healthy. I can't blame you for finding some choices difficult to make, but at the same time it's disheartening to see these "anti-religion" arguments brought out to dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices, for their own purposes which are not explicitly approved…

It wasn't a fad; it was a moral commitment. I certainly agree that some people are vegan for health reasons, but health was part of why I stopped being vegan: it was harming my health. Not for any of the reasons that anti-vegans trot out, mind you, it was that I was mostly consuming vegan junk food.

My comment was focused on this moral aspect because that's the part of veganism that I was a part of and are familiar with, but I don't think that all vegans are vegans for moral reasons, nor do I think that nobody should be vegan.

> dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices

I'm not dismissing that at all, in fact, I am arguing that it doesn't actually enable you to retain control. The AGPL is an acknowledgement that the GPL does not go far enough in doing that today, and its failure to gain traction demonstrates that it's not a tactic that works for this purpose. We need new strategies and tactics.

Re: What comes after open source

#57

Post by wrs »

steveklabnik wrote: post #22
alvalentini wrote: post #19

You know, sometimes I wonder if this whole conversation really isn't just meant for developers. I ask myself what is the sentiment across the larger population and realise no one really cares. They love free beers. They'd do anything not to pay 0.99 for an app, seeing that as an incredible amount of money to pay for something they expect nowadays to be free. There's a lot to unpack here and I don't think I am in the…

Thanks! I didn't get into it, but I do think that the user/developer distinction plays a part here. That is, one way to think about the Free Software/Open Source divide is that copyleft ensures freedoms for users at the expense of restricting developers, and permissive licenses ensure freedoms for developers at the expense of restricting users. As developers gained some power, we directed it towards helping ourselves…

Historically one of the controversies/confusions regarding the FSF’s ideology is that it ignores the distinction between developers and users. In the ur-hacker world RMS wanted to preserve, the users are developers. That’s why the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no non-developer can take advantage of), and why libre software is strongly skewed toward developer tools rather than viable “end-user” software applications.

Traditionally the FSF advocate will say something here about end users hiring developers to modify software for them, but in reality that’s economically ridiculous.

Re: What comes after open source

#58

Post by fartcannon »

steveklabnik wrote: post #49
fartcannon wrote: post #47

All these articles about licensing are starting to feel a lot like Microsoft's not-that-old 'Get The Facts' FUD campaign. Anyone else get the feeling they're being manipulated by a campaign?

I am unemployed, so I'm at my most free to talk right now :) So not these posts at least!

Your employment situation doesn't really change the fact that you could have been affected by previous articles. The tone of your article reminds me a bit of what stuff Miguel de Icaza used to write, for example.

Re: What comes after open source

#59

Post by monetus »

When it comes to verifying the process, I do think issue trackers are going to have to be included in the version control software. Off the top of my head, I can only think of fossil that does that. https://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki

Also, thank you for writing this. It is fascinating.

Re: What comes after open source

#60

Post by est31 »

For me, FLOSS is mainly about the users, less about the projects themselves. I care more about the product, the piece of software that you can download, use and modify in any fashion you want.

Most users of any popular piece of libre software don't contribute back, whether it's bug reports or patches. Even if it's targeted at developers, most don't do it. There is certainly value in community practices that encourage productivity and make it easy for individuals to get into. But they are only means to an end, it's not the end itself. For me, users should be at the center, not the developers.

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