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What comes after open source

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: What comes after open source

#81

Post by yarrel »

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.

Seeking perfect wholes is more religious than identifying specific areas where practical interventions can be made.

Free Software works to protect the freedom of individuals to use software that they own. It doesn't work as a magic way of making VCs money by companies giving server-side code away for free. The former is a politics, the latter is not even a religion. But sift through all the anecdotes and repeating of old Microsoft slurs against Free Software and it is clear that it is losing that religion that is behind the current debates.

Re: What comes after open source

#82

Post by wrs »

dragonwriter wrote: post #70
wrs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-use…

> That’s why the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no non-developer can take advantage of) Non-developers take advantage of it by hiring a developer; it's essentially the right to take your software to be serviced by someone other than the seller. > Traditionally the FSF advocate will say something here about end users hiring developers to modify software for them, but in reality that’s economic…

If you define “end user” as “institution with enough profit to hire a developer”, then yes, it’s a tautology that they can hire a developer. But that’s a minuscule fraction of end users. The person who buys Quickbooks off the shelf at Office Max isn’t hiring any developers.

Re: What comes after open source

#83

Post by rambojazz »

heathjohns wrote: post #53

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…

> 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.

What's the issue with Search? I see how Gmail and Android can lock you in, but Search? You just have to type a different address.

Re: What comes after open source

#85

Post by olau »

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…

FSF has always been about the users. And that has always been controversial among developers. I remember talking to my brother about it around 1999.

The basic premise is relatively simple - with no insight in something very complex, you're at the mercy of the creators of that complexity.

Doesn't that sounds nice, as a developer? It's a power struggle, really.

Regarding certification: I think you have this situation backwards. Developers will easily see through and gravitate to the project that's more friendly and open. The very examples you mention - people see through that and the companies end up getting negative PR in developer circles, despite releasing the code.

Those who have a problem in this game is again the users - they don't understand what's going on, but they might have lost a great deal of the power that the open source was supposed to give back to them, it's locked in behind the wall that the code is thrown over.

Re: What comes after open source

#86

Post by steveklabnik »

fartcannon wrote: post #72
craigsmansion wrote: post #38

> "card-carrying" > "I used to see Stallman lecture." I see this more often. Is this somehow to indicate the level of engagement you felt? Because Free Software is about the 4 software freedoms, everything else is maybe your own romanticised version of what that should mean, and you somehow felt let down by those expectations. And that's regrettable, but ultimately very much your own experience, and mentioning it len…

Right? It strikes me that perhaps he doesn't know what he wants. This is not a F/OSS issue, this is a bureaucratic issue.

Over the course of twenty years, especially in the twenty before your first thirty, many people grow, change, refine their understanding of themselves and the world around them, and reject beliefs they previously held. That’s just a part of being human.

Re: What comes after open source

#87

Post by dmix »

steveklabnik wrote: post #74
heathjohns wrote: post #53

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…

I agree that, to really think about this problem, you need to keep zooming out. But I also know that programmers tend to reach for abstractions quite often, and you can go up and up and up that chain. I was trying to stay at this one specific level, and not zoom out too far :) Thanks for a great comment.

Everything in life is just groups of key/value tags, man.

Re: What comes after open source

#88

Post by cr0sh »

heathjohns wrote: post #53

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…

> We need choice, but also connection.

The "distributed web/internet" is probably going to be part of the answer, but that ultimately hits up against the ISP and data transport layer.

Part of that can be (in theory) worked around via free "mesh networking" - but that too runs into the ISP (well, backbone) for long-haul traffic.

That could be (in theory) worked around at a country level; I could imagine very wealthy people supporting such open and free mesh networking, and providing free long haul transport networking in some manner. That's probably all a fantasy though - the reality is that there aren't any good solutions for mesh networking between distant points at the moment (hmm - with enough nodes, vehicle-to-vehicle mesh could be a possibility).

Not sure what the real solution is...

Re: What comes after open source

#89

Post by zokier »

> It’s that the source being open is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of being open source

I would really have preferred if some other term than "open source" would have been used to refer this wider concept of openess, in this paragraph and the ones that follow. The article itself establishes that open source is all about license, and thus argues it to be insufficient for todays environment.

Re: What comes after open source

#90

Post by phkahler »

heathjohns wrote: post #53

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…

>> When I want to stop using something, but I can't, that's power someone holds over me.

To take that power back means you have to do things yourself, and that means manage your own data. Unfortunately that is too much to ask of the general public, at least with the free tools available today.

People are trading power for convenience, in part because most people don't have the power (know-how and/or time) in the first place.

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