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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

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Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#111

Post by linguae »

grawprog wrote: post #53

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

I largely agree with you, and I share many of the same sentiments. Personal computing is supposed to be about user empowerment; the ability for users to not only communicate with other people and to get work done, but to also automate their tasks through programming. Early personal computing was about achieving this vision, and while it may not have fully attained this vision, companies in the 1980s and 1990s at least made an honest effort toward this goal. Unfortunately the companies that got rich off of personal computing from the 1980s to the 2000s no longer care about user empowerment. Unfortunately they've discovered that building platforms that lock users in and restrict their freedoms is quite lucrative. It is clear to me that the future of commercial computing will be locked-down platforms similar to the situation for smartphones.

The question I have is how can we reverse this trend? I've thought about this a few weeks ago and shared my thoughts at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso.... I am trying in my small way to reverse this trend by building a new FOSS desktop environment that focuses on user empowerment through programmable, component-based software that is inspired by Smalltalk, the Lisp machines of the 1980s, and Apple's OpenDoc. However, user empowerment is more than just having access to software that empowers the user; the hardware must be open enough to allow users to run a wide variety of software without special permission.

My dream is to start a company that is dedicated to preserving and improving general-purpose personal computing, as an alternative to commercial platforms. I'd like to pick up from where Apple left off in the 1990s, back when Apple had a lot of ideas about how to push the state of the art of personal computing through projects such as HyperCard, Dylan, Copland, and OpenDoc, yet sadly Apple at this time had a difficult time with project management, which led to the purchase of NeXT and Steve Jobs' retaking of the company. I also find the work of companies like System76 and Purism inspiring.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#112

Post by Aeolun »

samatman wrote: post #48
mjevans wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other optio…

Half a FAANG salary to write open source sounds pretty good.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#113

Post by geocar »

ywei3410 wrote: post #105
geocar wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I can agree with a lot of this, but I feel it’s a lot like blaming the government, when we live in a democracy so we are the government, and so I think programmers themselves deserve the blame. Any time I try to tell someone how to tell a computer what to do, I can guarantee someone will tell me how unreadable it is. Or how important it is to use java or python because there are lots of java or python program…

An insight I had recently while thinking about language, is that the terms commonly used by the developer community can have some unintended and far-reaching consequences. Take the term user-friendly ; which is insidious term in that it labels everything which isn't in that bucket as user hostile . That we now co-opt the term to mean any software which is easy to use for certain users, means that we, as developers st…

Bingo.

Some people see something hard and give up until someone else makes it easier.

Others make themselves better, and it will pay dividends.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#114

Post by octoberfranklin »

grishka wrote: post #97
octoberfranklin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chromebooks Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production. No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

I've never owned or used a chromebook, but don't they all have a "developer mode" that removes most of the restrictions?

The "developer mode" thing is part of Google's bootloader. Coreboot is a replacement for Google's bootloader.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#115

Post by Guthur »

mjevans wrote: post #24
city41 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want.

The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many.

This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#116

Post by rgbrenner »

sabujp wrote: post #96

general purpose computers will exist, they are literally the building blocks. However, it'll be bad when you as a private entity can't purchase CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, the building blocks for building your own general purpose computing device. I don't ever see that happening since there will always be engineers, students, hackers, startups, how will any new industries form if they can't get their hands on the sourc…

There are a lot of other fields where you need to go to university just to use the building blocks of the field. Doctors cant just acquire cadavers and try it out at home. Those industries move much slower, but innovation in our field might be related to how new it is.

There are many cheap computers like rpi, but regulations could demand certain security controls that might eliminate those devices.

So I could imagine (a terrible) future where innovation slows, our devices are like ipads, and you need to go to uni to use a real computer. It would take some time... but I think theres a chance it could happen.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#117

Post by amirkdv »

Guthur wrote: post #115
mjevans wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want. The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many. This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should und…

> The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control

This might be stretching the definition of greed as it's commonly understood.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#119

Post by rhn_mk1 »

roenxi wrote: post #57
amatecha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF is a non-profit organization, so that motivation quite literally doesn't apply to them. All other regular corporations, yes. :)

Google. Mozilla. The FSF. Microsoft. IBM springs to mind. These will all have their time in the spotlight as tech darlings or villains. You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do. It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push the…

You seem to imply that there are always incentives pushing any organization to do evil things. That's a big presumption.

Organizations are just groups of people. People have varied motivations, and their motivations don't have to change just because they join forces with others.

If what you're saying is correct, then either people's own varied motivations are all evil, or instantly become evil the moment they join a group (whatever that means).

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#120

Post by Guthur »

amirkdv wrote: post #117
Guthur wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want. The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many. This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should und…

> The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control This might be stretching the definition of greed as it's commonly understood.

Well if we are making acting in your own best interests defined as greed, which is all that corporations are doing, then I think it's a fine generalised definition to say protecting your own control is greedy as well.

Edit: for clarity I not implying negative connotations to either side. I think corporations are doing exactly what they should do. But I also think people need to be more responsible for their choices and the consequences thereof.

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