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It wasn't for nothing

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Re: It wasn't for nothing

#41

Post by caslon »

ivalm wrote: post #34
caslon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered the idea that it might just not be for you? There are plenty of workflows that don't require proprietary software, and adding proprietary software breaks a lot of the point of Guix, along with throwing more work onto the backs of maintainers. You wouldn't expect a bunch of people giving away a vegetarian cookbook to respond super well to, "This is all fine and great and all, but how can I adapt th…

> but how can I adapt this recipe to grilled dog > couldn't easily use it to shish kebab your cat This seems like an unnecessarily hostile response, kind of inline with what the OP mentioned.

It's not particularly hostile. It's using an example to demonstrate that someone who sees an action as unethical won't be super hyped about you asking them to spend their time assisting you in doing something they find to be unethical, especially after you insult them for thinking it's unethical.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#42

Post by hklgny »

xyzzyz wrote: post #38
hosh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism…

Richard Stallman was right in the same sense Karl Marx was right. The people would , in fact, be better off if each have according to his abilities, and received according to his needs. The problem here is the problem of incentives: you can state your desired end goal (prosperous communism, or free software utopia), but there is no mechanism to get there from here, and even if you somehow do get there, no mechanism t…

I know it's a silly thing to point out, but I really enjoyed your typo in the second line in the context of that world view being incongruent with reality. We can't even type it as a society.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#43

Post by colordrops »

hosh wrote: post #33
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism…

I think both of you are wrong. There is room for both idealism and pragmatism in this world. We don't have to choose a single path. In fact the tension between the two paths helps keep both of them dynamic and alive.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#44

Post by reilly3000 »

I really appreciate this post and how it highlights the power of becoming involved in occupation. I use that term in the context of the fact that my spouse is an Occupational Therapist by trade. In that field, the term occupation refers to a collection of activities of daily living, not a "job" per se. Rather than seeing patients through a framework of diagnosis or disability, they look at activities and people's ability to perform them, and intervene where there is lack. In practice that may involve helping an amputee learn how to put on socks, or helping an autistic child participate in education. More broadly, a central philosophy of their field is that meaningful occupation is a powerful motivator that has cascading effects across the many component activities in somebody's daily life. OP's post described how becoming involved as a Guix contributor effectively organized and motivated other areas of their life as well. The fact that we all are here hanging out on a VC's forum tends to color our idea of what value means. I think this post inspires that there is value to not only the community but also the individual as well in just "doing cool stuff".

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#45

Post by jyrkesh »

sierkov wrote: post #40
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

> I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. I'm using Guix for work, at home, my wife has Guix on her gaming laptop with nvidia card, playing games on steam. Nobody has any problems with enabling rpmfusion repo on Fedora, using aur on Arch, adding backports repo for kde or whatever on ubuntu. But as soon as it's nonguix channel it's suddenly a problem. Huh. It's literally…

> well, I've nothing to say actually.

That's definitely better than "go fuck yourself". "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" and all that.

Tbh, I've seen the "go fuck yourself" attitude in almost every Free Software community I've spent time around. It's really just a matter of whether it's encouraged, tolerated, or actively rejected by the project maintainers and influencers.

I would hope that someone writing a blog post this positive would be one of the "actively rejecting" folks, but I really don't know anything about Guix (hadn't heard of it until this post).

I will say that I run NixOS on my primary home server, and while there's definitely a learning curve there, the community I've experienced is largely very helpful, friendly, and positive. Now that I've got most of it working the way I want, I don't see myself moving to something else any time soon (it's absolutely rock solid).

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#46

Post by [deleted] »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

[deleted]

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#47

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #46
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#48

Post by biotinker »

xyzzyz wrote: post #38
hosh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism…

Richard Stallman was right in the same sense Karl Marx was right. The people would , in fact, be better off if each have according to his abilities, and received according to his needs. The problem here is the problem of incentives: you can state your desired end goal (prosperous communism, or free software utopia), but there is no mechanism to get there from here, and even if you somehow do get there, no mechanism t…

> I can really only name a handful of projects that are widely used and of high quality that have not been largely funded by commercial world: OpenSSH, some other BSD stuff, what else?

Is this perhaps though a result of most projects allowing donations, and some companies (e.g. Google) having a lot of capital to throw around and funding them more-or-less just because? Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to today?

Also, I would add things like the GNU project, and notably VLC media player, alongside OpenSSH and the BSD stuff.

I agree with your final point, though. I can't actually think of a company whose product only in-house FOSS software. Red Hat, Suse, Purism, etc are building off community code, not something primarily developed internally. And companies like MongoDB make all of their money off of non-free cloud products.

One that I can think of that was once like this, the Subsonic media player, actually went closed source due to too many people re-hosting the code and not paying the maintainer.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#49

Post by gtsop »

colordrops wrote: post #43
hosh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism…

I think both of you are wrong. There is room for both idealism and pragmatism in this world. We don't have to choose a single path. In fact the tension between the two paths helps keep both of them dynamic and alive.

I think your comment should be more strict: There isn't just room for both, it is a given that both ideals and pragmatism must exist and go hand in hand.

Ideals are the compass, shows you the final destination, where you are going.

Pragmatism is the next step towards ideals. It prevents you from being paralized when the ideals are very far away.

Without ideals it would be as if you don't have a GPS on your car and roam around randomly. Without pragmatism it would be as if your car didn't have an engine.

Yes, RMS is living a completely impractical and undoable life for the rest of the people, no matter what he says.

Yes, RMS is right and he must exist to show us in which way we should work towards

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#50

Post by biotinker »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

> If I can't get stuff done with it it's useless. Actually useless.

I think the very article we're commenting on here shows that it is very definitely not actually useless, it may merely have a different true use than is readily apparent.

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