We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#101

Post by megous » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

bregma wrote: post #24

I love the way commenters here equate FLOSS development with unpaid hobbyist developers. Fact: most of the contributors to the Linux kernel are highly-paid professionals who do that work full time. The same goes for many, if not most, of the popular and successful FLOSS projects. It is an error to assume that free (as in speech) software is only made by free (as in beer) development.

Fact based on what? I don't doubt the kernel claim. There are regular LWN summaries, about what companies contributed to whatever release.

But I have no clue what you're basing your second claim on. There's huge amount of FLOSS programs that work fine, are useful, but don't get much contributions. And I don't know about any studies/overviews on what number of programs say in a Debian distro is a work of passion, and what is created by paid devs.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#102

Post by Yaa101 » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

Convenience seems to be the only value of things in the real world, so bad even that people en masse are prepared to submit to slavery to get it.

I suggest that the FOSS community now finally starts building something convenient for themselfs instead of making things hard and massochist.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#103

Post by DiseasedBadger » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

Linux has an HR department now - and big corporate managers driving its technology goals.

I guarantee you 99% of the people on this forum will jump all over me in defense of both. Trannies, init systems, whatever layer of technology Wayland is these days, Pulseaudio, The Eternal Presence of Chrome... You and you - and you there! You kept picking corporate choices.

I don't need another job.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#104

Post by gridlockd » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

Don't listen to the Copyleftists. FOSS is bigger than ever because non-copyleft free software is what professionals can build on.

For the most part, Copyleftists are stuck in Hobbyland and it really shows when you look at the software they produce. Their business models - if they even have one - largely don't work. Given that software is very expensive to produce, copyleft software eventually runs out of suckers to support it after the "fun factor" wears off and the "real work" starts.

The Linux kernel is the major exception, but only because the particular exceptions that the GPL grants to it do not encumber the enterprises that develop Linux. Wherever it does, enterprises will choose non-copyleft alternatives (e.g. Sony and Nintendo building on FreeBSD).

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#105

Post by wmf » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

tabbott wrote: post #97

rst wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, there are workalikes for both Github and Slack which are at least tolerable -- Gitlab has most of Github's core features, and there are multiple slack-alikes (the one I've got experience with is Zulip, which I, at least, find to be a whole lot better than Slack). BUT... Just having open-source (or free software) alternatives doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Gitlab and Zulip still leave your…

Zulip lead developer here. For chat apps, I don't think the problem of "data scattered around backend-DBs" is a real concern. E.g. Zulip has a well-defined data export format that's easily parsable JSON and contains all non-transient data (i.e. the status of who's typing right now isn't included): https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and... . And so do most of the other popular chat systems. I'd b…

Can non-admins export data? Mailing lists often allow downloading archives in mbox format and people also have local archives.

In cases of catastrophic failure or why-style "digital suicide", it seems like modern tools could easily leave a community with no records at all.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#106

Post by mjevans » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #85

kuschku wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

For me the issue with IRC protocol (not that I know much about it outside my interaction with UIs built around it) was authentication, and connectivity. So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins. That, plus the weird way to authenticate do…

That's more an issue with your connection. Mobile devices have really bad connections. IRC was //never// designed with them in mind; they literally didn't exist and were not likely to exist for decades (which it has been).

IRC was designed, mostly, for two types of users: A) Large institution users who had a fixed link to the internet and ran in their shell on a mainframe. B) Dial-in users, who's devices mostly stayed connected, and when they disconnected, usually required manual intervention to get back on.

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE using a mobile phone SHOULD be using a 'bouncer' or other gateway to access a live communications environment. This would be more like use case A where someone has a small agent on a slice of a server they 'trust' and that maintains state (for their client) and stateful connection (for links to other servers and users).

IIRC, Quassel IRC has such a client/server model for the client, there are probably others too.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#107

Post by ummonk » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #64

jcastro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling at people because they're not using IRC instead of slack isn't a good way to convince anyone.

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

I know plenty who use IRCCloud. There is nothing FOSS about it, though.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#108

Post by jslabovitz » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #30

Here's a thought - can we trace this back to the point at which everyone moved from Slashdot to Hacker News? All of a sudden the dominant social incentive changed from open software to startups and profit.

Perhaps...

But if you do that, it would also be interesting to trace free software back to the point where the GPL became popular. (GPL was published in 1983, but in my recollection it wasn't until the early/mid-90s that it surged into general usage.) Before that, 'free' software generally meant public domain: no licenses, no limitation on use -- at all. We had two or three decades of free software of that type, mostly distributed over Usenet, BBSes, FTP/Gopher, etc.

I'm probably being too oblique, but I believe it's short-sighted to believe free software must only be ideologically free. There was, in fact, an earlier period, where developers release software for free because, well, why not?

Okay, time for this retired grumpy programmer to retreat back to his hut in the forest now...

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#109

Post by Naac » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #54

jakelazaroff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. Isn't this kind of the point, though? To compete with proprietary software, free software needs to actually be competitive. "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

Until you want your data. Turns out data roach motelling is a big thing. And it's even better for the corp interests if they can tie hardware and software to irreplaceable APIs that lock the user down to the whims of the owner. It's time to take the fight back to "Owner"... If you purchased it, why can't you do what you want? Why are you prevented from doing arbitrary actions?

Case in point, it's surprisingly frustrating to get your photos off of Instagram on mobile.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#110

Post by throw2016 » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

What made Linux and FOSS possible is a specific time and context and that is not happening again. There is no job security, everything is about building a resume, getting a job and hanging on or a startup, everything is related to money or status.

There is also an ahistorical perspective of tech, as if things just are or happen with no deliberate effort and its an open question whether there is any real commitment or concern for the principles which drove the open source movement.

In many ways Slashdot defined the original generation and Hackernews defines this one. And even paying lip service to principles would be quaint here. Defending building surveillance systems and stalking people 24/7 while referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments. This is a huge shift.