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We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

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Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#111

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

zanny wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, Windows is still pretty much the only desktop OS for 99% of people, Nvidia has stolen large-scale compute with a holistically proprietary CUDA, and Google has hijacked the ecosystem and culture with Android and ChromeOS (the former by having vendors use the incredibly destructive model of forking the kernel and stuffing it with binary blobs rendering it stuck to that version on whatever device you have, an…

Windows is still the desktop OS for the majority because you can't walk into Best Buy or Frys and buy a Linux laptop or desktop. There was a small window with the early netbooks, but that's it. My kingdom for the ability to walk into Frys and buy Dells XPS 13 with Ububtu.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#112

Post by arcanus »

ethbro wrote: post #76
stormbrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most of the early adopters of osx that I knew at the time were actively seeking out a unixy desktop because they worked on software eventually destined for Linux servers and didn't like the available desktop options for Linux. Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

This is a critical point. There are probably people on this board who were born after Ubuntu/Linux desktop UX received attention. For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

I used to schedule time after updating to fix my broken X11 server

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#113

Post by Ace17 »

kardashev wrote: post #87

From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr: Free software won. Yay! However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services? Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized. Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty. Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again. --------------------------------------------------…

The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

This simplistic view as a "property", which is a very familiar notion for most of us, confuses people into thinking that they could, and should be able to "own", for example, a joke, an idea for a business, or any kind of idea, the same way they can today own their car or their house.

The law is way more complicated than that, and by default, ideas can't be owned (and for that matter, can't be "stolen" either). I don't think we want this to change. However, it might be desirable to get this into peoples' mind.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#114

Post by dandelion_lover »

rpdillon wrote: post #100
Esau wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really? I seem to recall Ubuntu sending people's search results to Amazon. Why did they do that? They are a corporation and, thus, more concerned about money than freedom. My comment stands.

To be fair, that was a default, but you can change it, or avoid it entirely by not installing the launcher developed by Canonical. Which was always both the strength and Achilles' Heel of Linux compared to other desktop OSes. For people that never install Unity (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome), it's simply not an issue. This is quite a bit different than, for example, the situation with Windows 10.

>This is quite a bit different than, for example, the situation with Windows 10.

The situation is different; but the direction is the same.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#115

Post by stormbrew »

vetinari wrote: post #79
stormbrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most of the early adopters of osx that I knew at the time were actively seeking out a unixy desktop because they worked on software eventually destined for Linux servers and didn't like the available desktop options for Linux. Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

In the beginning (10.0 - 10.2 timeframe), OSX was pretty much broken if you wanted to work on software that was destined for Linux. Even the existing software was PITA to get running on OSX, you were fighting both autotools and OSX linker and libraries at once.

I don't really consider that to be the early adopter phase of OSX. If you go by the whole technological lifecycle theory that'd be the innovator phase (though realistically I think it was mostly just the most die-hard left of the old guard Apple fanatics).

To me it's when the Intel macs came along (10.4.4 I think) that new adopters really started picking up steam, but the ecosystem they helped build wasn't really there yet.

At least, that's my perception.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#116

Post by arca_vorago »

astrodust wrote: post #88
lmm wrote: post #55

We lost Linux. The big thing about Linux was that you could swap out pieces of it for better ones if you wanted. "Linux is about choice" - vi or emacs, KDE or Gnome and so on. OSX doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. And in these days of systemd, Linux doesn't even have that any more.

If you hate systemd that much make your own distribution with blackjackd and hookersd instead.

Already playing with devuan to get used to the jump I plan on making away from NSA/linux cough systemd/linux.

Oh RMS, how little they understand you...

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#117

Post by kazinator »

gaius wrote: post #8
deng wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has no lineage in common with Linux. That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

It would be more accurate to say Linux thrived because of them! Samba IIRC predates Linux too, as does the GNU project, Apache is based on the original httpd which was built on... Drum roll... NeXTStep. In 1990, before Linux existed.

> Samba IIRC predates Linux too

I don't think so. But IRC predates Linux. :)

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#118

Post by bluejekyll »

sievebrain wrote: post #64
bluejekyll wrote: post #21

I wish he would have gone more into the design of the kernel and significant changes that are going to be needed to take advantage of the NVRAM based systems that are coming very soon. The I/O design needs to be completely overhauled. It's probably going to be a great time to rewrite and resign portions of Linux, but I honestly don't think the community will be capable of doing a major architectural change. Kernel mo…

Could you elaborate on the changes for the NVRAM devices that you'd like to see? My understanding is that the 3D XPoint type devices are just exposed as a regular mmapped device and provide storage which is still a fair bit slower than DRAM, but a lot faster than SSDs.

It's mainly around IO scheduling in the kernel against other processes.

This is a good intro paper on some issues: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~luisceze/publications/novos...

This discussion is relevant too:

https://lwn.net/Articles/547903/

Those are both a few years, old, but I haven't seen discussion as to the progress made around scheduling when the disks start performing as fast as the CPU load operations.

Again, I was just pointing out that I wish that article got into more details around that, b/c I don't know the state of the world, but have some concerns in this particular area and the ability for the kernel to be able to accommodate new scheduling techniques to better utilize the much faster disk access.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#119

Post by TeMPOraL »

astrodust wrote: post #86
massysett wrote: post #78

"So what's our next fight?" I don't have a next fight. If I'm going to fight for something, it's going to be something a whole lot more important than computer software. Free software is here to stay. Success has occurred. I'm not going to grope around for another fight. Instead I'm going to harness my software freedoms to write software that does what I need it to do.

Precisely. Why do you need to stay in a perpetual state of war? What's wrong with peace?

Peace is fine. But go and negotiate one with the market. I'm fine with calling it a war, because it is kind of a defensive war - the current direction of affairs, the default, seems to be going towards a pretty bad future.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#120

Post by Delmania »

davexunit wrote: post #49
franciscop wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting Windows and Ubuntu in the same "commercial" bag is very miguiding...

I don't really think so. Canonical has proven to be a poor leader of the free software community.

> I don't really think so. Canonical has proven to be a poor leader of the free software community.

Why is that? They set out to make Linux more accessible. If you're complaining about the level of control they exert on Ubuntu, there are good reasons for that.

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