Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

linuxjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 264 posts

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

#111

Post by magduf »

kazinator wrote: post #61
Drdrdrq wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Why have users chosen those environments? > 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. Convenience always wins. Always. Users do care about free (as in beer) and they care if the product or service will disappear without warning (hello Google!). But the defi…

Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no i…

>Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.

If you're working with embedded Linux, Visual Studio isn't going to be much help for debugging on a target.

>Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator.

LaTeX does some things much better than Word, and Illustrator is very expensive.

>GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it.

GIMP is free. Photoshop is not.

You seem to be assuming the people have unlimited money to purchase software licenses. Many free software programs are used not because they're better, but just because they're free and good enough. If I just want to crop and rescale some photos or something, why on earth would I buy a Photoshop license when I can just download and use GIMP for free?

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

#112

Post by magduf »

amyjess wrote: post #92
seandougall wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention users! I can't count how many times I've seen bug reports responded to with a dismissive "you're welcome to file a PR", which is just a thinly veiled expression of the same attitude: you're not valuable, your domain expertise is not valuable, and the time you're taking to engage in the development cycle is not valuable; only your code is valuable. It's really not a big mystery why more average users do…

I wholeheartedly agree. In addition, responses like that do more to specifically push people towards commercial software than anything else (not specifically proprietary, just commercial). Why use a piece of software where the developers have no incentive to care about your concerns when you could instead use a piece of software where you're a paying customer and the production company has a financial incentive to ke…

>Compare this to GNOME, on the other hand, which regularly removes popular features and ignores all user complaints.

The fact that GNOME is the dominant DE for Linux, despite this fact you cite, really is confounding considering that the whole point of FOSS is supposed to be that it empowers the users. It almost feels like the entire existence and adoption of GNOME by many prominent distros was a conspiracy to prevent FOSS desktops from succeeding.

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

#113

Post by theamk »

jondubois wrote: post #38

I still cannot believe that we live in a world were: - A website with a silly name like 'Facebook' is worth half a trillion dollars and is extremely profitable. - A website with a silly name like 'Twitter' which only lets you post 140 characters at a time is worth 30 billion dollars. - An app with a silly name like 'Snapchat' which loses billions of dollars per year is worth almost $15 billion. - An international tax…

Re Lambda, I think the closest analogy is renting unfurnished office.

When our company moved into next office, it had bare walls with old ugly wallpaper. We paid for the new wallpaper, carpet, interior walls, wiring, etc... And we also kept paying the rent to the building owner, and were at their mercy when they eventually decided to stop renting out that space.

Even then, this made perfect sense for business. All-new construction would have been way longer and more expensive, even taking limited lease time in the account. Why would software equivalent of this (Lambda) be different?

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

#114

Post by kuschku »

malvosenior wrote: post #94
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?

Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)... I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack i…

Emoji reactions are actually a thing nowadays thanks to IRCv3 :)

And personally I consider the slack UI, especially due to the different workspaces, relatively unintuitive.

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

#115

Post by jcastro »

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?

Maybe consider the UX that Slack gives users instead of just cloning the UI on top of IRC and expect it to work out?

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

#116

Post by makz »

I have several things to say here.

I see we are still debating the same points as many years ago (GIMP vs Photoshop, Visual Studio, paid vs unpaid labor, chicken and egg, convenience...). It’s like we haven’t learned anything.

About the end of general computing, I don’t see it as a bad thing. In some way it has always existed. Right now we have server computers, desktop computers, smart phones, mainframe, cloud... even on a single class of computer we have some segmentation. It just means we’ll have even more specialization. And FOSS still can have a place there.

Speaking about that, I believe FOSS is stronger at the foundational layers.

Maybe the future is kind of and hybrid model in which we have lots of new computer classes with FOSS as their foundation. Not very different from what we have now, just much more diverse and, I hope, more open.

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

#117

Post by mwfunk »

zanny wrote: post #36

Its more abjectly a moral failing of society that institutions have not aligned to enable free software proliferation. Software, and information in general, have been a prisoners dilemma for time immemorial. The optimization of utility is total freedom of information - but such a state of affairs means benefactors reap the labors of others and have no obligation to give anything in return. Copyright was fabricated to…

Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright, because it's the only thing that gives the GPL any meaning at all. In a copyright-free world, any company could make a proprietary GCC fork, lock its code up behind many layers of physical and digital security, make all its developers/employees sign NDAs and other legal agreements ensuring they don't leak any of the new code, et voila. Hardly sounds like a Free Software utopia.

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

#118

Post by tabbott »

wmf wrote: post #105
tabbott wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, via the Zulip API, which is how the Lean Prover tool works. Zulip's "full organization data" export tool is only available to administrators, and we haven't heard any complaints about that model.

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

#120

Post by wrs »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #14

So the initial letter hits upon something that the article itself ignores, namely that the FOSS community requires more than just developers . I see this attitude all the time in certain circles that only the developers contribute any value to a project, and prospective contributors should either learn to code or get f--ked. It's not terribly welcoming to the larger community (of whom the majority are not developers)…

Having lived through the entire history of free software (well, Free Software with capital letters, anyway) it always comes back to this: Software freedom is fundamentally valuable only for developers, because only developers can use the freedom it gives. (That's pretty much the definition of "developer"—someone who can modify software.) Users get value only as a side effect of this developer freedom, because a developer builds a product for them.

Free Software originated in the hacker community—which is a community of developers developing for developers. It's always struggled to extend those values in a way compatible with the rest of the world. Notice that developer tools like GCC or Linux are the big success stories of Free Software, whereas end-user tools like OpenOffice or GIMP have always been kind of…meh.

Post reply on HN