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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

#121

Post by unethical_ban »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58
gaius wrote: post #6

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.* Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

> And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. That's kind of cheating though. OS X is a "workstation OS" but it's also a "desktop OS" used by millions of elementary school teachers and news reporters. So then the "workstation OS" gets to claim those people as users, but their main competition in that market is Microsoft Windows, which OS X loses the popularity contest to in the same way that OS X (includ…

Workstation = desktop when comparing to server.

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

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

cwyers wrote: post #107
davexunit wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The FSF does not believe that everyone should be a programmer. Much like freedom of the press matters for those that aren't journalists, freedom of the software matters for those that aren't programmers. I care about the right to repair even though I'm not a car mechanic. >The actual si…

Sure, it's a spectrum. But it's a very lopsided one -- there's a huge mass of people over at the "100% user" side of the spectrum, and a long, thin tail out towards developer.

But even those "100% users" will happily task third parties with improving their tools. "Freedom to tinker" is also important because without it, you don't have third parties that can help you. Your friend won't be able to do it, and there will be no small repair shop down the corner of the road, etc.

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

#123

Post by Pica_soO »

The battle is for the heads, and the future battlefield are the minds of tomorrow. The defeating blow is that Microsoft owns now minecraft - the first experience of the hacker culture a kid could have today where tech has become magic. This "Do-it-yourself" could have educated a million freedom demanding, because limits not accepting citizens. Now its hugged to death.

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

#124

Post by spacelizard »

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.

I think the point is that sociopolitical struggles continue outside of what we do as free software authors, and so we regularly need to re-examine the greater context in which we operate.

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

#125

Post by franciscop »

Esau wrote: post #43
franciscop wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

They have changed that based on user input and that's about the only "bad" thing they have done AFAIK. That's why I wouldn't put them in the same bag.

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

#126

Post by tremon »

legulere wrote: post #80
dasil003 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you except the very last assertion: > Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products. I understand DRM in great detail (as CTO of a streaming film company), and though I would in principal like to reject it, I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy. Theoretically if all the customers stood up and boycotted DRM we could have an ef…

DRM doesn't prevent privacy, it only professionalizes it. At some point the data is decrypted and crackers will take the data from there. You can only make copying harder, but not impossible. Pretty soon after release everything lands on the pirate bay. The only people that are hindered are legitimate costumers. The playback might not work, because the monitor/projector because it doesn't support HDCP. With movies on…

The only people that are hindered are legitimate costumers.

No, also third parties that have nothing to do with the content industry. At work, we have massive 60" touchscreen in all our conference rooms, and we use them daily for presentations/meetings. Those presentations are regularly interrupted by 20 seconds of black screen.

The problem? HDCP handshake incompatibility between the newest batch of laptops and the TVs.

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

#127

Post by MrTonyD »

ktRolster wrote: post #89
MrTonyD wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel. Seriously?

It's easy to forget the early days of Linux. If you go back and read the articles of the time they often pointed out that Linux made a good print server. But that was about all it could do - get lpr-style requests and talk to a printer driver. I did a test port of Oracle to Linux and wrote up a white paper for Larry. Larry was trying to figure out how to get Bill to kill important features in SQLServer. So Larry and Scott and IBM and HP had a couple of floors of kernel engineers at Redwood Shores fixing Linux and submitting the changes until Bill agreed to make SQL Server work more poorly stop competing so aggressively. But by that time we had already submitted enough to make Linux into a functioning product.

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

#128

Post by MrTonyD »

vidoc wrote: post #106
MrTonyD wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

> I wrote the original white paper for Larry analyzing the state of the Linux kernel. Would you mind sharing a link by any chance?

At the time it didn't seem like anything significant - nobody really wanted to do a Linux port of Oracle. But I did a test port and wrote up the many missing system calls and many incomplete system calls and many missing library implementations. Larry read it and I didn't really think about it again. Guess I should have saved a copy. And this was definitely an internal white paper - not something for circulation.

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

#129

Post by tanker »

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. --------------------------------------------------…

Consumers are like water seeking the path of least resistance. It takes lots of engineers to reduce the resistance. Someone pays these engineers. That money comes from the users. Users don't like to actually pay for things if there is a free alternative, so users pay indirectly with their information.

A Facebook clone wouldn't pull many users due to network effects. I think decentralization is opposed to network effects in this case.

The article mentions the somewhat current but certainly future problem of decisions being made by algorithms which "casually crush" users without any human being able to determine why it happened (and in many cases unable to fix it).

They could fix this problem by hiring more people and giving them more power to correct the system, but it will probably never be a big enough problem to affect the bottom line.

Increasing awareness of the problem and technical skill among users would probably cause users to become more autonomous and less like water. This is a long term possibility, but it strikes me as an unappealing fight. It’s like trying to convince an entire generation to take bitter medicine without any parents to assist. I’ll assume users won’t be getting better. Perhaps we just need to focus on building better ways to protect ourselves from the almighty algorithm, so there are options when the system fails. We can protect our data from online shopping sites by having nodes that process purchases for a large number of users and perhaps ship to a network of local points where pickup is by some type of PKI based system. Social networks seem like a lost cause. A return to blogs with lots of links rather than a replacement network may be the answer.

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

#130

Post by franciscop »

dandelion_lover wrote: post #114
rpdillon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the direction are the opposite:

1. Canonical makes no money.

2. They introduce a "bad" feature to try to make money.

3. Users outrage so canonical makes it easy to cancel.

4. Users are still not happy so Canonical turns it off by default.

vs

1. Microsoft makes s*loads of money from various sources.

2. They show an annoying popup urging users to upgrade to W10 (to make more money? to reduce support?).

3. They start forcing it by "closing is accepting".

4. They just start forcing it (according to many reports) so the users start creating tools to stop it.

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