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We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

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

#131

Post by PeterisP »

mwfunk wrote: post #117
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 F…

On the other hand, in a copyright-free world once a leak happens (and they inevitably do), everybody in the world would be legally free to use that code. There would be some liability for the developer breaking the NDA or for the hacker stealing that code, but in the absence of copyright the buck stops there and all the other seven billion people in the world would not be bound by these legal issues.

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

#132

Post by kazinator »

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…

"federated servers" is the only way to maintain a form of freedom while (out of necessity) operating software as a service.

If you think that you can't do free software development without relying on all the capabilities of Slack, then the honest thing to do is to quit and spend the rest of your days just working on proprietary stuff. You obviously prefer the solution which has features over any other concern, so why would you waste your time having anything to do with free software?

Richard Stallman obviously used proprietary software. But not past the point when he had replace it, even imperfectly: "I began work on GNU Emacs in September 1984, and in early 1985 it was beginning to be usable. This enabled me to begin using Unix systems to do editing; having no interest in learning to use vi or ed, I had done my editing on other kinds of machines until then." [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf] This tells us that Stallman used Unix. Well, why wouldn't he have; what other practical way was there to code anything? (One supposes he could have started from the bootloader on up, like the Unix guys before him.)

Stallman wouldn't use Unix today, since it has been replaced by free software, and he wouldn't use arguments like, well, such and such proprietary Unix has better memory management or faster I/O, so I will still use that.

If you're using things like Slack or Github without the slightest intent of working toward replacing them, yet using them for free software activities, then that is a comically conflicted position.

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

#133

Post by api »

kazinator wrote: post #16
saidajigumi wrote: post #13

– We collaborate inside proprietary environments Why is that? Why have users chosen those environments? Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Ask: "How can we address the actual user needs while supporting our goals?" – Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally Same answer as above. – We're not modeling our values WHY? (Hint: "the use of nonfree" is not, and has never been a…

> 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. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is th…

> If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3

The difference is usually more like "software A requires an hour of setup and constant maintenance on a dedicated VM or container due to dozens of dependencies, and software B requires 3 clicks"

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

#135

Post by zapzupnz »

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…

> For instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb

I mean, I debug with lldb which is free and open. Sure, I do the debugging through the non-free(-as-in-freedom), non-open Xcode, but that's because Xcode lets me harness the power of lldb in a manner that suits me.

There's nothing stopping free and open software projects from being delivered in a user-friendly manner. I'm sure there are plenty of people using gdb and lldb with fully-free and fully-open editors and IDEs.

Sometimes it just takes a mindset adjustment to see that what is most often considered inconvenient, and that followers of free software doctrines must begrudgingly accept as their lot, can actually be delivered in a user-friendly manner that meets the proprietary-software-users' expectations.

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

#136

Post by mlinksva »

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…

Yes, and it'll take collective action, i.e. politics, to fix those institutions. Positive example: https://fsfe.org/campaigns/publiccode/

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

#137

Post by nevrthepfhor »

People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep.

They don't want to find, audit, install, and evaluate dozens of obscure third-party extensions to make their OS usable.

They want options for setting their background image besides Fit to screen.

And they want to be able to use their friend's computer without having to learn how to use all their friend's customizations.

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

#138

Post by PeterisP »

jslabovitz wrote: post #108
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, most…

My memory of that period (mid-90s-299ish) is that in a majority of cases the widely used 'public domain' software was distributed without restrictions but also without source code, and thus did not really enable modification and redistribution of improved versions even if the licence (or lack of it) didn't prohibit me to do so; so back then the 'ideologically free' movement towards open source software did result in an actual increase of practical freedoms.

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

#139

Post by soulofmischief »

nevrthepfhor wrote: post #137

People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep. They don't want to find, audit, install, and evaluate dozens of obscure third-party extensions to make their OS usable. They want options for setting their background image besides Fit to screen. And they want to be able…

All of those are design choices. None of that has anything to do with open source.

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

#140

Post by zapzupnz »

mjevans wrote: post #106
komali2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 staye…

I guess that's the thing, though. Yes, mobile users should be using a bouncer — but who's going to set it up for them, who's going to host it for free and in a manner that it has guaranteed next-to-no-downtime?

It occurs to me that if IRC networks hosted their own bouncers, but that these bouncers were written efficiently to exchange data directly with the IRC servers' and their database rather than keep individual logs and so on, we might have something close to the "open-the-app-and-see-past-messages-without-needing-to-be-permanently-connected" quality that people have come to expect from instant messengers, Slack, Discord, etc.

(but then you might as well just write such functionality directly into the IRCd)

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