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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

#141

Post by feld »

kazinator wrote: post #110
ktRolster wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In 1994 I did contract work for a serious businesses that ran commercial pay-for-click information website that ran fabulously on Linux, 1.2.x kernels. Since I first started using Linux in 1993 (0.99 patch level 12), it has always been a functioning kernel.

Anyone can write a functioning kernel. The question is if it provides all the functionality required to run complex modern software -- especially big databases, which was pretty much your defacto benchmark back then.

"Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks with memory, etc"

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

#142

Post by JdeBP »

vetinari wrote: post #84
simonh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know that OS X was just a rebranding of NeXTSTEP which dates back to 1985 and so had all those things (dev tool chain, userland, etc) 6 years before Linux started, right? How much did NeXTSTEP owe to Linux, say in 1990?

NexTSTEP didn't have a lot of stuff that OSX had. Samba comes to mind. Another are autofs, bash, curl, less, libxml2, libxslt, screen and countless others.

screen was posted to net.sources in March 1987, under the name BSD screen manager. It made it to comp.sources.unix in August 1987 (v10i095), and was BSD multi-screen manager.

Linux did not exist at the time.

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

#143

Post by AnthonyMouse »

unethical_ban wrote: post #121
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's what I'm saying. Apple don't have 90% of the workstation market if you include Windows PCs in the same market, but they also don't have 90% of the workstation market if you don't include Mac users who don't care anything about Unix because they only run Firefox and MS Office.

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

#144

Post by SwellJoe »

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.

How does systemd, an entirely Open Source project under a liberal license, compare in any reasonable way to OSX or even Android (which, I would argue, is already pretty far ahead of OSX, though certainly still flawed from a software freedom perspective)?

This is just an arbitrary excuse to inject your personal dislike of systemd into a conversation where it doesn't fit. systemd is under the LGPL. That guarantees our freedom to change it, fork it, examine it, etc. And, no one forces you to use it; there are many distros still shipping without it (but, the major distros have chosen to include it because it's the best solution we've got, so far, to solve the problems it solves).

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

#145

Post by swsieber »

tanker wrote: post #129
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 effe…

But, it is possible to make distributed systems that are interopable. In that case, the standard, not a system itself is what gains the network effect.

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

#146

Post by shmerl »

Linux has surely advanced, and in some areas clearly won. Not everywhere though. Desktop usage and gaming are still an uphill battle against incumbent monopolists.

I agree with the rest. Decentralization of services and usage of FOSS for them is critical for freedom as well. Consider what a major mess instant messaging still is. Despite all the years of innovation it's a horrible mix of non interoperable walled gardens (unlike e-mail). How can this mess be fixed and "next Facebook" be avoided exactly? Decentralized social networks exist, but they are still in infancy, and making them grow is not trivial.

But of course it goes beyond all that. More importantly, consider advancement of society towards some non too distant technological future. Do we want to see a grim cyberpunk like domination of governments+megacorporations meld which controls everyone's life through access to augmentations and technology of everyday things, or we want to preserve free society while still having advanced technology?

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

#147

Post by throw2016 »

A tad premature one thinks and who is the we? Linux has been incubating a monster within its midst that goes by the name Redhat. This is the cathedral that was born in the bazaar with $2 billion in revenues, tight ties to the freedom loving US security industry and wielding massive influence thanks to its the ability to fund developers and projects to get things its way. If your fundamental altruistic principles depend on a commercial organizations goodwill your position is already comprised.

A cathedral is primarily concerned with self preservation and it will be naive to ignore how money drives decisions in the real world. A lot of the freedom that got Linux here and Redhat itself to its billion dollar revenues are now being slowly plucked away to entrench Redhat's continued dominance but this is not Redhat's fault. Any organization that got that big would do the same and it's the open source world's failure to anticipate and account for the disproportionate influence something like this would wield.

Even today most Linux organizations are industry bodies with no voice for the users, and in many circles there is open contempt for users nevermind its their commitment though some pretty dismal software that got you in a position that you can choose to ignore them in the first place. A project without users has no reason to exist.

As for Android how is it Linux? You can't run Linux on your Android phones. The GPU, hardware and drivers is locked down so tightly it makes Microsoft and Intel look like Stallman's soulmate when compared to Arm and its vendor ecosystem. And Google too, Android was designed to work around the GPL. Using Android to beat the Linux drum is galling and self defeating.

What we have is thousands of companies benefiting from Open source to build multiple billion empires. 20 years later there is not a single resource that tell you all the companies using open source and how they support it or give back. There is no transparency, pressure or even the felt need to give back. The newer lot of developers do not seem to even care about GPL though that could just be the audience here. Gloating about winning in the context seems misplaced even if it were true. It was never about winning but about choice.

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

#148

Post by giancarlostoro »

shmerl wrote: post #146

Linux has surely advanced, and in some areas clearly won. Not everywhere though. Desktop usage and gaming are still an uphill battle against incumbent monopolists. I agree with the rest. Decentralization of services and usage of FOSS for them is critical for freedom as well. Consider what a major mess instant messaging still is. Despite all the years of innovation it's a horrible mix of non interoperable walled garde…

Something like Jabber that everyone can adopt. With multiple open source clients like Pidgin, adding support to those clients would be a huge first step, then adding support for open source IM clients for mobile would also increase the range for something like Matrix or Jabber. Maybe a new player will come into town. It would be nice to be able to host an email server on a $5 a month DigitalOcean server, I can host IRC, and Mumble, alongside PHP and MySQL powered websites on DO for that amount, but a mail server is too much apparently.

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

#149

Post by shmerl »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #148
shmerl wrote: post #146

Linux has surely advanced, and in some areas clearly won. Not everywhere though. Desktop usage and gaming are still an uphill battle against incumbent monopolists. I agree with the rest. Decentralization of services and usage of FOSS for them is critical for freedom as well. Consider what a major mess instant messaging still is. Despite all the years of innovation it's a horrible mix of non interoperable walled garde…

Something like Jabber that everyone can adopt. With multiple open source clients like Pidgin, adding support to those clients would be a huge first step, then adding support for open source IM clients for mobile would also increase the range for something like Matrix or Jabber. Maybe a new player will come into town. It would be nice to be able to host an email server on a $5 a month DigitalOcean server, I can host I…

> Something like Jabber that everyone can adopt.

XMPP already exists. It's an IETF standard even. But how can the lock-in mentality be worked around exactly?

Making something new and better is good. But it doesn't seem to be the only issue.

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

#150

Post by bo1024 »

kazinator wrote: post #108
bo1024 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One point I took away from the article was to look around and think more deeply about what issues today are just important as freedom in computing was during the ascension of Linux. To me, a big one is ownership: who really owns/controls the things we purchase? As for free software, consider that desktop computers are rapidly becoming less and less relevant to consumers at large, on average, yet they are also becomin…

Desktop computers are extremely relevant to people who do anything more than passively consume entertainment and participate on social networks. Mobile touch screen devices are next to useless for creating content. Also, speaking of desktops, don't forget laptops.

I totally agree, but despite this, I still think desktops' general-population relevance is declining. I also think that laptops unfortunately are trending toward less freedom as compared to desktops.
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