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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

#161

Post by chillingeffect »

davexunit wrote: post #158
Delmania wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ubuntu has been the user friendly introduction to GNU/Linux and free software for many people, it was for me, but in recent years Canonical has made many harmful decisions. They have a purposely unclear trademark policy, have had multiple GPL violations, opted users into sending desktop search data to Amazon, market proprietary SaaS (Landscape, defunct One Cloud, and AFAIK the Snappy server is proprietary), and sell…

I've really liked Ubuntu and was looking forward to 16.04, but can you recommend what my next move might be? I'm certainly open to suggestions. My goal is a low-admin workstation for running design apps like Inkscape, eagle and other CNC and electrical engineering software. merci.

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

#162

Post by Grishnakh »

falcolas wrote: post #4
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…

I can appreciate why you are expressing the negativity you are... but that's not going to help us either. So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something. So, instead of deciding to do nothing but accept this as inevitable... do something. Contribute to Diaspora. Convince your friends and family to use email i…

>So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something.

Oh please, this is a terrible comparison. AOL was constantly mocked by general internet users, and finally died simply because it became obsolete thanks to other ISPs, web services like Gmail, etc. All of which are big companies.

Yahoo died (it's dead now, but a zombie) because of other big companies, like Google, whose services users migrated to (like Gmail again).

MySpace died (again, another zombie) because of the rise of Facebook, which again, is another huge company.

Your "someone" who decided to "do something" in every case was a big corporation who out-competed them, not a ragtag bunch of volunteers offering something for free because they want to improve the world.

I'd love it if everyone dumped Facebook and switched to Diaspora and email, but I'm sorry, there just aren't any examples at all of this kind of thing happening. Users abandon one crappy corporate service only when some other less-crappy corporate service comes along as an alternative, and the pain of switching becomes low enough to make it worthwhile for them to do so. Highly-technical users are, of course, the exception, but they pretty much never manage to convince their friends and family to abandon the corporate stuff and take up the community-driven stuff, they only succeed (sometimes) in recommending the least-crappy corporate stuff and getting people to switch to that.

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

#163

Post by Grishnakh »

sievebrain wrote: post #60
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…

I think the Linux community has always massively underestimated how destructive the no-stable-API policy has been. The result of not being willing to commit to a driver API has been that Android devices - by far the most massive deployment of Linux kernels ever - are a wasteland of out of date, exploit-ridden kernels that can't be patched because of the monolithic driver model. Windows has a single kernel and all dri…

This isn't quite true: XP drivers are incompatible with later Windows versions, and there's been a lot of problems with Win10 not working with drivers for older Windows versions. When this happens, users end up throwing away perfectly good hardware. Obviously, it's not nearly as bad as Android where every single version is incompatible with any other version, but it's still there.

The problem with Android is that Google has done an absolutely terrible job of managing it and getting vendors to participate correctly (by open-sourcing their drivers so that the OS can be updated). Linux was never meant to be a commercial product, it was always designed with the open-source philosophy, and what you're seeing there is the result of the conflict here. The kernel itself absolutely does have a stable API, but the drivers have always been considered to be part of the kernel, by the devs.

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

#164

Post by jsprogrammer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #156
jsprogrammer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10-20% seems high; even right now, programmers make up about 1% of the US workforce and computer and mathematical occupations combined account for less than 3% of the US workforce (halve the numbers to get percentage of US population).

That's the current percentage of professionals , which is likely to increase. It doesn't include many "programmers" whose occupation is listed under engineering or finance or management or security, or anyone who does it as a hobby instead of an occupation. And why do you expect the students and retirees who constitute the non-working half of the population to have a different long-term composition?

That's self-reported, current occupation [0] collected by BLS.

[0] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm

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

#165

Post by giancarlostoro »

shmerl wrote: post #149
giancarlostoro wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people give up on XMPP because of the XML side, maybe something like Matrix. I think the lock-in mentality could be worked around if we had open and public servers kind of how IRC has them that would be defaults in some of the clients, but the option should obviously remain to pick a server. Pidgin would reach many platforms, and other clients that already support multiple platforms.

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

#166

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dasil003 wrote: post #48
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

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…

> Theoretically if all the customers stood up and boycotted DRM we could have an effect, but in practice that would mean not being able to see the latest premium content for some period of time. Are people really going to give up their Game of Thrones to strong arm the industry?

Ordinary people aren't organized. They won't suddenly all stand up and sign some kind of petition. What they're going to do -- what they are doing -- is that when DRM sucks, they go watch cat videos or argue with people on the internet instead of watching your content, and that money disappears out of your pocket.

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

#167

Post by Grishnakh »

simonh wrote: post #109
bryanlarsen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the software is open source, you can relatively easily find somebody to do it for you for $100/hour or so. That's within the scope of many individuals. $100 000 000 is outside of the scope of pretty much everybody.

Relatively easily. Really. Your solution is for ordinary non technical people to become development managers and hire someone they don't know to do something they don't understand at their own financial risk.

How can they not understand it? If the consultant does his job, the software will work. Any idiot user can tell if the software actually runs or not.

People hire mechanics to fix stuff all the time, even though they don't really understand how their cars work. They do know when their cars aren't working though.

You're trying to convince me that ordinary people are utterly incapable of hiring experts to perform services for them?

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

#168

Post by simonh »

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.

Samba, bash, screen and autofs all predate Linux and most of the rest were either initially developed on others unixes or at least at a time when Linux was far away from its current dominance. The idea that modern OSX relies in any material way on Linux is simply obviously false to anyone with a basic understanding of the history of UNIX.

Linux succeeded due to its compatibility with this rich ecosystem of software, not the other way around.

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

#169

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #160
Ace17 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

> All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies. All "property" is government enforced monopolies, and much of it outside of IP (and especially much of the broader class of intangible personal property of which IP is itself as subclass) is also either temporary or conditional in nature.

The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. You don't own every similar parcel of land. It isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense. But a patent on a device does exactly that.

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

#170

Post by Grishnakh »

chillingeffect wrote: post #29
nxzero wrote: post #18

As someone that deeply cares about tech & freedom, truly feel most techies fail to see that that majority of the world does not see freedom as a priority. While I do not know the answer, I do believe it's possible to find one. Focus on building relationships first, then tech.

It goes all the way back to lifestyle. For most people, freedom means something like, "My partner and I will work our whole entire lives doing things we don't really like, possibly be out of debt by retirement, at which point our kids will be in debt. Then we can travel the world and spend the rest on our healthcare." The fact that they can do that seems good enough for them. They always think if they work a little h…

>For most people, freedom means something like, "My partner and I will work our whole entire lives doing things we don't really like, possibly be out of debt by retirement, at which point our kids will be in debt. Then we can travel the world and spend the rest on our healthcare." The fact that they can do that seems good enough for them.

Well it's better than what we had before. 5-15 centuries ago, freedom meant something like, "My family will toil all day long, with no vacation, for our whole entire lives in some feudal lord's fields doing backbreaking work in exchange for getting to live in a crappy shack with dirt floors and have some crappy low-nutrition food and not getting murdered by robbers. Our kids will work for the same lord or his heirs. Travel is just a fantasy."

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