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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

#181

Post by jakelazaroff »

kibwen wrote: post #100
jakelazaroff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Isn't this kind of the point, though? To compete with proprietary software, free software needs to actually be competitive. "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

> "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it. Except that it has to cut it in order for a free software movement to exist, because otherwise free software is starved by a chicken-and-egg problem where developers don't use free software because it's inferior, and free software never improves because developers don't use it. In other words, being willing to use technically infer…

I don't understand, though — there are so many cases in which free software dominates because it's better, despite proprietary alternatives from companies with deep pockets.

Most servers run Linux and Apache or nginx. The most popular CMS is WordPress. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB are the most popular databases.

On macOS, the most common shell is bash, and most of the commands are free. According to the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey, two of the three most popular development environments are the open-source Visual Studio Code and Notepad++. The most popular web browser was Firefox for a while, but even Chrome is based on a ton of open-source technologies.

Most people aren't picking these tools because they have some principled stance on free software, they're picking them because they're just plain better.

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

#182

Post by mwcampbell »

pdonis wrote: post #53

Searls says that the fight for general purpose computing is the one most worth having: but I think he's using a definition of "general purpose computing" that most non-developers won't even understand, much less agree with. The problem is that development is an extremely special purpose--one that most people don't do and don't understand the needs of. As a developer, I want a level of control over every aspect of my…

Maybe we can at least make sure that the next generation of children get it, or at least the kids that we are close to. This is on my mind because I have five nieces and one nephew, all of whom are less than five years old. I gave three of them Amazon tablets the Christmas before last, and have come to regret it. I will do what I can to make sure that their next computers will be general-purpose as we developers understand it.

It may be worthwhile to reflect on my own early experience with computers. In 1988, when I was almost 8, my family's first computer was an Apple IIGS. As I explained in my personal retrospective on that machine a few years ago [1], that machine had kind of a split personality, because it combined compatibility with the earlier 8-bit Apple II models with a more or less Mac-like, native 16-bit environment. The legacy 8-bit environment included BASIC in ROM, whereas the native 16-bit environment could only be programmed with a dedicated development environment that wasn't included with the computer. Of course, even many 8-bit Apple II programs were written in assembly language and were locked down to varying degrees (e.g. copy protection, no easy way to break into the BASIC interpreter). But at least that BASIC interpreter was available in the 8-bit environment. So the 16-bit environment represented another step in the direction of separating users from developers.

I remember one experience that, I think, helped spark my interest in programming. One day when I was about 8, my uncle Eric was over at our house, and he brought with him a disk full of 8-bit Apple II games. One of those games was written in BASIC and somehow involved shapes crudely rendered in text mode (I don't remember anything else about the game). He had modified those shapes to bear the names of his kids. That was interesting all by itself. But then, if I remember correctly, he went in and modified the game to show the names of my siblings and me instead. These days, we call this live coding. And with most off-the-shelf software now, it's impossible. If we can fix this for free software, I think more people will be enthusiastic about it. Of course, the specific example I recounted here is pretty trivial, but the lesson is clear: we need to make it practical for people to modify the software they use every day, on the fly, with low friction. Then, the freedom to modify software will matter to more people.

[1]: https://mwcampbell.us/blog/apple-iigs.html

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

#183

Post by scarface74 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #181
kibwen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it. Except that it has to cut it in order for a free software movement to exist, because otherwise free software is starved by a chicken-and-egg problem where developers don't use free software because it's inferior, and free software never improves because developers don't use it. In other words, being willing to use technically infer…

I don't understand, though — there are so many cases in which free software dominates because it's better, despite proprietary alternatives from companies with deep pockets. Most servers run Linux and Apache or nginx. The most popular CMS is WordPress. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB are the most popular databases. On macOS, the most common shell is bash, and most of the commands are free. According to…

How many of those products that you mentioned that are free are backed and for all intents and purposes controlled by commercial backers? Would the community maintain any of them to a re al degree if the backing company abandoned then?

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

#184

Post by scarface74 »

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…

Of all the “lock in” of AWS, lambda functions are the easiest to convert. Not only that, you can write a standard Node/Express C#/Web API, Python/Django service, throw a proxy on top of it and deploy it either to lambda or a standard server just by slightly tweaking your build pipeline.

A lambda function is nothing more than a standard app with an entry point with two arguments. Your handler function should be “skinny” just like a Controller action in a typical MVC framework.

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

#185

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

CJefferson wrote: post #147
shmerl wrote: post #18

Yeah, I'm often puzzled by some FOSS developers not using open communication tools and not running Linux on their actual day to day work computers.

That's partly because Linux is so hard to run. I bought an xps 13 because it is supposed to have official Ubuntu support and I still get weird errors on start-up, and crashes sometimes when I plug 2 external monitors in.

In 2019, it's far easier to run Ubuntu than Windows 10.

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

#186

Post by [deleted] »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #143
theamk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ne…

Running your own servers doesn't require you to bid for sparse plots of land, like constructing your own office space does.

[deleted]

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

#187

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

mruts wrote: post #71
shmerl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't fit reality. For example, Apple are avoiding and even banning GPL, preferring BSD. And they are one of the worst anti-FOSS values examples (due to extreme lock-in, patent aggression and so on).

Freedom isn't about people doing things you like. It's about allowing people to do things you don't like.

GPL is about user freedom. You're talking about someone else's freedom; not user freedom. GPL doesn't say 'you can't make money on this software' or even 'you can't do evil things with this software'. It just says you can't take away other people's freedom to use the software under the same terms.

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

#188

Post by danans »

throw2016 wrote: post #110

What made Linux and FOSS possible is a specific time and context and that is not happening again. There is no job security, everything is about building a resume, getting a job and hanging on or a startup, everything is related to money or status. There is also an ahistorical perspective of tech, as if things just are or happen with no deliberate effort and its an open question whether there is any real commitment or…

> referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments

I seem to recall this being true on Slashdot also.

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

#189

Post by caf »

zapzupnz wrote: post #140
mjevans wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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

Nah, such a thing would make most sense as a separate daemon that uses the server-server protocol to connect to the ircd (ie. it appears to the rest of the network as just another ircd).

It wouldn't be hard to build such a thing, the hard part would be convincing an existing IRC network to run it.

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

#190

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

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…

> 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.

Nothing says that all free software will be good or user-friendly (systemd is an excellent case-in-point). But you can choose a better alternative.

Proprietary software sometimes has short-term convenience benefits, but even thinking slightly-longer-term quickly shows that it's never worth it.

Even with less-than-ideal software like systemd, it's still miles better than proprietary alternatives. Yes, you may have to run "systemctl suspend"* to put your computer to sleep, but you don't end up with Candy Crush embedded in your program launcher, or over-12-years-outdated bash, etc.

[*] It's pretty easy to wrap 'systemctl suspend' in something friendlier, such as a shortcut.

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