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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

#191

Post by michaelmrose »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #59
michaelmrose wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android especially the google variants are pretty open and unlocked. The librem phone is due in Q3 of this year. If you crowd fund development instead of try to sell consulting or a premium version then Amazon can't pull the rug out from under you by offering hosting and support because you aren't in that business. You may never have an IPO or make a billion dollars but if as the song says we "Try just a little bit h…

> The common clause licenses isn't a "hybrid" its a proprietary software license. Calling it a hybrid is like saying a BLT without the bacon, lettuce, or tomato is a sandwich. It's not a solution its giving up. Well, it's more like tiramisu with chocolate instead of coffee. In the end, as a user, I would prefer a convenient and polished product (that I can't sell) to worse product that respects some other people's de…

Why would a license that discourages any community participation result in a more polished experience?

Got any examples?

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

#193

Post by wahern »

amyjess wrote: post #66
ralph84 wrote: post #2

Most people engage with FOSS for practical reasons, not ideological reasons. Given that developers of proprietary software have made a lot more money on the whole than developers of FOSS, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Everyone could stand to learn the lessons of gcc. Back in the '90s, when gcc really took off, it got a lot of attention for being faster and optimizing code better than anything else out there. It wasn't just free: it was _better_. Of course, the 'free' part helped too, but the only 'free' people cared about was as in beer, not speech. This was when Sun was charging $$$$ for C compiler licenses on top of the operatin…

That's the commonly accepted narrative about LLVM, but in retrospect it's even more clear that it was always about the GPL and, in particular, GPL3. Fast forward to today and LLVM's interfaces are no more stable than GCC's, and GCC is the only project with useable dynamically pluggable modules.

RMS was wrong to have pushed back on module support for so long, but it was irrelevant. Apple wanted to be in the driver's seat, and Apple's legal department was and remains violently opposed to GPL3. And it turns out that when you're in the driver's seat you don't really need stable interfaces and you definitely don't need modules.

The competition has been good, though. I like using both compilers.

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

#194

Post by subway »

Arathorn wrote: post #164
subway wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda-sorta? Matrix is an incredibly centralized service masquerading as an easily self-hosted distributed service. The moment you try to get a non-technical user connected to a homeserver other than matrix.org, all hell starts to break loose. It's bad enough that both France (tchap) and Purism have created their own client forks to make on-boarding somewhat tolerable at the expense of really painful rebases against…

This is pretty disingenuous - we have spent loads of time making Riot work well with self-hosted servers (c.f. the current login & registration flows, which explicitly prompt you to select a server), and around 50% of the network are running their own servers. Our intention is to turn off the original matrix.org server once we have decentralised accounts and the network is healthy enough.

Please share a useful workflow for getting a non-technical user onto a non matrix.org homeserver.

I've personally run 3 homeservers for communities formerly centered around Facebook, only one of which was technical. For the non-technical communities the workflow was the one provided by riot-web when a mobile user visits the homeserver.

Neither of the non-technical communities saw more than 5% adoption in the org. The technical community constantly complained about the login flow.

When I deployed Mattermost with a custom app for the first non-technical community I saw 40% adoption within a week, and 80 within the month. The second community has looked at the first as an example, and I can expect 80%+ adoption within a week or two of deployment.

I've asked repeatedly in both #ios:matrix.org and #android:matrix.org about assistance in putting together docs similar to mattermost's and was completely ignored.

I've asked if the Riot folks would be open to deep-links providing the homeserver to mobile apps, and was shut down by somebody who insisted deferred deep links were the only kind of deep links, and that they would only ever be supported by a Google Play on-boarding flow.

I really want to love Matrix, but y'all make it fucking difficult sometimes.

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

#195

Post by wahern »

oneplane wrote: post #159
kazinator wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Federation has been tried a lot and in the end it always fails, even if it's the best solution. XMMP is pretty much dead regarding free use, IRC for a lot of FOSS project is slowing dying, there were a lot of federated social media projects that simply failed because they couldn't attract anyone. Being technically the best (or the best in 'freedom') doesn't seem relevant to anyone.

Centralization has never succeeded. Let's see how popular Slack is in 5 years. 10 years. There's no reason to believe it won't go the way of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP, these are fundamentally technologies of federation. They succeeded and continue to succeed spectacularly. However, with the commercialization of the Internet there are much stronger countercurrents. I still expect federated solutions to succeed, but adoption will be slower and punctuated, and in the interim there'll be countless proprietary also rans.

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

#196

Post by kccqzy »

api wrote: post #133
kazinator wrote: post #16

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. 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"

And also the difference between "the code is inelegant and sucks and I'll remove it, damn the users" and "the code may be ugly but the feature users want is ugly so let's do it".

Case in point, I recently upgraded the computer of a non-technical person from Ubuntu 18.10 to 19.04. And now desktop icons are completely broken. It's been reimplemented in JS, with horrible performance, and doesn't even support features like dragging an icon to a folder. Their reason for removal? A bunch of technobabble no user would understand. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/158

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

#197

Post by wyre »

smnrchrds wrote: post #148
Drdrdrq wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they have one of the few FOSS products that can compete with any of its rivals on quality alone (the only one I can think of actually).

Don't forget about VLC.

Also 7zip, Calibre, some torrent clients.

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

#198

Post by jhoechtl »

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…

> Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally

As a long time FOSS and Linux user I can tell you that usability of FOSS GUI systems has repaidely degraded in comparison to professional systems (Mac OS or Windows). If half of my hardware is defunct under Linux I will not use the FOSS. It's like buying anew car and being unable to switch to fourth and fifth gear or use the built-in entertainment system.

The Wayland fork hasn't contributed to this situation.

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

#199

Post by floatingatoll »

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…

FOSS does not appear to value user accessibility as a priority. Non-IRC, non-XMPP chat systems continue to implement features that users enjoy and appreciate, while IRC/XMPP clients argue that those features are irrelevant because the ideals of IRC/XMPP should take precedence.

IRC has, in the past ten years, fallen behind on:

- Scrollback syncing (client-to-client) and persistence (server-to-client)

- Everyday user interface (mIRC ships a UI from 1995)

- Setup and configuration (I can't get SASL right on the first try and I helped upgrade an IRC network to support it)

- Authenticity at a network level (not just Anope setting a umode)

- Protocol resilience (netsplits should not be visible to users)

- Defense against attackers (pitting the idealism of anonymity against the safety of identity)

Why has FOSS allowed itself to be eclipsed by closed-source chat providers in these regards? I believe it's because the ideals of FOSS are now in direct conflict with the needs of modern users, including FOSS people themselves. For example:

- Anonymity is an ideal to be held up above all others, so defending against spam attacks is impossible, because anonymous users are granted equal rights as my friends.

- Accuracy is an ideal to be held up above all others, so preventing netsplits is impossible, because the clients must know when they don't have a realtime immediate connection to each other.

- Maximally-capable UX is an ideal to be held up above all others, so building a less-capable UX that is more widely easier to understand is impossible, because otherwise we might not be able to view our chat at the maximum information density possible.

- Local-only data is an ideal to be held up above all others, so scrollback syncing must be outright prohibited and campaigned against, because otherwise the clients would expect the server to help them exchange data that the server must never permit itself to hold.

If FOSS realigns its ideals with those of modern users such as ourselves, then it could easily retake the gap covered in the past decade by closed-source software. I hope with all my heart that it does so someday, but I'm not holding my breath.

Footnote: Apologies for all the whitespace but, ironically, HN doesn't support formatted text such as bulleted lists, nor does IRC. This would take up half as much vertical space on your screen on Slack :)

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

#200

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

We don't have an internet that functions as intended. IPSs conspired to prevent residential users from running servers. The result is that everything free either needs a patron to cover expenses or be monetizable.
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