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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

#21

Post by shmerl »

iaarn wrote: post #9
oldjokes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one really freaks me out. Especially since many of the TOS are downright abusive. Discord, for example, reserves the right to read through and listen to all your communications and monetize that in any way and you agree to let them sell all that to anyone, forever. The fact that we're just sort of expecting everyone to slave away on github every night and weekend to remain employable is pretty disgusting too. Th…

Friendly reminder that Mozilla has decided to abandon IRC and the Rust community has therefore moved to Discord, a platform that is abusive regarding data and requires you to use a closed source javascript application to access the service. Mozilla is a bad example because their leadership is simply pathetic, but you get the point. This trend is very, very dangerous. But well the writing was on the wall when many ope…

Why couldn't they use Matrix instead of Discord?

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

#22

Post by zanny »

jonawesomegreen wrote: post #4

> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use. This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project…

Just use Riot. I actively seek to contribute to projects nowadays that actively use Matrix as its communication platform. Rust was mentioned in another comment - Mozilla might move to a proprietary data-insecure privacy violating walled garden of Discord, but the Rocket web framework, Tokio, and several other Rust projects have official Matrix discussion rooms as some of their primary points of contact.

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

#23

Post by mikenew »

jonawesomegreen wrote: post #4

> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use. This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project…

Use Matrix. It's been a slow and bumpy few years, but it's there now. Idealism aside I genuinely prefer it to other messaging services.

You don't need to host your own server or anything special (unless you want to). You can just sign up here: https://riot.im/app/

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

#24

Post by bregma »

I love the way commenters here equate FLOSS development with unpaid hobbyist developers.

Fact: most of the contributors to the Linux kernel are highly-paid professionals who do that work full time.

The same goes for many, if not most, of the popular and successful FLOSS projects.

It is an error to assume that free (as in speech) software is only made by free (as in beer) development.

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

#25

Post by coldpie »

jaabe wrote: post #19
jonawesomegreen wrote: post #4

> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use. This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project…

I’m probably bad but I honestly can’t get slack to work with all the different communities I’ve been invited to. Discord basically works like IRC, except almost every channel I’m in is by invitation only, making it almost impossible for new people to join. In my opinion IRC is still the best tool out there and I really, really wonder why we stopped using it.

I think by a wide margin the biggest problem is that IRC doesn't have any offline features. In a world where people swap devices all the time, it really sucks to have to drop your connection on every device change, and lose any chat that occurred while you were offline and be unreachable while you're offline.

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

#26

Post by ralph84 »

ebg13 wrote: post #7
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.

That's absolutely not true for people who make it in the first place.

Maybe for GNU project contributors, but look at some of the most currently popular FOSS projects. They all came from companies that rely heavily on proprietary software for their core business. They're certainly not contributing to FOSS because they're ideologues who believe all software should be FOSS.

Kubernetes (Google), Angular (Google), TensorFlow (Google), VSCode (Microsoft), TypeScript (Microsoft), React (Facebook), PyTorch (Facebook), just to name a few.

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

#27

Post by zanny »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #20
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.

This. The problem with FOSS are incentives which are not aligned. Sure, some developers will give their best for free... for some time. But sooner or later the going gets tough and maintaining (let alone developing further) your pet project becomes a chore. Will you still do it? For how long? And if you try to monetize the project to at least somehow offset the lost energy and time, and maybe even pay someone else to…

This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so.

The valuable good in exchange is the developers time, not the code itself - nation states have constructed a goliath IP apparatus to impair the natural capacity to instantly and infinitely replicate information. But its wholly fictional and fabricated - its just an outdated paradigm from the era of the commoditization of the printing press where there were still marginal costs that could endanger businesses to overspend on.

There are many ways to monetize your time while creating liberated code in the process, but that is where the focus must be in the free software ecosystem.

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

#29

Post by Funes- »

jordigh wrote: post #11
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.

The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. GNU R has completely dominated most areas of statistical computing, for example…

>The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most.

While I wholeheartedly agree with this particular stance--doing away with ideology and sticking with ethics and pragmatism--, I am not sure that everyone in the FOSS community, if such thing exists, adheres to that same premise.

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