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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

#201

Post by Drdrdrq »

yarrel wrote: post #155
Drdrdrq wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe it is possible, but it is a compromise. Let go of one of the freedoms so that other freedoms (like "right to repair") have a chance. In other words: Commons Clause.

Compromise sounds nice but when the "compromise" is a one-sided capitulation it's not really compromise.

Do read the license, it's really short and to the point. At least for me I don't think I'm giving up much (as a user) by using Commons Clause software. I just can't sell the app or services without obtaining permission from authors. Which seems fair to me - if I earn money, they should get a piece of the value.

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

#202

Post by erklik »

amyjess wrote: post #92
seandougall wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention users! I can't count how many times I've seen bug reports responded to with a dismissive "you're welcome to file a PR", which is just a thinly veiled expression of the same attitude: you're not valuable, your domain expertise is not valuable, and the time you're taking to engage in the development cycle is not valuable; only your code is valuable. It's really not a big mystery why more average users do…

I wholeheartedly agree. In addition, responses like that do more to specifically push people towards commercial software than anything else (not specifically proprietary, just commercial). Why use a piece of software where the developers have no incentive to care about your concerns when you could instead use a piece of software where you're a paying customer and the production company has a financial incentive to ke…

I think your comment really does hit the point home. The developer working on a piece of software without any incentive to actually work on that software, doesn't and shouldn't care for the user.

To solve that, one needs to find a way to incentivise the developer so they are actually able to work on requests not just features they deem important.

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

#203

Post by Drdrdrq »

michaelmrose wrote: post #191
Drdrdrq wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why do you think it discourages any community participation?

It does put some restrictions regarding the license for modifications (it must be permissive, or CLA needs to be signed), but anyone can fork, maintain or share their copy. They just can't make money by selling it, without also paying to original authors. Which seems fair to me.

Should contributors also be somehow compensated? Bigger ones, absolutely. How? I have no idea, but there's at least some chance of that happening with Commons Clause, while with FOSS there is none.

As for examples... From Commons Clause? No. But since Redis Labs changed the license for their modules I'm not aware of any projects using it. Unfortunately.

There are plenty examples in closed source space though... Windows, MacOS, Photoshop, Illustrator, Trello, GitHub.

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

#204

Post by thaumasiotes »

malvosenior wrote: post #94
kuschku wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)... I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack i…

> there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions

I don't see a big difference between sending the message :rose: in Slack and having the client display it as a picture of a rose, vs sending the message :rose: in IRC and having the client display it as a picture of a rose. Emoji don't enter into it.

Reactions, maybe.

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

#205

Post by jondubois »

theamk wrote: post #113
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…

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…

>> bare walls with old ugly wallpaper

With Lambda, it's more like no walls at all... The land just comes with a concrete foundation but you have to build the walls and roof yourself.

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

#206

Post by arctantwo »

scarface74 wrote: post #183
jakelazaroff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Does it matter? If VSCode gets canned, or WordPress gets ruined, why should I, the user using the software to make a blog, give a damn? If VSCode goes there's another one I can switch to. If WordPress goes there's five million other blogging platforms I can switch to. The format that the content (i.e., the configuration, settings, presentation, etc) may all be proprietary, but so what? I have absolutely no allegiance to VSCode, MySQL, whatever. I just use the tool that made the most sense at the time, to accomplish what I wanted to at the time. Times change and if it means I switch tools then so be it. Who cares.

Edit:

I'm speaking from the perspective of an upper 20something. I'm part of a generation that jumps jobs when the opportunity is better, or just because "it's been too long", not the one of years past where I'd be expected to work my way through the same company my entire life. With that said: if my new job says "we use Slack" then I use Slack, end of story. If they say "we use IRC" then I'd Google for how to use IRC because I have never ever used it in my entire life, never read up anything about it in my entire life, and I definitely don't hold IRC in high reverence like many posters here do. All I can see when I google IRC is that it looks ugly and honestly, that's what's most important to me these days because I have to look at, and interact with, the thing for 8+ hours a day so the least it could do is work out of the box, look modern, and doesn't need me to waste hours fussing with some dotfiles to get it to look the way I want, which is exactly how most modern chatting apps look (again: to me it's a waste of time, when I can just grab a off the shelf solution).

I appreciate that there is open source, and that there are free programs out there. I appreciate all the libraries that make my life easier. But the thing is, these are all tools I use to do a job. I don't care at all about the history of say gcc. All I care is that it works and compiles my programs, and if it does, then so be it. And if it doesn't? There are other options, icc, llvm, etc. My point is that at the end of the day, all I want is a tool to achieve a solution, and who makes that tool, or the history behind that tool, doesn't matter to me at all. It's not even part of the equation.

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

#207

Post by kuschku »

jcastro wrote: post #115
kuschku wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

Maybe consider the UX that Slack gives users instead of just cloning the UI on top of IRC and expect it to work out?

That's a major part of what I've done recently, trying to significantly reduce complexity, and contribute to clients to make them more discoverable and require less knowledge to fully utilize them.

The goal is to get rid of the historic interfaces which required a lot of RTFM, and instead to allow users to discover functionality through the UI easily.

If you have any suggestions on what to improve regarding UX of Quasseldroid (my main project), I'd love to hear suggestions, as I'm always interested in improving its UX and learning more about UX design. After all, I, as quasseldroid maintainer, am just one student, not a team of highly paid UX designers.

(And personally, I'm a huge fan of tools like Zulip, Mattermost and Matrix as well — we're all fighting on the same side, after all :)

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

#208

Post by rizzin »

erklik wrote: post #202
amyjess wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree. In addition, responses like that do more to specifically push people towards commercial software than anything else (not specifically proprietary, just commercial). Why use a piece of software where the developers have no incentive to care about your concerns when you could instead use a piece of software where you're a paying customer and the production company has a financial incentive to ke…

I think your comment really does hit the point home. The developer working on a piece of software without any incentive to actually work on that software, doesn't and shouldn't care for the user. To solve that, one needs to find a way to incentivise the developer so they are actually able to work on requests not just features they deem important.

Some projects have adopted donation systems with different grades of success. However this really requires having a combination of factors to work out, such as people actually needing the product, developers not being toxic in communication, the project and developers actually being around for some time to gather a dedicated following.

Examples:

http://www.ardour.org/

https://godotengine.org/

https://rpcs3.net/

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

#209

Post by frobozz »

floatingatoll wrote: post #199
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 i…

Chat (and communications in general) is a tricky field to evaluate for this sort of thing, due to Metcalfe's law and related effects. I also don't think it would be easy for the gap to be retaken (for the same reason).

I use Slack, Facebook, Twitter etc. because I want to communicate with other people who use those services for communication. If I only use IRC and email, I would miss out on some of that communication.

I don't know the various reasons why each of those people use them, and I agree that it is, in part because of some of the things you mention. However, it is also probably also down to marketing. Many people use XMPP via Whatsapp without knowing it, they are just using Whatsapp.

The user accessibility problem is not universal to all FOSS. In my opinion, LibreOffice (MPL) is a superior office suite in terms of usability to MS Office. Audacity (GPL) has a simpler UX than many proprietary audio editing suites.

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

#210

Post by pjmlp »

regularfry wrote: post #95
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible. Anybody remember the dot-com boom? Sun Microsystem's silly " The Network Is The Computer. " ads? No? Linux wasn't even a blip on the radar back then at the enterprise level. > In a world where Windows was dominant and you had to pay a per cpu licensing fee, would companies be trying to put everything on the web, or would they create more apps that ran lo…

Linux itself might not have been (although I'd challenge that if I could remember dates a bit better); Apache and Perl certainly was.

In 2000 we were delivering UNIX software into production on Aix, Solaris and HP-UX boxes, my employer at the time did not consider either GNU/Linux or BSD fit for the quality standards we expected from a standard UNIX, although we did use them on some internal servers, including our builds.
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