Time to fork the FSF • Hacker News Board

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#211

Post by tychobrahe » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 4:42 PM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #151

aaronmorey wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a microcosm of a problem I've seen in the open source area in general... a preference for code over people. Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal…

> but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing. Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of…

Way to split hairs and miss the point, huh?

But that sorta proves his point. Linux isn't good to normal people today just because it's full of geeky magic dust. It is good today because it "Just Works™".

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#212

Post by tychobrahe » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 4:47 PM UTC

ordinary wrote: post #202

0x12 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing. Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of…

When a user installs Linux and can't get her brand new graphics card to work, she doesn't care whose fault that is. When the brightness adjustment keys don't work, all I think is "crap, my computer does not work". The vast majority of people are like that; my use of the first person singular was not an accident, I count myself among them. It's not a matter of assigning blame, it's a matter of recognizing reality. For…

Hey, NH, I'm not the poster, but why is this being down voted? Linux being easier to use and easier to maintain isn't something we all could benefit from?

And for fucks sake, don't say "it's FUD". I had a hard time installing drivers for an NVidia graphic card this month in Ubuntu's latest stable version, running in Dell workstation. I could even put out some videos.

I'm tired of people who had difficulties with Linux being called liars and getting down votes here.

Linux is great, but it's not finished yet. There's room for improvement. (Same with Windows. Same with OS X).

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#213

Post by epistasis » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 4:50 PM UTC

burgerbrain wrote: post #169

__david__ wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most early music stores had no DRM. Yeah, but they also had no music. Apple used their near monopoly of online music to force the majors into selling DRM free music online. That deserves praise.

Amazon MP3 beat them to that. "Launched in public beta on September 25, 2007,[1] in January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights management (DRM) from the four major music labels (EMI, Universal, Warner Music, and Sony BMG), as well as many independents.[1][2][3][4]" "On January 6, 2009, Apple announced that DRM had been removed from 80% of the entire music catalog in the U.S."

The labels gave DRM-free music to Amazon first in an attempt to lessen iTunes dominance. Apple was publicly rabble-rousing for DRM-free music before that.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#214

Post by orblivion » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 4:50 PM UTC

raganwald wrote: post #201

orblivion wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't even talking about aesthetics. I was talking about the sort of taste it takes to say "no" to expressing your opinion in an entirely frank manner at certain times.

Ah! I get that. +1! In my circle, that use of the word “taste” is almost always a negative, as in “Reg made a tasteless joke” but certainly it can be used positively, as in, “Reg’s commentary on admiring Steve but not deifying him was in good taste even if I don’t agree with it.” I was mixed up by the comparison to Bill Gates, who I don’t see as being tasteless in speech but whose company I used to view as being tast…

Yeah by invoking Microsoft I was expanding "taste" to a much more general meaning there, sorry for the confusion.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#215

Post by 0x12 » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 4:58 PM UTC

stonemetal wrote: post #191

0x12 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing. Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of…

When I bought a new box last year I couldn't get wireless to work. Until I went in to some random config file and forced it to load an older version of the driver because the new fancy version that is shipped doesn't actually work. But thanks for proving his point by calling him a liar.

Yes, because we all know that the occasional configuration problem is unique to Linux.

Really.

Counterpoint to your story: I bought a notebook with a 3G card in it, couldn't for the life of me get the thing to work under windows vista (which it came installed with). It got so bad that I suspected that the hardware must be broken.

For kicks I booted the machine using ubuntu NBR, not only did it detect and configure all the other peripherals properly but it also auto-detected the 3G card and it made it work instantly without further configuration, other than clicking the 'connect' entry in the menu and entering the PIN code (four times '0').

Just because there is the occasional glitch I'm not going to say 'windows vista doesn't support lots of hardware'.

If you say your soundcard/wireless/etc doesn't work under a major distribution then that's really unfortunate, but that does not make your story representative of the vast majority of Linux users. Personally I haven't seen any configuration issues in Linux for over a decade unless it was because I was using some very rare and either very new or totally obscure hardware, and even in those cases I could always get it to work by using google for a bit.

Except for that one time with the 3G card under windows. But that's not proof of anything other than that there was at least one instance where someone had a hardware issue with a windows machine.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#216

Post by dbbo » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 5:03 PM UTC

EiZei wrote: post #208

dbbo wrote: post #13

At the risk of getting repetitive: I think rms was speaking strictly from a utilitarian perspective-- that is, Jobs' absence is overall a good thing for the FOSS movement (even though that might not actually be true, unless Cook is more committed to FOSS than Jobs). I can see how some find his statement tactless, but I'm not offended by it because Jobs was not an important person in my life. That doesn't mean that hi…

Strictly from an utilitarian perspective RMS should keep his big fat mouth shut when someone -especially somebody as popular as Jobs - dies.

I don't really think popularity is a reason to suppress rms' constitutional rights (he is a US citizen as far as I know), no matter how crazy or alienating his opinions are.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#217

Post by tychobrahe » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 5:06 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #195

sliverstorm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic- it would seem to be RMS who is getting carried away. A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? To me, this discredits him more than anything I have ever heard him say. Software is not more important than life. Disclaimer: Actively avoids Apple products

> Software is not more important than life. // How about freedom? Is freedom from, for example, capitalist overlords more important than life? People give their lives for freedom all the time. > A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? // Meh. I don't see the problem with someone who didn't know Steve Jobs personally simply addressing how a change in leaders…

Ever heard of "blame the game, not the player"? Trying to put all the blame on Steve Jobs' shoulder, right after his death, is horrendous.

Steve Jobs wasn't the enemy of freedom RMS paints him as. That he personally wrote letters against DRM on media-stores and against the closed-platform called Flash asking everyone to favor HTML5 made much much difference in those two specific areas than most things Stallman did lately.

(Funny, reminds me that that FOSS advocates here on NH are okay with Android prolonging Flash's life and using closed-source software only as a means to gain market share)

Granted, he never open sourced the whole operating system, but why would he? To see Apple collapse again while Dell/HP and others strive? What's the point? Then we start all over again? We'll have open-source chips manufactured by 2 or 3 companies? What's the fucking point?

Seriously, I'm tired of Stallman's half-assed socialism. It's an offense to me. You don't destroy capitalism by destroying companies, or people. You destroy capitalism by destroying the core of it...

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#218

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

burgerbrain wrote: post #171

rimantas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an attack on all software developers. I am a software developer and I don't think I am under any attack. Heck they gave me one more platform to develop for. And there is lots of open source code written for it already.

Stockholm syndrome.

[deleted]

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#219

Post by Rusky » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

akg0 wrote: post #206

cookiecaper wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't find it tasteless. Is it really such a criminal thing to say that you are glad Jobs's influence is gone? Can't reasonable people disagree on that point? People totally go overboard wrt Steve Jobs, as they do his company, Apple. RMS comes from a time when computers were generally open for tinkering, and Apple strove to make its products impenetrable lest Jobs' pain-stakingly "perfected" designs be gaudied up…

I don't think it was anywhere near offensive, but once people start loudly complaining about how offended they are, the conversation inevitably focuses on their feelings instead of our freedoms. In the end, they will win. Either RMS will tone down to focus on the "real" stuff, or he won't, and his influence will wane in favor of more widely-acceptable voices. In this as in many other parts of life, watered-down moder…

So Steve Jobs was a watered-down moderate?

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#220

Post by maximusprime » Sat, Oct 08, 2011, 5:32 PM UTC

Best way to deal with extreme fundamentalists is to ignore them.

He's a joke.