We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by jsnz » Thu, May 09, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

The opinions in this article are simply fear-mongering and divisive of the programmer community as whole.

They are formulated on an irrational fear of FOSS being extinguished by the greed of the corporations.

So long as there is at least one programmer left with the will to post their source to the world FOSS will not die.

Let's also not be so one-eyed as forget to value equally the contribution of all programmers who write great software whether free or not, open or closed-source - we can still admire the fruits of their labours if not their algorithms.

FOSS community, please stop wringing your hands in fear, go write some code with them!

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

#222

Post by p2t2p » Thu, May 09, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

p2t2p wrote: post #174

Drdrdrq wrote: post #37

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. Convenience always wins. Always. Users do care about free (as in beer) and they care if the product or service will disappear without warning (hello Google!). But the defi…

It is not about "convenience". It is about "be done with it and get on with my life". I don't want to use an IDE, I want to debug a Java program. I don't want to use video editor, I want to have a video. I don't want to use 3D redactor, I want a 3D print something. I can go on forever. The problem with lots of free software folks and linux crowd is fetish of tools. Tools for the sake of tools. I couldn't care less ab…

I just re-read it and I have no idea how I didn't notice my brain burping out Russian word instead of English one.

%s/redactor/editor

Separate question why would it do that

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

#223

Post by Crinus » Thu, May 09, 2019, 10:17 AM UTC

arctantwo wrote: post #206

scarface74 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Who cares.

When the "new" tool is worse than the "old" tool, i care (and yes, the "new" tool can be worse - and often is - yet displace the "old" one, not because of its quality, but because of external reasons - like the developers of the "old" tool being unable to sustain its development).

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

#224

Post by rjsw » Thu, May 09, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #132

malvosenior wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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…

I would guess that he was editing source on ITS or a Lisp Machine before this point.

I think you can see some evidence of what people thought were development machines by the fact that Lisp Machines only seem to have been NFS servers, not NFS clients.

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

#225

Post by Crinus » Thu, May 09, 2019, 10:26 AM UTC

jeena wrote: post #130

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRCCloud is okay, but the UX/UI isn't anywhere near as nice as Slack.

Why would you need to use Slack (or IRC) when there is https://rocket.chat/ https://zulipchat.com/ https://matrix.org/ https://mattermost.com/

Probably because the few people who want to use alternatives to Slack are spread among these four alternatives instead of using one and sticking with it.

And honestly, of all the alternatives, IRC is by far the most popular one (and the other alternatives have IRC bridges) hence the most likely to stay around the longest.

Also the simplest to implement, which helps a lot too.

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

#226

Post by Crinus » Thu, May 09, 2019, 10:38 AM UTC

wyre wrote: post #197

smnrchrds wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget about VLC.

Also 7zip, Calibre, some torrent clients.

7zip from both a UX and feature perspective is awful compared to something like WinRAR, it is popular mainly because it provides good compression and is free, but beyond that it is eclipsed by WinRAR in almost every other front (outside of compression, the only other thing that i find 7zip good at is archive support - it supports a ton of formats including even disk images with support for various filesystems, although only for reading).

Even PeaZip has a (slightly) better UI than 7zip (and that one is also crossplatform, if you care about that stuff).

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

#227

Post by trasz » Thu, May 09, 2019, 10:38 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #43

mruts wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the GPL is so restrictive to violate the principles of FOSS. BSD or public domain is better and more free.

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).

Apple anti-FOSS, given the scale of their involvement in eg LLVM? They are at most anti-GPL.

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

#228

Post by Crinus » Thu, May 09, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

magduf wrote: post #112

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…

>Compare this to GNOME, on the other hand, which regularly removes popular features and ignores all user complaints. The fact that GNOME is the dominant DE for Linux, despite this fact you cite, really is confounding considering that the whole point of FOSS is supposed to be that it empowers the users. It almost feels like the entire existence and adoption of GNOME by many prominent distros was a conspiracy to preven…

My guess is that it wasn't really a conspiracy but that most distro developers do not give a rats ass about good desktop experience, thus they simply package whatever those who do work on desktop stuff and get done with it. "Those who work on desktop stuff" are basically Canonical and Red Hat and both of them decided, for various reasons to stick with GNOME, partly because GNOME at some point (2.x days) was a good enough desktop and partly because everyone had settled on Gtk+ as the defacto Linux toolkit (itself mainly thanks to it being usable from C, written in a way that allowed other languages to interface with it almost automatically and of course having a license usable by everyone from the beginning) and GNOME was the defacto desktop environment for Gtk.

Of course all that was on the Gtk2/Gnome2 days and Gtk3/Gnome3 broke a lot of bridges, still the complexity of the desktop and the fact that GNOME has actual paid people working on it ended up with the project having a lot of inertia and they are the projects that do most of the work no matter how misguided that work might be.

After all, those who do the work are those who decide how that work will look like. Anyone else, regardless of them being right, wrong, having better or worse opinion on that work, is irrelevant.

If you want to take control of the Linux desktop away from GNOME you need to replace the GNOME stack - not just the desktop, but also the toolkit, the inter-application communication, sound libraries, etc - with something that is objectively better (for a definition of better that a majority agrees with it) and convince other developers to use it.

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

#229

Post by Crinus » Thu, May 09, 2019, 11:06 AM UTC

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…

> Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins.

What is good quality differs between people. Personally i consider good quality to be desktop software with a good and simple (but not patronizing) UX and responsive UI that does not abuse my system's resources.

The vast majority of FLOSS fails hard there, at best you get a single aspect of the application to be very good at what it does (e.g. some 3D renderer might provide a very accurate light model) but suffer at everything else (e.g. be usable only through the command line, using only a custom format, no support for the 3D authoring tools that everyone else uses, etc).

There are very few FLOSS applications of good quality and of course that is what i consider good quality (someone might consider the command line part i mentioned above as a sign of quality because it would be easier to drive via scripts, e.g. for setting a render farm).

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

#230

Post by cpach » Thu, May 09, 2019, 11:17 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #65

coldpie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So use IRCCloud or selfhosted Quasseldroid+Quassel? Or maybe even Matrix with Riot and the IRC bridge?

IRCCloud is really neat. Great UI IMHO. However, I must admit I’m too cheap to pay $50 USD/year for something that I use even less than once a month. So I go with irssi+screen instead.