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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

#231

Post by Crinus »

zanny wrote: post #167
Drdrdrq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ok, I don't even agree with your definition of freedoms , but I'll bite anyway. Do you have an example of a different approach? RedHat? Selling services, FOSS is just a by-product. Mozilla? Yes, though its position is very unique, and they are the only ones who really have incentives aligne…

Many popular programs are now seeing continuous paid development by patronage including Godot, Krita, Blender, GIMP, and OBS. It is unsettling that they all get this success on a proprietary middle man that siphons a portion of the money in the form of Patreon, but the principle is absolutely applicable to development in general. Right now its regular people paying to have software they want to use developed - game e…

> Many popular programs are now seeing continuous paid development by patronage including Godot, Krita, Blender, GIMP, and OBS.

Godot=$10k/month (patreon) Krita=$2k/month (their donation page) Blender=€31k/month (their fund page) GIMP=individual donations only for two developers, $1k/month and $595/month each OBS=$3.5k/month from opencollective, $1.5k/month for the lead developer for patreon

Now, i do not know what sort of standards you have, but to me considering the amount of effort needed to create the software you mentioned these sound like pittance with the exception of OBS (and even then the developer would get a lot more money if he worked as a developer on a regular company... in some places even as a junior).

$10k/month for a game engine of the complexity of Godot? For Unity that would be absolute failure even back when the editor was available only on Mac OS X.

$2k/month for an advanced complex image editor and painting application? Even in the 80s (and ignoring inflation) that would be a cause to close shop for any software development company.

Blender needs to reach €50k/month to hire 10 developers full time? I'm curious what part of that €5k/month actually goes to the developer.

I'm not going to comment on GIMP, it should be obvious how ridiculous those numbers are.

Look, these numbers are actually the proof of how bad the economic side of FLOSS development is. These are jokes compared to even a small startup, let alone projects that exist years for software used by hundreds of thousands (if not millions, for some).

Developers who work on those aren't doing it for the money, they are doing it because they love the work. If you want to monetize your work, FLOSS is not the way to go, especially as an independent individual.

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

#232

Post by kuschku »

cpach wrote: post #230
kuschku wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that case you may want to try quassel + quassel-webserver + quasseldroid, which gets you something very close to IRCCloud, entirely selfhosted

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

#233

Post by belorn »

mwfunk wrote: post #117
zanny wrote: post #36

Its more abjectly a moral failing of society that institutions have not aligned to enable free software proliferation. Software, and information in general, have been a prisoners dilemma for time immemorial. The optimization of utility is total freedom of information - but such a state of affairs means benefactors reap the labors of others and have no obligation to give anything in return. Copyright was fabricated to…

Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright, because it's the only thing that gives the GPL any meaning at all. In a copyright-free world, any company could make a proprietary GCC fork, lock its code up behind many layers of physical and digital security, make all its developers/employees sign NDAs and other legal agreements ensuring they don't leak any of the new code, et voila. Hardly sounds like a F…

The way I see it free Software enthusiasts who advocate against copyright believes that without the ability to derive rent from copyright, companies will just release the code in hope for contributions. Rent seeking is thus seen by this group as the biggest reason why companies keep software strict proprietary, and it is a fair trade to give up on GPL if we could remove the rent seeking. In this scenario, EULA and other contract-like mechanics to replicate copyright would equally not be allowed, and right to repair addresses most issue around DRM in this context.

It is a very different strategy than GPL, and doesn't look very likely to happen given the trend in both EU and US, but I see it as a valid long shot strategy. It would be a terrible strategy however if we gave up GPL without anything in return.

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

#234

Post by handzbagz1 »

Crinus wrote: post #226
wyre wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, althou…

Whats wrong with the UI in 7zip? Its basic but it works absolutely fine.

The reason I use it is because it's open source and there are no terrible nag screens.

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

#235

Post by malvosenior »

kazinator wrote: post #173
malvosenior wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think so. I work on other OSS and happily use Slack because it's fun and easy (I used to use IRC). I'm not conflicted at all because I appreciate a good UX. I think it would be totally awesome if more open source developers realized that people will use whatever is better for them which often doesn't mean prioritizing openness over usability or features. I totally get the value of a non-corporate, non-c…

You're only narrowly escape being conflicted because you identify as an "OSS" developer rather than a "free software" developer. The term "open source" and its identification was basically crafted to avoid being conflicted this way. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... > A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprise…

This is correct. I care about user experience far more than any political statement. I love open source because I'm a developer and can work with the codebase but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of closed source software at all if it provides an excellent user experience. There are way more buckets someone may fall into rather than closed source freedom killer and free software activist.

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

#236

Post by oneplane »

wahern wrote: post #195
oneplane wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

I suppose you are right from a technology standpoint. I was aiming at the user-facing side of things. There is SMTP and email that is federated and usable by most people, so I suppose there are examples of user-success.

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

#237

Post by jakelazaroff »

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?

What if you're using a product and its community abandons it? This isn't a unique issue to products with commercial backers.

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

#238

Post by jamesgeck0 »

kuschku wrote: post #93
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That may be true, but it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers. And I'm personally working on Quasseldroid, improving its UI to make it much more usable. If you have suggestions on how to make Quasseldroid usable for the people that refuse to use IRC, I'd love to hear them :)

> it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers.

Sure, but the reason all the developers at my workplace use Slack is because we have to communicate with a lot of people who aren't developers.

Slack's good UX extends beyond the basic chat interface to configuration, administration, and initial signup. It's significantly easier for someone nontechnical to toss money at Slack to get a new private space than it is with IRC. The first page of "IRC hosting" search results on Google for me are mostly shell accounts; nothing turnkey and professional looking that a business person could/would use.

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

#239

Post by magduf »

Crinus wrote: post #228
magduf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 en…

>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.

Yes, but it's not just GNOME who does such work. KDE has been around even longer than Gnome, and has a very different philosophy for their DE (one which, IMO, is much more aligned with the hacker philosophy of being able to customize things to your heart's content and having lots of features), yet most Linux distros stick with Gnome.

>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.

Yeah, we already have that; it's called KDE. We also have other DEs based on both Qt and Gtk: LxQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce.

Basically, your post seems to imply that Gnome is the only full-featured DE available for Linux, and this simply isn't the case at all.

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

#240

Post by Crinus »

handzbagz1 wrote: post #234
Crinus wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, althou…

Whats wrong with the UI in 7zip? Its basic but it works absolutely fine. The reason I use it is because it's open source and there are no terrible nag screens.

There is nothing wrong with 7zip's UI (and a program cannot be only "perfect" or "garbage", there are in-between, e.g. "mediocre" or "good enough" or other things) but WinRAR's UX is simply better.

One example, which for me is one of the most annoying aspects of using 7zip, is double clicking on an .exe file or .html file or anything in an archive that relies on other files in the archive (dlls, images, data files, whatever): 7zip extracts only the file i double clicked on, ignoring everything else whereas WinRAR extracts all files since chances are if an executable is part of an archive, it'll need the other files in the archive to work too. This means that with 7zip i have to manually unzip the archive somewhere first, usually drag and dropping the top folder in the archive (assuming it has one, many donts) in the desktop or a temp folder, then open that temp folder, run it and then delete the folder. With WinRAR i just double click the executable and WinRAR does the rest. This is very useful when i want to run some game from a gamejam, run an installer which for whatever reason isn't part of an executable, test an archived build of a project that is made up of exe+data, check an archived webpage that is made up of several html and image files, etc.

As a sidenote (and another source of frustration), 7zip also has the annoying behavior of deleting that temp file almost right after it extracts it (i'm not sure exactly how it decides that) which means that unless the associated program is fast enough to open it, it'll get deleted under its feet, creating a race condition between the associated program and 7zip.

There are other issues with 7zip as well as a lack of features (practically zero features in the self-extracting archive generator, as an example). The main reason i have it installed is because it can open more formats than WinRAR, especially useful when dealing with disk images from VirtualBox since i can simply open it with 7zip and extract files from there directly without booting the VM. But when it comes to working with zip, rar and even 7z archives, i stick with WinRAR.

BTW, the "terrible nag screens" go away from WinRAR once you buy it. It has been a while since i saw any of those.

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