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We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

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Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#51

Post by grive »

tacos wrote: post #3

We're also a lot older now and many realize the "us versus them" thing wasn't helpful. Shame the article opens with such a flattering retelling of a wonky strategy. It was always the data, not the code. Try and find an open dataset for any interesting machine learning problem and you'll realize that while "freedom" was busy doing things like setting back the use of precompiled headers in GCC a decade and making it vi…

Focusing on code was not a mistake. It was a necessary preliminary step.

It's easy to say in hindsight, but that openness was not at all seen as a viable option for a lot of people in the industry back in the day.

Now that this has been solved (mostly), it is now necessary to take back control on the data. Thus, this article.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#52

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bad_user wrote: post #17
legulere wrote: post #12

I think the problem is that the FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The actual situation is that we have two groups that care about different things: Users and developers. Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. They care about restrictions like DRM if it hinders them in doing w…

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

> An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies.

Government agencies aren't even the interesting example.

The argument we usually get is that not everybody is going to be a programmer. Which, OK, sure, but maybe 10-20% of people are going to be programmers. Which means even if you aren't a programmer, your brother and your niece and your buddy are. So now you have some unmaintained software you've been using for 20 years, you get a new OS and it doesn't work anymore. It will take your buddy three hours to fix if they have the source and 1000 hours without it. And you can impose on (or afford to pay) your buddy for three hours but not 1000. And then your buddy can publish the fix and now everybody has it.

And it goes the same even if the thing isn't broken. If "the user" can improve the software then so can the user's brother who actually knows how to, which is clearly useful to the user.

It's fairly simple maths. How do you get better software, when every programmer in the world can improve it, or when only the assigned teams at Apple or Google or [defuct company] can do it?

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#53

Post by cm3 »

gaius wrote: post #8
deng wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has no lineage in common with Linux. That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

It would be more accurate to say Linux thrived because of them! Samba IIRC predates Linux too, as does the GNU project, Apache is based on the original httpd which was built on... Drum roll... NeXTStep. In 1990, before Linux existed.

> Samba IIRC predates Linux too

Not quite, actually.

Samba => sometime in 1992

Linux => October 1991

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#54

Post by jpetso »

officialchicken wrote: post #25

Like everyone, I want more freedom, not less: the battle should begin with a sane GPL version 4. See the MIT, BSD and LGPL licenses which provide more freedom over GPL3.

There's no benefit from making the GPL into something like the LGPL or MIT/BSD. If you prefer those licenses, they're already available to be used instead. The GPL stands for a specific kind of freedom and should continue to stand for the same, maybe with tweaks but definitely in the same spirit.

If it continues to go out of fashion then that's a different issue, but watering it down doesn't help to further the causes that the FSF set out to achieve with it.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#55

Post by lmm »

We lost Linux. The big thing about Linux was that you could swap out pieces of it for better ones if you wanted. "Linux is about choice" - vi or emacs, KDE or Gnome and so on.

OSX doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. And in these days of systemd, Linux doesn't even have that any more.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#57

Post by tacos »

grive wrote: post #51
tacos wrote: post #3

We're also a lot older now and many realize the "us versus them" thing wasn't helpful. Shame the article opens with such a flattering retelling of a wonky strategy. It was always the data, not the code. Try and find an open dataset for any interesting machine learning problem and you'll realize that while "freedom" was busy doing things like setting back the use of precompiled headers in GCC a decade and making it vi…

Focusing on code was not a mistake. It was a necessary preliminary step. It's easy to say in hindsight, but that openness was not at all seen as a viable option for a lot of people in the industry back in the day. Now that this has been solved (mostly), it is now necessary to take back control on the data. Thus, this article.

https://creativecommons.org/about/history/

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#58

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gaius wrote: post #6

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.* Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

> And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix.

That's kind of cheating though. OS X is a "workstation OS" but it's also a "desktop OS" used by millions of elementary school teachers and news reporters. So then the "workstation OS" gets to claim those people as users, but their main competition in that market is Microsoft Windows, which OS X loses the popularity contest to in the same way that OS X (including iOS) loses to Linux (including Android).

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#59

Post by mindslight »

zanny wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, Windows is still pretty much the only desktop OS for 99% of people, Nvidia has stolen large-scale compute with a holistically proprietary CUDA, and Google has hijacked the ecosystem and culture with Android and ChromeOS (the former by having vendors use the incredibly destructive model of forking the kernel and stuffing it with binary blobs rendering it stuck to that version on whatever device you have, an…

> We are still crippled by proprietary firmwares everywhere[1], rampant with backdoors, and there is no mindshare there to worry about - all it takes is a concerted effort and focus and within several hardware generations we can reverse this dire course, and the consumers do not even need to notice it happening.

(Please understand I care about these issues as much as you do but) you're vastly understating the effort required to purge these proprietary firmwares. Especially with the rise of high speed serial links, the model for peripherals has become a separate CPU running closed code, with ever-more complex code for competitive advantage (eg SSDs). Software is eating this world as well, for much the same reasons - increased complexity, post-manufacturing flexibility, and the emphasis on marginal cost.

A possible way forward is to concentrate on the central processor, treat peripherals as hostile [0], and mitigate vulnerability to them. For example, a hard drive "as-a-service" can be made secure with encryption and some type of PIR/ORAM (depending on our model of its side channels, which could be reduced by putting it in a Faraday cage with filtered power). This seems excessive, and it is.

But the alternatives are to convince Samsung to open up their SSD firmware (lol), hack into their always-changing devices, or to independently create an open SSD design. This design would be Free software with dumb hardware/flash, would have to be performant enough to convince consumers, and you'd have to successfully deter manufacturers from re-adding microprocessors to the dumb flash to increase margins.

[0] This obviously doesn't work for some peripherals, like a keyboard.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#60

Post by sievebrain »

zanny wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, Windows is still pretty much the only desktop OS for 99% of people, Nvidia has stolen large-scale compute with a holistically proprietary CUDA, and Google has hijacked the ecosystem and culture with Android and ChromeOS (the former by having vendors use the incredibly destructive model of forking the kernel and stuffing it with binary blobs rendering it stuck to that version on whatever device you have, an…

I think the Linux community has always massively underestimated how destructive the no-stable-API policy has been.

The result of not being willing to commit to a driver API has been that Android devices - by far the most massive deployment of Linux kernels ever - are a wasteland of out of date, exploit-ridden kernels that can't be patched because of the monolithic driver model. Windows has a single kernel and all driver vendors play nicely within it. You can upgrade Windows separately to upgrading your PC, and you get the updates when Microsoft pushes them out. This takes a lot of effort by Microsoft, but it works.

Android devices, on the other hand, can't do that because Google can't provide shared kernel builds. Everyone has to do it themselves. And as noted above, this did not lead to a utopia of shared and open drivers, it just led to Linux users having out of date operating systems.

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