71–80 of 264 posts
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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).
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> 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. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is th…
>about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible. This led from a model where the user ran their applications (open or closed) on their machines to one which turned the user's machine into a dumb terminal to access the network. This resulted in defacto loss of user privacy and control. In a world where Windows…
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 locally with some network based syncing?
Um, obviously yes? The fact that Sun and the other UNIX server vendors and Oracle other server software vendors were charging various fees for their OS and software, on a per server or per CPU basis, did nothing to put the brakes on the dotcom boom. Network-centric computing took off well before free software became the buzzword of the mid to late '00s.
So the initial letter hits upon something that the article itself ignores, namely that the FOSS community requires more than just developers . I see this attitude all the time in certain circles that only the developers contribute any value to a project, and prospective contributors should either learn to code or get f--ked. It's not terribly welcoming to the larger community (of whom the majority are not developers)…
Even when that attitude isn't so explicitly directed at users, you're right about it being visibly directed at other community members. It all sends a clear message, such that the average prospective user will move on, thinking "that application is meant for someone else."
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>> 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…
Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no i…
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I think part of what the author is addressing is the ignorance exhibited in your comment. I don't mean to be rude; it's easy not to see the big picture when you're busy just making a living. To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community. This is not just holier-than-thou moralizing; there will be real financial consequences if the cr…
Are you sure he's the ignorant one? As a young adult who had a roof over their head by default, I was 100% FOSS and installed Gentoo on anything I owned that could even limp its way along that path (and discarded devices that couldn't), I refused to use proprietary messaging tools and social networks, and I accepted that I had limited myself to the social and economic opportunities that these things allowed me, as a…
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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).
Freedom isn't about people doing things you like. It's about allowing people to do things you don't like.
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An excellent point. FOSS has long been great at underlying tech, freedom, and openness, and terrible at UI/UX and ease-of-use. That's been true for a long time and still seems to be true today. The reasons for this are much-debated and well-known, yet the underlying challenge persists.
Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech, and those are the people who write free software for themselves and others like them. (Why would you spend months making some UI that in the end requires a minute of manual labor to do what some piece of syntax in a config file achieves in seconds, and which can be diffed to the previous version and so on.) There are good…
The widespread love of the Mac and OS X among techies on HN says otherwise.
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> 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. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is th…
>about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible. This led from a model where the user ran their applications (open or closed) on their machines to one which turned the user's machine into a dumb terminal to access the network. This resulted in defacto loss of user privacy and control. In a world where Windows…
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…
Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no i…
If Visual Studio ran on Linux, would anybody bother with gdb? Currently, the second-highest voted UserVoice issue for Visual Studio is people asking for a Linux version (and rather hilariously not understanding what a colossal rewrite that would entail...)
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...
> Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator.
LaTeX might just be easier than trying to typeset something reliably in Word. I know I always wrote in plain-text and then did a final pass to paste and format it into Word immediately before printing.
> GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it.
Photoshop is stupidly expensive still, and cracking software has fallen out of favor
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Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech, and those are the people who write free software for themselves and others like them. (Why would you spend months making some UI that in the end requires a minute of manual labor to do what some piece of syntax in a config file achieves in seconds, and which can be diffed to the previous version and so on.) There are good…
> Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech The widespread love of the Mac and OS X among techies on HN says otherwise.