701–710 of 841 posts
But I think the world is better with him than without him and that he's worked hard to further his mission. Not everyone should be like him, but it's great that he is.
I sincerely wish RMS all the best.
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>The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that. Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their…
FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered o…
This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.
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FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered o…
> When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.
I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is. While the Free part of FOSS is…
> While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”,
Free software and open source are the same category of software and licenses (except for sporadic instances that are at the very edge of that one category, as categories tend to be blurred).
Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available.
There are companies trying to push source available proprietary software as "open source", perhaps hoping for such replacement, and this has had some success in some specific areas, but the open source community is pushing against it. Or, at least, the wise ones in it are.
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Linux desktop is more viable than ever. Zigbee/Matter/... are widely adopted open standards without vendor lock in. Things like Home Assistant are getting serious attention and funding. Could be much worse.
> Linux desktop is more viable than ever. Other then in most stuff migrating to the browser how so? Browser + terminal has been a good combo for a long time, the desktop enviornment only have suffered enshittification due to a push to touch screen oriented UI conventions.
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Always good to know that the modern generation of devs are ok with discounting someones ideas because they are "gross". These "gross" people are the ones who made overpaid dev positions possible.
It's crazy to think how back in the day, software devs were basically hard science engineers, needing to be proficient in hardware and the nitty gritty of CPU architecture to be effective programmers. All so they could be paid $60-80k/yr in today's dollars for 50-60 hour work weeks. Whereas nowadays you can do a few weeks of a javascript crash course and land a $100k job organizing text windows on a webpage for a few…
No one person knows the entire modern x86 architecture. And ofc those who know a lions share are paid top dollar. Maybe still underpaid for the value they bring to the entire world, but very comfortable.
Don't have much to say about the web dev stuff. Just note that CoL is still kinda crazy in the places with most demand. I'm not gonna say "100k is so hard to live on" like some spoiled CS students but it does cut a lot more into your spending power than you'd expect.
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What would happen?
The rabid anti-communism of Cuban diaspora in FL is so extreme it's driven them right into the GOP's arms for their votes; the amazing thing is how they've done it despite the racism just-below-the-surface there.
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The whole "charging for distribution is fine but charging for development is wrong" thing is what keeps me well away from any kind of involvement with FOSS groups.
I don't get where you get that idea of not charging for development. That said, I basically never seen anyone charge for a distribution. I figured that people think there's no point, so they just don't. Now, charging for development? That absolutely happens.
I charge for development of (F)OSS. It's my salary. My employer likewise charges the patrons/funding agencies. But we get paid once for the effort, like any usual labor contract. We don't try to get paid again when our past work products are copied.
In the old days, paying a distribution cost was more common for free software, when it actually took effort such as writing and shipping media. This handled the case where someone asked for a distribution, so that sharing did not become a financial burden. It's a mostly obsolete concept now with pervasive internet and many low cost or free hosting options to put content out there at essentially zero marginal cost to deliver copies.
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True, yet most users don't care about the details in any meaningful way. They just want to be able to use a convenient service like Spotify...who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore? Who cares that they don't pay artists as much as they could? The only time it's a problem is when an artist doesn't release their music on a certain platform and it's now work to try and go download a second app, make an account,…
> most users don't care > who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore? That's the thing, he is trying to raise awareness on this stuff. I do too. If people cared, he'd be mostly done with his raising awareness work. Open source is pretty much a developer issue. Free software, though, is a user issue. (Of course we often use the terms interchangeably)
This is a good point, and shows why we need people like Stallman to press us on important but unglamorous issues.
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Linux desktop is more viable than ever. Zigbee/Matter/... are widely adopted open standards without vendor lock in. Things like Home Assistant are getting serious attention and funding. Could be much worse.
The Linux desktop is better than ever (in fact, I am switching to it the first time in a few days! I just need to setup some things first) Sadly, the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome) Dark themes were not common while skeuomorphism was mainstream, they are only in demand right now because vie…
And it may even be true this time around (I love me some KDE).
But for me, it doesn't matter. Once I discovered i3 I just never went back, there is just no desktop that can compare to it.
Obviously I'm not your typical user, so this is an aside from a "nerd", but it's sometimes interesting not having a horse in that race anymore (I've been using i3 for 10-15 years I think at this point?)