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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

#81

Post by mruts »

shmerl wrote: post #76
mruts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom isn't about people doing things you like. It's about allowing people to do things you don't like.

So Apple are pretty much anti-freedom, since they for example don't like competing browsers (which are FOSS) and they don't allow them in their store. They also don't like people installing something they don't control, so they try to forbid it with DRM and other junk. The whole idea of lock-in is anti-freedom, since it reduces choice.

Preventing others from reducing choice is the epitome of anti-freedom. With freedom, you have to take the bad with the good, and trust in humanity that the good will outweigh the bad.

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

#82

Post by pjc50 »

jondubois wrote: post #38

I still cannot believe that we live in a world were: - A website with a silly name like 'Facebook' is worth half a trillion dollars and is extremely profitable. - A website with a silly name like 'Twitter' which only lets you post 140 characters at a time is worth 30 billion dollars. - An app with a silly name like 'Snapchat' which loses billions of dollars per year is worth almost $15 billion. - An international tax…

Names are hard, and all of those except Uber are extremely apt and descriptive.

In the lambda case, it's very much closer to "build and maintain a house, doing all the trades work yourself" versus just renting somewhere. The latter has a much shorter lead time and upfront cost. If you're just doing a job for 18 months somewhere to see if it works out, would you spend a decade building a house there first?

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

#83

Post by kazinator »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #74
kazinator wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think a few of us using Gimp (yes, I am an occassional user) will stand in the way of convenience winning . Hige majority of people do (and will) use Photoshop, simply because it meets their needs better.

> it meets their needs better.

That's hardly the case; they are not even aware of the existence of alternatives.

Most of people's occasional image fix-up needs could be met just by MS Paint, which they would find easier to use. Problem is, they don't even know that exists and that they have it pre-installed, let alone that GIMP exists.

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

#84

Post by kazinator »

thrower123 wrote: post #79
kazinator wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio 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…

> second-highest voted UserVoice issue for Visual Studio is people asking for a Linux version

How many of these users are long time free software developers, though, who did free software long before it could just be a reluctant aspect of a job you land into?

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

#85

Post by komali2 »

kuschku wrote: post #64
jcastro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling at people because they're not using IRC instead of slack isn't a good way to convince anyone.

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

For me the issue with IRC protocol (not that I know much about it outside my interaction with UIs built around it) was authentication, and connectivity.

So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins.

That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.

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

#86

Post by Drdrdrq »

pixelbath wrote: post #51
iaarn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that Mozilla has decided to abandon IRC and the Rust community has therefore moved to Discord, a platform that is abusive regarding data and requires you to use a closed source javascript application to access the service. Mozilla is a bad example because their leadership is simply pathetic, but you get the point. This trend is very, very dangerous. But well the writing was on the wall when many ope…

While Mozilla seems to be a large open source/web advocate, I always have a hard time with the fact that, as an organization, most of their revenue comes directly from Google buying the top spot in default search engines.

And yet, they have one of the few FOSS products that can compete with any of its rivals on quality alone (the only one I can think of actually).

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

jcastro wrote: post #45
kazinator wrote: post #16

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. 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…

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling at people because they're not using IRC instead of slack isn't a good way to convince anyone.

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by kuschku »

komali2 wrote: post #85
kuschku wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

For me the issue with IRC protocol (not that I know much about it outside my interaction with UIs built around it) was authentication, and connectivity. So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins. That, plus the weird way to authenticate do…

> That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.

That's what SASL has been for for over a decade nowadays :)

https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png

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

#90

Post by shmerl »

mruts wrote: post #81
shmerl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Apple are pretty much anti-freedom, since they for example don't like competing browsers (which are FOSS) and they don't allow them in their store. They also don't like people installing something they don't control, so they try to forbid it with DRM and other junk. The whole idea of lock-in is anti-freedom, since it reduces choice.

Preventing others from reducing choice is the epitome of anti-freedom. With freedom, you have to take the bad with the good, and trust in humanity that the good will outweigh the bad.

> Preventing others from reducing choice is the epitome of anti-freedom.

That's a fallacy of the same sort as party slogans from Nineteen Eighty-Four, just reversed. There they said "Freedom is slavery". What you are saying is "Tyranny is freedom" (since tyrants should be free to oppress). That's simply bunk. Tyranny is not freedom.

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