We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by rpdillon » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #46

dTal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume that the author is following the usual convention of referring to GNU/Linux as simply "Linux", I don't think it's unfair to say that OSX draws heavily from the free software ecosystem. Take a look in /usr/bin on an OSX machine and it's pretty much the free software kitchen sink. Emacs AND Vim even. The only reason Unix is popular for a workstation at all nowadays is because Linux runs everything.

If he meant GNU why didn't he say so? Linux has nothing to do with OSX, whether you call it Linus or GNU/Linux. > The only reason Unix is popular for a workstation at all nowadays is because Linux runs everything. And at a stroke the entire history of Sun, Solaris and Sun OS is brushed under the carpet as though it never existed. Yes. I give up. You win. Workstations only exist because of Linux. I think I need a litt…

> If he meant GNU why didn't he say so?

Because people think it's cool to just call it Linux and endlessly deride Stallman for insisting it be called GNU/Linux, even though the nuance is very important in discussions like this one.

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

#92

Post by dandelion_lover » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #59

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…

>A possible way forward is to concentrate on the central processor, treat peripherals as hostile

Reminded me of http://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.pd... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787614).

>or to independently create an open SSD design

http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project

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

#93

Post by andrey_utkin » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #55

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.

Relax, there's still Gentoo and others which don't depend on systemd.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #59

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…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by k__ » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #89

MrTonyD wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel. Seriously?

so full of himself...

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

#96

Post by rpdillon » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #55

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.

I would argue Android does have that...replaceable launchers, dialers, address books, a full open-source repository of apps (F-Droid) and built-in side-loading of APKs make it more open than any other mainstream mobile OS, even if it isn't perfect.

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

#97

Post by Hydraulix989 » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

I'm pretty disappointed. If anything Silicon Valley really screwed up by achieving the exact OPPOSITE of what the FOSS movement was striving for.

The commercialization of software has resulted in these walled gardens of proprietary software, closed data, closed formats, etc.

It's a sad day, for example, when a large percentage of the population actually believes that Facebook is the Internet.

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

#98

Post by lotyrin » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

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…

I'm pretty sure this is only because the current state of the art for software development is too hard, too risky and too inefficient.

Algorithmic and structural thinking are achievable by anyone. Most people just aren't willing to deal with arguing with a machine about what you mean (syntax), dealing with the accidental complexity and risks that modern languages and runtimes thrust upon you (memory management, declaring types, distributed consistency, persistence not being baked in, caring about where on the network your app "really runs"), and how much work it takes to go from a simple formula, some data and some money to a result.

If I am a scientist with a megabyte of numbers, a trivial map function (x^2) and a reduce function (x+x'), how many steps does it take and how many concepts do I have to learn and how long would it take me to run it? What if it's a gigabyte? How about a terabyte? A petabyte? A constant stream? What if my numbers are "weird" to computer science people like being bigger than a 64bit int or being n-dimensional arbitrary-precision vectors? Depending on these answers, why the hell are the steps and concepts I have to learn widely different? This is like the simplest problem to solve, and we just haven't. Software is solving problems it has invented for itself and failed both other disciplines and the layperson.

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

#99

Post by bo1024 » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #78

"So what's our next fight?" I don't have a next fight. If I'm going to fight for something, it's going to be something a whole lot more important than computer software. Free software is here to stay. Success has occurred. I'm not going to grope around for another fight. Instead I'm going to harness my software freedoms to write software that does what I need it to do.

One point I took away from the article was to look around and think more deeply about what issues today are just important as freedom in computing was during the ascension of Linux.

To me, a big one is ownership: who really owns/controls the things we purchase?

As for free software, consider that desktop computers are rapidly becoming less and less relevant to consumers at large, on average, yet they are also becoming one of the last holdouts of free software. Of the devices being produced and sold today, what fraction are free and what fraction are locked down? How do you expect that to change tomorrow?

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

#100

Post by rpdillon » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

Esau wrote: post #43

franciscop wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting Windows and Ubuntu in the same "commercial" bag is very miguiding...

Oh really? I seem to recall Ubuntu sending people's search results to Amazon. Why did they do that? They are a corporation and, thus, more concerned about money than freedom. My comment stands.

To be fair, that was a default, but you can change it, or avoid it entirely by not installing the launcher developed by Canonical. Which was always both the strength and Achilles' Heel of Linux compared to other desktop OSes. For people that never install Unity (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome), it's simply not an issue.

This is quite a bit different than, for example, the situation with Windows 10.