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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

#91

Post by Drdrdrq »

acd wrote: post #47

A bug in GPL is that it allows SAAS Software as a service built on Open source software which means Software as a service can leech on open source software without contributing back. https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/t... Using AGPL instead of GPL closes the Saas loop hole. Also due to close to zero bank interest rates the general availability of venture capital is to some extent stopping new…

> Using AGPL instead of GPL closes the Saas loop hole.

In spirit maybe, but not in practice because of its loopholes. That was the reason MongoDB changed their license.

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

#92

Post by amyjess »

seandougall wrote: post #73
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #14

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)…

Not to mention users! I can't count how many times I've seen bug reports responded to with a dismissive "you're welcome to file a PR", which is just a thinly veiled expression of the same attitude: you're not valuable, your domain expertise is not valuable, and the time you're taking to engage in the development cycle is not valuable; only your code is valuable. It's really not a big mystery why more average users do…

I wholeheartedly agree.

In addition, responses like that do more to specifically push people towards commercial software than anything else (not specifically proprietary, just commercial). Why use a piece of software where the developers have no incentive to care about your concerns when you could instead use a piece of software where you're a paying customer and the production company has a financial incentive to keep their paying customers happy?

Since the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft has been surprisingly responsive to customer requests. They have a ticketing system where customers can submit new feature requests, and if it's both reasonable and popular enough, they'll implement it. Here's a reasonable example: a while back, they decided to eliminate the split mode from the virtual keyboard because they thought nobody would miss it, as they added a swipe keyboard to replace it. Well, it turns out they were wrong, because lots of people opened tickets with Microsoft asking for it to be put back. They put it back in the next update. They listened to paying customers. Compare this to GNOME, on the other hand, which regularly removes popular features and ignores all user complaints.

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

#93

Post by kuschku »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #70
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?

IRCCloud is okay, but the UX/UI isn't anywhere near as nice as Slack.

That may be true, but it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers.

And I'm personally working on Quasseldroid, improving its UI to make it much more usable.

If you have suggestions on how to make Quasseldroid usable for the people that refuse to use IRC, I'd love to hear them :)

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

#94

Post by malvosenior »

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?

Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)...

I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack is light years beyond in terms of the UX of even the nicest IRC clients. I think Discord is probably even better than Slack though.

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

#95

Post by regularfry »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #72
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible. 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 lo…

Linux itself might not have been (although I'd challenge that if I could remember dates a bit better); Apache and Perl certainly was.

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

#96

Post by Arathorn »

eclipseo76 wrote: post #56
shmerl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't they use Matrix instead of Discord?

According to them, because they have special needs regarding moderation, because "muh harassment".

fwiw Matrix provides pretty comprehensive moderation tools as per https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation, hopefully exceeding Mozilla’s requirements

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

#97

Post by tabbott »

rst wrote: post #5
jonawesomegreen wrote: post #4

> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use. This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project…

For what it's worth, there are workalikes for both Github and Slack which are at least tolerable -- Gitlab has most of Github's core features, and there are multiple slack-alikes (the one I've got experience with is Zulip, which I, at least, find to be a whole lot better than Slack). BUT... Just having open-source (or free software) alternatives doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Gitlab and Zulip still leave your…

Zulip lead developer here.

For chat apps, I don't think the problem of "data scattered around backend-DBs" is a real concern. E.g. Zulip has a well-defined data export format that's easily parsable JSON and contains all non-transient data (i.e. the status of who's typing right now isn't included): https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and.... And so do most of the other popular chat systems.

I'd be surprised if Zulip doesn't still run in 20 years, but in any case, we have data import tools for the export formats of Slack, Mattermost, Gitter, and HipChat, and ultimately it wasn't that much work (The most recent few we've added were each a few person-weeks' work). So I think we can safely assume that at least for chat, it'll be possible to import the history.

But even if they don't, there are already scripts to export the public history of a Zulip organization and turn it into a webpage that can be hosted wherever (see for example: https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/).

The https://zulipchat.com homepage and https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source are relevant reading for folks considering Zulip for their open source project.

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

#98

Post by Drdrdrq »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #75
lotyrin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't disagree. You point out that there are no incentives for FOSS developers to cater to the muggles. Fine, so how do we fix that? I really want to know. I have to believe it's possible.

I do believe it is possible, but it is a compromise. Let go of one of the freedoms so that other freedoms (like "right to repair") have a chance. In other words: Commons Clause.

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

#99

Post by keithnz »

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…

Interestingly enough Visual Studio now supports cross platform debugging ( you still need Visual Studio running on windows, but it can debug a linux based program )

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

#100

Post by kibwen »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #40
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. 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. Isn't this kind of the point, though? To compete with proprietary software, free software needs to actually be competitive. "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

> "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

Except that it has to cut it in order for a free software movement to exist, because otherwise free software is starved by a chicken-and-egg problem where developers don't use free software because it's inferior, and free software never improves because developers don't use it. In other words, being willing to use technically inferior software solely because of the superior freedoms it grants is the way to make the engine of free software run. GCC was not the best C compiler in the world when Linux started using it.

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