Free software hasn't won
(dorotac.eu)367 points by LorenDB a day ago
367 points by LorenDB a day ago
Free Software isn'r just losing, it's being co-opted, hollowed out and sold back to us without the freedom it was meant to protect
Yes, basically rent extraction over various forms of cloud capital. The widening societal wealth gap means owners can simply charge workers for access to what they own, without having to produce very much. Perfect in the short term if you are rich. Cash thus flows from the working class to the ownership class in a feedback loop that intensifies the problem.
I shall quote:
“ The right of workers to manage the state, the military, various enterprises, and cultural and educational affairs is, in fact, the greatest and most fundamental right of workers under the socialist system. Without this right, other rights of workers—such as the right to work, the right to rest, and the right to education—cannot be guaranteed. … We must not understand the issue of the people's rights as meaning that the state is managed only by a small group of people, while the rest of the people merely enjoy rights such as labor, education, and social security under their management.”
Meaningless. You can replace socialist by capitalist and it would be equally meaningless.
The correct word is democracy. The people (or "workers") having a say or not has nothing to do with socialism or capitalism IMO.
Well he did try out, how should I say that, a different, bigger type of democracy.
I don't understand the downvotes - parent's right. All regimes today like to trumpet themselves as (exceedingly!!) democratic, the question is: are they? In my estimation, overall, communist countries have done significantly worse in this department. And yes, rule by the many people is the definition of democracy.
The vast majority of software now runs on personal devices and the average user has no knowledge nor interest in it, as long as they press the button and the action is done.
The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
> The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
People that fought for common hygiene standards, or labor rights, or human rights etc in the past were a minority too, because most people didn't care. But this minority was able to organize, push forward and gain support. And the fight was worth it, and improved lives of us all.
Ya think? I mean, I agree 100% that was the good fight. But to take a tangent here? That's falling apart, world wide.
It's falling apart because the average person wants to be "smart". I applaud this, the fact that people want to learn, want to know, want to understand.
Yet now, when they try to learn? To understand? They end up with youtube. Tiktok. Pages of AI slop. They're told what is "astonishing" or "proves that scientists don't have a clue!". They're told that gibberish is real, that those lab-coats are all evil, or trying to poison people, and so on. Or even better to their egos, that the lab-coats aren't so smart, and with this "one simple trick", you can be smarter than them!
This is coupled with outrage!!, when this rarely tends to be the case. Yes, there is corporate greed and it gets caught, recalls happen, mistakes happen, yet 99.99999% of the products and services just work. No one notices that aspect, only the "big news" of the tiny, rare, unusual failures of our system.
And then on top of that, politics enters the scene. Now, it's "us vs them" on matters like medicine?! Or health? Or school? What?! And no it's not just "one side", it's both sides, just in different ways.
People used to say things like "I don't know". Now people who can barely write, and read, have opinions on everything. They have no idea of the science behind things, but they'll just say "Oh! I saw this on youtube by a random person I've never heard of before! That's true, not what I learned in school!"
And the worst part is, we want people to think "being smart" is important. We want intellectual betterment. Yet now this is twisted and warped against the light of knowledge, for now everyone craves it, but are given the ashes of burned truths. All provided by false profits, so they can pocket some coin.
As far as I'm concerned, youtube and tiktok need to die. Social media needs to die. There are other solutions, but Google, Meta, the rest only care about cash, profit, and not one iota about fixing this.
So if they won't fix it? Then we must destroy it.
And can we? Nope! Because the public LOVES it. Loves loves loves it.
So back to FOSS. I've dedicated my entire life to FOSS. But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on.
I'm not happy about it, but if you can't get people to even be interested about privacy violations by Google on their Android device? How will you get them to even remotely care about FOSS?
Parent is right. Only geeks care.
Even those, who should know better, choose to not think about the consequences and in masses opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness. I mean, look at all the computing professionals (?), who use Google Chrome instead of Chromium or Ungoogled Chromium, or another browser entirely. Look at all the web developers, who only test on Chromium-derived browsers, maybe even only Google Chrome. Look at all the IT departments, who mandate use of Windows in companies. Instead of being part of the change, they are part of the dystopia.
I think we have a severe problem, due to influx of too many people, who don't actually care, even though they should be knowledgeable enough to see the consequences. Maybe the paycheck is the only thing that counts for them, but they are actively contributing to the process of us all losing our freedom. If we lose our freedom (more than we have already) in the digital realm, we will lose it outside of the digital realm as well. For example imagine there are no longer any auditable open source/free software messengers you can use and all you can do it trusting proprietary vendors, who can introduce any backdoor they like. What tool will you use to organize protests? What if messenger makers agree to introduce state determined blackouts? Or secretly report your activity to the state and police, so that they appear at your door, before your protest even started? How will you organize any critical number of people, without digital freedom to do so in this day and age?
Our freedom is at stake, but most people don't care, even if you tell them. We are too damn comfortable for our own sake.
Open source produces good infrastructure, but does not build good products. Asking people to use a worse alternative for some ideological reason that they don't feel strongly about is silly. Companies use Windows because it's easy to hire or train professionals capable of managing Windows deployments and there is a good system of getting support externally when needed. Control over source is very costly and companies and individuals rightly want to externalize the cost. Companies that make their product open source have trouble monetizing what they build. Offering paid support isn't always a viable business and other companies can simply repackage your product and sell it. There are a lot more things people prioritize above software freedom.
> Open source produces good infrastructure, but does not build good products. Asking people to use a worse alternative for some ideological reason that they don't feel strongly about is silly.
Waaay too generalized a statement. I've not seen a better password manager than KeepassXC. I have not seen a better browser than Firefox or its derivatives. There are so many good Open Source apps, that it wouldn't be "Asking people to use a worse alternative for some ideological reason". It would be asking people to be a bit more informed and then having a better digital life in many cases.
In contrast, I've not yet heard of any good Windows deployments. So far whenever I have somehow noticed, that a server is running Windows, it was because of it acting in silly ways or silly URL structure, or the thing frequently stopping to work. (See for example Deutsche Bahn infrastructure in Germany, ticket machines, in train screens, their ticket search and shop online ... all suck.)
So to me it actually seems like uninformed people making worse choices by not knowingly making them, and instead accepting whatever the vendors of proprietary software prescribe for them.
This is not unique to software. There's no "free&open ball bearing" design out there, let alone for a machine capable of making them, even though the modern world couldn't work without them. The only people caring about ball bearing design are technical minded people already working in the field.
Same as for a thousand other fields essential to operating the modern world. Nobody has time to learn them all, so we specialize.
There are some attempts at things like this: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs
They're usually very hard to get share because machine manufacturers can smash out cheaper things via processes like castings, mouldings and stampings, then eventually lock down spares (or just don't bother).
The open source option basically only be worse (but maybe more repairable) and/or more expensive than the alternatives, except when there is no alternative in the market. And China is providing so much mid-grade affordable and fairly functional stuff there often is an alternative even in the most isolated places. In 1980, getting a decent lathe in some town in, say, Angola might have been basically impossible. Now, it's still not cheap, but it's not completely impractical. If you can get bearings and induction-hardened shafts you'd need to DIY, you can get the whole thing, and maybe even cheaper.
It's a bit depressing, because of course I want to see the world flooded with high-quality, modular, very standardised, re-usable, repairable, hackable items, but that approach has a limited market in reality.
Even their own manufacturers don’t know what’s in a bearing assembly they manufactured ten years ago, all they can do is sell you a new one with the same spec. Rolling element bearings are specified by application; shaft diameter, load direction, and so on. Manufacturers change important things about bearings, like how many rolling elements they have, without necessarily changing the part number. It’s worse than closed: after some time has passed, nobody anywhere knows how it was made.
Software is unique in a few ways. It has the ability to spy on us, to be insecure and against our best interests if an attacker gains control. It can also lock us in in ways that are harder with just physical objects. Infact printer ink lockin happens using software not e.g. the shape of the cartridge.
Inversely, the only end-users FOSS cares about are those that can compile and build from source themselves. More so if they can also submit good bug reports and patches.
The demographics of the majority of end-users shifted a long time ago but FOSS is stuck with a mindset that treats everyone like their own sovereign sysadmin.
It'll take a big shift in the Free Software movement to make it something that represents regular end-user enough for regular end-users to care about the Free Software movement.
I think this post overstates the "loss" of free software. Yes, closed firmware and locked hardware are real gaps...but that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack. From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.
I tend to see this kind of absolutist, binary tone a lot from people deeply involved in FOSS... and sometimes I think maybe that mindset is necessary to push the movement forward, but it also feels detached from how much open software has already changed reality.
I think the article properly addresses that:
> Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version
What devs can build without much oversight or business pressure usually works well open sourced.
Almost everything else (hardware, non technical "productivity" software, services) doesn't, and that's most of our life. We live in a world that's still massively closed source.
I wouldn't call someone absolutist for wanting printers, coffee machines, laptops, TVs, cars, "smart" lights to be more open than closed.
That's true. Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier.
Of course we'd all prefer open printers and cars, but those domains aren't mainly limited by software ideology; they're limited by regulation, liability, and econ. The fact that programmers can build entire OSs, compilers, and global infra as open projects is already astonishing.
So yes, the world is still full of closed systems... but that doesn't mean FOSS lost. It means it's reached the layer where the obstacles are social, legal, and physical, not technical. IMO that's a harder, slower battle, not evidence that the earlier ones were meaningless.
I think it's fair to put it as a failure, as the overtone window moved so much it now sounds normal that regulation, liability or econ interfere with openness.
The very fact "right to repair" had to be coined, proclaimed and we're fighting for it is a regression from the early days when repairing a radio wouldn't be violating some clause.
Of course, the openness was more accidental or pragmatic than really intended, and we saw companies slowly put up the barriers as they found technical and legal ways to do it (like forbidding plugging third party phones to the network for instance). If it's a frontier, IMHO it would be more akin to the battlefields front lines than anything else.
Put another way, the battle has always been social and legal.
The other famous example which people have mentioned here is that "sideloading" is now used to refer to installing software on a computer, which used to be a normal, routine (and required) thing to do in order to use any computer. So the idea that someone curates what software you're allowed to run, and there's no way to even opt out of that, has become normalized for huge numbers of users and parts of the tech industry.
It's true that malware authors are much better funded and more aggressive than they were a few decades ago, so we have some long threads talking about how there is an element of the paternalism here that's protecting people from some pretty malicious stuff, which could also cause a lot of harm. However, seeing this paternalism as the basic normal way that software is used shows that we've lost a lot.
> Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier.
It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it.
That’s predicated on the assumption that FOSS is preferable to the alternative- maybe it isn’t.
Yeah. I'd say open source won in the basic infrastructure of the tech world, but actual political free software is just barely holding on. I want users to be free not some base shared code you can't actually modify running somewhere in the stack of a closed source SASS.
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor
It absolutely does.
Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now. They discriminate against us for it. Installed your own open source software? All services denied. Can't even log into your own bank account.
We're marginalized. Second class citizens. There is no choice, it's either corporate owned computers or nothing. What good is free software if we can't run it?
Its a lost battle not a lost war. You have to adapt for the circumstances of the time. Today that seems to be using a device that is closed but gapped only to get the essentials done(government services, banking etc.)
For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings.
In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow).
I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.
This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile computing platforms but if a sizable portion of personal computers remain using free software it will be hard for the big corporations to fully close the web or make platform attestation truly required for everything.
Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.
Multiple devices is the answer. Otherwise you end up with people having their banking hacked because they installed a game mod.
Here's a take on this which might be unpopular:
Open source software lost in this domain fair and absolutely square. Desktop linux has been an extremely accessible and decent option desktops and laptops for, what, three decades; it lost in the open market. I'm typing this comment on arch linux, but even so: It failed to become a force sizable enough to fight back against the tide of corporate-owned attested consumer hardware. Android has been an option for nearly two decades. Its reasonably successful, globally. Google is now toggling the doomsday switch everyone knew they had, to force all applications to go through the Google Mothership. Samsung could fight back; they won't. Motorola could fight back; they won't. The market could revolt; it won't.
Software being open source is not enough to change the tide on what the market wants. Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to? By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software? You get there by building products people want. Anything else is succumbing to the same authoritarian forces that you're hoping free software will stop, by forcing service providers to behave against their own interests.
If that was unpopular, here's where it gets really unpopular: I don't see a doomsday-level problem with a world where, in addition to whatever awesome FOSS hardware I might have, I also have an iPhone 12 ($130 on swappa) as my "attested device" to do "attested stuff" with, like store my drivers license, banking, whatever. To me, this is... fine. Not ideal; but fine. We should fight like hell to score wins where we can, like in right to repair, parts availability, ensuring old devices are kept up to date for as long as possible (Apple is pretty good at this); but if I have to carry an old iPhone in my backpack to access my bank because they refuse to support my hypothetical GnuPhone 5, the world isn't going to end.
We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.
> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to?
Yes.
Well, sort of. They don't actually have to do anything. Nobody wants to force them to work for us, that's slavery.
Just don't get in our way when we start writing and using our own software. That's the "support" we want. Just stay out of our way. Leave us alone, without actively discriminating against us for it.
> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to? By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?
The same mechanism that stops a bank from saying, "sure you can withdraw more than $10,000 from your account and we won't ask any questions about what you plan to do with it" - explicit financial regulation with real penalties attached to it, that banks systematically adhere to. I'm not necessarily a fan of all legal regulations around banks or other financial product providers - this is a huge reason I'm interested in truly decentralized cryptocurrency systems - but given that the regulated fiat financial system does exist and is widely used, we might as well demand that these regulations include provisions that the bank has to let people running free smartphone OSs connect to their systems too.
> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company.
We need nerds who care about this to stop complaining about minor things in existing GNU/Linux phones and other similar devices on the market and go buy them. These hardware companies have been there for years already.
It's hard to build a profitable and sustainable business only basing on the minority that doesn't mind it being "too thick", "too slow", "not high-res enough" or "unable to run modern PC games" (all of these are real things I heard from people here, no kidding). And I assure you that if you really care, you'll easily find a way to live with a (swappable) battery that lasts 20 hours.
> By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?
Similar to all the accessibility requirements, of course. Do you think the society / government should force banks to provide services to blind or deaf people? Or should we just let the market decide?
I've done research on this, and have considered it but it's capital and time intensive even if I think it's viable.
There are two reasons I think it's viable now:
1. It's possible to wire an agentic system management service into the OS to handle a lot of the routine stuff, so non-technical users will be able to just talk to their computer and it'll be fine tuned to be good at fixing system issues, installing/removing software, managing windows, etc. I developed a scheduling inversion of control executor for enterprise agent control that I've looked into adapting for this use case.
2. The steam deck has proven a new model. Game friendly and a simplified UI is enough to carry Linux. New Arch rices like Omarchy are pushing the envelope of usability. I've been ricing desktops since enlightenment on slackware 96, so I'm pretty familiar with this world.
Regarding form factor, I'm not a huge fan of phones, too many tradeoffs. I think with strong AI voice systems, the optimal setup is buds + tablet. That's a better setup for mobile linux anyhow, and it makes the hardware almost a non-issue.
This is a valid take. I do not agree with it in general: if we look beside the consumer devices, FOSS software us everywhere. and powers almost everything consequential.
But the mobile phones specifically turned from phones into trusted terminal which institutions like banks and governments use to let users control large amounts of money and responsibility. And the first rule of a secure device is to be limited. In particular, the device should limit the ability of its owner to fake its identity, or do unauthorized things with networking, camera, etc.
This junction of a general portable computer and a secure terminal is very unfortunate, because it exerts a very real pressure on the general computing part. Malicious users exist, hence more and more locking, attestation, etc, so that the other side could trust the mobile phone as a secure terminal.
It would be great to have a mobile computer where you can run whatever you please, because it's nobody's business. And additionally there'd be a security attachment that runs software which is limited, vetted, signed, completely locked-up and tamper-proof on the hardware level (also open-source), which sides of the communication would trust. Think about a Yubikey, or a TPM, but larger and more capable. The cellular modem and a SIM card are other examples, even though they may be not as severely hardened. They are still quite severely limited, and this is good.
If I were to offer an open-source phone (and, frankly, any mobile phone), I would consider following this principle. Much like the cellular modem, it would carry a locked up and certified security block, which would not be user-alterable. It would be also quite limited, unable to snoop into the rest of the phone. The rest of the phone would be a general-purpose computer with few limitations. Anything that would want to run on it securely would connect to the unforgeable interface of the security module, and do encryption / decryption / signing / secure storage that other parties, local and remote, would be able to verify and thus trust.
One can dream.
At this point there are only two things stopping me from using kde or gnome on my work box: Apple and my employer, and I could probably convince my employer. The hardware though is something I’m not willing to compromise on and Apple is in a tier above everyone else currently, so I’m stuck with subpar macOS, not planning upgrading to Tahoe for as long as possible.
Nerd have been at it since the OpenMoko days, the problem is that they don't understand what the general public cares about, thus all those efforts end up failing, as the few nerds that care about being customers all get a phone, and there isn't anyone left to keep the business going, buying new devices.
> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.
We need nerds that are more politically conscious than that, and are not naive enough to believe they can solve political problems through creating companies and hardware.
Indeed.
This is what we're up against:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...
We need to take an organization like EFF and make it 100x more well-funded and 1000x bigger and more aggressive to compete with these corporations in the political arena.
Eh? Samsung still maintains a whole suite of independent alternative apps, providing things ranging from NFC payments to calendaring and contact management, that they stuff onto their phones in addition to the usual Google fare.
Until very recently, most/all of their phones had alternative Samsung-produced chipsets available in various markets (Exynos).
They've got their own app store as a built-in.
And they also maintain their own small-system operating system, with Tizen, in case it all goes to shit.
They've been working very hard on parallel development for quite a long time. They're probably better-prepared to jump ship than any other top-tier manufacturer of Android cell phones is.
Motorola Mobility? That was spun out of the stodgy-big batwing mothership in Chicago a long time ago -- and first purchased by Google, before being sold to Lenovo. Subsequent to Google's influence, whatever remains is ill-prepared to jump ship, but that was certainly a design intent. That behemoth is much more dug-in.
So the outlook is certainly gloomy, but it's not all darkness.
(In terms of things like banks only supporting one OS or another: Gosh. Prior to the entrenchment of the smart phone age, I never installed a company-specific consumer banking application on any computing devices at all. It was OK. I just used Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web to do that stuff, sometimes with a side dose of SMS on my dumb-phone for active notifications.
And still today, I don't have banking apps for most of the companies that I do banking-stuff with -- and I get along fine with keeping track of the money I have, the money I owe, and the bills I need to pay.
Maybe the right answer here is to shore up the utility of the platform-independent WWW.)
>Eh? Samsung still maintains a whole suite of independent alternative apps, providing things ranging from NFC payments to calendaring and contact management, that they stuff onto their phones in addition to the usual Google fare.
Which is EVEN WORSE in maintaining device attestation than Android. Read about the Knox warranty bits.
> To me, this is... fine. Not ideal; but fine. We should fight like hell to score wins where we can, like in right to repair, parts availability, ensuring old devices are kept up to date for as long as possible (Apple is pretty good at this); but if I have to carry an old iPhone in my backpack to access my bank because they refuse to support my hypothetical GnuPhone 5, the world isn't going to end.
But even as you say, as you're using Arch as your desktop computer, things may be fine now, but they're only going to get worse.
Should we all have to carry two laptops because anything running a free software core is just utterly unusable due to remote attestation?
> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.
Didn't you just spend most of your comment talking about how the market forces don't care anyway? Would good is starting up a phone hardware company that will ultimately go bust due to total apathy of the general consumer?
Yep
"free and open web" isn't even used to be anymore, many are using bots and AI to make things worse and many people especially young people didn't even do "surfing" on the web anymore
like it or not but internet that need verification on personal level is the future, I don't agree with it either but if you see from the progress perspective its always been like that
As I said other times: we need a Free Hardware Foundation now like we needed the Free Software Foundation for many years. The GSD (GNU software distribution) is basically a standard GNU-Linux distro using GUIX as the package manager seems very interesting, but if you want to run 100% free software on a RYF-certified device you'll have to pay a lot of extra money for 15 years old class hardware.
We need the equivalent of a Linus Torvalds + Richard Stallman but hardware. We were lucky to have had both for software at the same time. We need the same luck again now.
Pointless. Silicon fabs currently cost billions of dollars. They are single points of failure. Even if the market starts trending towards openness, governments can just regulate a backdoor into these fabs. They have every incentive in the world to do it. Democratized access to cryptography is subversive.
We need some kind of 3D printer that can print computer chips. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own software at home. Democratized electronics fabrication. That's the only way we'll be saved.
While I, for the most part, agree to this in principle, at the moment, general compute hardware production is relatively safe (or so it seems).
But when it comes to humongous costs, the fact that even "open source AI models" don't have their training data available (the actual "source") is one thing, but even if it was, it'd be impossible to retrain a model "at home". But if data was available, I am sure any of the existing free software foundations, or a new one, could rally users around sponsoring one DC.
We are back in the "mainframe" days where top-end compute is accessible only to few (with lots of money).
Absolutely.
The takeover of "free software" by the enemies of freedom is not the "winning" of free software.
> It absolutely does.
I'm not sure I follow. Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms. FOSS didn't start by demanding that MS release the source code for Windows and Office. It started with developers writing their own alternatives. What helped was the open and standardized nature of the IBM/PC stack that made it all possible. Without it, FOSS would have died before birth.
> Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms.
To wit, hardware that I bought is not "their platform", but many corporations sure like to pretend it is.
It's already not illegal to reverse engineer hardware you have bought (for the purpose of maintaining it or compatibility), regardless of how much IP lawyers like to pretend otherwise. (And even if it were illegal, I would contend that reverse engineering is a fundamental right that laws cannot rob you of.)
When BlackRock has stake in 95% of fortune 500 companies, and we are forced to use software and services provided by them because no viable FOSS alternatives exist, it becomes, and already is, a big problem.
You have to own a phone to participate in society these days. I need one to even log onto my laptop for work. Eventually I'm sure some form of digital ID / biometric information will be required for verifying my online identity.
It's a slippery slope, and we're sliding into the abyss.
> Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms.
Yeah? They shouldn't be. Any attempt to deny us service on the basis of the software we use should be classified as discrimination. It should be a crime of the same caliber as racial discrimination.
This looks like a loser's move, but if your bank has no other options except for mobile app, you can buy a cheap phone for that app only, and connect it over WiFi (without SIM card) so the bank would only get your IP address from this and nothing more.
This is indeed a way to cope. But why should we have to merely cope? Why do we accept the world getting objectively worse? The necessary technology is cheaper, better and more abundant than ever – so why are we letting a few megacorps and some power-hungry politicians decide how we use it?
> This looks like a loser's move, but if your bank has no other options except for mobile app, you can…
…switch banks.
Come on, this kind of defeatism only emboldens entrenched players.
Yes, we're awkwardly cornered - hardware used to be open or easily reverse-engineered. Now it isn't. The solution is to demonstrate the demand for open hardware. No one is going to walk away from money that can be made even if the market is smaller.
This movement was strong enough that the incumbents themselves offered Linux-friendly hardware. We continue to see momentum in the mobile space as well with /e/OS, Fairphone, etc. GrapheneOS is pursuing alternatives to Pixel.
Be brave!
What did it take to port Linux to M1 series Macs (which at least has an unlocked bootloader)?
How do I install GNU/Linux distribution on a latest Galaxy S25 or iPhone or Google Pixel or Apple Watch or... (these are likely top-selling general compute devices in the world)?
Yes, on Windows PCs, Linux usually works better than Windows itself (except for the very newest stuff for a short while). But I think you missed the point of the GP.
> No one is going to walk away from money that can be made even if the market is smaller.
Unfortunately the tech industry has shown us that isn't true. For example, look at the iPhone mini - I forget the exact sales numbers others have cited, but it sold very well. There is clearly a solid market there, even if it is smaller. But Apple isn't willing to chase it, and nor are the various Android OEMs. The same may well prove true for open hardware.
I think it's worth distinguishing between what "winning" should mean and what's still possible in the world we're in. We may not win by owning every transistor, but we sure as hell lose if we stop demanding the right to.
Are you able to source all (or even the majority) of goods and services that YOU use, within the crypto ecosystem? Are you getting paid directly in crypto (or if you offer goods/services, do you only accept crypto)? i.e. direct exchange of crypto for goods and services? If not, you are using an intermediary to convert crypto into fiat and vice-versa. Do you invest in ANY non-crypto assets? If not, you are relying on a financial intermediary. Do you practice true self-custody of your crypto? If not, you are relying on intermediaries.
For all the theory about the being financially independent of intermediaries, in practice it is nigh on impossible for most folks living in the real economy. Meaning that for most of them, even the crypto-knowledgeable, "embracing crypto" means a compromise with the "absurd" as you put it.
Y'all should've pushed back far more strongly against their "security" long ago... but now the only way forward is to keep fighting.
If you're definition of winning is owning every transistor, then it is an unproductive definition.
Under that definition, we have and will always lose.
I see, it makes sense. But I feel like it is a worth while compromise.
Attestation as I understand it is to allow third parties to trust a user's computing device for purposes of handling their sensitive data (both from the user's and the third party's point of view) in a way that doesn't rely strictly on the user's savvy for keeping everything leak proof.
Even if this data belongs to me - as said user - I still think that the existence of open source attested software is a net benefit in the bigger picture because the future looks more and more dependent on secure computation.
You can run it, I'm just under no obligation to let your machine send signals to my machine that my machine will respond to if you are running software I do not trust.
And that's the complexity of this era of computing. We just got finished convincing people that it made sense that they should have the right to run whatever software they wanted on hardware they owned... And then immediately the technology shifted so that most things no longer get done using exclusively hardware that you own. The RMS four freedoms approach is only chipping away at the larger problem: capitalism (I mean that literally in that the problem is that the machines that do the work, the capital, are owned by a tiny ownership class).
> You can run it, I'm just under no obligation to let your machine send signals to my machine that my machine will respond to if you are running software I do not trust.
If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.
It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.
This is especially important when I just want to run my own OS and not have people go out of their way to deliberately break things because of that.
If the future hopes for openness in computing rely on ending capitalism, we're already toast. Nobody's going to be building the next generation of chip fabs without gargantuan amounts of funding.
Capitalism isn't a necessary prerequisite for gargantuan amounts of funding.
Smartphones have cryptographic hardware that can provide proof that a device has not been "tampered with". This is called attestation. The hardware attests to the fact trust has been preserved since boot.
Your device will not attest to this if you install your own operating system, if you root your phone, if you do anything that they don't like, anything at all.
You install your bank's app and try to use it. The bank's servers ask for the attestation. You will not have one. They decide you cannot be trusted and deny you service.
Even if you can program your own keys into your device, nobody is gonna trust those keys. Why would your bank trust your own keys? They'll trust Google's keys, Apple's keys, the government's keys. You? You don't get to participate.
The corporations and governments want to own your computer. They demand cryptographic proof that your device is owned by them and that they have complete control. If you don't provide it, you're banned and ostracized from everything.
Remote attestation on Android is one of the primary examples. Banking apps and a bunch of other apps that will cut you off if you do something like root your phone.
(This is not directed to you but the wider community writ large, you just happened to be the one to kick the hornets nest)
You know… there was time before this latest generation started calling everyone that complained to a manager a karen… that complaining to manager would resolve issues… and if that failed, publishing your story and refusing to do business with someone was seen as proper conduct.
Banks!!! Lol! Are the most fragile institutions ever! Fdic, exists for a reason… get enough people to withdraw their money all at once and see what happens.
Open source people that want to stick to your grit… don’t work with banks that won’t let you use open source software. Oh is that too hard for ya? If you’re not compiling your own slackware distro than you have no leg to stand on (/s)
But seriously, use a local bank and try solving human problems by dealing with human’s. Quit trying to tech everything… if the open source community would get unified and actualize… thats a fuck ton of people!
Here’s another crazy concept that the oss community could do… they could literally just open their own bank… voila (its not as hard as it seems and takes way less money than you think)
> try solving human problems by dealing with human’s
Welp. I actually tried it. Here's my experience.
I contacted my banks and got in touch with their managers and devs. They do have APIs. I wanted to use those to create my own software with read only access to my account. I didn't even want to transfer money anywhere, just get my transactions for accounting purposes. I was using ledger at the time and was getting tired of manually inputting everything into the journal.
I eventually discovered I would need to incorporate and beg the central bank for permission to touch the financial system.
> But seriously, use a local bank and try solving human problems by dealing with human’s. Quit trying to tech everything… if the open source community would get unified and actualize… thats a fuck ton of people!
Wise, and thus downvoted. Many FOSS enthusiasts are antisocial, sometimes even misanthropic, fragile snowflakes ("I should be able to run any software I like, on any device I like"), so any call for collective political action, that actually could achieve something more, is disregarded.
I think free software has to adapt. I find it very difficult to run QGIS on a modern Mac with an up-to-date OS. It won't run for genuine security reasons, not because some corporation doesn't want me to run free software.
In most places that I have been, free software is basically the way to not pay for software, for most companies free === gratis.
In the 1980's and 1990's, the same kind of places would be pirating software.
In Portugal, we used to have shops with catalogs during those days, hardly anyone at goverment level cared about software sales, nowadays it is controlled by an economic agency and those kind of shops aren't as easy to find as they were up to early 2000's.
Free software allows them to now be in a legal state, yet the authors get the same as before most of the time, nothing.
Which is why in the end many FOSS projects end up pivoting for something commercial, preferbly in ways where even piracy isn't possible, like SaaS.
As someone not deeply involved in FOSS I am starting to get the absolutist mindset.
I run graphene on my phone and this new restricted security patch limit by google is nothing short of a shit show.
Can you shed light on this new patch? Does it hinder your freedoms as a user of graphene OS?
I wonder if switching to a Jolla C2 [0] is a reasonable alternative.
[0] https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone
Google recently changed their security policy regarding Android, where there's now a 3-4 month delay between when OEMs get access to security patches and when they're posted to AOSP (it was previously 1 month). The patches are broadly distributed to OEMs, so there's no significant barrier to attackers and companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite obtaining them. GrapheneOS has access to the patches, but the embargoed nature means they're not able to publish the patch source code or any details about what vulnerabilities are being patched. This means that GrapheneOS users are forced to choose whether to opt into the closed source patches and get recent vulnerabilities patched, but lose out on having an open OS.
I will check this out. I have not seen this one. I have and have tried a Pinephone but I enjoy spending time not plugged into a charger.
> From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet.
I may be unable to control the software in the device I am holding in my hands right now, but the important thing is that a few corporations can externalize the costs of maintaining their infrastructure to "the open-source community". And even get free publicity from doing so!
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.
I remember when winning meant you can modify your computer as you please because you have all the sources. We’re locked down in a world of apps, saas, and whatnot.
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.
It doesn't matter if software published under free licenses sets the norms and powers most of what is built if critical transistors that are necessary to use important hardware at all are powered by unfree software. That is precisely what this article is decrying. If you don't own every transistor, whoever does own those transistors can use their control over them to prevent you from using your hardware as you wish, or attempting to get money out of you for the privilege; and preventing this state of affairs is actually more important in many ways than being able to use free software to create novel internet applications.
Free software may have won on the infrastructure side, but it is people's computing that deserves freedom first and foremost. The good news is that Linux is gaining ground on the desktop, and we may eventually see the "year of the Linux desktop."
The issue is that most people's computing has now shifted to mobile devices, and these are quickly becoming fully locked down. Apple has been a lost cause for a long time, but Google is now aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. Projects like Lineage and Graphene are more important than ever for this reason.
Google is not aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. It has always been 99% developed by Google and a handful of close partners like Samsung. It is simply aligning workflows to make this arrangement less costly to maintain. The fact that Graphene is hurt by the change was simply not part of the consideration. I'm sure they can alter their arrangement to get similar access to other partners and continue on as before.
Winning does has many different outcomes, only some which is similar enough that the historical records will see it as such. A comparison I would make is the war on encryption that was won. It is no longer illegal to sell encryption. The question becomes how much of a victory that is if then government impose laws that dictate backdoor, like say chat control.
What did that NSA official said. They lost the battle over control of encryption, but won the war against privacy?
The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.
Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.
I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
> I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers.
It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)
> it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.
I think there can be a difference between the literal and official meaning of a term, and what it most commonly means in practice - and that’s a descriptive claim about how words get used, not a prescriptive claim that anyone has some moral or legal obligation to do anything in particular
> The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.
That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open.
You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.
"FOSS won so decisively on the supply side" because it's basically giving away something that would ordinarily cost money. Anyone can "win" by giving away something of value away for free; it's not a victory that's worth anything.
What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.
You are so close. Or maybe you’re there and I misread that.
FOSS killed the profit margin in just making software. That shifted profits to hosting it, and in so doing shifted the industry to a more closed model than it had before.
In other words the net effect over time on the system from FOSS was to close things more. It had the opposite of the intended effect. We incentivized closed.
The result had been horribly dystopian. Before we had PCs that ran closed source but still local software and had our own data. Now we have cloud they runs opaque software we can’t even run ourselves and our data is not ours and is subject to mass surveillance. (By “our” I mean most people. Tech savvy people can opt out with some effort.)
This is super common. It’s hard to predict the actual incentive structure that something will create, and it is incentives not intentions that determine outcomes. Large scale socioeconomic systems are mindless gradient descent machines that chase profits of various kinds the way a plant grows toward sunlight.
>he infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software.
Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to.
>Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.
>I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.
Maybe it's not "overstating the loss"... it's just focusing on a different kind of loss
I think you completely miss the point.
You're focusing on the benefits of open source in booming the technological sector, but his emphasis is that openness ends at the developer's, not consumer's stage and this is particularly bad when more and more of your life is technology dependant and de facto you cannot control nor modify it.
> that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack
What stack?
You give a bunch of web stack examples, great. The vast majority of people will never run a server nor benefit from the licenses of the code running on the server. They overwhelming give their money to the companies benefiting from those licenses and get typical crummy consumer EULAs in return.
Meanwhile phones tablets iot tvs appliances cars tractors pacemakers videogame consoles security cameras coffee makers printers juicers friggin Christmas lights routers, all that stuff, is overwhelmingly closed source.
Speaking as one of the less-technically inclined HN users all I know is Linux has never been easier to install for even the slightly motivated and while there are lots of gaps, you really can run a lot of key tasks on FOSS without much fuss.
If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.
On installing Linux, I think it always has been relatively easy to do on previous generation hardware.
20 years ago if you didn't care about decent laptops, you'd easily find a mid-level desktop tower and it would mostly work. You'd be in pain if you wanted the best GPU or best hardware, but mid-tier stuff would work fine.
Nowadays you can get Linux very easily on ThinkPads or a mid-tier business laptop for instance. Or Framework. But it will be PITA on a Surface Pro, or the best Asus laptop.
I'm with you in that the market has matured so much mid-tier is now viable enough for most office or everyday life, trying to get top hardware isn't really needed. But there's still definitely a gap if your use case spills out in a more demanding area (games, VR, CAD etc.)
Yeah to be clear I’d never say it’s “easy” and ready for mass adoption. But I also had 0 issues getting bazzite going on my PC I built with an AMD 9800x3d/9070 working out the gate. I played expedition 33 the day I finished building! Kind of remarkable given the GPU was only a month or two old. What’s striking was that I never had to open a terminal window or install a single driver. Some of the distros are near-turnkey at this point.
I work in solar, so we have quite a lot of hardware which doesn't run on free software. We couldn't patch part of our inverter pipeline because the hardware was proprietary and had no open alternatives. We had to pay quite a lot of money to find one of the original engineers and have them flown in to help us unlock it, so that we could replace the firmware with some we had a security clearance holding contractor write for us.
To be fair this is a story about not doing your due diligence and buying the wrong hardware, but I think it can give you some insight into what the article talks about. Because yes, you can install Linux, but can you install something on your blender when "BRAND" decides you need to pay a subscription to run the self-cleaning program?
Do vendors give you schematics for boards they make or RTL for asics? Where do you draw the line as to what is expected? From a hardware vendors perspective, firmware they give you which is locked down is simply an extension of the hardware that enables them to more cheaply iterate on it. Not a feature for customers to use to arbitrarily modify and add complexity to the test matrix and technical support for the vendor. Vendors who give away full configurability tend to see their costs rise rather than fall.
The fundamental conflict here is that software developers want/need to get paid. We have mortgages/rent/medical bills/groceries and none of those are free.
The root problem, in my opinion, is combining "free as in beer" with "free as in speech". The latter cannot be achieved if you insist on the former. I.e., if your solution to privacy is only use free-as-in-beer software then you will fail because developers want/need to get paid.
What we need is a business model in which people are willing to pay for privacy-respecting software. That's the only sustainable path. And it's frustrating to me that the people who are most vocal about software freedom are actively working against that with this kind of article.
[p.s.: I realize I'm ranting and not offering enough detail to change minds, much less offer a solution. Sorry about that.]
I think people are willing to pay for privacy protecting software. The problem is I don’t think people trust companies who claim that because there are too many instances of that “privacy” coming with a subtle asterisk. Businesses can’t seem to resist eroding trust in the interest of $ (growth! Shareholder value!) or caving to authorities. Plus, it’s rare that companies are transparent enough to earn the trust they claim we should give them.
I do agree with the sentiment: people need to get paid to write software, and people want freedoms to be respected by that software. It seems to be challenging to rectify the two in most cases (yes, there are cases where it works - those are the exception not the norm).
100% agree. Regulation is part of the answer. For instance, we trust that a gas pump is accurate because we know the government inspects it.
But I think we need more companies where trust/privacy is a brand promise. Apple, I think, is trying because they can. As long as they make money selling hardware, they don't have to rely on ad revenue.
In my opinion, the reason there aren't more companies that brand themselves as privacy-protecting is because people aren't willing to pay that much for it--at least not as much as the companies can make by selling data.
Part of my reaction to the article, however, is that the people who most value privacy are the least willing to pay for software--their solution is always about free-as-in-beer software. That obviously shrinks the market for privacy-respecting software.
Except the "something else that pays the bills" is usually ads. And I think we all see why that's a bad idea.
John Deere bricking someone’s tractor because they put in an unrecognized spare part has nothing to do with supporting some poor hard working software developer who would otherwise starve.
It’s using software for evil. (And if I had to bet I would bet a software engineer was nowhere near that decision. They just implemented it!)
Sure--but the article is saying that there are many cases where it doesn't work--where no good free software exists.
Could the Blender model replace YouTube, for example? I don't think it can, until hosting costs drop significantly. Maybe that's part of the answer.
What replaces YouTube is a symmetrical internet where people can upload lots, and probably something like popcorn time. Then some discoverability. The only issue is lack of moderation because of "bad videos". Can't have nice things :(
This topic provokes a question, what exactly is "winning" anyway? As others point out, how could there be absolute winning, or complete dominance of the whole gamut of software used for every purpose. Of course, no one ever proposed such a definition of open-source success.
Since the 1990s I've been thoroughly committed to using and developing open-source programs. I strongly prefer using open-source products even when they've been less robust than proprietary options. In recent years, that's changed in favor of open-source, a number of open-source programs have become best-in-class. To name a few Blender, postgresql, Firefox, most developer tools. Still, proprietary products dominate areas like OSs, enterprise programs, etc., and will probably continue to do so.
But even if not as widely used, the fact that quality alternatives exist to a significant share of proprietary offerings speaks to open-source success. It's noteworthy that giants like Microsoft have open-sourced some of their products, a practice unheard of a couple of decades ago that shows influence of the open-source movement.
A winner-take-all philosophy is bound to be as deleterious to open-source advocacy as in any other endeavor. Realistically, producing excellent, bug-free, well-documented open-source software is what it takes to find an appreciative user-base. Perhaps not the majority of users of that category of software, but is that necessary to call a project successful? To say it is seems a prelude to enduring a constant sense of failure and missing out on authentic victories.
The goal of the Free Software movement is to build a usable computing environment for which all software (i.e., "code") is free. If you include things like cell phones, tablets, web services, firmware, or basically anything other than core os components in the computing environment, that goal is very far off.
Sure, the FSF is as idealistic as it has been influential. Can't fault FSF for unrelenting commitment to stated purposes. While the totally free OS was a goal that never quite materialized, a large proportion of modern open-source systems is composed of free (in the FSF sense) software. What FSF advocates has indeed mattered.
I think the question is this: is having totally free cell phones, etc., the essential criterion of success? Or is something less than embodying FSF-style ideology acceptable? To be sure, there's no definitive answer to such a question. But ideological purity is a luxury in the real world that even FSF acknowledges, compromises sometimes have to be made, pragmatic considerations have to be taken into account.
Nothing wrong with keeping lofty goals, but as practical necessity frequently dictates, graciously accepting less than total victory more often than not best serves our interests.
(Edited re: grammar.)
> a large proportion of modern open-source systems is composed of free (in the FSF sense) software.
The critical parts aren't though, and that's where it matters the most, IMHO intentionally so.
An HP printer being 99% based on free components won't be a tangible improvement if the last 1% vehemently prevents it's free use. Open source being the core of the OS doesn't help if nothing can replace iOS on an iPhone.
We're in a world where free software has massively grown, while the day to day impacts are IMHO comparatively small. It feels like we're more free than ever, inside our new confinement cells.
The victory situation for free software is that it becomes socially unacceptable, and rare, for individuals and for organizations to claim IP rights over software, to restrict its dissemination, to hide its source code, etc. When it is clear that software is shared commons, and nothing else.
Why would that ever happen? Software is too important for people to not sell outside of communism and free software people aren’t as good as making consumer products as capitalists
Software is too important for people not to _share_. And too important for people to have to waste endless resources in re-developing in multiple closed contexts.
As for "communism" - if by whiskey, I mean if by Communism you mean soviet-union-style social arrangements, then I'm pretty sure they had closed-source software which the government controlled and people could not use and alter freely; but if you mean "communism" as in software being a "commons", then, yeah, free software will win when that is again the case.
I love firefox, but it is NOT best in class. What kind of copium are you huffing? I want some!
With branding like "free software", it could have have lost the battle for hearts and minds for that reason alone, if not for all the other reasons.
Of course the public thinks "free software" is software for which you do not pay money.
And everyone immediately goes on their way with their downloads, without you getting the chance to give your hour-long spiel on "I'm glad you asked what I mean by 'free software'."
Because no one would ever ask what "free software" means, because they already know what it means.
It is the advocates who are terrible at advocacy who keep trying to give a term new meaning, and failing for a few decades to get the public to understand or pay attention.
You could even say that's the philosophical/awareness barrier, right there: people thinking in terms of free software, rather than in terms of Free Software(tm)(R).
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I really don’t like this comment but have to admit it’s pretty damn true.
Thats why I like enshittification as a phrase as it attacks the bad side of things.
If you want to propagandise against the cloud the thing most average (and indeed smart and dumb also) people hate about the cloud is: the software keeps morphing. the buttons keep moving. the menu disappeared.
Lets call it shapeshifting software. Different from this morning-ware!
Confusionware!
This touches on something I've noticed the past few years - it seems to me many advocates of most topics often do more harm than good for their cause - taking hardline positions normal people simply can't relate to, even if they do agree in theory.
Anyway, on the topic of "free" software - how might you recommend we try to frame this to be more clear to the public? I think people tried to make "libre software" a thing, but doesn't that have the exact same issue - that is, that people will misunderstand what it is?
Back in the day, it was the X/Open group that was muddying the waters:
I would kill for decent NURBS oriented 3D CAD software. I feel like the 3D printing community would absolutely thrive if they stopped dealing with polygons for things meant to exist in the real world.
Rhino is really the only fully featured tool in town, at least available to the general public at a somewhat "affordable" price (~$700 from the right reseller). I end up paying to upgrade every few years when compatibility with my existing OS finally breaks. Apple announced the removal of Rosetta in 2027 (dear god why?! I use so many apps that'll likely never be made native) so I'm gonna have to pay again then.
At least, so far, it's software I'm allowed to *own* rather than rent. I can run my old versions in perpetuity, particularly on an emulator. As someone who has 3D models going back to around the year 2000 in his collection, the idea of using any of these hosted solutions just sends absolute shivers down my spine.
OpenSCAD is really the best we have in open source non-polygonal modeling tools, and it honestly wouldn't be too bad if someone could slap a decent WYSIWYG GUI on it.
This and a good RAW image processor are the two reasons I ever boot up the Windows VM these days. None of the options available on Linux come close to the software I use on Windows for those tasks.
You can get Fusion360 to work on Linux through some scripts someone created, but I don't like how Fusion works at all after using SolidWorks (and Pro/E) professionally.
And better still in the upcoming 1.1 release. Lots of improvements.
> What picture does this paint? Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version.
I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc).
When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.
what are the good modern examples of true FOSS projects which are still managing to make OK money?
even services like MSP are all relying on M$FT and similar vendors
there are some attempts at building open-source stack, but that ends up not viable in the end :(
I am baffled that people in this thread write something along "well, depends what you call win" - the goal of Free Software is quite clear. The goal is freedom, computing freedom, freedom of the software user. It is very easy to notice that in 2025 users have less freedom even if they run some Libre Linux distro on their Thinkpads than they had running Win98, because of everything that happens OUTSIDE PC software ecosystem (phones, SaaS etc), and even inside PC world things sometimes are not obvious.
Free Software is losing, simple as that. Even with Kubernetes, as the goal was never to provide free labor and free software infra to companies.