Free software hasn't won
(dorotac.eu)364 points by LorenDB a day ago
364 points by LorenDB a day ago
> There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.
It's often beyond just sacrificing "any sort of convenience" - but rather "it's effectively impossible for someone who's not at least a compentent IT hobbyist to install this software".
> I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.
You need to change the culture in free/open software. The current goal seems to be something like "as long as it works, and I can install it --no matter how convoluted or unreliable that process is-- then that's good enough". Mainstream users don't want to use the shell, or have to search internet forums for solutions, or use Docker, or whatever.
If you genuinely want FOSS to win, the goal should be to be better than the commercial alternatives: easier to install, more reliable, better more intuitive UIs, smaller, faster, more features, whatever.
It isn't like it shouldn't be easier on Linux either as it already is much of the time. I can open up my command line and type "yay ProgramName" and hit enter a couple times to install most things. Its even easier on a distro that uses a store for distributing applications. But as soon as you get away from that curated selection the process becomes so much more difficult very quickly. Users will give up if it is more complicated than downloading an executable and clicking on it.
It should be easy to make FOSS Web apps especially ones that favour front end (and hence web standards) for most of what they do. Someone does need to be the server though so you end up with a bit of cloud.
I think another problem is marketing. The SaaS can afford to advertise. The free libre app has to be discovered.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink
Yeah we can Properly Educate non techies all day, but when they sit down to watch Netflix and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors, I’ve yet to get a single person to care after that.
> and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors
They shouldn't have to if the software is properly made. I am not talking about teaching normies to install Docker apps, but teaching them why FOSS is important and the implications of using corporate-owned tools.
My point is that DRM isn’t something that FOSS has any control over, and is becoming an increasingly common strategy to discourage using third party software because it forces compromises.
So when the DRM doesn’t work and you get a degraded experience, pitching anybody who isn’t really interested in the ecosystem of technology is pretty much impossible. One tech stack works well, one doesn’t. That’s all one cares about
Freedom lost not because it was taken, but because most people didn't care to keep it.
So much software is “open source”, but it’s either de jure or de facto controlled by a single company.
Sure you could fork it, but for complex projects you’re not gonna. 99.99% of users of open source software will never meaningfully contribute. So the only option most people have is to hope someone else forks the project if something goes wrong, and for complex projects maintaining a fork requires serious resources.
We really need to distinguish between generic “open source” and actual community built and controlled projects.
The term open source itself was popularized by the open source initiative. A group funded by Tim O’Reilly and big tech to co-opt the free software movement and make it more business friendly.
They’ve spent so much time and money promoting the term, that there’s an enormous amount of good will around it. To the point that any project that doesn’t use an OSI approved license is widely considered dirty.
You could have a project controlled by the community with a nearly completely free license with the caveat that companies making more than $100 million in annual revenue can’t resell it, and the majority of devs would trust it less than an “open source” project completely controlled by a trillion dollar company.
Complex puzzle, I feel a key part is that the financing / financial sustainability of free software has not been solved. The author touches on it a bit by saying "when you sell hardware..." which kinda means no hardware == no revenue since you can't sell the software. I don't discount that Redhat is a thing, but it is the exception not the norm.
I am quite convinced a lot of open source is not open for ideology reasons but rather are a result of competition and the market itself.
When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads.
Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this.
Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.
Free software has won on servers. It is making inroads into desktop/gaming PCs (above 5% market share now), and the exodus from Windows 10 could well push it over 10% soon.
But the computing landscape has shifted towards mobile devices and this is where our freedoms are now the most at risk. It is time that we turn our back on Apple and Google and exclusively buy devices that can run operating systems that are community-controlled such as Linux phones, and devices that can be flashed to Lineage and Graphene.
Free software will win in the long run. But it depends on what you call "win". For me it means that, provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others. They will write free software and each year, that free software, although years behind commercial offerings, will be better than the software of ten years ago. With the GPL, that software will stick and won't be appropriated. So in the long run, free software will produce value.
See KiCad, Inkscape, emacs, etc. Are those better than commercial offering ? Sure not. But compare that with 10 years ago: it's much better.
And in the long run (say, 50-100 years), it will come out positively.
Just keep the spirit alive.
> Just keep the spirit alive.
And to do that, blog posts like this one are necessary.
> provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others
They don't spawn in a vacuum and rarely arrive at a significant formed idea of Free Software from first principles, so providing education and awareness into that direction is important. In the last decade free software discourse (at least in my perception) has significantly quieted down, to a point where I'm not sure that newcomers to the topic satisfy a replacement rate.
If one wants to keep the spirit alive, now would definitely be a time to push!
I think being a programmer we must understand that there's never a one size fits all needs.
Each project has different needs having an option never hurts, as long as there is competition, there will exist a chance of open sourcing the source.
Because, closed source softwares die faster in their lifetimes, while open source remain remembered even after being unmaintained.
Had it not been for GitHub(a closed source software) we'd had never reached this stage of open source expansion and understanding, because hosting a git to open source a project was and still isn't cost effective solution. Meanwhile torrents are mildly successful with this, yet faced by the lawful resistance in many regions.
Basic goals, should be to always have a choice, if there isn't much then create one if you can. Rest is just fog in hindsight, I'd say.
Gaming is one such usecase that requires and works well, currently, with proprietary software.
As such, gaming is a sport and as long as a game is competitive, there's always a chance to bypass a n obstacle with a hack, just as there was misconceptions with OSes.
But unlike OSes, games don't have a commercial application yet, we still have a long time before the realisation of freeware gaming.
It's quoting people who say that it has won because of extensive adoption. However, that adoption doesn't mean that most people are allowed even in principle to change most of the software in embedded devices they own, or even on most of the computing devices they own.
I've also found this really weird. Like, we have Linux kernels on most cloud instances, and most data center servers, and most academic and research computing systems, and probably lately on most embedded microprocessors that are big enough to run it. (And various ecosystems for computing infrastructure and software development are mainly using free software userspace and tools.) Meanwhile, almost all user-facing software that almost all people interact with almost all of the time is proprietary. Why would someone say it's "won"? Thinking really small?
Even Linux hasn't "won" in those areas. It has just replaced what we would call a common API layer or a communication standard. The virtualization products are still proprietary. Servers and their firmware are too. People needed a Unix-like OS that hasn't been riddled with patent issues and wasn't outrageously expensive. They needed it because they were also price-sensitive or outright cheap. They didn't want to change APIs or modularize their software. Linux was there. Startup culture happened which demanded cutting all the costs you can. Linux was free of charge. Linux wasn't the best OS for the job sometimes. But it was there and it was gratis. So it became the middleware for Unix-compatible software.
We have open standards and even open/free software for anything that companies aren't making money out of. FOSS by itself cannot make money. In places where software matters the most or, if the software hides the trade secrets the most or, if it is the main money maker, creating FOSS is economically infeasible.
For FOSS to win, we need to change the economic and legal system. Current capitalist system in many West-aligned countries is actively hostile against sharing in any kind, except the ones that profit the biggest players in their non-critical areas. In a market where the first one to market gets to buy all competitors, in a market the one that has the biggest secrecy wins and gets all the money from investors like Y-Combinator, there cannot be any truly FOSS software-only products. They need to do rug pulls to support the exponential growth. Startup culture is fundamentally anti-FOSS. It is pro-FOSS in only consuming. Even a startup releasing some middleware can be interpreted as mishandling investment.
We need to make sure our governments support FOSS infrastructure and FOSS user-facing software. They need to be equal employers and competitors to Big Tech or they need to directly support smaller competitors for decades. Otherwise, I am afraid, FOSS cannot win.
Corporations are not really a capitalist thing. They get misconstrued as one.
My takeaway was that the article was looking at common Open Source claims, and then locating the only " 100% true" example of that.
Like you cant make a 100% open hardware mobile phone. Theres lots of near enough cases. But that Qualcomm chip is proprietary for the phone bit. So they exaggerate by going back to an old, open source rotary phone.
It didn't succeed because he was always against making money from software. He also has pushed for governments to be forced to use FOSS.
I remember him doing some interviews in the 90s, and he would put his coat over the camera, if it wasn't using FOSS. This sort of zealot mindset will always be on the fringes of society and eventually abandoned for something more liberal (which is what we've seen in the last decade or so).
If winning means mass adoption, I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free.
If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it. The de facto strategy in our era for commercializing any tech is surveilling its users.
If a technology can't be harnessed, corporations will contain if not outright kill it.
We've seen this time and time again. So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Remain in the hands of individuals who care and build it for themselves. In that sense, there are many free software that have already won.
My question is, why on earth are people obsessed with things like the year of the Linux desktop, and more people adopting their software.
Fragmentation is probably the only way free software will remain free.
> I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free.
The Linux kernel is widely adopted and remains kind-of-free.
LibreOffice is widely adopted and remains quite free.
> If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it
Not necessarily. That is, they may engage in commercial activity surrounding it, but that's not the same thing.
> So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar.
Your "winning" requires not-winning, i.e. most people not using the relevant software.
I have no problem with closed source firmware as long as I can install Linux, with proprietary junk apps as long as I can side load open source ones, with ads as long as I have Ublock. Currently, especial Google is passing over my red lines and I am preparing for retaliation (ungoogle).
FOSS used to win by being able to run on anything. Now hardware chooses you. If you’re not running the sanctioned OS, even the browser might be crippled. I’m not sure if that’s progress, but it’s definitely not freedom.
Note that non-free firmware in a network card, for example, doesn't affect anything, if the traffic is encrypted (and ideally routed through VPN so that the card has no direct Internet connection). So in some cases we can isolate non-free components so that they cannot do any harm. Modem in a phone, probably can be isolated also.
People seem to think Free Software ought to have won purely as being free, as if that was somehow going to overcome the heinous acts f profit motivated groups to try and take away your end user freedom for their own gain. Its an idealogical battle not an economic one, though sadly we havent won its true
The pacemaker example is an interesting one. Medical devices are shrouded in secrecy, ostensibly for "good reasons", but in reality they're often insecure garbage. I'm not sure if an open source pacemaker would be safer than a proprietary one. It would be nice to be able to audit the source code, but I'm not sure whether contributions from random committers would have a net positive impact in this space?
In many cases you shouldn't need a computer, and for many where a computer is helpful, a very simple one should be possible which can use less power and with small enough ROM and RAM, and not needing any Wi-Fi and stuff like that. You also should not rely on computers too much even in the circumstances where they are helpful.
I do think that different computers (and other stuff) can be made which do not use proprietary software (and which do not use excessive software; I think it is also important, for a different reason). Free open specifications can also be made, too. Many people don't, but it can be done (although in some cases it is difficult, for various reasons).
Well said.
“When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.” — Star Trek: Insurrection.
A month ago I watched animatronic dogs herd sheep around a paddock just minutes after some Border Collie did the same thing. What came to mind straight away was: that’s not a problem that needs solving. Yet here we are, injecting technology into every nook and cranny we can and ultimately all it’ll do is free us from our own freedom as people and enslave us to the rich, who will own all the tech and knowledge to support those animatronic dogs.
It's about to get much worse.
You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.
If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.
>You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.
In abstract, probably true, but so vague to be useless.
I can probably vibe code with qwen on debian. But are you then going to pivot from your microsoft example to like, my ISP? And if I point out I can move to an ISP with less than 5 staff, you will probably just move the goalposts further right?
Might be better to let you establish your goalposts first hey.
I use it on Windows, I am just loosely aware that I could run it on debian if I wished. I use 7b and its roughly as useful as GPT 3.5. I dont have any tools linked to it yet.
I'm implementing an MCP client using Qwen3 4B and its tool call capabilities are impressive! I'm sure it will only improve and the 30B is probably already much better.
Eh, this I cannot abide with. There are dozens of hosted model providers, from the foundational providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) to cloud re-hosting (Azure, GCP, AWS) to routing proxies (OpenRouter, Vercel, etc). There are huge open source models that are quite competitive (Qwen3-Coder). There are smaller open source models that can run on your laptop and easily help with function writing. There are walled garden, highly integrated tools (Claude Code, Codex) and there are plug-and-play bring your own API key or model tools (Charm Crush, etc). The ecosystem is vast, and every facet of it appears to be getting better.
It may surprise you to learn that some people actually like programming, so yes I will. If AI tools are 20x faster then I guess I'll have to use them to get paid, but I'll be damned if I start letting a computer do the fun part for me on personal projects.
That said I'm not too worried. Vibe coding is currently slower due to how bad it is at writing software. In several years companies pouring billions into improving LLMs still haven't been able to make them not suck. That suggests to me that it's a fundamental limitation of the tech at present, and won't get better until another research breakthrough happens.
> You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.
True, but that's also not exactly a good thing to be doing to begin with.
Age verification laws in the US are chipping away at Internet anonymity. You might not be able to get another account because your legal identity might be required (and can be banned).
This isn’t just a US thing. Many countries require KYC for a lot of online accounts
All major platforms have mechanisms to identify ban evasion. It's not so easy to create another account when, for example, they ask for a phone number.
In the U.S. at least, it is trivial to buy a new SIM anonymously. But really, you should refuse to use any platform that requires a phone number in the first place. These companies make it implicitly very clear that they want to control you and extract every bit of information that they can from you.
You need thousands of dollars of hardware to run a decent coding model with bearable tokens/s.
Haiku will win in the end, at least win what many in the free software world are trying to win. Or at least what I think this blog is trying to get at, but it is a weird post I am not completely sure what it is trying to get at. But I do appreciate its methods even if I am somewhat confused by them.
The year of the linux desktop is not going to happen, far too much baggage. The year of the Haiku deaktop will happen; they are doing everything right and staying under the radar until they are ready.
Like all permissively licensed software, it certainly will win what many in the free software world are trying to win: a bunch of nerds will do a ton of free work for corporations in exchange for absolutely nothing. Not even the drivers they need to run their own software on their own hardware. See: BSD, Minix, etc.
Permissively licensed software is everywhere. It's winning. What exactly it's winning, I'm not sure. Permissively licensed software is in my hypervisor. It's in my ankle monitor. Permissively licensed software will power the terminator drone that kills me in WW3. But it isn't in my laptop because the drivers don't work.
I've been using desktop linux for 15 years, at least. I play Steam Games on my Linux Desktop. I work on one. It's not prefect, but neither are the other OSes.
I guess what I am saying is that its been the year of the linux desktop for 15 years for me. What is the status of Haiku running on real hardware? Can it use linux device drivers yet?
I think Haiku is a neat project and I wish it well, its just hard to imagine what path it has to desktop dominance.
That is a hot take. I’d take the other side of that bet.
What do you want to bet and which assertion are we betting on?
Haiku has stayed out of the open source drama and focused on its goals; slowly and steadily working towards them even when the goalposts move. The big thing is their determination and staying focused on the user experience in a way Linux has not and can not without a single distro wining which is not going to happen. When it comes to the desktop, Haiku is offering everything Linux doesn't.
Huh? I like haiku and all but have never seen it running anywhere. At least Linux has a few percent market share. While not huge it is in the millions of folks successfully using it across the world every day.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon. They will all open source wash themselves and have a cadre of former red hat and other equivalent employees speaking about how they are the center of open source.
Meanwhile there's an entire parallel universe where people view things using different terms than these tired 1990s battles.
The next generation of software cannot be controlled by a small number of hyperscalers.. that is the new center of freedom focus. Times change
As a quasi-tech person I can’t imagine what more can be (or what isn’t being) achieved within reason by FOSS. And when it comes to Life’s Big Problems™ showing me someone playing Snake on an ULTRAK 435 Digital Pitch Counter doesn’t instill me with confidence that free software is as big a solution as its proponents would like to think.
The main benefit that I see it of having the source code to the software running on the devices you own is that you can always fix or modify it if and when you want to. Lots of things can happen such as the law changing, the company going out of business, the company stopping support for your device, or you just wanting to make some changes to how it works to better suit your lifestyle.
This doesn't mean that everyone will dive right in and make the code changes by themselves, but it does allow for paying someone knowledgeable to come in and make the changes for you. The same kind of way that you can (or used to be able to) get someone knowledgeable in cars to come in to fix or change things for you.
Think of it as having access to the device's schematics so that you (or someone knowledgable) can make repairs to the device when you need to.
This brings me to another point, that in addition to having the source code for the device available, there way to build and deploy the code to the device also has to be made available, otherwise it's only a shadow of a solution.
"Within reason" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence, isn't it? What I define as reasonable FOSS solutions, many executives would not agree with, but that doesn't mean they're not practical or acheivable.
Your Snake example also doesn't seem very fair - there are many large, concentrated FOSS movements and organizations that are doing good. More and more - albeit very slowly and sporadically - there are governments and organizations choosing to invest in self-hosted FOSS solutions. And you focus on hackers expressing curiosity doing silly but interesting things on various types of systems. Come on.
The title undersells it, it retreated. We open sourced the visible parts and then built a surveillance and firmware monoculture underneath. Every “smart” thing is a dumb terminal for code we can’t audit. The GPL didn’t fail, we just stopped applying it where it mattered most.
Soo open source "won" commercially, but Free Software hasn't won philosophically
Yeah I'm not exactly sure what the appeal is of a world in which none of us are rewarded for our time and labor...
What's not mentioned here is that every single successful OSS project is funded by multi-million dollar corporations and the reason it's so prevalent today.
The rest usually become abandonware because maintainers don't have the time or energy to continue with it for years at a time, especially if they can't make money from it.
I mean the reactions to posts on HN when a developer dares to make their OSS/MIT project sustainable by adding paid extensions is part of the problem. Almost to the point where I believe most developers are acting in the interest of the large corperations by bullying OSS developers into keeping their work free as in gratis.
The same people lose their minds if a project is GPL or copyleft.
I guess there will always be people who think in black and white. I'm pretty sure that if Stallman had been born in the 19th century, he would have been the first to write "The Communist Manifesto" before the other two guys had a chance.
I highly doubt that, considering Stallman's stance on freedom and personal sovereignty. Free software often operates like market anarchy (pure meritocracy), similar to the Internet. Coercive structures of centralized power that dictate what the 'common good' is do not align with the principles of the GPL. Also the GPL is focused on enforcing property rights ("this is yours unconditionally"), while communism emphasizes transferring property to the government ("this is ours but you might have some if you behave").
Nothing is truly free. All developer time is bought and paid for. Even leisure time. What pays for the software developer to be able to not starve and be able to spend leisure time on free software? Paid software. Obviously. Somewhere in the equation someone needs to be paid.
Usually if software is open source, it won't be paid for. So whatever is funding it... well if it's a software company funding open source software where does the money come from? Obviously paid software. And people won't pay for open source software because it's basically free.
Follow the money trail it ends at roughly three places: 1. donations, 2. tech support 3. ads 4. closed source software.
1 and 2 are too miniscule to be effective.
All this time and people still do not understand the difference between Freedom and Gratis.
But I would say Free software also has not lost. It also has the advantage that it will get better with time and a lot of commercial software gets worse throug enshittification. We also saw this with blender, I think free software will win eventually
Blender is an interesting case. It's seeing wider adoption in studios generally - an Oscar win has helped and the recent Blender Conference had talks from Framestores vizdev[1] and Paramounts in-house teams[2]. Blender 5.0 is around the corner, which is adding more and more industry standard features[3][4], though recently there was a discussion about pulling away from the VFX Reference Platform[5][6], which they have walked back from[7]. It's not there yet, but it's gaining mindshare rapidly. Enshittification in DCCs is interesting. Arguably the two dominant companies, Autodesk (Maya, 3ds Max) and Maxon (Cinema 4D) are on that path, whereas SideFX (Houdini) is kicking ass!
[1] https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk
[2] https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o
[3] https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc
[5] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-plat...
[7] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-stateme...
Use firefox. Click "reader view" on any page and read it according to your own theme. Maybe help free software win.
Flipping into reader mode constantly is clunky and jarring. People shouldn’t use that as an excuse for poor styling.
Fundamentally, the issue is that only a small number of people know what free/"libre" software is, and only a small subset of those people think it is a good tradeoff.
For that reason alone, there's just not going to be a lot of people working on building something the vast majority of people very clearly do not want.
That's unfortunate, mainly because they will find out that they can clone closed devices as well, in fact it's their default mode (not much of HW is open).
They even clone stuff that you send them to manufacture but forgot to include the sources (or have them outdated) as part of providing a good service :)
If AI is actually a software revolution, OS/Freeware will close the gap with non-gaming proprietary software.
As someone who recently made a post on how to change it just recently and has been thinking about why[1] Here are some of my thoughts.
Your article is great and that is a reality I also want to live in where everyone completely "owns" their device and lives free from proprietory stuff and you are approaching things from a hardware perspective because you maybe more familiar with that and I am more familiar with software (as compared to hardware) but here's the shocking part that I want to share
People don't even use open source software. Something which just works as compared to hardware. There are sooo many low hanging fruits for privacy in this world that we haven't picked.
Even if I have a completely open source laptop, if the only way to message my school's teacher some message that he will look or send me is whatsapp, all of that falls apart.
We need to advocate on both sides & I 100% agree that we should want the same thing for hardware as well (proprietory blobs Intel ME are scary with proprietory blobs) but we need to definitely prioritize in the process as well.
What are some low hanging fruits of privacy/open source we can share that people aren't using because they are unaware.
Also, as someone deeply interested in advocating for open source and to those comments on that ask HN I made, I am deeply saddened to see the state.
Since I feel from those comments on my post that there is no hope. Everyone expects a better UI/UX but nobody said anything about donating to the contributors.
We expect so much from open source and we give so little back as a society.
And its just funny that on my post which is about how to give back to open source contributors so that they might work full time on it so that they can make a better UI/UX, people expect the better UI/UX first. I can understand them but...
It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Open source is itself a chicken and egg problem. Why do we want unpaid labour abused by big tech which is then used for surveillance/ad-tech and then if we can't create a better UI/UX then stop trying to expect any payment. Why do we want perfection before giving open source guys some donations. They are competing with a company which might have full time guys working on a project funded by a VC fund only to enshitten stuff later.
Please, I genuinely want to change it. Give me any ideas on how we, the people interested in open source, can change/fix this chicken and egg problem.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that)
(also I should've probably changed it to say how can we change that but the HN limits the text of a title and I had to modify some of it, and now after writing it, I am genuinely not sure if we even a "how can we change" or if my title was correct and its now "can we even change")
I think the free software model underestimates how much people dislike being compelled to operate on other peoples terms when it comes to exercising discrete with their intellectual property. Even if they get "free" software.
The suggestion free software is free is intellectually dishonest, I don't think free software is really free, the nature of it is very controlling towards those who decide to depend it. I publish most of the code I do for small side projects publicly, but I would never use free software if I arbitrary forgo to my ability to make the decision for myself. It deprives contributions of dignity, any suggestion a contribution comes from a willingness to share is undermined by the fact they are compelled to do so.
There's a reason why their interpretation of free is prefaced by a bunch of precondition, because it's a force framing that is odds with what people actually understand to be free.
It's free as in freedom/libre - liberty.
Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be. Same is true in software.
But it literally isn't that, as an author in depending on it you reduce your liberty. The software is free, those dependent on are not free.
You could argue well it's free to users, but there's a level of survivorship bias due to the fact this is confined to the software people will publish under this license.
Edit: Back to "free software losing" is unsurprising given the above. All the benefit to the user are ultimately irrelevant to the growth of software when doesn't come from users, it comes from people weighing up if they want to forgo this ability to exercise control over software they made. And the portion of users who actually care are negligible to the point it has zero incentive to the software provider. The one exception I would say is, the "Free" softwares model works well for public goods like shared infrastructure like database software and such, but for end user software it is insane licensing model.
> Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be
Do you even hear yourself. This is the rhetoric why no one takes this seriously. Your suggesting my desire not to be deprived of my own personal liberty and act on my own terms (without causing harm to anyone else) is somehow authoritarian? It's such a narcissistic / manipulative entitled framing, to suggest this embodies anything resembling liberty.
Ok, let's talk specifics. Which of these will deprive your liberty:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
It sounds to me like the biggest problem are the users.
There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.
I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. I don’t think anybody can at this point now that Google and Microsoft are having extremely successful trial runs with fully managed systems.