Comment by makeitdouble

Comment by makeitdouble a day ago

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.

xwowsersx a day ago

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.

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makeitdouble a day ago

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.

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- schoen a day ago
  
  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.
  
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epolanski a day ago

It has lost in it's goal of giving freedom to the end users which is the real goal.
John Deere has built a great tractor that the company itself prevents you from repairing without their involvement.
The only beneficiary of open source there is John Deere.

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thaumasiotes a day ago

> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

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- NetMageSCW 14 hours ago
  
  That’s predicated on the assumption that FOSS is preferable to the alternative- maybe it isn’t.
  
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jowea a day ago

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.

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