Comment by wolvesechoes

Well he did try out, how should I say that, a different, bigger type of democracy.

Those who hold the money hold the power. Is rule by billionaires really democratic? Have you seen how easily they are wiping their asses with our democracy now that it’s convenient?

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.

Good point. Wasn't going to say the fight is useless, just that those who know are the minority.

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.

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.

> opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness

Surely you can think of more reasons than that.

When I choose to play Mario Kart with my kids, it's not because I'm too lazy to download and install Tux Racer.

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.