Comment by ta1243

Comment by ta1243 5 hours ago

23 replies

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> when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever

You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no single villain that James Bond could take down, or that a charistmatic leader could get elected could change. The oil tanker has been moving in that direction for decades. There are legions defending the right to run your own software, but it's a continual war of attrition.

The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.

"Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that."

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

wkat4242 4 hours ago

Yeah in the name of "security".

Unfortunately it also means giving the key to the Kingdom to a company like Microsoft or Google which are definitely adversaries in my book. Keeping them in check was still possible with full system access.

Even Apple I don't trust. They're always shouting about privacy but they define it purely as privacy from third parties, not themselves.

And they were the first to come up with a plan where your phone would spy on you 24/7.

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gjsman-1000 5 hours ago

If you want a real blackpill (I think this is the right word), consider the famous Cathedral and the Bazaar.

I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral.

The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.

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  • nerdsniper 4 hours ago

    There are definitely bazaars which have a very old history. Being that the word "bazaar" has middle-eastern origins it feels appropriate to highlight middle eastern bazaars. Al-Madina Souq in Aleppo is one such bazaar with quite a few shops/stalls/"souqs" dating back to the 1300's or 1400's, such as Khan al-Qadi (est. 1450). Khan el-Khalili in Cairo has its economic marketplace origins rooted in the 1100's-1300's.

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    • gjsman-1000 4 hours ago

      Name a single bazaar vendor that's still going more than 50 years in any of them. The bazaar as an institution remains, as it does today, but there's no permanence with a bazaar, just as open-source will never have a permanent victory without becoming a cathedral. Bazaars persist through constant replacement, churn, not victory.

      Windows NT will be with us longer than systemd and flatpak.

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      • nerdsniper 4 hours ago

        No I meant there are individual shops inside the bazaars that are still going under the same brand name for hundreds of years. The El-Fishawy Cafe inside Cairo's Khan el-Khalili bazaar has been operating under the same name since the 1700's[0]. Bakdash ice cream parlor inside Damacus' Al-Hamidiyah Souq was established in 1895.

        For me, walking through an old Souq gives me a similar feeling of awe / mortality / insignificance as viewing a cathedral or looking from the Colorado ranch land up to the Rocky Mountains.

        Also some cathedrals have remained "Catholic" since their raising, but there are a lot that have changed from Christian to Islamic to Protestant ... both the cathedral and the bazaar's physical buildings are still present from the same era and both are used for their original purpose (marketplace or worship). And both have delibly shaped their regions by being engines of culture, innovation, and power.

        0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El-Fishawy_Café

        1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakdash_(ice_cream_parlor)

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      • PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago

        Windows NT is younger than Unix. I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount.

        However ... the domain of operating systems is subject to weird constraints, and so it's not really appropriate to make some of the observations one might make in other domains. Nevertheless, I thought the point was that we want things to improve via replacement (a "bazaar" model), rather than stand for all time. We don't actually want technology "cathedrals" at all, even if we do appreciate architectural ones.

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      • bigstrat2003 4 hours ago

        Cathedrals change organizations too. You can't compare the longevity of a physical edifice (a cathedral) to an individual or organization (a bazaar vendor). They are different classes of things.

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  • [removed] 4 hours ago
    [deleted]
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    • iamnothere 3 hours ago

      Not to mention the large number of ancient marketplaces that still exist (in active use) all over the world, some of which are UNESCO world heritage sites.

      This type of informal market likely outnumbers cathedrals, especially if you count the ones that evolved into tourist markets, high streets, malls, and central business districts.

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  • spookie 4 hours ago

    I fail to see the link, businesses come and go. Their software dies with them.

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    • gjsman-1000 4 hours ago

      Businesses die. Cathedrals don't. IBM is 114 years old. Microsoft is 50. Google is 27. Disney is 101. Nintendo is 136 (they'll outlive Steam and the next nuclear war at this rate). The COBOL running banks is 65 years old. Windows NT architecture is 32. The platforms become infrastructure, too embedded to replace.

      How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained? Go through GitHub's trending repos from 2015. Most are abandoned. The successes transform - GitLab, Linux, Kubernetes, more Cathedral than Bazaar.

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      • dandellion an hour ago

        I we're doing bad analogies my mom's open source duck recipe has been around for hundreds of years.

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      • mariusor 4 hours ago

        Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib and GCC, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.

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      • iamnothere 4 hours ago

        > How many bazaar projects from even 10 years ago are still maintained?

        Uhh, all the big ones in common use? GNU’s massive portfolio of software, Linux, multiple BSDs, Apache, Firefox, BusyBox, PHP, Perl, the many lineages of StarOffice, LaTeX, Debian, vim, fish, tmux, I mean this barely scratches the surface. Are you kidding me?

        How many startups have failed over the last decade? I would argue that the norm is for any project to eventually cease. Only useful things with an active community (whether that community is for-profit or not) tend to last, until they are no longer valued enough to maintain. This goes for things in the physical world just as it does for software.

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  • api 4 hours ago

    The title also correctly describes the relationship between FOSS and cloud SaaS. FOSS is the bone yard and parts catalog that devs go to when building closed platforms to lock in users. It largely exists today to be free labor for SaaS and training data for AI.

    I'm not there yet, but I am perilously close to tipping over into believing that making open source software today is actually doing harm by giving more free labor to an exploitative ecosystem. Instead you should charge for your software and try to build an ecosystem where the customer is the customer and not the product.

    I stress today because this was not true pre-SaaS or pre-mobile. FOSS was indeed liberating in the PC and early web eras.

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api 4 hours ago

> The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.

I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction.

I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution.

Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.

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  • HiPhish an hour ago

    > I'm not sure why this is

    I think a big reason was customers' ignorance. The manufacturers can come up with whatever they want, if no one buys it it does not matter. People accepted locked-down smartphones because they saw them a phones first and foremost. If I recall correctly the iPhone released without any app store, so it was really not that different from a dumb cell phone. If you had offered those same people a desktop PC or laptop that you could not install your own programs on, that had no file explorer, that could barely connect to anything else no one would have bought it. But because they say smart phones as telephones first it flew over their head. How many of the people who are upgrading to Windows 11 now because of lack of security support are still running an outdated smartphone? The phone probably has more sensitive data on it than the PC by now.

    People are willing to accept restrictions when they come with newer technology. Why is that? I don't know, I'm just reporting on what I see.

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  • btown 2 hours ago

    Ironically, to take it full circle, I think that the thing that led to mobile being so user-hostile was the lack of sideloading of apps.

    I remember sites on the early web like Hampster Dance, where monetization happened as an afterthought. But if you have to pay $99 annually and jump through hoops just to get your software even testable on the devices of a large number of consenting users, the vast majority of software is going to be developed by people who seek an ROI on that $99 investment - which wasn't cheap then and isn't cheap now. Hampster Dance doesn't and wouldn't exist as an app, because Hampster Dance isn't made as a business opportunity.

    Similarly, outside of a few bright lights like CocoaPods, you don't get an open-source ecosystem for iOS that celebrates people making applications for fun. And Apple doesn't want hobbyist apps on its store, because Apple makes more money when every tap has a chance of being monetized. Killing Flash, too, was part of this strategy.

    Apple certainly could have said "developers developers developers" and made its SDK free. But it realized it had an opportunity to change the culture of software in a way where it could profit from having the culture self-select for user-hostility, and it absolutely took that opportunity.

    It's not a bad place, the environment we live in. But IMO, if Apple had just made a principled decision years ago to democratize development on its platforms, and embraced this utopian vision of "anyone can become a programmer"... it could have been a much brighter world.

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  • dandellion an hour ago

    I suspect the average computer user is significantly smarter than the average phone user. The reason is that I've never seen a really dumb person using a computer, but I've seen plenty using phones. That might (or might not) be related to why the phone ecosystem evolved the way it did and computers didn't end up like that.

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