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> I think what precludes the final victory of open source is that the world itself changed for the better.

Maybe we don't live in the same world???

> The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions.

Yes, but this software is not empowering the users, it is controlling them, isolating them, radicalizing them and making them feel more depressed.

"We put a chicken in every pot! Nevermind that they're rotting, salmonella-filled carcasses, we still did it!"

And:

>In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development.

What, exactly, is supposed to be new here? I see nothing distinguishing the economics of this "new consumer environment" from 1995, except maybe that Redhat doesn't sell CDs anymore.

What has changed since the 90s is increasingly onerous intellectual property law, anti-reverse-engineering laws, and the continued creep of the belief that ideas should be owned.

And this is precisely backwards:

> What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security.

If everybody's crazy uncle RMS had been more accommodating, more willing to compromise on ideology, things never would have changed in the 90s. One slightly cynical way of looking at it is that he was could play Bad Cop to ESR and others' more corporate-friendly, accommodationist "Open Source" promotion, somewhat similar (for much lower stakes) to how Huey Newton played bad-cop to MLK's nonviolence.

If you drop the principle of always putting the user first, you'll eventually compromise on everything else.

> What, exactly, is supposed to be new here? I see nothing distinguishing the economics of this "new consumer environment" from 1995

The free software model failed all the same in 1995 for a certain class of applications. It's great for high performance, challenging pieces of code, for kernels, servers and databases. Things with a large community of devolopers among the users, willing to push patches back. Things that look good on a CV. Software that needs to customized for professional users.

It's less good for mass market software. It's flawed for complete games (as opposed to game engines). It's bad for professional software not used by developers and that does not require customization. For example, it has never been able to displace most Adobe products, despite the numerous attempts and the revolting behavior of that company towards it's clients.

What changed was not the economic realities of free software. It's simply that the type of projects where it shines have grown much slower than the rest of the consumer software ecosystem. The world of computing moved ahead from the needs of programmers to the needs of ordinary people, many of whom are willing to pay .99 to solve them.

Insisting on "free to use" today stops you from realizing the other, more substantial free software freedoms, and deprives the projects from much needed resources in their competition with closed software.

First thing: the world is better by most metrics. Life span, literacy, crime rate,... There are some dips now and then but the net effect is mostly positive.

On the computer side of things, for less than $100 ($200 if you need a screen), you can have a full, general purpose computer you can code on, new. And with internet access you can have all the documentation you need to get you started.

And the "web revolution" not empowering users? A simple example: buying an uncommon book used to take weeks, if possible at all. Now a few clicks on Amazon and you get it delivered the next day. Realtime communication to people anywhere in the world is almost a given now, it was somewhat possible 10 years ago but at a much different price. And what about navigation? If you have a working smartphone and data connection, getting lost is more or less impossible.

The part about controlling, isolating, radicalizing, and depressing people is debatable. Tech certainly has an effect but is it a net positive or a net negative? It is used to control people but also raises awareness. It makes people stay at home but facilitates communication. It radicalizes people but also expose them to mind opening diversity. It makes some people more depresses but provides outlets.

On your isolation point, I think the modern walled gardens that people use to interact online are so stale and devoid of meaningful interaction that not much "mind opening diversity" actually occurs. I think this is a design problem and not a technological problem.

> Yes, but this software is not empowering the users, it is controlling them, isolating them, radicalizing them and making them feel more depressed.

That's a horribly lopsided analysis. That's not to say that there are no examples or truth to the issues you raise, but it's far from the whole story. People do extract massive value from the communication, education, and entertainment features offered by the software in question.

Empowerment implies that users may do things with this software you don’t personally agree with or approve of.

The world is clearly better in many ways over the last 20 years - more productivity, more literacy, less crime, less poverty, more accessibility, more communication. Those improvements have also brought new problems: more radicalization, more surveillance, more exposure to “keeping up with the Jones’” that might lead to depression.

Are we creating more than we’ve solved? Maybe? There have been radicals and electric eyes online since BBS’ in the 80s, we just haven’t societally kept up with what was obviously going to happen when you drop the cost and barriers to communicating. I’m think we will fix things.

> I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry.

Outside mobile: Linux (the OS not the kernel) won the web.

Way back in the 'Linux on the desktop' days, KDE needed something like gtkhtml so KDE made KHTML and Konqueror. Apple needed a web browser and couldn't make one from scratch, so webkit was forked from KHTML. Chrome needed to fork webkit so made blink. Edge adopted blink too.

KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.

> KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.

On the one hand yes, on the other Apple tried as hard as it could without technically violating the license that KHTML would get as little back from webkit as legally possible.

While I agree with you, it’s also sad that what was formerly community-controlled got more and more taken over by corporations until now Google has practically complete control over Blink. It’s open source, but the community hasn’t made it.

Google open-source projects have a strong tendency toward not building outside of an internal Google build environment and they'll pretty much just be like, "Whups! Nobody works on this who doesn't work at Google, so we very commonly break the build." ChromiumOS suffers from this a lot and it's like, unclear that they are even really adhering to the licenses for the upstream FOSS they include and depend on, but who even has the time to challenge them?

Reminds me of the 90s when RedHat's source CD wouldn't actually build their binary distro, but since almost noone ever tries, almost noone cares.

That's definitely been a problem, however UnGoogled Chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium and Edge https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/ have fixed a lot of it.

> KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.

Amazing for whom? How much control does KDE have over the code they originally wrote? Last time i checked KHTML and Konqueror were abandoned.

For internet users that get the benefit of having all the major browsers be Open Source.

Chrome is not open source. Safari is not open source. I haven't checked Edge but is it actually open source?

The only major open source browser remains Firefox.

And what difference does it make that those three browsers aren’t open source? While their browser engines are?

What’s amazing about Apple, Microsoft, Google using open source browsing engines as their core? Or being open source currently? They completely control their browsers. Besides electrons rise, what major difference would there be if Safari, Edge, Chrome weren’t open source?

Given we understand the difference between an open source application and a closed source application that uses open source libraries... Then I can answer.

If Chrome etc were actually open source then the vendors would have less control of the browsers and users would have more control. End users could then build Chrome themselves.

Since these browsers are in reality proprietary it would make little difference to end users vs vendors level of control if they used 0% code from open source projects rather than 99% as they do at the moment. No one but Google can build Chrome either way.

So we broadly agree that there is nothing amazing about the current situation.

I however claim that if these browsers were Foss this would be different.

--- Yes I am aware of Chromium. But Chromium is not Chrome. For example Netflix supports Chrome and blocks Chromium.

Safari, Edge, Chrome are NOT open source.

Edit Removed suprious '?'

What are you asking?

I said browser engines initially so I meant the browser engines. I also brought up Electron. Which doesn’t depend on Chrome. But the browser engine.

So I could’ve for a third time repeated WebKit, Edge’s open source Blink, and Blink/Chromium. I’m not sure if that’s the only point of your comment? Based on another comment it seems like being pedantic is your only point.

So what does it matter if the browser itself or as it is now, the engines are open source? Since that is still my question. What difference does it make?

The pedantry doesn’t change anything.

It is very much not pedantry. Chrome, Safari etc are proprietary programs. Calling them open source is like calling a peanut an orange.

Foss comes with the requirement that you as the user have certain freedoms. With Chrome etc you do not have those freedoms.

And yet I clarified all that. And all you’ve done is repeat stuff that has already been clarified. Nothing you have said has been of any substance or use.

Still you have said nothing of substance or use. It’s pedantic in this thread because I had already referred to the browser engines as open source and referred to electron. I didn’t explain what electron was either. You didn’t find a big problem with that.

And I’ll ask again, what differences would there be if the browsers themselves were open source? We already have Chromium vs Chrome. So what would be different if Chrome was open source?

Not to mention responding to anything else.

The Linux kernel is the only GPL piece still used on Android, and who knows for how long, given how little userspace is actually aware of it.

Why else would Google be building Fuchsia? Apple has been removing all GPL apps slowly from their platform. From a RMS perspective, the FOSS community is worse than it was in the 90s. There is little end-user, self-hostable FOSS stuff out there. It's all middleware, released by the giants, to integrate with their big social media system.

I wrote about this a few years back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...

Isn't this what gpl advocates want? Or did they expect every tech company to open source their entire stack?

No they want fully free OS's with free applications. That doesn't have to come from big corps.

On the other hand, MIT/Apache/BSD advocates will have a bright future ahead of them.

There is a lot of speculation that Google is developing Fuschia because they want to move _away_ from their mobile OS being so thoroughly FOSS.

I thought Google was developing Fuschia because some of their ambitious junior project managers need to appear to be working on Something Big And New to get a promotion, leaving their project to turn into Something Half-Assed And Cancelled In Two Years. Isn't that the standard trajectory for Google projects launched within this decade?

I thought Google is developing Fuschia because.

A) Linus won't stablize kernel ABI

B) Device manufacturers won't release driver code to allow recompilation of an updated kernel.

So this means an upgraded kernel needs upgraded drivers from manufacturers that match the kernel version, but manufacturers don't want to do this.

Not sure where I heard it but I thought that was one of things about Fuschia is the device ABI is a separate, stable layer.

>A) Linus won't stablize kernel ABI

Yes, but this is for very good reasons. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

Doesn't Android have some sort of stable layer that allows for updating the OS without rewriting drivers?

Yes, Project Treble, it basically kind of changes Linux into a pseudo-"mikro-kernel", which is kind of ironic.

Where classical Linux drivers are considered legacy (Passthrough HALs) and all new drivers since Android 8 are user space, written in either Java or C++ and talk to the kernel via Android IPC (Binderized HALs).

Somewhat recently added, yes: https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/hal-types/

Ha, sounds familiar. :)

I wonder for how long we'll be able to use Gmail before it follows the G+ road.

I've basically given up on Google and their corporate ADHD. I use Android because it's the only phone OS that allows for easy permanent sideloading while also having a healthy native app ecosystem, and I'll use search and maps, but that's literally (not figuratively, but literally) it. It seems that the only products of theirs with any staying power were launched prior to 2010.

But search and maps are a lot of Google. Beyond that it’s YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, Google Cloud. Along with Android, Chrome, ChromeOS as the cornerstones of the company. Search is by far the most important piece. Followed by Android and Chrome, in my opinion.

Or are you saying you aren’t going to use anything new by them? That is probably the case and I misunderstood. Though it’s not like Google has any major hits this decade anyway. Everything mentioned is quite old.

>Or are you saying you aren’t going to use anything new by them? That is probably the case and I misunderstood.

Basically, yes. I don't even make the effort to log in to use any of their services, except for the Google account on my phone for the purposes of Play Store access. I'm just tired of being Charlie Brown trying to kick Google-Lucy's exciting-new-product-football.

You'll need to stop receiving purchase recepits and flight details by email before Google is not interested in reading you email :)

That would leave plenty of room for someone else to take on the android ecosystem...

Sure, because the Android clones without Google services have been such a tremendous market success.

It's not like the google services get much use.

Except for Maps, Gmail, Messages, Photos, Search, and (due to the servicing model) Play.

I could be forgetting a few.

Maps, at least, I've completely replaced with Citymapper. Due to its goal it doesn't work everywhere, but in a supported area I've found it to be completely superior to Google Maps. So there is competition.

Citymapper uses Google Maps. In what way is it competition?

I suppose it's competition in urban navigation, but not competition in map tiles.

They use Google Maps so it’s worse for Google vs using Maps directly. But you’re still using them.

Did you ever try printing a Google map? They're unreadable and the roads are nearly invisible.

Um...no? Why would I do that? It's on my phone...with a moving dot where I am on the map, and a tiny lady in there that can tell me when to turn. I'm genuinely confused by this...what are you getting at?

I happen to like a large printed map, and they do support it in the hamburger menu. The result is unusable though. I dont have a data plan, but I'll look into the latest OSM which has directions.

Pretty good for the other 99.98% of use cases though. Your objection doesn't refute "Maps gets used a lot on Android" in any case.

I don't think they will drop Android until it is not (very) profitable anymore.

They don't need to drop Android, just Linux kernel.

ART is being ported to run on top of Fucshia.

>It's an appliance model of computing.

That's the real strength of Linux, creating appliances from commonly available hardware. The biggest mistake is therefore to copy Apple and MS and their general purpose approach, it will never work because the community isn't united like a company, every Linux camp seeks to make the best thing for their own purpose, and constantly clashes with other camps that want to do the same for themselves. A general purpose Linux OS is an anti pattern.

Complete and utter nonsense. You might as well rant about "general purpose" sheets of paper.

There is a need for general purpose computing, and Linux is one of the very few options there. That won't change.

One major beauty of Linux is its flexibility, so it can also provide niche/embedded products.

My perspective is the user and application level, not the distribution maker and developer level.

Interesting that you mention $1 billion, GitLab is a $1 billion company apparently: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2019/07/21/he...