Saying No to unjust computing even once is help | Hacker News Reader

Saying No to unjust computing even once is help

gnu.org

75 pointscrazypython74 comments

I hate to say it but free software has eaten everywhere many programmers want to work. If you want to work in operating systems, frameworks, databases, editors, tools, compilers, etc, you’d better be willing to do it on your own time. If you’re like top 10, you’ll get picked to work for the big leagues and make money doing it. Meanwhile the paying gigs are the things that either are services or can’t be open sourced.

I guess I’m just sad that all the tools conpanies are gone or shells of their former selves. Borland, Symantec, etc. New ones pop up but there’s no money in support.

Companies are making huge money on their services that are 90% open source and 10% special sauce that they don’t contribute back. We’ve seen how they’ll spend $300,000+ per programmer but won’t pay $10,000/year for a tool or framework. It’s like the economics are messed up now.

Free software has definitely created some weird economics. Like I can't imagine paying money for a programming language on the other hand I don't blink about paying for Jira.

Maybe not for a programming language per se but Developers often do pay for IDEs and other niceties around developing software. Swift is another interesting example of a language that you have to pay for developing in (not directly but in order to participate in Apple's developer program).

Swift on Linux costs no money haha

> If you want to work in operating systems, frameworks, databases, editors, tools, compilers, etc, you’d better be willing to do it on your own time.

This true. I was very glad that this contest show up (https://repl.it/jam) just for see somebody try to give some incentives to early and experimental try. This help me in push for make a MVP for my own lang (https://tablam.org) that I dream could be something like FoxPro/Access/Excel.

I wish exist a way to access to micro-funding in this area. Even if is still for "hobby" I think it could make a dent because from my experience most believe this kind of tools are "too hard" for the average developer to work on, until somehow you find some time and just try.

This way the talent pool can be build...

That's not what happened. Pre-internet, we paid for software. Post internet, we paid for services.

We run our own Jira instance, but yet we pay for it.

Before, the best paid jobs were in developing operating systems or databases or compilers for companies that sold them. Now the best paying jobs are optimizing ads whether in regards to efficiently storing and processing people’s private data or making it more likely people will click an ad.

I think we need to find a new paradigm for funding infrastructure work. You guys might not like it, but may be you could get something like grants from NSF or the like.

In the computational world, NSF, DOE, and DOD often fund the development of computational codes that are then used by researchers across the US and even the world. It isn't the most stable way to fund development, but it's better than nothing that is the status quo. For an example of this, see this[0]. The ecp is kind of an exception, but smaller grants fund all sorts of smaller codes.

[0] https://www.exascaleproject.org/

I don't see this at all. You can easily get a high paying job contributing to LLVM, Clang, Swift, Chromium, WebKit, GraphQL, React, K8, and 1000s of other open source projects. And, many companies do contribute one way or another.

> I guess I’m just sad that all the tools conpanies are gone or shells of their former selves.

And the tools they made are largely gone with them. The whole point of free software (well, one of the benefits anyway) is that it keeps being useful even after the original programmer stops making it or no one can make money from it anymore.

(And just for fun, since you're mostly talking about money and money wasn't mentioned in the article: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html )

The software stays but without support it dies or remains in a stagnant place until it’s unusable by modern equipment.

Infrastructure software pays exceptionally well and companies will pay impressively large amounts of money for it. You just can’t deliver a commodity product that has a vague equivalent in open source. I always recommend using open source first, if it will work, and I literally sell closed source database technology. Open source doesn’t come close to competing with anything I do, so it isn’t a threat, and the market for what open source can’t do is astronomical.

There is a booming market for state-of-the-art infrastructure software but that market is no longer retail and it doesn’t publish much, because that business model no longer makes sense. An uncomfortable fact, but one that many enterprise customers acknowledge, is that open source database technology (the part of the business I know) is quite poor. If you want to get paid in databases, produce software that offers an order of magnitude or two higher efficiency, scalability, throughput, etc on the same hardware than anything in open source. Companies will happily pay for that because it saves them millions of dollars a year in OpEx alone.

The economics works just fine, better than fine actually. You just need to deliver a product that materially outperforms the not-that-high bar of open source. This market is huge, it just isn’t as visible anymore because they don’t do marketing on billboards in Silicon Valley.

The real issue is that there aren’t enough people that can design infrastructure software that is materially better than open source. There is a large skill gap.

Unfortunately it becomes near-impossible to say no to nonfree software such as zoom, skype, discord, slack, gmail, etc. You will often end up with no job and perhaps even no friends or no communication whatsoever by declining to use the world's most popular centralized communication platforms.

Until there is a way to dampen the extreme and long-lasting power of network effects for communication platforms, little will change with respect to this, as no one is truly willing to accept the consequences of declining to use the software that the rest of the world expects them to use.

Use this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

This is great, but the video has 1000 views and no comments. This is part of the problem - how do you get people to use a platform that no one else is using? It’s not a ‘build it and they will come’ situation, there are already working (non-free) options out there.

Yup. This one is free. But your question is a good one! Any advice?

No advice I'm afraid - when someone finds the answer to that question they'll change the world.

This is incorrect. It becomes impossible to say "no" 100% of the time. It's very possible to say no occasionally. Indeed, if everyone said "no" when not overly awkward, it would make a world of difference.

If everyone was willing to pay even an extra buck for a microwave based on free software, market economics would push for 95% of microwaves to run free software.

And if everyone picked banks which ran on free software, being willing to give up just 0.1% interest, every bank would run 100% free software.

If everyone who could afford to pay for a free Google Docs clone did so, we'd have nice alternatives. I don't know the adoption, but it'd be enough to sustain a company.

And for video conferences, I'd never move a business meeting, but I do pick freedom-preserving technologies when I set up meetings, and many of my friends do as well. No one has ever commented on it.

This assumes there are equivalent free software options each time, at only slight disadvantages. That's pretty frequently not the case.

Even if you want to claim there exists a stable configuration with all those true, there's still a bootstrapping problem to get there, and we're certainly not past that point right now.

This is absolutely true.

That said, I have been thoroughly impressed with https://meet.jit.si every time I've used it.

It genuinely works well, and it may not be a Zoom killer, but for my one-on-one calls, it has absolutely been a viable alternative.

quite stable for me as well with whomever I can convince to chat with me there

I used jitsi until I was overruled and now we use teams (sigh). It worked somewhat but would start to get iffy after 5 or 6 people would be in a call, especially when they're a few hours away. We'd have to start turning off cameras to get it to work. That of course doesn't seem like a software issue more than it is an instance issue, zoom and microsoft probably have hosts of more servers to handle stuff compared to the default jitsi stuff.

Microwave is the canonical example of RMS strange inconsistency where he says that "appliances" don't need to be free software (along with some remarkably quaint dated examples like "watch" and "automobile".)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.en.ht...

Zoom is not allowed by our security policies at work. If I can say no due to security concerns, I can say no for other reasons.

One phenomenon I am fascinated by is the advent of software that is entirely built out of open source components and open standards, that is closed off to people using non-mainstream open operating systems and hardware sort of by accident at packaging time.

I'm thinking of apps that built around Electron and Chromium. This stack allows people to ship beautiful webapps (= web protocols and languages, weblike experience) in a format like native applications, with the addition of desktop integration, but ... now we have HTML5 developers shipping binary blobs for the operating systems and CPU architectures they choose. It's cool that that includes common Linux distros as well as the leading commercial OSes, but what if I want to run RISCV instead of Intel/AMD, or FreeBSD, or <insert any other system entirely capable of running the usual stuff from the Unix ecosystem that some people call the "Linux desktop"> instead of Linux, and why is an HTML5 developer/publisher making that choice? Add to this the fact that Chromium itself is an open source project that is widely ported to systems other than Android/Linux/macOS/Windows, but the upstream apparently doesn't accept portability patches. Suddenly that matters if the unit of delivery includes an internal browser executable.

I understand the practical reasons for all of the above, but it irks me on some level; the whole point of all of the huge tower of open standards involved was to avoid this situation. In practice most of these apps are probably also available as straight up webapps in a browser, so it's not really a big deal in the end, but it seems like a really strange position to have finished up in.

It always bothered me, that applications have to ship and load their own copy of chromium and node. I don't get the compatibility argument. After all, websites have the exact same problem to solve and do that just fine, most of the time.

For desktop applications you could even require a given minumum version of electron installed on your target system. If its not there, your installer offers to download and install/update it. Also, instead of including a copy of chromium and node, electron could just use installed version of those.

I emailed RMS on 2019-02-19, with a subject line, "What's bad about: Zoom.us". Somehow Zoom was missing from his pages as an example of unacceptable software/service (I see it's finally there, but very barebones compared to the rest of the examples -- http://stallman.org/zoom.html).

Let me quote his select quote from my email, and the start of his reply:

---

  > I really enjoy your What's-bad-about series.  Any chance you can do one for Zoom.us?

  I never heard of that.  What does it do?  I would guess that since I
  never head about it then it isn't important enough to mention.

---

Yes, 2019. With Zoom having a billboard at SJC and plenty of other airports, not to mention every other phone interview for a software engineering role being done over Zoom.

FWIW I never used zoom until this year and even then only for town halls. I didn’t know it was a thing until late last year.

And I’m very much a youthful person in the tech industry.

Zoom itself is relatively new. I've only used it once or twice, but if you've been interviewing in 2018/2019, it's basically been the platform of choice for every other interview. I almost always decline to use Zoom; one time I've tried it on my phone, my phone almost burned from how much power the app was consuming; never again.

Here's what I wrote to Stallman in 2019-02-19 about it:

> I really enjoy your What's-bad-about series. Any chance you can do one for Zoom.us? And, possibly, Google Meet / Hangouts as well?

> The context: I'm interviewing for a number of UNIX/Go/C SRE/SWE positions, and it is surprisingly common that the company requires that I join a meeting, to check my coding proficiency or whatnot, through Zoom. For me, it's a security issue, as you have to install a third-party closed-source binary in order to join. I instead prefer to join via ssh/tmux (somehow noone ever offers this), or Collabedit (which at least always works in my OSS browser without having to install any third-party plugins).

> OSS browser

Prob triggered him right there

You're "almost" right. I think he was way more triggered by "closed-source", however.

---

  > I instead prefer to join via ssh/tmux (somehow noone ever offers
  > this), or Collabedit (which at least always works in my OSS
  > browser without having to install any third-party plugins).

  Have you tried asking to do it this way instead?

  > For me, it's a security issue, as you have to install a
  > third-party closed-source binary in order to join.

  Could we please avoid the term "closed source"?  I disagree deeply
  with the idea of "open source", so I never use that term or its
  antonym.  What I advocate is "free software", a totally different
  idea.

---

I'm from the OSS camp -- BSD developer -- using a BSD email address to email RMS, so, I've used "OSS" term very intentionally.

Obviously, I have tried and succeeded in asking the companies to use the phone and Collabedit. To my surprise, noone ever came prepared with ssh/tmux; I don't think anyone even realises that it's a possibility; when I once offered to provide mosh/tmux myself, I've wasted a bit too much time around the whole setup that I've actually entirely failed the interview itself that time.

As for RMS -- I'm not sure if I was the one to tell him about Zoom in 2019-02, but I was left rather disappointed from that conversation -- he didn't have a way to see who I am (he'd have to have someone else vouch for me in person for that?!), he ignored my wake-up call about Zoom taking over the young minds (he requested references for Zoom being an issue -- who else other than RMS cares about these issues so much as to write whole pages about it?!), he didn't offer any concrete solution to the situation that wasn't already obvious, and he schooled me about a term that -- clearly as a BSD developer -- I don't particularly care about. My email chain shows that I've never bothered to reply back -- I had nothing else to say about the matter compared to what's already been said in my initial email.

My biggest surprise was that he's just never heard of Zoom, in a year where Zoom IPO'ed (in 2019), and $ZM was already worth 21 billion in 2020-01 even before the whole COVID19 took over later in 2020-03.

>Yes, 2019. With Zoom having a billboard at SJC and plenty of other airports, not to mention every other phone interview for a software engineering role being done over Zoom.

Would you rather he bluffed and said "Oh yeah, Zoom.." and rattled off some reasons, rather than expressing a curiosity and willingness to listen to someone about it?

No one listens to RMS because they think he's the most hip person around -- they listen to him because occasionally he spouts out some wisdom that, on average, is worth listening to.

Almost certainly parent isn't talking about

> I never heard of that. What does it do?

I'm pretty sure they're talking about the dismissal on the following line (which on the surface is the opposite of curiosity, although you can make the argument that paired with his question on the previous line it's more a statement about his confidence in his own familiarity with the field of software):

> I would guess that since I never head about it then it isn't important enough to mention.

Let's agree that he has to draw the line at some point, otherwise the list of proprietary programs would be huge.

Stop intentionally ignoring the thrust of the argument.

Let's agree that Stallman does have to draw a line. Let's also acknowledge that Zoom is included on this side of the line.

I was honestly puzzled he's never heard of it; because I know he flies a lot, and surely he must have seen at least one of their billboards, unless he was specifically avoiding all the billboards (I guess he might).

Also, that's not curiosity, either. He completely ignored the rest of the email where I've already explained the context for my concern (see my sibling reply in this thread), and dismissed the whole thing as not being that important; and without bothering to investigate on his own, either.

If you look at what he and his assistants write about it, they still don't get what people use Zoom for. I'd never join any Zoom meeting period, unless they support joining without installing any third-party software, but the offers I get are for the interviews, not for participating in a vague "activity". It's usually not a big deal to decline; and do a phone screen instead; with one of the CoderPad services that let you write the code, and share the text of the code, through the browser.

While this is true to some extent, there has to be a game plan. This is a lot like climate change. Sure, individual choices help, but there has to be systemic change as well, especially if your goal is to change the situation that exists in the world around you. I mean, hell do I push, I've been trying to get people to use jitsi over zoom for example even when the default instance is kinda poor compared to zoom for the reasons rms listed. But from the other side, we need regulation of the worst abuses that zoom has done. There need to be some sort of consequences for zoom lying constantly about their product and how it isn't actual encrypted for example. When they can operate on an uneven playing field and get away with abuses just because will mean we'll never win.

We should recognize that many times network effects are not the problem, but the low quality of the free software offerings.

Many free software advocates are OK with ugly and bad interfaces, bad documentation, etc. and they don't understand why anyone would prefer the proprietary alternative.

As a community, if we want to make normal people use (and donate to) free software, we should increase our quality standards. It's important that the whole user experience (downloading, installing and using software) is smooth.

For example: I can give many good reasons to use Jitsi instead of Zoom, but if Jitsi's usability or video quality is not on par with Zoom's, all my reasons crumble at the eyes of normal people, and we shouldn't blame them. (Just an example, not saying Jitsi is bad.)

I think we also need to realize the difference between a "pretty" interface and a functional one.

I think it's possible to have something that's not ugly and yet not bloated to hell. It just depends on actually understanding UI design in a way that is universal to your audience. For instance, I doubt most people find pre-XP windows "Ugly", if anything a lot of us yearn for that era of interface.

Not to take away from your point, but you can be sure that most (almost all) companies that create non-trivial high quality software use a lot of free software to create it. This is the advantage they have. They can use their resources very efficiently to pick an choose the right combination of free stuff and also pick and choose which parts to implement out of their own pocket.

The open source movement is like government subsidies in that it helps companies make better products with fewer own resources spent.

Free software documentation is usually pretty good, and installing SW on just about any Linux distro is very smooth. Uninstalling is just as smooth. As for the ugliness, one could also say they a given UI is "time tested" (eg Gimp, Gnumeric).

Unfortunately a number of projects feel they have to change their UI as often as commercial SW (Firefox, Evince, Ubuntu). I would certainly prefer they remain away from that temptation and remain "ugly". Some people favor efficiency above all.

I need to get rid of Google, they don't even let me login to my own account anymore because they don't recognize my devices... but before I do I need to get my data out, somehow.

I understand why open source software is important for security and innovation. I don’t understand why it some believe developers shouldn’t charge a fee for software. Why is charging a fee unjust?

The FSF is fine with charging for software. That's why they say "free as in freedom not free as in beer"

Yes but the fsf's model has objectively skewed the economics away from paid software to paid support

Theoretically true, but practically unworkable.

If you give end users the right to redistribute your software for free there's not much you can do other than appeal to people's better selves and implore them to pay for your software instead of choosing the exact same copy for free (even though that's something both legally and ethically completely allowed by your choice of license).

At that point it's just a donation model with a suggested donation, which really isn't all that different from "free as in beer."

Under most circumstances "free as in freedom" is a superset of "free as in beer."

This is the reason why open source businesses focus on paid add-on products or services rather than monetize their nominal core product.

When you say paid add-on products.. you mean, that's the reason "open source" business focus on selling proprietary software? As in, "open core".

Effectively yes. Sometimes it's not quite "open core" in the sense that they don't offer two versions of the same piece of software, but rather separate programs that are meant to work in conjunction with that software (or a paid cloud version of the local program), but the end result is similar. There is some nuance in how this affects community uptake of the software if it is divorced at the software level.

Personally I am increasingly concerned by deceptive SW, free or not.

Take the enrollment tunnel of a brand new Android phone, or Google Play as a whole. Deceptive wording everywhere, trying to make optional steps pass for mandatory. You could say it is just as bad as many ecommerce site (eg Amazon with Prime).

I know Google Play and key applications of the Android ecosystem are not open source, still it is based on a pretty large free codebase (on which my employer, hence me, make a living by BTW). But that makes one of the largest open-source contributor, Google, act quite devilishly. And other large contributors (I am thinking of Redhat) act devilishly too.

In short, there were days when being an open-source contributor meant being ethical. These days are definitively over.

I've found refusing to use an app on privacy or security grounds often doesn't curry a lot of favor. Even if I can demonstrate concrete examples of harms. But I generally try to invite people to open platforms when I can.

So if I need to share something online with someone, I share using my Sandstorm server. Sometimes they ask what it is, sometimes they don't because it works for what we are doing and nobody found need to comment further.

I'd never heard of Sandstorm but it looks great. The similar alternative I've been using owncloud for things like this, but will give Sandstorm a shot!

Also linked from this is a set of Libre (Freedom as in liberty and also often Freedom as in usually beer recipes also) communications tools.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/better-than-zoom-try-the...

Voice: Mumble, Asterisk/SIP

Video calls and presentations: Jitsi, Jami, OBS (and presumably an RTMP server?)

etc

Hahaha, have you ever set up an Asterisk server? It's difficult to do right. Then you've got clients - there aren't many good SIP clients for Android, let alone free ones (CSipSimple is long abandoned)

I've never used Asterisk, and perhaps I misunderstand what you're trying to do with SIP, but wouldn't the built-in VOIP client work for AOSP-Android?

It may be hidden based on your carrier, but it's configurable if you remove your SIM, reboot, and set it up under Phone > Settings > Calls > Calling Accounts. Settings you enter will save if you reboot after as well.

I don't think it's fair, but when I read Stallman it always feels he's part of a Machiavellian ploy to suppress wages.

What sort of an economic model makes open source software feasible at large scale?

Here is one we are making:

https://qbix.com/token

Specifically this part...

https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Monetizing-Open-Source

Ad supported search engines comes to mind, as one example: https://opensource.google/

/me dodges tomatoes

But maybe you meant something about software under the GNU license specifically?

Non-profit (wikipedia, gnu, etc.) open sass or hosted solutions to open source software (wordpress, gitlab, etc.), selling hardware (System 76, Rasp PI, etc.) Entreprise support (Red hat and others)

> What sort of an economic model makes open source software feasible at large scale?

If you mean business model, pretty much any that isn't selling software licenses, particularly services around the software, whether SaaS or enterprise support. (And enterprise software, even when some of the payment is notionally license fees, is mostly about support, anyway.)

I would flip everything around: At scale, doesn't a private enterprise run out of money to support large codebases?

This isn't a facetious suggestion. Every employer I've had in the industry has been drowning under their heavy codebases. They have massive amounts of vendored dependencies, and long tails of single-author modules. The bigger employers have to create special teams just for pruning codebases and cleaning up after old projects.

And they're losing the battles. Code sprawls between multiple cloud vendors. Services exist in ecosystems so large that they have echo chambers, network effects, and politics. New languages are slowly introduced and even more slowly removed, with most code being written in mid-level glue modules. Code ontology and navigation is primitive and limited to indexed search.

What makes FLOSS different? Political discussions have to bring technical justifications to the table, mostly; this is Linus' famous "talk is cheap, so show me the code" slogan. The openness of collaboration ensures that CI systems, code repositories, and other shared services are available to folks, although this is still a cultural situation that isn't quite uniform yet. (There's too many folks who only publish tarballs and don't share the rest of their infrastructure, which is fine but not very collaborative.)

The resulting ecosystem can directly and openly compare codebases, and deprecate code which is shown to be inferior or unsafe or otherwise undesirable. We have shown an ability to not just change code artifacts, but the protocols and languages which we use to communicate, at a very rapid rate.

> We have shown an ability to not just change code artifacts, but the protocols and languages which we use to communicate, at a very rapid rate.

Results may vary for the C language, IPv4, X11, GTK, ALSA, and massive swathes of the CoreUtils.

Rust, Zig, IPv6 in Linux, Wayland, EGL, PulseAudio, PipeWire, and of course BusyBox. Compare and contrast with the fact that the banking industry is still searching for COBOL maintainers.

Not really "large scale", but blender receives $122k a month from donations. [1]

If you ask me, donations are starting too look like a viable model for open source development.

[1] https://fund.blender.org/

> If you tell one organization you won't use its “portal” or app, so you will deal with it by phone, that helps.

If those are the choices, I think using a proprietary app might be better from a non-religious, consequentialist perspective than adding to the stress of an overworked and underpaid call center worker.

Also, for some people, using the app isn't just a slight convenience. I don't know this for sure and would be happy to be corrected, but I imagine that deaf people greatly prefer an app over using a TDD or a hearing interpreter to communicate with a phone-based customer service rep.

Call center reps prefer having work to do than being unemployed.

sorry but this example is too contrived for me to understand. why am I overextending myself for some call center employee because they didn't just call me? (without Skype)

It's good to be reminded that every choice makes a difference and it's not all about being self-consistent. Kind of like how, even though I left home without a mask yesterday, it's still better to wear a mask today than not.

My disagreement with the fsf is pretty fundamental. I don’t see anything wrong, all things equal, with paying someone for software that is closed source provided there’s some way to ensure it’s not doing things wildly unexpected or malicious. Perhaps it’s impossible to verify such a thing without source code, but the core ethical claim seems off to me.

Off in what way?

It's not about maliciousness it's about owning the machine. If you bought a radio in the 1950s, you could take it to bits and fix or upgrade it. You can't do that's with today's software.

It's not comfortable for companies but it is a simply better way of doing software development both ethically and in terms of quality.

The donate button at the bottom of the page is telling.

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com