The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.

Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people.

I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.

The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many.

This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs

Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.

The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'.

MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'.

In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'make' your pair of Nike shoes - it's definitely not the 'cost of parts and labour' (though that's obviously an input).

Making anything working, of material value is usually an excessive grind involving a lot of people. 'Software' is not 'the implementation of some algorithm' it's all of the ugly complexities around that and the sausage-making realities of getting things to work well and play nicely with other platforms. And then of course it requires ongoing support, maintenance, docs, training, security updates etc.. That's real work.

In then 1990's when we 'controlled' the software that went onto our Mac/PCs ... that we didn't have access to Windows or Adobe Photoshop source code wasn't really an excessive problem.

Especially the fact that there was a clean delineation between 'OS and Software' (other than for say MS Office Products) - then it 'mostly worked'.

IP protections are absolutely not going away, for good reason, the challenge is to make those work as the situation evolves, moreover, they are not the 'real problem' frankly, as excessive platform control (i.e. Apple, now Google) represent a more fundamental issue, and consider that happens while technically most of Android is open source anyhow.

Even Linux is open and popular, and to this day it's still a mostly 'dev/interest' OS that most people don't use in their homes, partly due to distribution power controls by MS/Apple, but also because frankly managing massive real world deployments of 'Moms, Dads and frankly most people' who 'just want it to work' is an operational challenge as much as it is an R&D/Creative effort.

Consider the basic economics involved: Even reasonably smart corporations with 'good IT' still don't generally deploy Linux to regular userbase. Why not? Because $50 a year to MS is very cheap, and frankly worth every penny in terms of value created. Any 'supported' Linux variation is going to cost 'something' anyhow, so what's the difference between '$20 a year' for some 'supported Linux variation' and '$50 a year' for MW Windows? Basically nothing. In a per capita basis, the true cost of a lot of software is marginal.

It was not until much later, due leaving good environments for bad reasons, that external financial motivations became a driver, providing a temporary bad self justification for not leaving sooner. Even then, solving the puzzle, exceeding the clients expectation. We're still the most rewarding parts of the job.

If you love what you do, money just becomes an issue in just 2 cases.

(1) When your needs for living in comfort (and with that I mean the luxury of not having to worry about money) are not met.

(2) When you feel others are exploiting you financially (you see disproportionate gains by others based of your work)

Now. Against this background, let us return to the question of 'will software still get written if we allow the free distribution of it'?

My believe is yes. While it is most certainly not for everyone, a certain type of people just love to create digital platforms and solutions. In fact their passion is now more often than not exploited, see for example the practices in the major gaming industry. There are more than enough specific needs that people will want to prioritise to offer financial incentives for their prioterization even if that means the result will become part of the commons. Current exclusive IP exploitation rights very seldom reward the creators, most often just those who have constructed layers on layers of financial instruments confining and leeching of the creative.

Finally IP protection most certainly stifles innovation. It restricts forms of further creation. The question is Wether this reduction is compensated by a boon in extrinsic driven creation that would be missing in the absense of guaranteed monopolies on exploitation. My guess once again is no. Science, innovation in knowledge, has progressed for centuries through the free sharing of ideas. The Eastern electronics industry has thrived in a climate of fluid copying and absense of IP enforcement. Most of the 'major' industry investments carry disproportionate public investments through grants and incentives while still locking up all rights on the publicly funded results.

We might see a different software world if copying and extending of all software was free, but not one whete creators go hungry, or innovation ceased to exist.

Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.

I've known who Stallman is for a long time, but I had never heard about the toe cheese incident. I just looked it up. My reaction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc

For anyone interested in the toe cheese incident:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

I'm not trying to malign Stallman here, but you can't deny this is interesting.

Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a lot more exploitation of software projects and open source software developers and it's almost embarrassing how often open source projects and commercial open source entities are surprised when it happens.

I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other, but we don't. If we did, I think we wouldn't even need share-alike licenses. But we don't, so we do.

I even feel the need to add that I don't share his skepticism, lest I raise suspicion about my own position by posting this.

One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more."

If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human species. People with life experience so deep as to have limited exposure to some of the more mundane ones we all take for granted. I'd recommend offering a bit more benefit of a doubt, and a wee bit more effort in terms of investigating context before writing someone off.

After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.

And TPM does not allow other people to maintain that software.

Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software.

Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free.

I'm no ideologue, just sayin'.

It's the same idea as with Right to Repair - the movement isn't expecting everyone to learn how to use a soldering iron and a chip programmer; is to allow local communities to have their own specialists capable of repairing hardware. Similarly, with free software, my mother isn't going to look or modify the code herself, but she may ask me to help with it. Or a different neighbourhood tech whiz, who may even take payment for the service.

Software freedom is in part enabling local markets to work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Is it? Logging into my old Slashdot account after several years of not bisiting /., early 6 digits, I found old posts removed.

This is what depresses me. It was won, like you said -- yet there's a new generation of tech-minded people, even here (or on stackoverflow, reddit and many other places), who are not Joe Averages and who don't acknowledge the matter is settled, who disregard the old arguments, and who will argue walled gardens and locked down hardware are good things. Surely you've seen this too. It's really disheartening, and probably part of the wider phenomenon of younger generations unwilling to learn and understand old battles and hard-won rights and lessons.

To be clear: I don't mind people not knowing about the history of computing. Nobody is born knowing. But actively arguing for less freedom, freedom that was once part of hacker culture -- that hurts.

TO expand on my other comment on this thread, I think what we need to do is train the next generation to handle and demand more, rather than lock them into appliances based on what the older generations supposedly can't handle. Maybe we need to look to historic systems like Lisp machines, NLS (the subject of Engelbart's "mother of all demos"), or the original PARC Smalltalk system to recapture a more ambitious vision for personal computers, from before Apple decided that they should be appliances.

Some people see something hard and give up until someone else makes it easier.

Others make themselves better, and it will pay dividends.

I think a lot of us will agree that it's a shame Apple allowed Hypercard to wither and die. What you might not know -- and what I only learned about a year ago -- is that there was an effort within Apple's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to make more of the whole system (and programming generally) "Hypercard-like" called SK8 [1]. It seems like it was received with confused stares from the more traditional developers in the company. And, as with much of the really interesting ATG work, it was tossed out eventually.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8

Of course, that kind of power corrupts regardless of its wielder's benevolence, with there being recent examples of Apple imposing, or being forced to impose censorship on services provided through third-party apps (e.g. Telegram being forced to censor doxxing of Belarusian police), and smartphones play a much more important role in society than game consoles do.

With respect, the threats are real. I spend plenty of time removing unwanted software from my relatives' PCs. Antivirus/antimalware software is not much better; it slows the systems down significantly and doesn't protect against adware.

The article is not biased or out of date at all. Most people can't figure out how to get around "secure boot" technology, which has the effect of locking people out. Big companies, both those that make hardware and software, work together to lock ordinary people out of creating alternatives. If an independent creator were to make something good, the big companies would just make their own version, that would be just as good for most users.

Yeah, this article seems like it accurately predicted the future when it was written.

>Secure Boot/Trusted Computing

This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff".

The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab.

>Monolith's

The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon.

Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.)

All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern.

It's got to stop.

There are other solutions to this problem that do not involve surrendering control over everything that matters to corporate interests that may coincidentally align with your own sometimes.

For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security? We know this is not often the case, because the quality of so much software produced by big businesses today is terrible in terms of security. What is more telling is that it continues to be terrible even though we are well aware of methods to mitigate many of those vulnerabilities. But those methods usually require more skill and/or more time to get right, and typically that means greater up-front costs, and since it turns out that Joe User will often put up with junk security and pay good money for the software anyway, the profit incentive does not have the outcome we would like.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean Joe likes the poor security. He might be willing to use the tech anyway because he values what he gets from it more than he believes the dangers are costing him, or because he believes the dangers are inherent in the tech and unavoidable, or because he just doesn't realise the dangers are there in the first place.

This can be solved in a number of ways, but most of them come down to showing people that it's possible to do better by writing software that actually does better, and given the lack of commercial incentives coming from above, the most likely place we'll see that is in community efforts. Those efforts don't even have to result in some sort of openly developed software that dominates its market to succeed here, just to make it obvious to enough normal people that they don't need to accept substandard junk and they should demand better in return for their money.

Much the same argument can be applied to issues like privacy, repairable and upgradeable hardware, open standards for data portability, freely programmable devices, and no doubt many more. If competition in the commercial markets isn't getting the job done, yet we know doing the job is possible, it's up to those of us with the knowledge and skills to push things forward for now. That could mean directly creating better hardware and software, educating our less skilled and experienced peers to improve standards in the industry and make hiring better people less expensive, or simply educating users and pushing for higher standards from the customer's side.