The more I grow old, the more I consider that OSS is the 8th marvel of the world. Millions of humans worked independently and created the hugest building of our civilization: Linux/Postgres/MySQL/Wordpress/Audacity/OBS/drivers/Nginx/Owasp/NPM/React/Angular, a stepping stone that powers everything and has even already taken off from Mars (Perseverance’s helicopter).
Stallman is a (rightfully) controversial figure, but the Free Software movement is one of the most important movements of our age.
Step 1, use diminutive gatekeeping scare quotes to imply that Windows and Apple users are not doing /real/ computing.
Step 2, use flamebait language where a house you got without paying is "freedom" but a listed building you bought from someone else is "a prison".
Step 3, make up some fantasy about people being told "the natural state of things".
Step 4, make sure to look down on average people with their lacking awareness, compared to you, an intellectual with your posturing understanding of philosophical underpinnings.
> "often demeaned, or neglected, even here on HN"
"I'm the one being demeaned, you inferior clueless simpletons!"
Home Depot sells you a hammer, and also in some way (even in a legally enforceable way) tries to suggest you can only build chairs with it.
Anyone, ANYONE, who agrees that you're somehow wrong when you use it to build a table is a shill, a sucker, or an idiot. Full stop.
When you pay your monthly fee, someone will come around to your house with this variety of hammers for different tasks and when you stop paying your monthly fee a different person may come around with just one hammer.
You say you want to build a chair and this hammer is ready-made and convenient, and they tell you that you only think buying hammers is the natural state of things because you were told that. You try to walk away. They get in front of you and say that you don't understand the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of tools! You step to the side and push past, they call after you that you are in prison and don't even know it!
You get home and make a chair. It's a nice chair. You sit in it while telling the story about the crazy person you met earlier.
> "Anyone, ANYONE, who agrees that you're somehow wrong when you use it to build a table is a shill, a sucker, or an idiot. Full stop."
You buy arsenic, you can't put it in people's food. You buy a camera, you can't use it to sneakily record people using the toilet even in your own home. You buy a recorder, you can't use it to quietly record phonecalls in many states. You rent a film to watch at home, you can't show it to a large audience for profit. You buy a radio transmitter, you can't modify it to be more powerful or use different frequencies. You can't decorate your car to look like a police car, put a midnight klaxon on your house or an unsightly chimney overshadowing the neighbourhood. You can't lease a car and disassemble it to find out how it works. There are restrictions on all kinds of things in everyday life for all kinds of reasons. And you don't get a free pass to do any of these things with a computer just because you identify as a computer geek. The rhetoric that people who are agreeable or disinterested, must be "shill, sucker, idiot, full stop" is plainly incorrect and embarassingly simplistic, and just pointless insults. As you can see from the large number of people who use macOS to develop for Linux servers because it's got a nice GUI - people who definitely know about Linux, aren't shilling for anything. You calling them suckers and idiots is irrelevent when they get a better experience and trade away nothing which interests them. That's not stupid, that's a reasonable trade.
I'm fairly certain the "politeness" or whatever it is you're calling for here works against my goals here. I could be wrong about that, but either way I don't think what you're railing against is as near as important as the bigger idea I presented initially.
There are tons of reasons people make decisions about software - it's what they learned before and can setup quickest, it's the standard in their industry, it's what their boss demanded, it's used by a customer or supplier and they need to be compatible, it's approved by a third party organisation or certification program, it's the only one a vendor will support, or they've considered software freedom and come to different conclusions than you and don't value it at all. Why should a Disney animator care whether they have the source to PhotoShop? Why should a manufacturing company CEO care that their data in an Oracle database file can't be read by third party tools? Why should an ISP care that they are paying for PowerDNS instead of using BIND9? Why should an accountant care that TurboTax can't be extended by a consultant they hire? Why should a congressperson care that Adobe licensing isn't GPL?
Much easier not to discuss and instead say people "perhaps may have been lulled into going along with it". Which is empty low-effort "I'm smarter, more awake, less deceivable" tribal posturing and nothing else, and then when called out on it, try and sidestep into complaining about tone-policing instead.
Yes, I'm being "loud and mean." I agree that normally, people shouldn't be loud and mean. But I also believe that sometimes it's approrpriate.
Right now, I'm reminded of when people here got panicky because youtube-dl was possibly being taken off of Github. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that the bulk of the commenters strongly appeared to have forgotten that you can just download the code yourself, perhaps host it somewhere else.
Yes, I'm sensing a slow descent into what an old-timer like me, who's used to "computers that you fully control, full stop" into what I can reasonably call stupidity.
Step 2: re-frame it as the pro-FOSS side having bad manners
Step 3: ???
Then it becomes a lot clearer that there are tradeoffs around amount of effort needed, amount of money spent, amounts of freedoms, with many reasonable choices for different people and use-cases, rather than the implied binary choice.
average people don’t give a shit about this sort of thing.
...wow.
and yet, despite that, they're still selling.
2. I wouldn't call it a prison, but it would be pretty disappointing to move into a listed building where the thermostat was locked behind an acrylic case. Simply put, it sucks when you pay for something and can't run arbitrary software on the hardware you own. I don't really think most people would disagree here: having options is better than having none.
3. Is it really a fantasy? I doubt the average PC owner even knows they have options other than Windows, much less free ones. Maybe this is the HN US-centric mindset taking over again, but nobody in America really knows or cares about this stuff, for better and worse.
4. Pretty much all of your refutations so far haven't actually debated their core point, so I don't think it's fair to start throwing stones. Given the average vitriol of HN, I would say that many different people are "often demeaned, or neglected, even here on HN", be it Free Software advocates or proud Macbook owners. It doesn't make them any more or less credible, but their original point still stands: people on this website love to quibble about how atrocious OSS is when compared to $GLORIOUS_SAAS, despite the fact that the iPhone/Windows/Android device they're writing on is more OSS than it is proprietary.
Whether it's Apple, Microsoft or Google, none of them deserve to inherit the future of computing. It's not a radical opinion, and I'd agree with the parent comment that it's pretty often overlooked on a forum about startup culture and business.
That’s true, though.
Nothing is free. All the FOSS I've built and give away "for free" cost me a lot of time, and time is my most valuable asset. So certainly it's not built for free, but it is given away for free (both as in freedom and in beer).
Also important to note, not all FOSS or "free software" is given away for free. All that is required is that the purchase comes with the code and that code can be freely modified by the user.
Free software is amazing and infinitely more valuable than closed source solutions, and we should never take it for granted or think that we are entitled for the time and effort of FOSS developers.
Sorry for being pedantic, but this is quite literally impossible, unless you’ve never bought a single piece of electronics.
Let me qualify the statement, then: I never paid for off-the-shelf software (or SaaS subscriptions) unless it was available under a F/OSS license.
- Trees produce O2 as a byproduct of the work they need to live, whether it is available for you or not is irrelevant to them. People working in Free Software are doing with the primary purpose of getting it available to people, and a secondary purpose of getting more people involved, collaborating, improving it, etc.
- Much like we need to keep the environment healthy and not just take the O2 produced by trees for granted, we need to foment an economy where developers can choose to develop Free Software without sacrificing themselves.
People working in F/OSS need to to have their livelihood secured somehow. This does not mean that all F/OSS developers need to turn it into a profession, but it does mean that we as consumers should understand that if we want to see an increased global output of FOSS, we need to contribute and support its economy.
- Software is never finished. I've been using Emacs for almost 25 years of my life, but do you think I'd still be using it if it got stuck on version 17?
The worst part though is this:
> The producers presumably got their money’s worth already
That is a terribly wrong assumption. Just like startups can go for a long time without being profitable, a lot of people working on F/OSS projects might be doing for the future expectation of turning it into a profitable venture. Personally speaking, if I were to bill for all the time that I've put into my own open source project [0] I'd would have stopped about two years ago, and if I stopped then it would never reach the stage that is reaching now where I can actually try to market it properly.
Mind you, this does not mean that people should be forced to pay, but it means that it would help a lot if more people started to realize that it could be economically interesting for them to pay for some F/OSS projects.
[0]: https://hub20.io
No, the exact opposite. I'd like to have a society that values sustainability and their civil liberties more than they value consumerism and short-term thinking based on immediate conveniences.
Software is increasingly a crucial part of everyone's lives and we can not just wait that others will make stuff for us out of goodness of their hearts. As consumers, we should be more selective about what kind of business we patronize and we should vote with our wallets to indicate what should be at premium.
If we wait for Companies to develop a conscience or "The Government" to fix these problems, it's never going to happen. But we can collective take action and start demanding F/OSS alternatives and software that does not lock us into any trap and we should be ready to pay for it.
> I instead want to improve society to the point that developers have enough spare time
This is the worldview that implies that F/OSS is something that should be only a hobby, and something to be practiced only by amateurs (in the good sense of the word). Apologies for the language, but fuck that worldview. I do not want to do FOSS in my spare time. I want to use my spare time with my family, pursuing other interests and hobbies, do something else besides writing software.
This is not to say that all software should be written only in a "professional" context. If there are people that want to write software for their own interests and self-expression, great. If they want to make that F/OSS, even better! But if the majority of software being written is meant to solve actual problems that people/business are willing to pay actual money for it, why can't that be F/OSS as well?
> But we can collective take action and start demanding F/OSS alternatives and software that does not lock us into any trap and we should be ready to pay for it.
A nice sentiment, but I don’t think this has any realistic chance of happening. Individuals boycotting something has, as far as I know, never worked to achieve anything, and that is, in effect, what it is that you are proposing – boycotting proprietary software in favor of paying for free software.
> This is the worldview that implies that F/OSS is something that should be only a hobby, and something to be practiced only by amateurs (in the good sense of the word).
Oh, no. Software will probably be written all over the place, both for pay and not, to solve people’s specific problems (either their own problems, or the problems of their immediate customers or associates). What does require spare time and effort, however, is generalizing this software to be useful for a wide class of people in general. Also general polish, manuals, error checking, etc. This work is what will never have an incentive to happen except the minor recognition and job satisfaction which I mentioned. And for people to spend the effort for this minor reward, they must have an abundance of effort and time to spare on it. And somehow supplying this to developers is, I believe, the only solution.
This niche needs to be strict about upholding its values ("avoid unnecessary burning of fossil fuels!", "GMOs reduce biodiversity and introduce systemic risks in our food production chain!", "non-FOSS and the ad-subsidized Internet is destroying the civil discourse and leading to immense concentration of wealth") and it needs to foment the creation of alternatives. Even if the masses don't fully adopt the "better" alternative, the competition should be enough to force a change in behavior of the status quo.
Take IE6 and Firefox (pre-Chrome): the majority of people didn't care about the browser they were using, as long as they could go to the websites they wanted. At first, they'd use IE because that's what was there and the majority of sites worked with it. But when we got an intolerant minority [0] that upheld the idea that the web should be open and started adopting Firefox, it was enough to get a virtuous cycle of having less IE-only sites, more features on Firefox and more people simply following the recommendations of their tech-savvy friends to use Firefox. Even if Firefox never got to be the dominant browser, its mere existence and support was enough to put the incumbent in check.
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Call it “vegan”, “halal”, or “kosher”, though, and suddenly it’s a thing which people might grumble about, but many people will at least grudgingly respect. We’d need something like that for this. But I’ve never even seen it named, except when RMS jokingly called it being a “Saint in the Church of Emacs”, but that’s obviously a terrible name, and also just a joke.
Even gcc was a languishing mess until it got some real corporate backing into it. The Hurd never took off - the bulk of the real FSF successes had tremendous infusion of commercial support.
30 years seems a lot to me. I would rather force by law companies to open source every piece of firmware after some time (2-5 years?) it is declared obsolete or doesn't receive direct support anymore. The goal should be rather to prevent perfectly good hardware to become bricks and be thrown away than to help retrocomputing enthusiasts revive the few surviving devices decades later. I understand there would be huge legal implications but still...
I'm not sure how well this might work. It's currently easier for me to resurrect an old Z80 ASM program than to get a node.js V6 program working. Our complicated dependency chains will make future-retro hard.
Meanwhile, I was able to get an early 2000s mac Cocoa project building and running again in just a few hours, with the bulk of the work going into fixing deprecations. The main difference between the two was the number of third party dependencies… the Cocoa app had almost none while the RoR project had several tens when counting sub-dependencies.
The projects themselves don’t need to be usable for the source to be valuable. I could easily imagine the source code of say a defunct MMO server being a useful reference for enthusiasts re-implementing their own servers.
In the far future, I would not at all be surprised that Open Source becomes the only way historians know in precise detail how software evolved in the past. There will only be vague descriptions of commercial software, possibly some names and near-apocryphal stories, but no source code so no way to know for sure.