Free software hasn't won

They're usually very hard to get share because machine manufacturers can smash out cheaper things via processes like castings, mouldings and stampings, then eventually lock down spares (or just don't bother).

The open source option basically only be worse (but maybe more repairable) and/or more expensive than the alternatives, except when there is no alternative in the market. And China is providing so much mid-grade affordable and fairly functional stuff there often is an alternative even in the most isolated places. In 1980, getting a decent lathe in some town in, say, Angola might have been basically impossible. Now, it's still not cheap, but it's not completely impractical. If you can get bearings and induction-hardened shafts you'd need to DIY, you can get the whole thing, and maybe even cheaper.

It's a bit depressing, because of course I want to see the world flooded with high-quality, modular, very standardised, re-usable, repairable, hackable items, but that approach has a limited market in reality.

It's falling apart because the average person wants to be "smart". I applaud this, the fact that people want to learn, want to know, want to understand.

Yet now, when they try to learn? To understand? They end up with youtube. Tiktok. Pages of AI slop. They're told what is "astonishing" or "proves that scientists don't have a clue!". They're told that gibberish is real, that those lab-coats are all evil, or trying to poison people, and so on. Or even better to their egos, that the lab-coats aren't so smart, and with this "one simple trick", you can be smarter than them!

This is coupled with outrage!!, when this rarely tends to be the case. Yes, there is corporate greed and it gets caught, recalls happen, mistakes happen, yet 99.99999% of the products and services just work. No one notices that aspect, only the "big news" of the tiny, rare, unusual failures of our system.

And then on top of that, politics enters the scene. Now, it's "us vs them" on matters like medicine?! Or health? Or school? What?! And no it's not just "one side", it's both sides, just in different ways.

People used to say things like "I don't know". Now people who can barely write, and read, have opinions on everything. They have no idea of the science behind things, but they'll just say "Oh! I saw this on youtube by a random person I've never heard of before! That's true, not what I learned in school!"

And the worst part is, we want people to think "being smart" is important. We want intellectual betterment. Yet now this is twisted and warped against the light of knowledge, for now everyone craves it, but are given the ashes of burned truths. All provided by false profits, so they can pocket some coin.

As far as I'm concerned, youtube and tiktok need to die. Social media needs to die. There are other solutions, but Google, Meta, the rest only care about cash, profit, and not one iota about fixing this.

So if they won't fix it? Then we must destroy it.

And can we? Nope! Because the public LOVES it. Loves loves loves it.

So back to FOSS. I've dedicated my entire life to FOSS. But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on.

I'm not happy about it, but if you can't get people to even be interested about privacy violations by Google on their Android device? How will you get them to even remotely care about FOSS?

Parent is right. Only geeks care.

Surely you can think of more reasons than that.

When I choose to play Mario Kart with my kids, it's not because I'm too lazy to download and install Tux Racer.

What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.

FOSS killed the profit margin in just making software. That shifted profits to hosting it, and in so doing shifted the industry to a more closed model than it had before.

In other words the net effect over time on the system from FOSS was to close things more. It had the opposite of the intended effect. We incentivized closed.

The result had been horribly dystopian. Before we had PCs that ran closed source but still local software and had our own data. Now we have cloud they runs opaque software we can’t even run ourselves and our data is not ours and is subject to mass surveillance. (By “our” I mean most people. Tech savvy people can opt out with some effort.)

This is super common. It’s hard to predict the actual incentive structure that something will create, and it is incentives not intentions that determine outcomes. Large scale socioeconomic systems are mindless gradient descent machines that chase profits of various kinds the way a plant grows toward sunlight.

Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.

It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

The very fact "right to repair" had to be coined, proclaimed and we're fighting for it is a regression from the early days when repairing a radio wouldn't be violating some clause.

Of course, the openness was more accidental or pragmatic than really intended, and we saw companies slowly put up the barriers as they found technical and legal ways to do it (like forbidding plugging third party phones to the network for instance). If it's a frontier, IMHO it would be more akin to the battlefields front lines than anything else.

Put another way, the battle has always been social and legal.

John Deere has built a great tractor that the company itself prevents you from repairing without their involvement.

The only beneficiary of open source there is John Deere.

right now we want it because we want the side-effect the the tinkerability, the data transfer, the cost-optimizaton (host it where it's cheap, or modify it if it's not cheap enough)

but users want their problem solved, they are extremely happy about an imperfect solution (deeply flawed delegation of the problem and responsibilities), they are willing to pay a lot for it, and their time-value discounting coefficients are atrocious. they want it now, and don't really care about tomorrow. (or next month when the free trial expires, when their credit card gets charged, when the price increases when their blessed business bamboozler becomes bankrupt - or worse a ruthless monopolist)

FOSS is an education problem, quite isomorphic to the problem of democracy (and climate change and other slow burn issues)

...

and of course it's a political problem too

but where's the coalition of friends of FOSS who pledge to spend/buy/support development of the missing components? where's my FOSS printer? where's my movement that encourages me to buy a shittier phone knowing it will help spin up the flywheel of FOSS?

... and where are the faithful pragmatists that don't get sidetracked by their own toenails?

You can't control any of them fully. Most you can't root.

Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.

If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.

It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.

This is especially important when I just want to run my own OS and not have people go out of their way to deliberately break things because of that.

You should be.

Your device will not attest to this if you install your own operating system, if you root your phone, if you do anything that they don't like, anything at all.

You install your bank's app and try to use it. The bank's servers ask for the attestation. You will not have one. They decide you cannot be trusted and deny you service.

Even if you can program your own keys into your device, nobody is gonna trust those keys. Why would your bank trust your own keys? They'll trust Google's keys, Apple's keys, the government's keys. You? You don't get to participate.

The corporations and governments want to own your computer. They demand cryptographic proof that your device is owned by them and that they have complete control. If you don't provide it, you're banned and ostracized from everything.

…switch banks.

Unfortunately the tech industry has shown us that isn't true. For example, look at the iPhone mini - I forget the exact sales numbers others have cited, but it sold very well. There is clearly a solid market there, even if it is smaller. But Apple isn't willing to chase it, and nor are the various Android OEMs. The same may well prove true for open hardware.

When exactly was that? The 1980s?

Linux hardware support is better now than its ever been.

You have to own a phone to participate in society these days. I need one to even log onto my laptop for work. Eventually I'm sure some form of digital ID / biometric information will be required for verifying my online identity.

It's a slippery slope, and we're sliding into the abyss.

To wit, hardware that I bought is not "their platform", but many corporations sure like to pretend it is.

It's already not illegal to reverse engineer hardware you have bought (for the purpose of maintaining it or compatibility), regardless of how much IP lawyers like to pretend otherwise. (And even if it were illegal, I would contend that reverse engineering is a fundamental right that laws cannot rob you of.)

Yeah? They shouldn't be. Any attempt to deny us service on the basis of the software we use should be classified as discrimination. It should be a crime of the same caliber as racial discrimination.

But even as you say, as you're using Arch as your desktop computer, things may be fine now, but they're only going to get worse.

Should we all have to carry two laptops because anything running a free software core is just utterly unusable due to remote attestation?

> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.

Didn't you just spend most of your comment talking about how the market forces don't care anyway? Would good is starting up a phone hardware company that will ultimately go bust due to total apathy of the general consumer?

Yes.

Well, sort of. They don't actually have to do anything. Nobody wants to force them to work for us, that's slavery.

Just don't get in our way when we start writing and using our own software. That's the "support" we want. Just stay out of our way. Leave us alone, without actively discriminating against us for it.

There are two reasons I think it's viable now:

1. It's possible to wire an agentic system management service into the OS to handle a lot of the routine stuff, so non-technical users will be able to just talk to their computer and it'll be fine tuned to be good at fixing system issues, installing/removing software, managing windows, etc. I developed a scheduling inversion of control executor for enterprise agent control that I've looked into adapting for this use case.

2. The steam deck has proven a new model. Game friendly and a simplified UI is enough to carry Linux. New Arch rices like Omarchy are pushing the envelope of usability. I've been ricing desktops since enlightenment on slackware 96, so I'm pretty familiar with this world.

Regarding form factor, I'm not a huge fan of phones, too many tradeoffs. I think with strong AI voice systems, the optimal setup is buds + tablet. That's a better setup for mobile linux anyhow, and it makes the hardware almost a non-issue.

Similar to all the accessibility requirements, of course. Do you think the society / government should force banks to provide services to blind or deaf people? Or should we just let the market decide?

We need nerds who care about this to stop complaining about minor things in existing GNU/Linux phones and other similar devices on the market and go buy them. These hardware companies have been there for years already.

It's hard to build a profitable and sustainable business only basing on the minority that doesn't mind it being "too thick", "too slow", "not high-res enough" or "unable to run modern PC games" (all of these are real things I heard from people here, no kidding). And I assure you that if you really care, you'll easily find a way to live with a (swappable) battery that lasts 20 hours.

The same mechanism that stops a bank from saying, "sure you can withdraw more than $10,000 from your account and we won't ask any questions about what you plan to do with it" - explicit financial regulation with real penalties attached to it, that banks systematically adhere to. I'm not necessarily a fan of all legal regulations around banks or other financial product providers - this is a huge reason I'm interested in truly decentralized cryptocurrency systems - but given that the regulated fiat financial system does exist and is widely used, we might as well demand that these regulations include provisions that the bank has to let people running free smartphone OSs connect to their systems too.

But the mobile phones specifically turned from phones into trusted terminal which institutions like banks and governments use to let users control large amounts of money and responsibility. And the first rule of a secure device is to be limited. In particular, the device should limit the ability of its owner to fake its identity, or do unauthorized things with networking, camera, etc.

This junction of a general portable computer and a secure terminal is very unfortunate, because it exerts a very real pressure on the general computing part. Malicious users exist, hence more and more locking, attestation, etc, so that the other side could trust the mobile phone as a secure terminal.

It would be great to have a mobile computer where you can run whatever you please, because it's nobody's business. And additionally there'd be a security attachment that runs software which is limited, vetted, signed, completely locked-up and tamper-proof on the hardware level (also open-source), which sides of the communication would trust. Think about a Yubikey, or a TPM, but larger and more capable. The cellular modem and a SIM card are other examples, even though they may be not as severely hardened. They are still quite severely limited, and this is good.

If I were to offer an open-source phone (and, frankly, any mobile phone), I would consider following this principle. Much like the cellular modem, it would carry a locked up and certified security block, which would not be user-alterable. It would be also quite limited, unable to snoop into the rest of the phone. The rest of the phone would be a general-purpose computer with few limitations. Anything that would want to run on it securely would connect to the unforgeable interface of the security module, and do encryption / decryption / signing / secure storage that other parties, local and remote, would be able to verify and thus trust.

One can dream.

"free and open web" isn't even used to be anymore, many are using bots and AI to make things worse and many people especially young people didn't even do "surfing" on the web anymore

like it or not but internet that need verification on personal level is the future, I don't agree with it either but if you see from the progress perspective its always been like that

Until very recently, most/all of their phones had alternative Samsung-produced chipsets available in various markets (Exynos).

They've got their own app store as a built-in.

And they also maintain their own small-system operating system, with Tizen, in case it all goes to shit.

They've been working very hard on parallel development for quite a long time. They're probably better-prepared to jump ship than any other top-tier manufacturer of Android cell phones is.

Motorola Mobility? That was spun out of the stodgy-big batwing mothership in Chicago a long time ago -- and first purchased by Google, before being sold to Lenovo. Subsequent to Google's influence, whatever remains is ill-prepared to jump ship, but that was certainly a design intent. That behemoth is much more dug-in.

So the outlook is certainly gloomy, but it's not all darkness.

(In terms of things like banks only supporting one OS or another: Gosh. Prior to the entrenchment of the smart phone age, I never installed a company-specific consumer banking application on any computing devices at all. It was OK. I just used Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web to do that stuff, sometimes with a side dose of SMS on my dumb-phone for active notifications.

And still today, I don't have banking apps for most of the companies that I do banking-stuff with -- and I get along fine with keeping track of the money I have, the money I owe, and the bills I need to pay.

Maybe the right answer here is to shore up the utility of the platform-independent WWW.)

We need nerds that are more politically conscious than that, and are not naive enough to believe they can solve political problems through creating companies and hardware.

For all the theory about the being financially independent of intermediaries, in practice it is nigh on impossible for most folks living in the real economy. Meaning that for most of them, even the crypto-knowledgeable, "embracing crypto" means a compromise with the "absurd" as you put it.

Nothing is stopping you from keeping fiat under your mattress.

This isn't really a crypto issue.

We need societies, and we need to work to fix their flaws. Every person cannot be an island.

Welp. I actually tried it. Here's my experience.

I contacted my banks and got in touch with their managers and devs. They do have APIs. I wanted to use those to create my own software with read only access to my account. I didn't even want to transfer money anywhere, just get my transactions for accounting purposes. I was using ledger at the time and was getting tired of manually inputting everything into the journal.

I eventually discovered I would need to incorporate and beg the central bank for permission to touch the financial system.

there is not a single bank in my area that would let me do that, unless it is by accident. so the choice you suggest is de facto not available.

Wise, and thus downvoted. Many FOSS enthusiasts are antisocial, sometimes even misanthropic, fragile snowflakes ("I should be able to run any software I like, on any device I like"), so any call for collective political action, that actually could achieve something more, is disregarded.

We need some kind of 3D printer that can print computer chips. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own software at home. Democratized electronics fabrication. That's the only way we'll be saved.

What else are they supposed to do then? Start Luigi'ing people?

The critical parts aren't though, and that's where it matters the most, IMHO intentionally so.

An HP printer being 99% based on free components won't be a tangible improvement if the last 1% vehemently prevents it's free use. Open source being the core of the OS doesn't help if nothing can replace iOS on an iPhone.

We're in a world where free software has massively grown, while the day to day impacts are IMHO comparatively small. It feels like we're more free than ever, inside our new confinement cells.

As for "communism" - if by whiskey, I mean if by Communism you mean soviet-union-style social arrangements, then I'm pretty sure they had closed-source software which the government controlled and people could not use and alter freely; but if you mean "communism" as in software being a "commons", then, yeah, free software will win when that is again the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open

They shouldn't have to if the software is properly made. I am not talking about teaching normies to install Docker apps, but teaching them why FOSS is important and the implications of using corporate-owned tools.

Like you cant make a 100% open hardware mobile phone. Theres lots of near enough cases. But that Qualcomm chip is proprietary for the phone bit. So they exaggerate by going back to an old, open source rotary phone.

That said I'm not too worried. Vibe coding is currently slower due to how bad it is at writing software. In several years companies pouring billions into improving LLMs still haven't been able to make them not suck. That suggests to me that it's a fundamental limitation of the tech at present, and won't get better until another research breakthrough happens.

I think Haiku is a neat project and I wish it well, its just hard to imagine what path it has to desktop dominance.

        The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
        The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
        The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
        The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.