Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device.

I hate to risk sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, but when I hear this I flash back to Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. I interpreted his message in that book as something approximately like "you can't out-tech the bad guys", where "bad guys" can mean government surveillance agencies (probably more what he had in mind) OR "big corporations trying to control your life" (this may be me extrapolating). But even if I'm over-generalizing a bit, I think the point still stands.

"We" (open source advocates / hackers / hobbyists / makers / whatever) can't win on just tech alone. We have to use the legislative process, political pressure, social pressure, whatever, to achieve our goals. And so we should use our superior knowledge of technology to support doing that. So don't just think "how can I hack my phone to use an open source OS" but think "How can I help use technology to influence the outcome of the next election, and elect candidates who really represent the things I care about?" or "How can I help use technology to stir up enough activists making enough noise to persuade my bank to let me access my account using a non-proprietary OS", etc.

Now I'm not saying any of this is easy. By no means. Just suggesting that we need to at least approach things with that mindset in view to some extent.

I see your point, but I disagree that you need direct involvement in the legal process.

Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.

Say that you get to a point where 90% of desktop users are on linux. Is there any doubt that banks, messaging platforms and the like would have their own linux apps? no matter how many hoops you make them pass through, they won't let that piece of the cake go.

The problem is that the current way of doing things will never reach those numbers, because we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities; I think changing that is the mising piece.

> we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities

Some of the bigger open source communities, like GNOME, do some amount of these things. But I think very few people are excited enough about user studies or marketing to do them as a hobby, unlike writing code. It's hard to see how you could beat Google/Apple/Microsoft at their own game like this without a lot of money. Red Hat is probably the biggest company that might be interested in this, but still about 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the giants.

You’d be surprised, behance and the like are full of people doing case studies for rebuilding popular apps for example.

There are hobbyists and people trying to get experience eveywhere, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between communities.

Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.

I don't disagree, and I guess I'd say that I think that is all part of the larger point. Eg, "getting more people to use (Linux|BSD|Minix|Mach|Whatever)" is part of the larger idea of "social pressure" to convince companies to behave in ways that we find desirable. So the question then is, as far as I can tell, what more can use techies do - leveraging out existing mastery of technology - to promote "(Linux|BSD|Minix|Mach|Whatever)" to people who don't currently understand the importance of these issues?

And I don't mean to claim that "using our tech knowledge" is the only kind of activism that matters. Maybe for some people it's just "donate money to the EFF every month" or whatever. But to me, that's all still part of the same general initiative.

s/out existing mastery/our existing mastery/

Damn typo. And missed the edit window. Sorry. :-(

> Say that you get to a point where 90% of desktop users are on linux. Is there any doubt that banks, messaging platforms and the like would have their own linux apps? no matter how many hoops you make them pass through, they won't let that piece of the cake go.

Here's the thing: we had that already. It was called Android.

> Companies are moved by money, if your tech is popular enough companies will dance to your tune.

We're having this discussion precisely because this is not true. If your tech is popular enough, companies will use their money and influence to subvert it so it serves their bidding.

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