Hacker News Reader

Comment by gilgoomesh | Hacker News Reader

I can't see this being a pleasurable user-experience. Ever.

I think this highlights the fact that it would be much easier to start with open hardware and install something intended to be fully open like Ubuntu Touch on it. Unless you do that, you're going to need to reverse engineer every device driver for every piece of phone hardware – you'll never finish and the user will always be cut off from some percent of their phones features and the rest might not work correctly.

I guess that a pleasurable user-experience might not be the end-goal and maybe this is fun because hacking.

View on HN

You describe exactly how Linux became what it is. And the goal was not to support all the hardware there was - just 386. In light of existing examples, your argument has little value.

I'm in the Replicant market. I don't give a shit about convenience if I can find a free software version somewhere :)...

> > I can't see this being a pleasurable user-experience.

> You describe exactly how Linux became what it is.

The main server OS (UX not quite relevant for servers) or an OSS kernel primarily used by consumers with a semi-closed (Android) userspace?

You're quite right. UX was never a factor with Linux, and OSS (in the large, excluding things like Basecamp, sorry) has never succeeded to create good, consumer UX. Unfortunately UX is absolutely critical with mobile.

Here's a talk by Aral Balkan (that I couldn't recommend more) that covers this topic amazingly (jump to about 32m30s for the meat):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QCBzQ0aNc&t=00h32m30s

Basecamp is not open source.

Oops, good point! (It was very late when I wrote that).

That's why Bunnie's open source laptop is exciting.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3265

It seems very analagous to a FLOSS-only desktop experience (for a while I think Fedora Linux was one). It was not a polished user experience, and certainly some things were lacking, but when I used it I was able to accomplish all the things I needed done (and face it, most of those can be done by the web browser anyways).

The other reason I have hope for this is most of the non-FLOSS functionality is available at least in some form in web apps, or in a F-Droid application. Google Maps, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, etc all have pretty good (capable, functional) mobile web applications, and all you need FLOSS for is the web browser.

What is the difference then if you are still using proprietary services that run proprietary code, just on a different CPU?

You are not gaining anything from the change other than the inconvenience of "pretty good" web applications instead of local native applications: you still can't modify them or verify their behavior.

It depends on what your goals are. If you want a system that's only running open-source-built code on your device, but are willing to have your device interact with devices running proprietary software, then mobile web applications are fine.

If you only want to interact with devices and services that are using open source software, then you're likely not to miss e.g. Google Maps application in the first place.

Yes, of course, but that’s a tautology. What would the first goal achieve over running the Twitter app on my phone?

Security, for one. It is much harder for a web app to key log your phone than to a native app.

Freedom and convenience are virtually always antagonists.

That isn't true, and it's dangerous to say it is.

I think it's an interesting suggestion. If you believe it's false and dangerous it may be helpful to provide some reasoning.

A lot of the free software I use is much more convenient than the commercial alternatives. See Firefox at the least for the largest most well recognized project with open contributions that is also usually much more convenient and free than commercial alternatives.

Nothing about releasing source or having a collaborative contribution model suggests the software can't be convenient. A better terminology is that security and convenience conflict one another, because to be secure requires you to sacrifice your own convenience to limit foreign entities convenience in accessing your data.

Slavery always requires less thinking.

The road to slavery requires less thinking. Once you get there you need all of your wits just to survive.

Responses such as yours require less thinking. Slavery requires less thinking. Therefore you are a slave. /s

There are at least three relevant meanings of free, not two!

Free as in beer, free as in freedom, and free as in degrees of freedom. Too many degrees of freedom makes a system inconvenient to use.

An application like Transmission is great: libre software but constrained in the "degrees of freedom" department, so you don't have the "chooseaphone" effect.

Edit: Let me illustrate. If I gave you a bike for free, you'd have the freedom to get around on it, tinker with it, sell it to someone else, etc.

If it had more degrees of freedom, it would be a unicycle, and much, much harder to use. But more flexible!

Technically, a unicycle has fewer degrees of freedom that a bicycle.

Unicycle:

1. Lean forward and backward 2. Lean side to side 3. Twist 4. Pedal

Bicycle

1. Lean side to side 2. Twist handlebars 3. Pedal

That's not technically correct. Your work is modulated by the device. A device with less parts modulates it less. Less modulation of your actions means you have more direct control.

Freedom usually means being able to achieve your personal goals: of speech, of movement, of opinion, etc.

We humans are often aided by tools. So, we can also talk about the freedom to study and modify said tools.

What many FOSS advocates seem to miss is that the first freedom, that which comes from being able to fulfil your own goals, is the most important one for everybody.

To the point where freedom of the tools is only relevant for you if understanding said tools was your personal goal in the first place.

Pleasurable? Depends in what sense but in general and framed with the average user in mind I would agree with you there.

I have been doing a self-experiment for the last few months to use FOSS app(lication)s as much as possible on my Note II running CyanogenMod 10.1 or instead use actual websites instead of apps. I am using F-Droid as a repo, it has been great.

To say it is really easy or convenient would be a lie though, I am also missing some (mostly cloud) features I really liked when I was inside the GOOG garden, but living without Google's and other closed-source apps has actually been relatively painless for me and my data is inside my own control.

Firefox, K-9, AntennaPod, Focal, RedReader, FeedEx are a few of the great FOSS apps (just need K-9 to get a decent icon).

K-9 is awesome, but I really do hate the icon.

Absolutely, I had great fun running all kinds of custom ROMs on my Galaxy s and One X but at no point did either of them function 100%.

Does an open hardware phone exist? I'm not aware of one that I can actually buy today. The closest I know of is the OpenMoko GTA04, but it's not clear to me that the project is still living.

There's a continuation to GTA04 in the works: http://neo900.org/

Apparently the fairphone will be: http://www.fairphone.com

This looks cool, but doesn't appear to be open hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com