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We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

386 points by brewski 7y ago

ralph84 7y ago
Most people engage with FOSS for practical reasons, not ideological reasons. Given that developers of proprietary software have made a lot more money on the whole than developers of FOSS, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
- ebg13 7y ago
  That's absolutely not true for people who make it in the first place.
  - ralph84 7y ago
    Maybe for GNU project contributors, but look at some of the most currently popular FOSS projects. They all came from companies that rely heavily on proprietary software for their core business. They're certainly not contributing to FOSS because they're ideologues who believe all software should be FOSS. Kubernetes (Google), Angular (Google), TensorFlow (Google), VSCode (Microsoft), TypeScript (Microsoft), React (Facebook), PyTorch (Facebook), just to name a few.
- jordigh 7y ago
  The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. GNU R has completely dominated most areas of statistical computing, for example. The ideology is there not because we think you're "impure" or "evil" or something if you use non-free software, but because we think you'll be happier if you do, because you deserve it, because we all deserve free software.
  - Funes- 7y ago
    >The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. While I wholeheartedly agree with this particular stance--doing away with ideology and sticking with ethics and pragmatism--, I am not sure that everyone in the FOSS community, if such thing exists, adheres to that same premise.
    - the_af 7y ago
      In fact, that's only the ideology of Open Source software. Free/libre software (e.g. GNU and the FSF) believe in "free as in speech" for ideological reasons, not for tech quality reasons. In fact -- they argue -- one should sacrifice convenience and sometimes even short-term quality in favor of freedom. I certainly see the merit of that line of thought, though it's also a very hard road, and harder still to convince people. Ideology is not a bad word :)
      - jordigh 7y ago
        I'm not saying the quality of the software is the most important thing. I'm saying that software freedom is a pragmatic goal. Being able to fix your own software or bring it to anyone competent who can repair it is a practical thing. Giving the software to your friends is a practical thing. Being able to modify the software is a practical thing. Knowing that your software won't spy on you is a practical thing. Software freedom is not some abstract ideology with no relation to pragmatics.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    > Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. What is good quality differs between people. Personally i consider good quality to be desktop software with a good and simple (but not patronizing) UX and responsive UI that does not abuse my system's resources. The vast majority of FLOSS fails hard there, at best you get a single aspect of the application to be very good at what it does (e.g. some 3D renderer might provide a very accurate light model) but suffer at everything else (e.g. be usable only through the command line, using only a custom format, no support for the 3D authoring tools that everyone else uses, etc). There are very few FLOSS applications of good quality and of course that is what i consider good quality (someone might consider the command line part i mentioned above as a sign of quality because it would be easier to drive via scripts, e.g. for setting a render farm).
- deleted 7y ago
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- Drdrdrq 7y ago
  This. The problem with FOSS are incentives which are not aligned. Sure, some developers will give their best for free... for some time. But sooner or later the going gets tough and maintaining (let alone developing further) your pet project becomes a chore. Will you still do it? For how long? And if you try to monetize the project to at least somehow offset the lost energy and time, and maybe even pay someone else to help you, then you figure out you can't. Because free / open / libre means that anyone can take what you did and run with it. This is the reason why FOSS projects don't reach the maturity and polish of closed variants. The only exception I can think of is Firefox, because it is able to capitalize on its unique position where it threatens (a bit) Google Search. With Google also making its biggest rival. And the end result is that while the FOSS software is free (as in freedom), its quality leaves much to be desired, so the users are not flocking to it. Far from it. Until FOSS movement rethinks what "freedom" is, nothing is going to change for better. Maybe giving Commons Clause and other hybrid licenses a chance could be a way out? I don't know, but it makes me sad that I'm typing this on a closed phone without (realistic) choice.
  - zanny 7y ago
    This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. The valuable good in exchange is the developers time, not the code itself - nation states have constructed a goliath IP apparatus to impair the natural capacity to instantly and infinitely replicate information. But its wholly fictional and fabricated - its just an outdated paradigm from the era of the commoditization of the printing press where there were still marginal costs that could endanger businesses to overspend on. There are many ways to monetize your time while creating liberated code in the process, but that is where the focus must be in the free software ecosystem.
    - Drdrdrq 7y ago
      > This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. Ok, I don't even agree with your definition of freedoms, but I'll bite anyway. Do you have an example of a different approach? RedHat? Selling services, FOSS is just a by-product. Mozilla? Yes, though its position is very unique, and they are the only ones who really have incentives aligned with their users'. Redis? Mongo? MariaDB? Their change of license tells everything. If it didn't work for myriad of projects in the past, maybe there's a problem with the approach? As for other things... You must be living in a very different world from mine. (edit: this was not meant in a bad way... just an observation)
- amyjess 7y ago
  Everyone could stand to learn the lessons of gcc. Back in the '90s, when gcc really took off, it got a lot of attention for being faster and optimizing code better than anything else out there. It wasn't just free: it was _better_. Of course, the 'free' part helped too, but the only 'free' people cared about was as in beer, not speech. This was when Sun was charging $$$$ for C compiler licenses on top of the operating system. So you could buy Sun's cc for massive amounts of money... or get a _better_ product without having to shell out. No wonder gcc won. And if you look down the road to the 2010s, when LLVM/clang is eating gcc's lunch, you have to wonder what went wrong. What went wrong was that gcc fell behind for ideological reasons. RMS categorically refused to allow gcc's frontends to output the AST on the grounds that proprietary tools could make use gcc's output. The developers of LLVM and clang, on the other hand, had no such qualms. Being able to get an AST out of clang meant you could have IDEs compiler-assisted syntax highlighting and real-time error checking, things that gcc will never have for ideological reasons. gcc succeeded when it was better than the competition and faltered when it was worse, and freedom had nothing to do with it.
  - GenghisSean 7y ago
    That's a great example. The concept seems obvious, but often times free software activists forget or are unaware of lessons like this. Because free software activists are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their freedoms, they sometimes forget that others are not willing to make those same sacrifices. Getting end users and often developers interested in your project isn't easy. The vendor lock in proprietary software companies use makes it even more difficult to get users even if a free solution is better. The goal of a project should be to grow the community outside of just the free software community by improving the software until it's eventually better than proprietary alternatives. That's why I'm particularly excited about projects like GNUnet, Guix, and Librem 5. I think they have the potential to blow the competition out of water and move the free software community closer to it's goal. https://gnunet.org/en/ https://gnunet.org/en/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
  - wahern 7y ago
    That's the commonly accepted narrative about LLVM, but in retrospect it's even more clear that it was always about the GPL and, in particular, GPL3. Fast forward to today and LLVM's interfaces are no more stable than GCC's, and GCC is the only project with useable dynamically pluggable modules. RMS was wrong to have pushed back on module support for so long, but it was irrelevant. Apple wanted to be in the driver's seat, and Apple's legal department was and remains violently opposed to GPL3. And it turns out that when you're in the driver's seat you don't really need stable interfaces and you definitely don't need modules. The competition has been good, though. I like using both compilers.
fopen64 7y ago
That's what happens when you are bogged down in Donglegate-like discussions.
jonawesomegreen 7y ago
> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use. This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project moving to github / slack, where we may not have nearly as good a record of conversations that formed the software in 20 - 30 years. On the other hand you won't see any argument from me that these services provide an easier workflow than what existed before, and maybe that easier workflow opening development up to a wider community is more important.
- rst 7y ago
  For what it's worth, there are workalikes for both Github and Slack which are at least tolerable -- Gitlab has most of Github's core features, and there are multiple slack-alikes (the one I've got experience with is Zulip, which I, at least, find to be a whole lot better than Slack). BUT... Just having open-source (or free software) alternatives doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Gitlab and Zulip still leave your data scattered around back-end DBs which may not be terribly accessible in 20 years' time if the software itself doesn't still run.
  - tabbott 7y ago
    Zulip lead developer here. For chat apps, I don't think the problem of "data scattered around backend-DBs" is a real concern. E.g. Zulip has a well-defined data export format that's easily parsable JSON and contains all non-transient data (i.e. the status of who's typing right now isn't included): https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and-import.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and.... And so do most of the other popular chat systems. I'd be surprised if Zulip doesn't still run in 20 years, but in any case, we have data import tools for the export formats of Slack, Mattermost, Gitter, and HipChat, and ultimately it wasn't that much work (The most recent few we've added were each a few person-weeks' work). So I think we can safely assume that at least for chat, it'll be possible to import the history. But even if they don't, there are already scripts to export the public history of a Zulip organization and turn it into a webpage that can be hosted wherever (see for example: https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/). The https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com homepage and https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source are relevant reading for folks considering Zulip for their open source project.
groovybits 7y ago
I am generally a fan of Linux and FOSS on my personal gear. However, I'm still not sure where this article is coming from, or who it addresses. The author seems to be mixing the use of FOSS in the professional world with the use of FOSS in their personal world. In a professional environment, there is no room for "modeling your values". It sounds harsh, but that is the way it is. You use what works. Yes, Linux OSs do some things better than Windows OSs, and vice versa.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  I think part of what the author is addressing is the ignorance exhibited in your comment. I don't mean to be rude; it's easy not to see the big picture when you're busy just making a living. To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community. This is not just holier-than-thou moralizing; there will be real financial consequences if the creators of open source products don't start eating a lot more of their own dogfood.
  - groovybits 7y ago
    > To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community. I agree, and perhaps my parent comment itself was harsh and looking at this from the wrong point of view. I think I perceived this article written in a more romanticized way than necessary. If there is a concrete, financial detriment to FOSS developers, then I would advise to make that point upfront. If the problem is "There is too much monetization within the open source community", then many of the points in this article sound like symptoms or variants of the problem, rather than isolated problems themselves.
  - lotyrin 7y ago
    Are you sure he's the ignorant one? As a young adult who had a roof over their head by default, I was 100% FOSS and installed Gentoo on anything I owned that could even limp its way along that path (and discarded devices that couldn't), I refused to use proprietary messaging tools and social networks, and I accepted that I had limited myself to the social and economic opportunities that these things allowed me, as a sort of altruistic techno-hippie. Now I am on LinkedIn, Slack, on a Mac and an iPhone, backing up to a proprietary NAS, operating most things in Amazon's or Microsoft's clouds using managed services that lock me and my clients in to their ecosystems, running default OS on most of everything. The technology choices in my day job are made by whoever has the power to make them, for whatever reasons those people may have -- and "freedom" or even "sustainability" for that matter are pretty low on their list of priorities. The technology decision in my home life come down to "what do I have time and energy to put up with?" and "is there a risk that I'll have to fuss with this in order to make sure it's operational when my wife wants to use it, late at night on some weekend when I'd rather be relaxing?". Maybe when and if I return to a survival-by-default - when the mortgage is paid and health risks are (well enough) accounted for I'll be able to "model my values", but probably not before then. Even that might require a divorce, in adult life one's motivations and their consequences are not solely one's own to keep. Aside from that, given the experience I've had with FOSS, at this point I doubt even if I were 100% financially independent and early retired if I'd go back to participating except to go to low effort to upstream fixes to my own problems (here's a patch/pull request, if you don't like how it's indented or documented, that's your problem to solve, not mine). The incentives are all awful with so many volunteers trying to create software for users or use cases that are fantasies, bike shed arguments, corporate interests trying to get their way and take advantage of free labor, corporate leech organizations saving millions in license fees for proprietary software and contributing nothing but sassy bug reports, the folks who are militant and awful to each other about inclusion/exclusion topics, well-meaning but ignorant people who refuse to understand their behaviors and words cause others grief, projects with lack of vision, leaders who are reluctant to lead. Further aside still, there's a reason normal human beings don't use free software or decentralized whatever and it's because the developers of those things don't have the resources or vision to build software for normal human beings: people who won't edit a config file, won't author content in Markdown, don't want to read a man page of flags to understand the permissions in their chat channel, don't want to have to have a tower PC whirring and heating up a corner somewhere in order to solve what seem to them like simple problems, etc. etc. etc.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saidajigumi 7y ago
– We collaborate inside proprietary environments Why is that? Why have users chosen those environments? Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Ask: "How can we address the actual user needs while supporting our goals?" – Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally Same answer as above. – We're not modeling our values WHY? (Hint: "the use of nonfree" is not, and has never been a primary human motivator even for many people who "get it".) etctera. Finally, regarding the below... only one of these, the first, even tangentially touches on the user experience. There's an implied expectation of so much FOSS advocacy which reduces to "by writing and using our software, you will be wearing a hairshirt for the cause". This mindset is guaranteed to fail in front of users, who are by and large "non-believers". "Having real-time chat is absolutely essential to the advancement of free software." "We're the resistance now." "We need to create mass movement." "Volunteer to write free and open code, to participate in communities." "If you didn't live the history, learn from those who did." "If you did learn from history, teach those who need to know it. Respectfully." "Be patient. Remember that the tortoise won not only because it was patient, but because it ignored insult, ridicule and dismissal." "Model your values. Use free software and hardware." "Remember always how 'the rights to copy, share, modify, redistribute and improve software' are fundamental rights that matter to people." "Work to convince developers that their software freedom matters."
- kazinator 7y ago
  > Why have users chosen those environments? Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is that large numbers of people are now "reluctant" FOSS developers. They do FOSS because someone told them to. They got a job somewhere and the job involves writing code that gets upstreamed somewhere and is redistributable. Well, they don't give a damn about that, it's just a job, no different from working on proprietary software. Or they work on some proprietary stuff, but it interacts with and depends on some FOSS pieces so they get in there and make changes out of necessity, and those changes are freely licensed only because they are derived from a work which requires that due to copyright doctrines about derived works. It's partly a generational thing. Notice how Doc Searls looks about fifty-something. He remembers a grassroots free software movement which was about actually about displacing proprietary software and liberating the user, and not about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. If you were born after 1990, you don't know a world in which Linux and other FOSS wasn't used for making locked-down tech, and proprietary web sites that lock in millions of people and step on their privacy. So of course it's hard to understand someone like Doc Searls. The free software ideology originated in a world in which you still installed applications locally and ran them on local data, on a machine where you were allowed to stick in a floppy disc with any piece of machine language in its boot sector that could easily take over the machine. The machine that was understood to be owned by you once you paid for it.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
So the initial letter hits upon something that the article itself ignores, namely that the FOSS community requires more than just developers. I see this attitude all the time in certain circles that only the developers contribute any value to a project, and prospective contributors should either learn to code or get f--ked. It's not terribly welcoming to the larger community (of whom the majority are not developers), and the fact that many of these projects lack adequate documentation, wide availability, or a centralized support forum only reinforces that understanding. It's a problem that can be remedied, provided the projects stop pretending that the packagers, technical writers, GUI/UX artists, and community managers are expendable.
- seandougall 7y ago
  Not to mention users! I can't count how many times I've seen bug reports responded to with a dismissive "you're welcome to file a PR", which is just a thinly veiled expression of the same attitude: you're not valuable, your domain expertise is not valuable, and the time you're taking to engage in the development cycle is not valuable; only your code is valuable. It's really not a big mystery why more average users don't flock to that sort of treatment. Even when that attitude isn't so explicitly directed at users, you're right about it being visibly directed at other community members. It all sends a clear message, such that the average prospective user will move on, thinking "that application is meant for someone else."
  - amyjess 7y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. In addition, responses like that do more to specifically push people towards commercial software than anything else (not specifically proprietary, just commercial). Why use a piece of software where the developers have no incentive to care about your concerns when you could instead use a piece of software where you're a paying customer and the production company has a financial incentive to keep their paying customers happy? Since the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft has been surprisingly responsive to customer requests. They have a ticketing system where customers can submit new feature requests, and if it's both reasonable and popular enough, they'll implement it. Here's a reasonable example: a while back, they decided to eliminate the split mode from the virtual keyboard because they thought nobody would miss it, as they added a swipe keyboard to replace it. Well, it turns out they were wrong, because lots of people opened tickets with Microsoft asking for it to be put back. They put it back in the next update. They listened to paying customers. Compare this to GNOME, on the other hand, which regularly removes popular features and ignores all user complaints.
mtaksrud 7y ago
This! Like much else, these kind of movements (FOSS etc.) depends on having good “institutions” that work. In this case e.g. the documentation project and similar. They are fundamental building blocks ...
shmerl 7y ago
Yeah, I'm often puzzled by some FOSS developers not using open communication tools and not running Linux on their actual day to day work computers.
- jlarocco 7y ago
  I've seen (and also not understood) the use of Slack/Gitter/etc. but the "not running Linux" part is a surprise to me, personally. I've used Linux or BSD on all of my personal machines for a long time, and assumed, wrongly I guess, that most other people were in the same boat. I'm not sure it's a problem, but it's interesting.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    In my experience, using Linux until even recently had some rough edges, which I personally was ready to deal with. I suppose some don't want to do it. But I've always seen not doing it as not modeling our values, same way the article suggests, so it was an obvious choice for me, despite the learning curve.
  - the_af 7y ago
    Agreed, I've been using desktop Linux on my home laptop for more than a decade now. Every piece of software I want, wireless printers, videogames (many AAA!), everything just works. I'm puzzled. I think it was just the unfortunate rise of mobile.
- mruts 7y ago
  I would argue that the GPL is so restrictive to violate the principles of FOSS. BSD or public domain is better and more free.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    That doesn't fit reality. For example, Apple are avoiding and even banning GPL, preferring BSD. And they are one of the worst anti-FOSS values examples (due to extreme lock-in, patent aggression and so on).
bregma 7y ago
I love the way commenters here equate FLOSS development with unpaid hobbyist developers. Fact: most of the contributors to the Linux kernel are highly-paid professionals who do that work full time. The same goes for many, if not most, of the popular and successful FLOSS projects. It is an error to assume that free (as in speech) software is only made by free (as in beer) development.
- megous 7y ago
  Fact based on what? I don't doubt the kernel claim. There are regular LWN summaries, about what companies contributed to whatever release. But I have no clue what you're basing your second claim on. There's huge amount of FLOSS programs that work fine, are useful, but don't get much contributions. And I don't know about any studies/overviews on what number of programs say in a Debian distro is a work of passion, and what is created by paid devs.
Jorge1o1 7y ago
There's a great deal of irony in a publication promoting FOSS, but their own website is closed source.
- sleepus 7y ago
  .. along with the usage of Disqus, some third-party analytics and Google Apps.
- skyfaller 7y ago
  Is Linux Journal's website closed source? Looks like it's running Drupal to me, a quick scan of the HTML reveals <meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 8 (https://www.drupal.org)" https://www.drupal.org)" />. Drupal is GPLv2+, seems fine. Would be nice if they replaced Disqus with e.g. https://commento.io/ https://commento.io/ though.
bencollier49 7y ago
Here's a thought - can we trace this back to the point at which everyone moved from Slashdot to Hacker News? All of a sudden the dominant social incentive changed from open software to startups and profit.
- jslabovitz 7y ago
  Perhaps... But if you do that, it would also be interesting to trace free software back to the point where the GPL became popular. (GPL was published in 1983, but in my recollection it wasn't until the early/mid-90s that it surged into general usage.) Before that, 'free' software generally meant public domain: no licenses, no limitation on use -- at all. We had two or three decades of free software of that type, mostly distributed over Usenet, BBSes, FTP/Gopher, etc. I'm probably being too oblique, but I believe it's short-sighted to believe free software must only be ideologically free. There was, in fact, an earlier period, where developers release software for free because, well, why not? Okay, time for this retired grumpy programmer to retreat back to his hut in the forest now...
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    My memory of that period (mid-90s-299ish) is that in a majority of cases the widely used 'public domain' software was distributed without restrictions but also without source code, and thus did not really enable modification and redistribution of improved versions even if the licence (or lack of it) didn't prohibit me to do so; so back then the 'ideologically free' movement towards open source software did result in an actual increase of practical freedoms.
    - jslabovitz 7y ago
      Ah, I did not explain clearly. My mistake. I wasn't talking about binary-only shareware distribution, but rather source code (primarily Unix/C-based on comp.sources.*). I'm thinking about the Usenet software itself (B News, C News, rn, tin, vnews), sendmail/bind, early Pine/Mutt/procmail (?), scripting languages like Perl/Python/Ruby, and so on. And a pile of early microcomputer code for Z80/8080/6500/6800/etc.
degobah 7y ago
We also need to donate more to FOSS. And find more ways to monetize FOSS. It's tough for many FOSS projects to succeed on a volunteer basis.
zanny 7y ago
Its more abjectly a moral failing of society that institutions have not aligned to enable free software proliferation. Software, and information in general, have been a prisoners dilemma for time immemorial. The optimization of utility is total freedom of information - but such a state of affairs means benefactors reap the labors of others and have no obligation to give anything in return. Copyright was fabricated to solve 18th century problems with an 18th century bureaucratic solution. The whole free software movement in general emerged as a counterculture to how intensely harmful to society that policy influenced the natural state of affairs to become. If anything, the fact free software enthusiasts have lost sight of what the ultimate goal has to be - the abolition of copyright and institution of basic standards of living for all citizens derived from the productive gains of the extraordinary multiplicative effects technology, itself derived substantially from free software, produces - is what really needs to shift. Anything less keeps the movement in an atrophying limbo where fresh minds join, put in their best effort, and fall out from the captured value innovation produces in our society. We need to move towards a state of affairs where enthusiasts can produce freedom respecting code because they want to, that don't go hungry or homeless for their efforts, and where all of society can reap the benefits of theirs (and billions others) generosity and compounding efficiency produced through technological innovation. And where everyone has access to the fruits of those labors regardless of means as a way to improve the collective knowledge of mankind for all the rest of us. Just think for a moment of the bizarre world where the brightest need not toil to manipulate tired and depressed minds psychologically to siphon scarce money from them to line the pockets of robber barons masquerading as productive members of society, but instead could comfortably collaborate towards actually making the world a better place.
- mwfunk 7y ago
  Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright, because it's the only thing that gives the GPL any meaning at all. In a copyright-free world, any company could make a proprietary GCC fork, lock its code up behind many layers of physical and digital security, make all its developers/employees sign NDAs and other legal agreements ensuring they don't leak any of the new code, et voila. Hardly sounds like a Free Software utopia.
jondubois 7y ago
I still cannot believe that we live in a world were: - A website with a silly name like 'Facebook' is worth half a trillion dollars and is extremely profitable. - A website with a silly name like 'Twitter' which only lets you post 140 characters at a time is worth 30 billion dollars. - An app with a silly name like 'Snapchat' which loses billions of dollars per year is worth almost $15 billion. - An international taxi service with a silly name like 'Uber' which is losing billions of dollars per year is worth almost $100 billion. - That software developers don't see anything wrong with building apps on top of proprietary cloud APIs (e.g. Amazon Lambda) - The closest real-world analogy that I can think of is that it's like building a house with your own bare hands for years and then, once you finally finish it, you start paying a corporation rent (at whatever rate they ask for) so that you can live in your own house! Meanwhile, the whole time, there was an even better plot of land right next door which was 100% free but you ignored it because the signposts on the corporate land were flashing with bright neon lights. The economy makes so little sense that there is no incentive left to create value. The best you can do is just look for the next financial scheme to take advantage of. I bet it will be something completely random and useless.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Names are hard, and all of those except Uber are extremely apt and descriptive. In the lambda case, it's very much closer to "build and maintain a house, doing all the trades work yourself" versus just renting somewhere. The latter has a much shorter lead time and upfront cost. If you're just doing a job for 18 months somewhere to see if it works out, would you spend a decade building a house there first?
- theamk 7y ago
  Re Lambda, I think the closest analogy is renting unfurnished office. When our company moved into next office, it had bare walls with old ugly wallpaper. We paid for the new wallpaper, carpet, interior walls, wiring, etc... And we also kept paying the rent to the building owner, and were at their mercy when they eventually decided to stop renting out that space. Even then, this made perfect sense for business. All-new construction would have been way longer and more expensive, even taking limited lease time in the account. Why would software equivalent of this (Lambda) be different?
acd 7y ago
A bug in GPL is that it allows SAAS Software as a service built on Open source software which means Software as a service can leech on open source software without contributing back. https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/the-saas-loophole-in-gpl-open-source-licenses https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/t... Using AGPL instead of GPL closes the Saas loop hole. Also due to close to zero bank interest rates the general availability of venture capital is to some extent stopping new open source software. Instead of giving away your software for free as Open source software you start a venture capital funded Software as a service instead.
- Drdrdrq 7y ago
  > Using AGPL instead of GPL closes the Saas loop hole. In spirit maybe, but not in practice because of its loopholes. That was the reason MongoDB changed their license.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  True, but that is what has driven most business to ignore most GPL libraries and drive back to glory days of PD/Freeware/Shareware, just with the source code for basic funcionality as the modern demo version, instead of the old time limited one.
pdonis 7y ago
Searls says that the fight for general purpose computing is the one most worth having: but I think he's using a definition of "general purpose computing" that most non-developers won't even understand, much less agree with. The problem is that development is an extremely special purpose--one that most people don't do and don't understand the needs of. As a developer, I want a level of control over every aspect of my computer that most people don't want, need, or even think of. To most people, "general purpose computing" just means their computer (or more likely their phone, these days) can run any app they want it to run. It doesn't mean what Searls (and the people whose articles he references, like Doctorow) takes it to mean. And to the ordinary person, the idea that it is essential to society that developers have the freedom to configure their computers however they want, regardless of what the government or some corporation says, doesn't sound like something worth fighting for; it sounds like something scary. They don't think of Stallman developing Gnu or Linus Torvalds developing Linux; they think of computer viruses and worms running rampant.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  Maybe we can at least make sure that the next generation of children get it, or at least the kids that we are close to. This is on my mind because I have five nieces and one nephew, all of whom are less than five years old. I gave three of them Amazon tablets the Christmas before last, and have come to regret it. I will do what I can to make sure that their next computers will be general-purpose as we developers understand it. It may be worthwhile to reflect on my own early experience with computers. In 1988, when I was almost 8, my family's first computer was an Apple IIGS. As I explained in my personal retrospective on that machine a few years ago [1], that machine had kind of a split personality, because it combined compatibility with the earlier 8-bit Apple II models with a more or less Mac-like, native 16-bit environment. The legacy 8-bit environment included BASIC in ROM, whereas the native 16-bit environment could only be programmed with a dedicated development environment that wasn't included with the computer. Of course, even many 8-bit Apple II programs were written in assembly language and were locked down to varying degrees (e.g. copy protection, no easy way to break into the BASIC interpreter). But at least that BASIC interpreter was available in the 8-bit environment. So the 16-bit environment represented another step in the direction of separating users from developers. I remember one experience that, I think, helped spark my interest in programming. One day when I was about 8, my uncle Eric was over at our house, and he brought with him a disk full of 8-bit Apple II games. One of those games was written in BASIC and somehow involved shapes crudely rendered in text mode (I don't remember anything else about the game). He had modified those shapes to bear the names of his kids. That was interesting all by itself. But then, if I remember correctly, he went in and modified the game to show the names of my siblings and me instead. These days, we call this live coding. And with most off-the-shelf software now, it's impossible. If we can fix this for free software, I think more people will be enthusiastic about it. Of course, the specific example I recounted here is pretty trivial, but the lesson is clear: we need to make it practical for people to modify the software they use every day, on the fly, with low friction. Then, the freedom to modify software will matter to more people. [1]: https://mwcampbell.us/blog/apple-iigs.html https://mwcampbell.us/blog/apple-iigs.html
fgheorghe 7y ago
Linux was built in an era of fierce resistance from the corporate world, so what is there to save today when everything runs or touches OSS in one way or another and most decent developers will make an OSS contribution, to claim on their CVs?
workingpatrick 7y ago
Bit of hypocrisy on the part of the author for publishing on this platform.... The comment section of this article: "Our discussions are powered by Disqus, which require JavaScript. "
Yaa101 7y ago
Convenience seems to be the only value of things in the real world, so bad even that people en masse are prepared to submit to slavery to get it. I suggest that the FOSS community now finally starts building something convenient for themselfs instead of making things hard and massochist.
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
Linux has an HR department now - and big corporate managers driving its technology goals. I guarantee you 99% of the people on this forum will jump all over me in defense of both. Trannies, init systems, whatever layer of technology Wayland is these days, Pulseaudio, The Eternal Presence of Chrome... You and you - and you there! You kept picking corporate choices. I don't need another job.
gridlockd 7y ago
Don't listen to the Copyleftists. FOSS is bigger than ever because non-copyleft free software is what professionals can build on. For the most part, Copyleftists are stuck in Hobbyland and it really shows when you look at the software they produce. Their business models - if they even have one - largely don't work. Given that software is very expensive to produce, copyleft software eventually runs out of suckers to support it after the "fun factor" wears off and the "real work" starts. The Linux kernel is the major exception, but only because the particular exceptions that the GPL grants to it do not encumber the enterprises that develop Linux. Wherever it does, enterprises will choose non-copyleft alternatives (e.g. Sony and Nintendo building on FreeBSD).
throw2016 7y ago
What made Linux and FOSS possible is a specific time and context and that is not happening again. There is no job security, everything is about building a resume, getting a job and hanging on or a startup, everything is related to money or status. There is also an ahistorical perspective of tech, as if things just are or happen with no deliberate effort and its an open question whether there is any real commitment or concern for the principles which drove the open source movement. In many ways Slashdot defined the original generation and Hackernews defines this one. And even paying lip service to principles would be quaint here. Defending building surveillance systems and stalking people 24/7 while referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments. This is a huge shift.
- danans 7y ago
  > referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments I seem to recall this being true on Slashdot also.
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  from the article's comments: Dave Taht • 44 minutes ago We really, really, really need a return to our core values I remember how fired up I was in 1999, when I wrote this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxLbNCB-YKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxLbNCB-YKI and how fired up I am now to try and get our internet back. Still it is hard to be a revolutionary with two kids and a mortgage, and we've lost most of the next generation of coders to javascript and student debt.
makz 7y ago
I have several things to say here. I see we are still debating the same points as many years ago (GIMP vs Photoshop, Visual Studio, paid vs unpaid labor, chicken and egg, convenience...). It’s like we haven’t learned anything. About the end of general computing, I don’t see it as a bad thing. In some way it has always existed. Right now we have server computers, desktop computers, smart phones, mainframe, cloud... even on a single class of computer we have some segmentation. It just means we’ll have even more specialization. And FOSS still can have a place there. Speaking about that, I believe FOSS is stronger at the foundational layers. Maybe the future is kind of and hybrid model in which we have lots of new computer classes with FOSS as their foundation. Not very different from what we have now, just much more diverse and, I hope, more open.
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ngcc_hk 7y ago
Wonder how many free software would be in china inside e-great wall? What wonder what we use if majority of computer is intel based and they have a parallel computer controlled your cpu? Strangely arm is sort of open what can you pay to develop your own total open env and ... Any further, wonder what is open source movement is all about if not asking for a mixed environment ? It is the dying middle that might be the problem or is there no problem. Wonder.
nevrthepfhor 7y ago
People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep. They don't want to find, audit, install, and evaluate dozens of obscure third-party extensions to make their OS usable. They want options for setting their background image besides Fit to screen. And they want to be able to use their friend's computer without having to learn how to use all their friend's customizations.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  All of those are design choices. None of that has anything to do with open source.
  - nevrthepfhor 7y ago
    All this time I was under the impression that OSS design was heavily influenced by a subculture involving hacking and ruthlessly rejecting any unnecessary features in 'officially' supported versions. I'm sure that the massive correlation between fake North Korean storefront-tier GUIs and open source is just a coincidence. If you're going to say that these sorts of design choices aren't perpetuated by so-called open source culture as it currently exists then there's no conversation to be had. Unless OSS culture has radically transformed in the last three months and I missed it.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  > People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep. Nothing says that all free software will be good or user-friendly (systemd is an excellent case-in-point). But you can choose a better alternative. Proprietary software sometimes has short-term convenience benefits, but even thinking slightly-longer-term quickly shows that it's never worth it. Even with less-than-ideal software like systemd, it's still miles better than proprietary alternatives. Yes, you may have to run "systemctl suspend"* to put your computer to sleep, but you don't end up with Candy Crush embedded in your program launcher, or over-12-years-outdated bash, etc. [*] It's pretty easy to wrap 'systemctl suspend' in something friendlier, such as a shortcut.
sovande 7y ago
Sure, we need naive wish lists, but for open source to be more than a curios historical blip and not fall into a Venezuelan disaster, the least we can demand of FSF and OSI is to give us a proper open source license so those who want to _do_ open source work can also succeed commercially. They need to understand and address problems faced by MongoDB, Redis, Elastic et. al. and support their needs with a new license (something better than AGPL). Not flat out dismiss the problems and swipe it under the rug.
- yarrel 7y ago
  No, they need to make clear that VC funding isn't entitled to returns on bad business models. That is the real problem.
danans 7y ago
I don't think the problem is that FOSS (as a movement) can't accomplish what proprietary software does. For a while, some FOSS software did address certain user needs better than proprietary software. But the world of proprietary software (including permissively licensed open source software) just moved faster, because its associated business models gave it the money, incentives, and the early signals needed to attack problem spaces in human-computer-interaction and secure, managed application platforms, among other things, that FOSS didn't have the resources to address, and so it just fell behind in key areas relevant to users. We just don't know what the FOSS movement could have achieved given similar resources (or how it would have gotten those resources in the first place without a business model), or a lot more time.
interfixus 7y ago
> Our discussions are powered by Disqus Abandon all hope.
maxhedrome 7y ago
I’ll just leave this here for whoever wants to read it https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
jsnz 7y ago
The opinions in this article are simply fear-mongering and divisive of the programmer community as whole. They are formulated on an irrational fear of FOSS being extinguished by the greed of the corporations. So long as there is at least one programmer left with the will to post their source to the world FOSS will not die. Let's also not be so one-eyed as forget to value equally the contribution of all programmers who write great software whether free or not, open or closed-source - we can still admire the fruits of their labours if not their algorithms. FOSS community, please stop wringing your hands in fear, go write some code with them!

386 points by brewski 7y ago

Most people engage with FOSS for practical reasons, not ideological reasons. Given that developers of proprietary software have made a lot more money on the whole than developers of FOSS, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

ebg13 7y ago
That's absolutely not true for people who make it in the first place.
- ralph84 7y ago
  Maybe for GNU project contributors, but look at some of the most currently popular FOSS projects. They all came from companies that rely heavily on proprietary software for their core business. They're certainly not contributing to FOSS because they're ideologues who believe all software should be FOSS. Kubernetes (Google), Angular (Google), TensorFlow (Google), VSCode (Microsoft), TypeScript (Microsoft), React (Facebook), PyTorch (Facebook), just to name a few.
jordigh 7y ago
The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. GNU R has completely dominated most areas of statistical computing, for example. The ideology is there not because we think you're "impure" or "evil" or something if you use non-free software, but because we think you'll be happier if you do, because you deserve it, because we all deserve free software.
- Funes- 7y ago
  >The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. While I wholeheartedly agree with this particular stance--doing away with ideology and sticking with ethics and pragmatism--, I am not sure that everyone in the FOSS community, if such thing exists, adheres to that same premise.
  - the_af 7y ago
    In fact, that's only the ideology of Open Source software. Free/libre software (e.g. GNU and the FSF) believe in "free as in speech" for ideological reasons, not for tech quality reasons. In fact -- they argue -- one should sacrifice convenience and sometimes even short-term quality in favor of freedom. I certainly see the merit of that line of thought, though it's also a very hard road, and harder still to convince people. Ideology is not a bad word :)
    - jordigh 7y ago
      I'm not saying the quality of the software is the most important thing. I'm saying that software freedom is a pragmatic goal. Being able to fix your own software or bring it to anyone competent who can repair it is a practical thing. Giving the software to your friends is a practical thing. Being able to modify the software is a practical thing. Knowing that your software won't spy on you is a practical thing. Software freedom is not some abstract ideology with no relation to pragmatics.
- Crinus 7y ago
  > Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. What is good quality differs between people. Personally i consider good quality to be desktop software with a good and simple (but not patronizing) UX and responsive UI that does not abuse my system's resources. The vast majority of FLOSS fails hard there, at best you get a single aspect of the application to be very good at what it does (e.g. some 3D renderer might provide a very accurate light model) but suffer at everything else (e.g. be usable only through the command line, using only a custom format, no support for the 3D authoring tools that everyone else uses, etc). There are very few FLOSS applications of good quality and of course that is what i consider good quality (someone might consider the command line part i mentioned above as a sign of quality because it would be easier to drive via scripts, e.g. for setting a render farm).
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Drdrdrq 7y ago
This. The problem with FOSS are incentives which are not aligned. Sure, some developers will give their best for free... for some time. But sooner or later the going gets tough and maintaining (let alone developing further) your pet project becomes a chore. Will you still do it? For how long? And if you try to monetize the project to at least somehow offset the lost energy and time, and maybe even pay someone else to help you, then you figure out you can't. Because free / open / libre means that anyone can take what you did and run with it. This is the reason why FOSS projects don't reach the maturity and polish of closed variants. The only exception I can think of is Firefox, because it is able to capitalize on its unique position where it threatens (a bit) Google Search. With Google also making its biggest rival. And the end result is that while the FOSS software is free (as in freedom), its quality leaves much to be desired, so the users are not flocking to it. Far from it. Until FOSS movement rethinks what "freedom" is, nothing is going to change for better. Maybe giving Commons Clause and other hybrid licenses a chance could be a way out? I don't know, but it makes me sad that I'm typing this on a closed phone without (realistic) choice.
- zanny 7y ago
  This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. The valuable good in exchange is the developers time, not the code itself - nation states have constructed a goliath IP apparatus to impair the natural capacity to instantly and infinitely replicate information. But its wholly fictional and fabricated - its just an outdated paradigm from the era of the commoditization of the printing press where there were still marginal costs that could endanger businesses to overspend on. There are many ways to monetize your time while creating liberated code in the process, but that is where the focus must be in the free software ecosystem.
  - Drdrdrq 7y ago
    > This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. Ok, I don't even agree with your definition of freedoms, but I'll bite anyway. Do you have an example of a different approach? RedHat? Selling services, FOSS is just a by-product. Mozilla? Yes, though its position is very unique, and they are the only ones who really have incentives aligned with their users'. Redis? Mongo? MariaDB? Their change of license tells everything. If it didn't work for myriad of projects in the past, maybe there's a problem with the approach? As for other things... You must be living in a very different world from mine. (edit: this was not meant in a bad way... just an observation)
amyjess 7y ago
Everyone could stand to learn the lessons of gcc. Back in the '90s, when gcc really took off, it got a lot of attention for being faster and optimizing code better than anything else out there. It wasn't just free: it was _better_. Of course, the 'free' part helped too, but the only 'free' people cared about was as in beer, not speech. This was when Sun was charging $$$$ for C compiler licenses on top of the operating system. So you could buy Sun's cc for massive amounts of money... or get a _better_ product without having to shell out. No wonder gcc won. And if you look down the road to the 2010s, when LLVM/clang is eating gcc's lunch, you have to wonder what went wrong. What went wrong was that gcc fell behind for ideological reasons. RMS categorically refused to allow gcc's frontends to output the AST on the grounds that proprietary tools could make use gcc's output. The developers of LLVM and clang, on the other hand, had no such qualms. Being able to get an AST out of clang meant you could have IDEs compiler-assisted syntax highlighting and real-time error checking, things that gcc will never have for ideological reasons. gcc succeeded when it was better than the competition and faltered when it was worse, and freedom had nothing to do with it.
- GenghisSean 7y ago
  That's a great example. The concept seems obvious, but often times free software activists forget or are unaware of lessons like this. Because free software activists are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their freedoms, they sometimes forget that others are not willing to make those same sacrifices. Getting end users and often developers interested in your project isn't easy. The vendor lock in proprietary software companies use makes it even more difficult to get users even if a free solution is better. The goal of a project should be to grow the community outside of just the free software community by improving the software until it's eventually better than proprietary alternatives. That's why I'm particularly excited about projects like GNUnet, Guix, and Librem 5. I think they have the potential to blow the competition out of water and move the free software community closer to it's goal. https://gnunet.org/en/ https://gnunet.org/en/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- wahern 7y ago
  That's the commonly accepted narrative about LLVM, but in retrospect it's even more clear that it was always about the GPL and, in particular, GPL3. Fast forward to today and LLVM's interfaces are no more stable than GCC's, and GCC is the only project with useable dynamically pluggable modules. RMS was wrong to have pushed back on module support for so long, but it was irrelevant. Apple wanted to be in the driver's seat, and Apple's legal department was and remains violently opposed to GPL3. And it turns out that when you're in the driver's seat you don't really need stable interfaces and you definitely don't need modules. The competition has been good, though. I like using both compilers.

fopen64 7y ago

That's what happens when you are bogged down in Donglegate-like discussions.

jonawesomegreen 7y ago

> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use. This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project moving to github / slack, where we may not have nearly as good a record of conversations that formed the software in 20 - 30 years. On the other hand you won't see any argument from me that these services provide an easier workflow than what existed before, and maybe that easier workflow opening development up to a wider community is more important.

rst 7y ago
For what it's worth, there are workalikes for both Github and Slack which are at least tolerable -- Gitlab has most of Github's core features, and there are multiple slack-alikes (the one I've got experience with is Zulip, which I, at least, find to be a whole lot better than Slack). BUT... Just having open-source (or free software) alternatives doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Gitlab and Zulip still leave your data scattered around back-end DBs which may not be terribly accessible in 20 years' time if the software itself doesn't still run.
- tabbott 7y ago
  Zulip lead developer here. For chat apps, I don't think the problem of "data scattered around backend-DBs" is a real concern. E.g. Zulip has a well-defined data export format that's easily parsable JSON and contains all non-transient data (i.e. the status of who's typing right now isn't included): https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and-import.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and.... And so do most of the other popular chat systems. I'd be surprised if Zulip doesn't still run in 20 years, but in any case, we have data import tools for the export formats of Slack, Mattermost, Gitter, and HipChat, and ultimately it wasn't that much work (The most recent few we've added were each a few person-weeks' work). So I think we can safely assume that at least for chat, it'll be possible to import the history. But even if they don't, there are already scripts to export the public history of a Zulip organization and turn it into a webpage that can be hosted wherever (see for example: https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/). The https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com homepage and https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source are relevant reading for folks considering Zulip for their open source project.

groovybits 7y ago

I am generally a fan of Linux and FOSS on my personal gear. However, I'm still not sure where this article is coming from, or who it addresses. The author seems to be mixing the use of FOSS in the professional world with the use of FOSS in their personal world. In a professional environment, there is no room for "modeling your values". It sounds harsh, but that is the way it is. You use what works. Yes, Linux OSs do some things better than Windows OSs, and vice versa.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
I think part of what the author is addressing is the ignorance exhibited in your comment. I don't mean to be rude; it's easy not to see the big picture when you're busy just making a living. To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community. This is not just holier-than-thou moralizing; there will be real financial consequences if the creators of open source products don't start eating a lot more of their own dogfood.
- groovybits 7y ago
  > To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community. I agree, and perhaps my parent comment itself was harsh and looking at this from the wrong point of view. I think I perceived this article written in a more romanticized way than necessary. If there is a concrete, financial detriment to FOSS developers, then I would advise to make that point upfront. If the problem is "There is too much monetization within the open source community", then many of the points in this article sound like symptoms or variants of the problem, rather than isolated problems themselves.
- lotyrin 7y ago
  Are you sure he's the ignorant one? As a young adult who had a roof over their head by default, I was 100% FOSS and installed Gentoo on anything I owned that could even limp its way along that path (and discarded devices that couldn't), I refused to use proprietary messaging tools and social networks, and I accepted that I had limited myself to the social and economic opportunities that these things allowed me, as a sort of altruistic techno-hippie. Now I am on LinkedIn, Slack, on a Mac and an iPhone, backing up to a proprietary NAS, operating most things in Amazon's or Microsoft's clouds using managed services that lock me and my clients in to their ecosystems, running default OS on most of everything. The technology choices in my day job are made by whoever has the power to make them, for whatever reasons those people may have -- and "freedom" or even "sustainability" for that matter are pretty low on their list of priorities. The technology decision in my home life come down to "what do I have time and energy to put up with?" and "is there a risk that I'll have to fuss with this in order to make sure it's operational when my wife wants to use it, late at night on some weekend when I'd rather be relaxing?". Maybe when and if I return to a survival-by-default - when the mortgage is paid and health risks are (well enough) accounted for I'll be able to "model my values", but probably not before then. Even that might require a divorce, in adult life one's motivations and their consequences are not solely one's own to keep. Aside from that, given the experience I've had with FOSS, at this point I doubt even if I were 100% financially independent and early retired if I'd go back to participating except to go to low effort to upstream fixes to my own problems (here's a patch/pull request, if you don't like how it's indented or documented, that's your problem to solve, not mine). The incentives are all awful with so many volunteers trying to create software for users or use cases that are fantasies, bike shed arguments, corporate interests trying to get their way and take advantage of free labor, corporate leech organizations saving millions in license fees for proprietary software and contributing nothing but sassy bug reports, the folks who are militant and awful to each other about inclusion/exclusion topics, well-meaning but ignorant people who refuse to understand their behaviors and words cause others grief, projects with lack of vision, leaders who are reluctant to lead. Further aside still, there's a reason normal human beings don't use free software or decentralized whatever and it's because the developers of those things don't have the resources or vision to build software for normal human beings: people who won't edit a config file, won't author content in Markdown, don't want to read a man page of flags to understand the permissions in their chat channel, don't want to have to have a tower PC whirring and heating up a corner somewhere in order to solve what seem to them like simple problems, etc. etc. etc.

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saidajigumi 7y ago

– We collaborate inside proprietary environments Why is that? Why have users chosen those environments? Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Ask: "How can we address the actual user needs while supporting our goals?" – Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally Same answer as above. – We're not modeling our values WHY? (Hint: "the use of nonfree" is not, and has never been a primary human motivator even for many people who "get it".) etctera. Finally, regarding the below... only one of these, the first, even tangentially touches on the user experience. There's an implied expectation of so much FOSS advocacy which reduces to "by writing and using our software, you will be wearing a hairshirt for the cause". This mindset is guaranteed to fail in front of users, who are by and large "non-believers". "Having real-time chat is absolutely essential to the advancement of free software." "We're the resistance now." "We need to create mass movement." "Volunteer to write free and open code, to participate in communities." "If you didn't live the history, learn from those who did." "If you did learn from history, teach those who need to know it. Respectfully." "Be patient. Remember that the tortoise won not only because it was patient, but because it ignored insult, ridicule and dismissal." "Model your values. Use free software and hardware." "Remember always how 'the rights to copy, share, modify, redistribute and improve software' are fundamental rights that matter to people." "Work to convince developers that their software freedom matters."

kazinator 7y ago
> Why have users chosen those environments? Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is that large numbers of people are now "reluctant" FOSS developers. They do FOSS because someone told them to. They got a job somewhere and the job involves writing code that gets upstreamed somewhere and is redistributable. Well, they don't give a damn about that, it's just a job, no different from working on proprietary software. Or they work on some proprietary stuff, but it interacts with and depends on some FOSS pieces so they get in there and make changes out of necessity, and those changes are freely licensed only because they are derived from a work which requires that due to copyright doctrines about derived works. It's partly a generational thing. Notice how Doc Searls looks about fifty-something. He remembers a grassroots free software movement which was about actually about displacing proprietary software and liberating the user, and not about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. If you were born after 1990, you don't know a world in which Linux and other FOSS wasn't used for making locked-down tech, and proprietary web sites that lock in millions of people and step on their privacy. So of course it's hard to understand someone like Doc Searls. The free software ideology originated in a world in which you still installed applications locally and ran them on local data, on a machine where you were allowed to stick in a floppy disc with any piece of machine language in its boot sector that could easily take over the machine. The machine that was understood to be owned by you once you paid for it.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

So the initial letter hits upon something that the article itself ignores, namely that the FOSS community requires more than just developers. I see this attitude all the time in certain circles that only the developers contribute any value to a project, and prospective contributors should either learn to code or get f--ked. It's not terribly welcoming to the larger community (of whom the majority are not developers), and the fact that many of these projects lack adequate documentation, wide availability, or a centralized support forum only reinforces that understanding. It's a problem that can be remedied, provided the projects stop pretending that the packagers, technical writers, GUI/UX artists, and community managers are expendable.

seandougall 7y ago
Not to mention users! I can't count how many times I've seen bug reports responded to with a dismissive "you're welcome to file a PR", which is just a thinly veiled expression of the same attitude: you're not valuable, your domain expertise is not valuable, and the time you're taking to engage in the development cycle is not valuable; only your code is valuable. It's really not a big mystery why more average users don't flock to that sort of treatment. Even when that attitude isn't so explicitly directed at users, you're right about it being visibly directed at other community members. It all sends a clear message, such that the average prospective user will move on, thinking "that application is meant for someone else."
- amyjess 7y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. In addition, responses like that do more to specifically push people towards commercial software than anything else (not specifically proprietary, just commercial). Why use a piece of software where the developers have no incentive to care about your concerns when you could instead use a piece of software where you're a paying customer and the production company has a financial incentive to keep their paying customers happy? Since the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft has been surprisingly responsive to customer requests. They have a ticketing system where customers can submit new feature requests, and if it's both reasonable and popular enough, they'll implement it. Here's a reasonable example: a while back, they decided to eliminate the split mode from the virtual keyboard because they thought nobody would miss it, as they added a swipe keyboard to replace it. Well, it turns out they were wrong, because lots of people opened tickets with Microsoft asking for it to be put back. They put it back in the next update. They listened to paying customers. Compare this to GNOME, on the other hand, which regularly removes popular features and ignores all user complaints.

mtaksrud 7y ago

This! Like much else, these kind of movements (FOSS etc.) depends on having good “institutions” that work. In this case e.g. the documentation project and similar. They are fundamental building blocks ...

shmerl 7y ago

Yeah, I'm often puzzled by some FOSS developers not using open communication tools and not running Linux on their actual day to day work computers.

jlarocco 7y ago
I've seen (and also not understood) the use of Slack/Gitter/etc. but the "not running Linux" part is a surprise to me, personally. I've used Linux or BSD on all of my personal machines for a long time, and assumed, wrongly I guess, that most other people were in the same boat. I'm not sure it's a problem, but it's interesting.
- shmerl 7y ago
  In my experience, using Linux until even recently had some rough edges, which I personally was ready to deal with. I suppose some don't want to do it. But I've always seen not doing it as not modeling our values, same way the article suggests, so it was an obvious choice for me, despite the learning curve.
- the_af 7y ago
  Agreed, I've been using desktop Linux on my home laptop for more than a decade now. Every piece of software I want, wireless printers, videogames (many AAA!), everything just works. I'm puzzled. I think it was just the unfortunate rise of mobile.
mruts 7y ago
I would argue that the GPL is so restrictive to violate the principles of FOSS. BSD or public domain is better and more free.
- shmerl 7y ago
  That doesn't fit reality. For example, Apple are avoiding and even banning GPL, preferring BSD. And they are one of the worst anti-FOSS values examples (due to extreme lock-in, patent aggression and so on).

bregma 7y ago

I love the way commenters here equate FLOSS development with unpaid hobbyist developers. Fact: most of the contributors to the Linux kernel are highly-paid professionals who do that work full time. The same goes for many, if not most, of the popular and successful FLOSS projects. It is an error to assume that free (as in speech) software is only made by free (as in beer) development.

megous 7y ago
Fact based on what? I don't doubt the kernel claim. There are regular LWN summaries, about what companies contributed to whatever release. But I have no clue what you're basing your second claim on. There's huge amount of FLOSS programs that work fine, are useful, but don't get much contributions. And I don't know about any studies/overviews on what number of programs say in a Debian distro is a work of passion, and what is created by paid devs.

Jorge1o1 7y ago

There's a great deal of irony in a publication promoting FOSS, but their own website is closed source.

sleepus 7y ago
.. along with the usage of Disqus, some third-party analytics and Google Apps.
skyfaller 7y ago
Is Linux Journal's website closed source? Looks like it's running Drupal to me, a quick scan of the HTML reveals <meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 8 (https://www.drupal.org)" https://www.drupal.org)" />. Drupal is GPLv2+, seems fine. Would be nice if they replaced Disqus with e.g. https://commento.io/ https://commento.io/ though.

bencollier49 7y ago

Here's a thought - can we trace this back to the point at which everyone moved from Slashdot to Hacker News? All of a sudden the dominant social incentive changed from open software to startups and profit.

jslabovitz 7y ago
Perhaps... But if you do that, it would also be interesting to trace free software back to the point where the GPL became popular. (GPL was published in 1983, but in my recollection it wasn't until the early/mid-90s that it surged into general usage.) Before that, 'free' software generally meant public domain: no licenses, no limitation on use -- at all. We had two or three decades of free software of that type, mostly distributed over Usenet, BBSes, FTP/Gopher, etc. I'm probably being too oblique, but I believe it's short-sighted to believe free software must only be ideologically free. There was, in fact, an earlier period, where developers release software for free because, well, why not? Okay, time for this retired grumpy programmer to retreat back to his hut in the forest now...
- PeterisP 7y ago
  My memory of that period (mid-90s-299ish) is that in a majority of cases the widely used 'public domain' software was distributed without restrictions but also without source code, and thus did not really enable modification and redistribution of improved versions even if the licence (or lack of it) didn't prohibit me to do so; so back then the 'ideologically free' movement towards open source software did result in an actual increase of practical freedoms.
  - jslabovitz 7y ago
    Ah, I did not explain clearly. My mistake. I wasn't talking about binary-only shareware distribution, but rather source code (primarily Unix/C-based on comp.sources.*). I'm thinking about the Usenet software itself (B News, C News, rn, tin, vnews), sendmail/bind, early Pine/Mutt/procmail (?), scripting languages like Perl/Python/Ruby, and so on. And a pile of early microcomputer code for Z80/8080/6500/6800/etc.

degobah 7y ago

We also need to donate more to FOSS. And find more ways to monetize FOSS. It's tough for many FOSS projects to succeed on a volunteer basis.

zanny 7y ago

Its more abjectly a moral failing of society that institutions have not aligned to enable free software proliferation. Software, and information in general, have been a prisoners dilemma for time immemorial. The optimization of utility is total freedom of information - but such a state of affairs means benefactors reap the labors of others and have no obligation to give anything in return. Copyright was fabricated to solve 18th century problems with an 18th century bureaucratic solution. The whole free software movement in general emerged as a counterculture to how intensely harmful to society that policy influenced the natural state of affairs to become. If anything, the fact free software enthusiasts have lost sight of what the ultimate goal has to be - the abolition of copyright and institution of basic standards of living for all citizens derived from the productive gains of the extraordinary multiplicative effects technology, itself derived substantially from free software, produces - is what really needs to shift. Anything less keeps the movement in an atrophying limbo where fresh minds join, put in their best effort, and fall out from the captured value innovation produces in our society. We need to move towards a state of affairs where enthusiasts can produce freedom respecting code because they want to, that don't go hungry or homeless for their efforts, and where all of society can reap the benefits of theirs (and billions others) generosity and compounding efficiency produced through technological innovation. And where everyone has access to the fruits of those labors regardless of means as a way to improve the collective knowledge of mankind for all the rest of us. Just think for a moment of the bizarre world where the brightest need not toil to manipulate tired and depressed minds psychologically to siphon scarce money from them to line the pockets of robber barons masquerading as productive members of society, but instead could comfortably collaborate towards actually making the world a better place.

mwfunk 7y ago
Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright, because it's the only thing that gives the GPL any meaning at all. In a copyright-free world, any company could make a proprietary GCC fork, lock its code up behind many layers of physical and digital security, make all its developers/employees sign NDAs and other legal agreements ensuring they don't leak any of the new code, et voila. Hardly sounds like a Free Software utopia.

jondubois 7y ago

I still cannot believe that we live in a world were: - A website with a silly name like 'Facebook' is worth half a trillion dollars and is extremely profitable. - A website with a silly name like 'Twitter' which only lets you post 140 characters at a time is worth 30 billion dollars. - An app with a silly name like 'Snapchat' which loses billions of dollars per year is worth almost $15 billion. - An international taxi service with a silly name like 'Uber' which is losing billions of dollars per year is worth almost $100 billion. - That software developers don't see anything wrong with building apps on top of proprietary cloud APIs (e.g. Amazon Lambda) - The closest real-world analogy that I can think of is that it's like building a house with your own bare hands for years and then, once you finally finish it, you start paying a corporation rent (at whatever rate they ask for) so that you can live in your own house! Meanwhile, the whole time, there was an even better plot of land right next door which was 100% free but you ignored it because the signposts on the corporate land were flashing with bright neon lights. The economy makes so little sense that there is no incentive left to create value. The best you can do is just look for the next financial scheme to take advantage of. I bet it will be something completely random and useless.

pjc50 7y ago
Names are hard, and all of those except Uber are extremely apt and descriptive. In the lambda case, it's very much closer to "build and maintain a house, doing all the trades work yourself" versus just renting somewhere. The latter has a much shorter lead time and upfront cost. If you're just doing a job for 18 months somewhere to see if it works out, would you spend a decade building a house there first?
theamk 7y ago
Re Lambda, I think the closest analogy is renting unfurnished office. When our company moved into next office, it had bare walls with old ugly wallpaper. We paid for the new wallpaper, carpet, interior walls, wiring, etc... And we also kept paying the rent to the building owner, and were at their mercy when they eventually decided to stop renting out that space. Even then, this made perfect sense for business. All-new construction would have been way longer and more expensive, even taking limited lease time in the account. Why would software equivalent of this (Lambda) be different?

acd 7y ago

A bug in GPL is that it allows SAAS Software as a service built on Open source software which means Software as a service can leech on open source software without contributing back. https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/the-saas-loophole-in-gpl-open-source-licenses https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/t... Using AGPL instead of GPL closes the Saas loop hole. Also due to close to zero bank interest rates the general availability of venture capital is to some extent stopping new open source software. Instead of giving away your software for free as Open source software you start a venture capital funded Software as a service instead.

Drdrdrq 7y ago
> Using AGPL instead of GPL closes the Saas loop hole. In spirit maybe, but not in practice because of its loopholes. That was the reason MongoDB changed their license.
pjmlp 7y ago
True, but that is what has driven most business to ignore most GPL libraries and drive back to glory days of PD/Freeware/Shareware, just with the source code for basic funcionality as the modern demo version, instead of the old time limited one.

pdonis 7y ago

Searls says that the fight for general purpose computing is the one most worth having: but I think he's using a definition of "general purpose computing" that most non-developers won't even understand, much less agree with. The problem is that development is an extremely special purpose--one that most people don't do and don't understand the needs of. As a developer, I want a level of control over every aspect of my computer that most people don't want, need, or even think of. To most people, "general purpose computing" just means their computer (or more likely their phone, these days) can run any app they want it to run. It doesn't mean what Searls (and the people whose articles he references, like Doctorow) takes it to mean. And to the ordinary person, the idea that it is essential to society that developers have the freedom to configure their computers however they want, regardless of what the government or some corporation says, doesn't sound like something worth fighting for; it sounds like something scary. They don't think of Stallman developing Gnu or Linus Torvalds developing Linux; they think of computer viruses and worms running rampant.

mwcampbell 7y ago
Maybe we can at least make sure that the next generation of children get it, or at least the kids that we are close to. This is on my mind because I have five nieces and one nephew, all of whom are less than five years old. I gave three of them Amazon tablets the Christmas before last, and have come to regret it. I will do what I can to make sure that their next computers will be general-purpose as we developers understand it. It may be worthwhile to reflect on my own early experience with computers. In 1988, when I was almost 8, my family's first computer was an Apple IIGS. As I explained in my personal retrospective on that machine a few years ago [1], that machine had kind of a split personality, because it combined compatibility with the earlier 8-bit Apple II models with a more or less Mac-like, native 16-bit environment. The legacy 8-bit environment included BASIC in ROM, whereas the native 16-bit environment could only be programmed with a dedicated development environment that wasn't included with the computer. Of course, even many 8-bit Apple II programs were written in assembly language and were locked down to varying degrees (e.g. copy protection, no easy way to break into the BASIC interpreter). But at least that BASIC interpreter was available in the 8-bit environment. So the 16-bit environment represented another step in the direction of separating users from developers. I remember one experience that, I think, helped spark my interest in programming. One day when I was about 8, my uncle Eric was over at our house, and he brought with him a disk full of 8-bit Apple II games. One of those games was written in BASIC and somehow involved shapes crudely rendered in text mode (I don't remember anything else about the game). He had modified those shapes to bear the names of his kids. That was interesting all by itself. But then, if I remember correctly, he went in and modified the game to show the names of my siblings and me instead. These days, we call this live coding. And with most off-the-shelf software now, it's impossible. If we can fix this for free software, I think more people will be enthusiastic about it. Of course, the specific example I recounted here is pretty trivial, but the lesson is clear: we need to make it practical for people to modify the software they use every day, on the fly, with low friction. Then, the freedom to modify software will matter to more people. [1]: https://mwcampbell.us/blog/apple-iigs.html https://mwcampbell.us/blog/apple-iigs.html

fgheorghe 7y ago

Linux was built in an era of fierce resistance from the corporate world, so what is there to save today when everything runs or touches OSS in one way or another and most decent developers will make an OSS contribution, to claim on their CVs?

workingpatrick 7y ago

Bit of hypocrisy on the part of the author for publishing on this platform.... The comment section of this article: "Our discussions are powered by Disqus, which require JavaScript. "

Yaa101 7y ago

Convenience seems to be the only value of things in the real world, so bad even that people en masse are prepared to submit to slavery to get it. I suggest that the FOSS community now finally starts building something convenient for themselfs instead of making things hard and massochist.

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

Linux has an HR department now - and big corporate managers driving its technology goals. I guarantee you 99% of the people on this forum will jump all over me in defense of both. Trannies, init systems, whatever layer of technology Wayland is these days, Pulseaudio, The Eternal Presence of Chrome... You and you - and you there! You kept picking corporate choices. I don't need another job.

gridlockd 7y ago

Don't listen to the Copyleftists. FOSS is bigger than ever because non-copyleft free software is what professionals can build on. For the most part, Copyleftists are stuck in Hobbyland and it really shows when you look at the software they produce. Their business models - if they even have one - largely don't work. Given that software is very expensive to produce, copyleft software eventually runs out of suckers to support it after the "fun factor" wears off and the "real work" starts. The Linux kernel is the major exception, but only because the particular exceptions that the GPL grants to it do not encumber the enterprises that develop Linux. Wherever it does, enterprises will choose non-copyleft alternatives (e.g. Sony and Nintendo building on FreeBSD).

throw2016 7y ago

What made Linux and FOSS possible is a specific time and context and that is not happening again. There is no job security, everything is about building a resume, getting a job and hanging on or a startup, everything is related to money or status. There is also an ahistorical perspective of tech, as if things just are or happen with no deliberate effort and its an open question whether there is any real commitment or concern for the principles which drove the open source movement. In many ways Slashdot defined the original generation and Hackernews defines this one. And even paying lip service to principles would be quaint here. Defending building surveillance systems and stalking people 24/7 while referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments. This is a huge shift.

danans 7y ago
> referring to general users as idiots are often the top voted comments I seem to recall this being true on Slashdot also.
fuzzfactor 7y ago
from the article's comments: Dave Taht • 44 minutes ago We really, really, really need a return to our core values I remember how fired up I was in 1999, when I wrote this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxLbNCB-YKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxLbNCB-YKI and how fired up I am now to try and get our internet back. Still it is hard to be a revolutionary with two kids and a mortgage, and we've lost most of the next generation of coders to javascript and student debt.

makz 7y ago

I have several things to say here. I see we are still debating the same points as many years ago (GIMP vs Photoshop, Visual Studio, paid vs unpaid labor, chicken and egg, convenience...). It’s like we haven’t learned anything. About the end of general computing, I don’t see it as a bad thing. In some way it has always existed. Right now we have server computers, desktop computers, smart phones, mainframe, cloud... even on a single class of computer we have some segmentation. It just means we’ll have even more specialization. And FOSS still can have a place there. Speaking about that, I believe FOSS is stronger at the foundational layers. Maybe the future is kind of and hybrid model in which we have lots of new computer classes with FOSS as their foundation. Not very different from what we have now, just much more diverse and, I hope, more open.

deleted 7y ago

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ngcc_hk 7y ago

Wonder how many free software would be in china inside e-great wall? What wonder what we use if majority of computer is intel based and they have a parallel computer controlled your cpu? Strangely arm is sort of open what can you pay to develop your own total open env and ... Any further, wonder what is open source movement is all about if not asking for a mixed environment ? It is the dying middle that might be the problem or is there no problem. Wonder.

nevrthepfhor 7y ago

People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep. They don't want to find, audit, install, and evaluate dozens of obscure third-party extensions to make their OS usable. They want options for setting their background image besides Fit to screen. And they want to be able to use their friend's computer without having to learn how to use all their friend's customizations.

soulofmischief 7y ago
All of those are design choices. None of that has anything to do with open source.
- nevrthepfhor 7y ago
  All this time I was under the impression that OSS design was heavily influenced by a subculture involving hacking and ruthlessly rejecting any unnecessary features in 'officially' supported versions. I'm sure that the massive correlation between fake North Korean storefront-tier GUIs and open source is just a coincidence. If you're going to say that these sorts of design choices aren't perpetuated by so-called open source culture as it currently exists then there's no conversation to be had. Unless OSS culture has radically transformed in the last three months and I missed it.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
> People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep. Nothing says that all free software will be good or user-friendly (systemd is an excellent case-in-point). But you can choose a better alternative. Proprietary software sometimes has short-term convenience benefits, but even thinking slightly-longer-term quickly shows that it's never worth it. Even with less-than-ideal software like systemd, it's still miles better than proprietary alternatives. Yes, you may have to run "systemctl suspend"* to put your computer to sleep, but you don't end up with Candy Crush embedded in your program launcher, or over-12-years-outdated bash, etc. [*] It's pretty easy to wrap 'systemctl suspend' in something friendlier, such as a shortcut.

sovande 7y ago

Sure, we need naive wish lists, but for open source to be more than a curios historical blip and not fall into a Venezuelan disaster, the least we can demand of FSF and OSI is to give us a proper open source license so those who want to _do_ open source work can also succeed commercially. They need to understand and address problems faced by MongoDB, Redis, Elastic et. al. and support their needs with a new license (something better than AGPL). Not flat out dismiss the problems and swipe it under the rug.

yarrel 7y ago
No, they need to make clear that VC funding isn't entitled to returns on bad business models. That is the real problem.

danans 7y ago

I don't think the problem is that FOSS (as a movement) can't accomplish what proprietary software does. For a while, some FOSS software did address certain user needs better than proprietary software. But the world of proprietary software (including permissively licensed open source software) just moved faster, because its associated business models gave it the money, incentives, and the early signals needed to attack problem spaces in human-computer-interaction and secure, managed application platforms, among other things, that FOSS didn't have the resources to address, and so it just fell behind in key areas relevant to users. We just don't know what the FOSS movement could have achieved given similar resources (or how it would have gotten those resources in the first place without a business model), or a lot more time.

interfixus 7y ago

> Our discussions are powered by Disqus Abandon all hope.

maxhedrome 7y ago

I’ll just leave this here for whoever wants to read it https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...

jsnz 7y ago

The opinions in this article are simply fear-mongering and divisive of the programmer community as whole. They are formulated on an irrational fear of FOSS being extinguished by the greed of the corporations. So long as there is at least one programmer left with the will to post their source to the world FOSS will not die. Let's also not be so one-eyed as forget to value equally the contribution of all programmers who write great software whether free or not, open or closed-source - we can still admire the fruits of their labours if not their algorithms. FOSS community, please stop wringing your hands in fear, go write some code with them!