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I think the problem is that the FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable go

I think the problem is that the FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The actual situation is that we have two groups that care about different things: Users and developers. Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. They care about restrictions like DRM if it hinders them in doing what they want to do. The only way free software can help here is that other people (developers) can remove those restrictions. Proprietary software can easily offer the same freedoms for users.

bad_user 10y ago
> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the freedom to change the oil or filters by themselves or even do technical repairs. The worst that could happen is a void warranty, which is limited anyway. And people that don't have the technical know-how, such as myself, can go into any repair shop. Doesn't have to be an "official representative" of my car's brand. This in turn keeps prices down. I mean, I can tell you that for my Peugeot, where I live, the prices for both service and components for my car at the local representative are at least 2x or 3x bigger than at alternative and quite respectable repair shops. Let me put it another way. A proprietary software package doesn't even guarantee that it will still be around and developed in 10 years from now. An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. > They care about restrictions like DRM... Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products.
- simonh 10y ago
  >An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. At the government department or big organization level, they can fund or perform any proprietary development they need themselves as well. FOSS just isn't necessary at that level of resources. For ordinary users FOSS provides essentially zero comparative benefits over proprietary. If code doesn't have the features they need, goes unsupported or has bugs, they're in the same boat regardless. People choose to pay for software for valid reasons.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    "they can fund or perform any proprietary development they need themselves as well" Try phoning up Microsoft and asking them how much it would cost to add a feature for an old piece of DOS software that they haven't touched in the last 20 years. I suspect the answer would be at least 8 figures, if not 9.
    - simonh 10y ago
      The point is, an organization at that scale can solve problems at that level because they have the resources to fund development of an alternative that e.g. doesn't rely on DOS. Individual users don't have the funds to do that, or the skills to develop new features themselves, so once it's no longer supported they're equally screwed whether the software they rely on is FOSS or proprietary.
      - bryanlarsen 10y ago
        If the software is open source, you can relatively easily find somebody to do it for you for $100/hour or so. That's within the scope of many individuals. $100 000 000 is outside of the scope of pretty much everybody.
        simonh 10y ago
        Relatively easily. Really. Your solution is for ordinary non technical people to become development managers and hire someone they don't know to do something they don't understand at their own financial risk.
- iheartmemcache 10y ago
  ** > There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. < RE: 1 - Yes they do. Look at your little sister/brother/niece/nephew aged 13-18. They want to gossip and flirt on Instagram and take selfies as a way to promote themselves. Their goal is pretty clear-cut -- they want to raise their social stature amongst their peers. People in their 40s know what they want too. With Facebook they can keep in touch with people they knew 20 years ago and kill time at their work playing {whatever replaced Farmville} looking at pictures of {cats or something}. RE: 2 - I agree, but I posit it's really not their job to care. You don't know how the traffic light infrastructure works (presumably) or the logistics of your city's DPW. You just presume concrete will be poured into potholes when appropriate. Very few people actually care how things actually get done; their concern isn't freedom or the subtle politics behind BSD vs GPL2 vs CC w Attribution - their concern is if they can 'drive home without hitting the potholes' (load instagram without the app crashing). -- (That car analogy breaks down due to the fact that you're driving a relatively obscure car manufacturer/make/model. Those alternative and respectable repair shops are staffed with your average joe picking up a spanner used to swapping out Toyota Corolla struts and changing Ford Focus oil. The difference in topology between cars has decreased as a function of time (especially modern cars, which tend to share components - e.g. the '99 Corolla was piece for piece, internally, what a Chevy Prizm had of the same model year). I'm no automotive engineer but I can tinker my way into making anything work (bonus: with a high confidence factor of "this wire loom won't catch on fire"), but Joe-your-friendly-tech is charging 2x-3x more because he has to open a book and invest time in reading data-sheets for something he's not used to working on regularly (then ordering the proper pieces, installing them, and doing things like calibrating the stoich of the carb/adjusting the float, etc that's all taken care of by one of the ~600-800 MCU's in a modern car).
  - vetinari 10y ago
    Peugeot will a well-known brand in Europe (French, after all). Chevy, on the other hand ;)
  - palunon 10y ago
- zepto 10y ago
  "Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products." This may be the true. But how about this: 'Users don't care much about DRM because the benefits of convenience outweigh the costs' How do you know which explanation is true? Personally I favor the latter. DRM is not more complicated than other things that people care about. If it was compelling for people to care about it, the people who do understand it would find it easier to educate and convince those who don't.
- dasil003 10y ago
  I'm with you except the very last assertion: > Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products. I understand DRM in great detail (as CTO of a streaming film company), and though I would in principal like to reject it, I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy. Theoretically if all the customers stood up and boycotted DRM we could have an effect, but in practice that would mean not being able to see the latest premium content for some period of time. Are people really going to give up their Game of Thrones to strong arm the industry? I can't foresee any universe where that would happen regardless of the users' understanding and savviness. edit: it's amazing how this provokes a flurry of replies, none of which address my point at all. I am not making any positive claims about DRM. I am simply asking: how are you going to mobilize customers to boycott DRM?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    > I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy Why? Pirates are the only ones who aren't affected by DRM. That's why I torrent Netflix shows even while paying for Netflix. I can play them anywhere, even without a net connection.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    I would turn the question the other way: are movie publishers going to give up the distribution over internet / playback on anything connected to the internet? I very much doubt it. They are never going back to physical discs and require their customers to drive to shop and buy a physical copy. Heck, right now companies like Netflix fight hard in order to be able to be present in the web browser. On the other hand, I see adapting a so keep your Game of Thrones for yourself attitude somewhat more realistic. There are already people like that.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my media computer. My friend brought over a Blu-Ray copy of "The Social Network". It turned out that we could not play the film in the drive without paying an additional fee for a proprietary, DRM-enabled Blu-Ray video player application. This is particularly bullshit because I paid for the hardware. They could have just built the appropriate crypto keys into there. Hell, they could have built a whole update-and-revocation scheme into the drive's firmware, something that much smaller and weaker devices than Blu-Ray drives can still afford in their electronics and firmware. They could have built it all so that buying the hardware would enable me to play the media, no further questions asked. They did not need to sell me a piece of hardware that is outright unusable for its intended purpose without further payment for proprietary software whose primary job is just to license the appropriate crypto keys.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. Government agencies aren't even the interesting example. The argument we usually get is that not everybody is going to be a programmer. Which, OK, sure, but maybe 10-20% of people are going to be programmers. Which means even if you aren't a programmer, your brother and your niece and your buddy are. So now you have some unmaintained software you've been using for 20 years, you get a new OS and it doesn't work anymore. It will take your buddy three hours to fix if they have the source and 1000 hours without it. And you can impose on (or afford to pay) your buddy for three hours but not 1000. And then your buddy can publish the fix and now everybody has it. And it goes the same even if the thing isn't broken. If "the user" can improve the software then so can the user's brother who actually knows how to, which is clearly useful to the user. It's fairly simple maths. How do you get better software, when every programmer in the world can improve it, or when only the assigned teams at Apple or Google or [defuct company] can do it?
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    10-20% seems high; even right now, programmers make up about 1% of the US workforce and computer and mathematical occupations combined account for less than 3% of the US workforce (halve the numbers to get percentage of US population).
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      That's the current percentage of professionals, which is likely to increase. It doesn't include many "programmers" whose occupation is listed under engineering or finance or management or security, or anyone who does it as a hobby instead of an occupation. And why do you expect the students and retirees who constitute the non-working half of the population to have a different long-term composition?
      - jsprogrammer 10y ago
        That's self-reported, current occupation [0] collected by BLS. [0] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm
davexunit 10y ago
>FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The FSF does not believe that everyone should be a programmer. Much like freedom of the press matters for those that aren't journalists, freedom of the software matters for those that aren't programmers. I care about the right to repair even though I'm not a car mechanic. >The actual situation is that we have two groups that care about different things: Users and developers This is a very broad and inaccurate generalization. Even as someone that identifies as a "developer", I'm often just a user. Sometimes the "user" ends up hacking on something, perhaps not even really knowing that they did. It's a spectrum, and it wouldn't seem like such a dichotomy if more software was actually written that encouraged its users to explore its source code and provided ways to extend it. The tech industry reinforces the "user and developer" separation and I think that's a real shame.
- toyg 10y ago
  > The tech industry reinforces the "user and developer" separation and I think that's a real shame. It's also a losing strategy, which is why concepts like dogfooding and support duties exist. Developers must be users at times, and users have a lot to gain from occasionally being developers (hence all the brouhaha about "learning to code" and so on). Seeing the world in terms of users and developers is a throwback to 1970s waterfall cathedrals, something the Free Software movement is quite clearly set against.
- ethbro 10y ago
  I think in practice it's a user / tinkerer / developer trichotomy. Or to put it another way blind user / configuring user / developer. With the ability to take a change someone else has made and apply it to something you purchased (e.g. Cyanogenmod) being exercised far more frequently than individual development.
- cwyers 10y ago
  Sure, it's a spectrum. But it's a very lopsided one -- there's a huge mass of people over at the "100% user" side of the spectrum, and a long, thin tail out towards developer.
lotyrin 10y ago
I'm pretty sure this is only because the current state of the art for software development is too hard, too risky and too inefficient. Algorithmic and structural thinking are achievable by anyone. Most people just aren't willing to deal with arguing with a machine about what you mean (syntax), dealing with the accidental complexity and risks that modern languages and runtimes thrust upon you (memory management, declaring types, distributed consistency, persistence not being baked in, caring about where on the network your app "really runs"), and how much work it takes to go from a simple formula, some data and some money to a result. If I am a scientist with a megabyte of numbers, a trivial map function (x^2) and a reduce function (x+x'), how many steps does it take and how many concepts do I have to learn and how long would it take me to run it? What if it's a gigabyte? How about a terabyte? A petabyte? A constant stream? What if my numbers are "weird" to computer science people like being bigger than a 64bit int or being n-dimensional arbitrary-precision vectors? Depending on these answers, why the hell are the steps and concepts I have to learn widely different? This is like the simplest problem to solve, and we just haven't. Software is solving problems it has invented for itself and failed both other disciplines and the layperson.

bad_user 10y ago

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the freedom to change the oil or filters by themselves or even do technical repairs. The worst that could happen is a void warranty, which is limited anyway. And people that don't have the technical know-how, such as myself, can go into any repair shop. Doesn't have to be an "official representative" of my car's brand. This in turn keeps prices down. I mean, I can tell you that for my Peugeot, where I live, the prices for both service and components for my car at the local representative are at least 2x or 3x bigger than at alternative and quite respectable repair shops. Let me put it another way. A proprietary software package doesn't even guarantee that it will still be around and developed in 10 years from now. An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. > They care about restrictions like DRM... Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products.

simonh 10y ago
>An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. At the government department or big organization level, they can fund or perform any proprietary development they need themselves as well. FOSS just isn't necessary at that level of resources. For ordinary users FOSS provides essentially zero comparative benefits over proprietary. If code doesn't have the features they need, goes unsupported or has bugs, they're in the same boat regardless. People choose to pay for software for valid reasons.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  "they can fund or perform any proprietary development they need themselves as well" Try phoning up Microsoft and asking them how much it would cost to add a feature for an old piece of DOS software that they haven't touched in the last 20 years. I suspect the answer would be at least 8 figures, if not 9.
  - simonh 10y ago
    The point is, an organization at that scale can solve problems at that level because they have the resources to fund development of an alternative that e.g. doesn't rely on DOS. Individual users don't have the funds to do that, or the skills to develop new features themselves, so once it's no longer supported they're equally screwed whether the software they rely on is FOSS or proprietary.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
      If the software is open source, you can relatively easily find somebody to do it for you for $100/hour or so. That's within the scope of many individuals. $100 000 000 is outside of the scope of pretty much everybody.
      - simonh 10y ago
        Relatively easily. Really. Your solution is for ordinary non technical people to become development managers and hire someone they don't know to do something they don't understand at their own financial risk.
iheartmemcache 10y ago
** > There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. < RE: 1 - Yes they do. Look at your little sister/brother/niece/nephew aged 13-18. They want to gossip and flirt on Instagram and take selfies as a way to promote themselves. Their goal is pretty clear-cut -- they want to raise their social stature amongst their peers. People in their 40s know what they want too. With Facebook they can keep in touch with people they knew 20 years ago and kill time at their work playing {whatever replaced Farmville} looking at pictures of {cats or something}. RE: 2 - I agree, but I posit it's really not their job to care. You don't know how the traffic light infrastructure works (presumably) or the logistics of your city's DPW. You just presume concrete will be poured into potholes when appropriate. Very few people actually care how things actually get done; their concern isn't freedom or the subtle politics behind BSD vs GPL2 vs CC w Attribution - their concern is if they can 'drive home without hitting the potholes' (load instagram without the app crashing). -- (That car analogy breaks down due to the fact that you're driving a relatively obscure car manufacturer/make/model. Those alternative and respectable repair shops are staffed with your average joe picking up a spanner used to swapping out Toyota Corolla struts and changing Ford Focus oil. The difference in topology between cars has decreased as a function of time (especially modern cars, which tend to share components - e.g. the '99 Corolla was piece for piece, internally, what a Chevy Prizm had of the same model year). I'm no automotive engineer but I can tinker my way into making anything work (bonus: with a high confidence factor of "this wire loom won't catch on fire"), but Joe-your-friendly-tech is charging 2x-3x more because he has to open a book and invest time in reading data-sheets for something he's not used to working on regularly (then ordering the proper pieces, installing them, and doing things like calibrating the stoich of the carb/adjusting the float, etc that's all taken care of by one of the ~600-800 MCU's in a modern car).
- vetinari 10y ago
  Peugeot will a well-known brand in Europe (French, after all). Chevy, on the other hand ;)
- palunon 10y ago
zepto 10y ago
"Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products." This may be the true. But how about this: 'Users don't care much about DRM because the benefits of convenience outweigh the costs' How do you know which explanation is true? Personally I favor the latter. DRM is not more complicated than other things that people care about. If it was compelling for people to care about it, the people who do understand it would find it easier to educate and convince those who don't.
dasil003 10y ago
I'm with you except the very last assertion: > Again, users don't care about DRM. Because they don't understand it. If they did, they would reject DRM-enabled products. I understand DRM in great detail (as CTO of a streaming film company), and though I would in principal like to reject it, I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy. Theoretically if all the customers stood up and boycotted DRM we could have an effect, but in practice that would mean not being able to see the latest premium content for some period of time. Are people really going to give up their Game of Thrones to strong arm the industry? I can't foresee any universe where that would happen regardless of the users' understanding and savviness. edit: it's amazing how this provokes a flurry of replies, none of which address my point at all. I am not making any positive claims about DRM. I am simply asking: how are you going to mobilize customers to boycott DRM?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  > I have no basis to do so except illegal piracy Why? Pirates are the only ones who aren't affected by DRM. That's why I torrent Netflix shows even while paying for Netflix. I can play them anywhere, even without a net connection.
- vetinari 10y ago
  I would turn the question the other way: are movie publishers going to give up the distribution over internet / playback on anything connected to the internet? I very much doubt it. They are never going back to physical discs and require their customers to drive to shop and buy a physical copy. Heck, right now companies like Netflix fight hard in order to be able to be present in the web browser. On the other hand, I see adapting a so keep your Game of Thrones for yourself attitude somewhat more realistic. There are already people like that.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my media computer. My friend brought over a Blu-Ray copy of "The Social Network". It turned out that we could not play the film in the drive without paying an additional fee for a proprietary, DRM-enabled Blu-Ray video player application. This is particularly bullshit because I paid for the hardware. They could have just built the appropriate crypto keys into there. Hell, they could have built a whole update-and-revocation scheme into the drive's firmware, something that much smaller and weaker devices than Blu-Ray drives can still afford in their electronics and firmware. They could have built it all so that buying the hardware would enable me to play the media, no further questions asked. They did not need to sell me a piece of hardware that is outright unusable for its intended purpose without further payment for proprietary software whose primary job is just to license the appropriate crypto keys.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. Government agencies aren't even the interesting example. The argument we usually get is that not everybody is going to be a programmer. Which, OK, sure, but maybe 10-20% of people are going to be programmers. Which means even if you aren't a programmer, your brother and your niece and your buddy are. So now you have some unmaintained software you've been using for 20 years, you get a new OS and it doesn't work anymore. It will take your buddy three hours to fix if they have the source and 1000 hours without it. And you can impose on (or afford to pay) your buddy for three hours but not 1000. And then your buddy can publish the fix and now everybody has it. And it goes the same even if the thing isn't broken. If "the user" can improve the software then so can the user's brother who actually knows how to, which is clearly useful to the user. It's fairly simple maths. How do you get better software, when every programmer in the world can improve it, or when only the assigned teams at Apple or Google or [defuct company] can do it?
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  10-20% seems high; even right now, programmers make up about 1% of the US workforce and computer and mathematical occupations combined account for less than 3% of the US workforce (halve the numbers to get percentage of US population).
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    That's the current percentage of professionals, which is likely to increase. It doesn't include many "programmers" whose occupation is listed under engineering or finance or management or security, or anyone who does it as a hobby instead of an occupation. And why do you expect the students and retirees who constitute the non-working half of the population to have a different long-term composition?
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      That's self-reported, current occupation [0] collected by BLS. [0] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm

davexunit 10y ago

>FSF's definition of freedom still stems from a time where everybody being a programmer was seen as a realistic and achievable goal. The FSF does not believe that everyone should be a programmer. Much like freedom of the press matters for those that aren't journalists, freedom of the software matters for those that aren't programmers. I care about the right to repair even though I'm not a car mechanic. >The actual situation is that we have two groups that care about different things: Users and developers This is a very broad and inaccurate generalization. Even as someone that identifies as a "developer", I'm often just a user. Sometimes the "user" ends up hacking on something, perhaps not even really knowing that they did. It's a spectrum, and it wouldn't seem like such a dichotomy if more software was actually written that encouraged its users to explore its source code and provided ways to extend it. The tech industry reinforces the "user and developer" separation and I think that's a real shame.

toyg 10y ago
> The tech industry reinforces the "user and developer" separation and I think that's a real shame. It's also a losing strategy, which is why concepts like dogfooding and support duties exist. Developers must be users at times, and users have a lot to gain from occasionally being developers (hence all the brouhaha about "learning to code" and so on). Seeing the world in terms of users and developers is a throwback to 1970s waterfall cathedrals, something the Free Software movement is quite clearly set against.
ethbro 10y ago
I think in practice it's a user / tinkerer / developer trichotomy. Or to put it another way blind user / configuring user / developer. With the ability to take a change someone else has made and apply it to something you purchased (e.g. Cyanogenmod) being exercised far more frequently than individual development.
cwyers 10y ago
Sure, it's a spectrum. But it's a very lopsided one -- there's a huge mass of people over at the "100% user" side of the spectrum, and a long, thin tail out towards developer.

lotyrin 10y ago

I'm pretty sure this is only because the current state of the art for software development is too hard, too risky and too inefficient. Algorithmic and structural thinking are achievable by anyone. Most people just aren't willing to deal with arguing with a machine about what you mean (syntax), dealing with the accidental complexity and risks that modern languages and runtimes thrust upon you (memory management, declaring types, distributed consistency, persistence not being baked in, caring about where on the network your app "really runs"), and how much work it takes to go from a simple formula, some data and some money to a result. If I am a scientist with a megabyte of numbers, a trivial map function (x^2) and a reduce function (x+x'), how many steps does it take and how many concepts do I have to learn and how long would it take me to run it? What if it's a gigabyte? How about a terabyte? A petabyte? A constant stream? What if my numbers are "weird" to computer science people like being bigger than a 64bit int or being n-dimensional arbitrary-precision vectors? Depending on these answers, why the hell are the steps and concepts I have to learn widely different? This is like the simplest problem to solve, and we just haven't. Software is solving problems it has invented for itself and failed both other disciplines and the layperson.