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I’m sorry, no. If the FSF had a billion dollar budget, you’d still lose people immediately at the first instruction to open a terminal and become root. Your com

I’m sorry, no. If the FSF had a billion dollar budget, you’d still lose people immediately at the first instruction to open a terminal and become root. Your comment actually illustrates the exact point I’m making: the epsilon between us and them is widening, because the loudest voices want people to look at computing the same way our heroes of the ‘70s and ‘80s did and don’t realize this is unproductive. Freedom is too often equated with the way we have done things before. You or I buy a phone and look for a terminal. They buy a phone and go straight to the App Store to install Facebook. And yes, people know what they want. They are on Facebook because that’s what they want. Look at pictures of my newborn, group of friends. Oh, all my friends are on Facebook and it lets me do that. What’s that, GNU Social? I need to figure out what? I need a server? Mail is decentralized. How many average people don’t use a central service like Gmail? People are choosing the things Free Software doesn’t like because for them it is better. Full stop. Free Software has no competitive answer for anything the big names are doing for the average user. Not one thing. There’s enough people interested in it that competitive answers could be developed and find a market. The problem is unrealistic ideals (decentralization, often; how much of global SMTP traffic is spam, again?) placing unrealistic requirements upon a project and focusing all of its resources on things the average user doesn’t care about. What if I wrote a Facebook that cared about privacy and, somehow, miraculously got billion MAU traction? You’d be right back banging the same drum making you irrelevant about surveillance state apparatus because it’s centralized. Except the whole point of Facebook is network effect. So. You’re deluding yourself if you think billions of people are clueless and Free Software has all the answers, if only there were a little more budget. Just look at the worldview evident in your comment. That sort of talk will make most anybody glaze over, and you immediately lose your chance to pull them to a better way of doing things. “Only use things to which you can read source code.” What’s source code? Nobody cares about the ideals. Adapt accordingly if you want to effect meaningful change. That’s my point. There’s literally decades of proof based on what’s successful that we don’t have a firm grasp of how to adapt software freedom to Joe Random. You and I both know it’s better. Now figure out how to tell them and design systems that are palatable to the average user. That’s my other point: I don’t think a customizable system with Free Software ideals in mind can sufficiently protect and be useful for the average user. I want to be proven wrong.

mindslight 9y ago
If the FSF had a billion dollar budget, they could copy the UI and infrastructure of Faceboot, include hooks that allowed people to run their own code/servers/etc, and then pump the resulting product LA^h^hSV-style until it caught on. There would be no need to criticize it for being somewhat centralized, because the option to run your own part would exist. And rather than powerlessly complaining about unilateral corporate decisions, even normal users could share software fixes instead. The FSF itself might specifically not be capable of this (due to an aesthetic formed from decades of waging trench war), but a generic Free software organization certainly would be. What's missing is the billion dollars to develop, refine, and endlessly promote this idea, because there is no scalable profit in actual Free software! I don't think we're actually disagreeing on the above lead-in topic - we're just coming at this from wildly different paradigms. My comments are not trying to convince "billions" of people - I'm resigned to the fact that people will tend to choose the shiny promoted thing, even when the shininess itself is paid for by the harm being done to them! But that does not mean that people who should know better (eg programmers) should find justification, or even escape scorn, for creating such things. Eroding users' ultimate control over their devices goes past the paternalism of protecting careless/ignorant users, and into the territory of malfeasance. Such things are against any basic sense of professional ethics - the same type of principle-agent violation as a sysadmin who creates a backdoor for their future self. To bring this back to something concrete, look at the paradigm of control promulgated by contemporary bootloaders. Verifying running code is a worthwhile goal, but there is no reason this requires trust rooted in manufacturer-kept keys. Rooting the trust in symmetrical algorithms or user-loaded signing keys would accomplish the same exact goal while still preserving user freedom. And then the default scheme of only trusting code signed by the manufacturer would be implemented on top of that. But doing so would require a little more implementation complexity (giving up control inherently makes things harder), and be less profitable. > There's literally decades of proof based on what's successful that we don’t have a firm grasp of how to adapt software freedom to Joe Random My above points are essentially refuting your point here. The lack of mass-appeal Free software does not imply we don't know how to make it, as it can also be explained by simply not knowing how to fund it! There are plenty of things in life that have rough edges and "average users" have ultimately learned to "not do that". Software is at an analogous stage to people putting water in the engine oil because of "one simple trick", but this does not justify welding the hood shut on all new cars!

mindslight 9y ago

If the FSF had a billion dollar budget, they could copy the UI and infrastructure of Faceboot, include hooks that allowed people to run their own code/servers/etc, and then pump the resulting product LA^h^hSV-style until it caught on. There would be no need to criticize it for being somewhat centralized, because the option to run your own part would exist. And rather than powerlessly complaining about unilateral corporate decisions, even normal users could share software fixes instead. The FSF itself might specifically not be capable of this (due to an aesthetic formed from decades of waging trench war), but a generic Free software organization certainly would be. What's missing is the billion dollars to develop, refine, and endlessly promote this idea, because there is no scalable profit in actual Free software! I don't think we're actually disagreeing on the above lead-in topic - we're just coming at this from wildly different paradigms. My comments are not trying to convince "billions" of people - I'm resigned to the fact that people will tend to choose the shiny promoted thing, even when the shininess itself is paid for by the harm being done to them! But that does not mean that people who should know better (eg programmers) should find justification, or even escape scorn, for creating such things. Eroding users' ultimate control over their devices goes past the paternalism of protecting careless/ignorant users, and into the territory of malfeasance. Such things are against any basic sense of professional ethics - the same type of principle-agent violation as a sysadmin who creates a backdoor for their future self. To bring this back to something concrete, look at the paradigm of control promulgated by contemporary bootloaders. Verifying running code is a worthwhile goal, but there is no reason this requires trust rooted in manufacturer-kept keys. Rooting the trust in symmetrical algorithms or user-loaded signing keys would accomplish the same exact goal while still preserving user freedom. And then the default scheme of only trusting code signed by the manufacturer would be implemented on top of that. But doing so would require a little more implementation complexity (giving up control inherently makes things harder), and be less profitable. > There's literally decades of proof based on what's successful that we don’t have a firm grasp of how to adapt software freedom to Joe Random My above points are essentially refuting your point here. The lack of mass-appeal Free software does not imply we don't know how to make it, as it can also be explained by simply not knowing how to fund it! There are plenty of things in life that have rough edges and "average users" have ultimately learned to "not do that". Software is at an analogous stage to people putting water in the engine oil because of "one simple trick", but this does not justify welding the hood shut on all new cars!