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I think this tacitly article is admitting something I've come to believe, that open source came to concentrate on on the wrong end of the problem. What I care

I think this tacitly article is admitting something I've come to believe, that open source came to concentrate on on the wrong end of the problem. What I care about is being able to get to my stuff - forever. Open source might help with that if it runs on my computer, and someone out there with the skill to maintain it decides to keep doing so (even most programmers have little hope of actually maintaining most of the software they use). The focus, I believe, should always have been on data formats, interchange, and local storage, not on the source code of programs. I'd rather live in a world with no open source software and open data formats than the world we seem to be heading into: one running on open technology stacks with all the data sitting on servers somewhere in formats we can only guess at.

fwip 8y ago
I'm very excited about tools like Dat and Scuttlebutt, because they do promise this exact transformative rethink of the control and ownership of data.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
What free software are you using that is creating a ton of data in a locked format without allowing a local copy? Solving this end of the problem largely solves the data format issue, and that is not the case in reverse.
- thejohnconway 8y ago
  Well I, like everybody, use the internet which mostly runs on Linux. But that wasn’t my point. Open Source probably hasn’t made things any worse, but the ideological battle was waged at the wrong end, resulting in a hollow victory. Tell some open source advocate from 2001 or so that most people do most of their computing on Linux in 2019, and I think they’ll picture something quite different to what we have in Android and the cloud.
  - meruru 8y ago
    Tell that to a Free Software advocate and you might get interesting results :) To be less obtuse: this is exactly what people who say GNU/Linux and Free Software rather than Open Source have been concerned about since the beginning.
    - thejohnconway 8y ago
      Yes, indeed. I think that Richard Stallman and similar have a more balanced message in this respect. At some point the popular focus seemed to shift the notion that open source software needed to “win” in terms of market share, regardless of whether that was helping in the cause of computing freedom.
      - quadrangle 8y ago
        That argument was not dominant (though it existed) within the world of people who cared. It was primarily pushed by people who felt that ethics were in the way of business goals. For point of reference, Linus Torvalds only half cares about ethics. He likes all the value of collaboration from a developer perspective and doesn't care so much about whether software treats people well and gives end users any freedom.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Perhaps not 2001. But there were certainly people starting to ask by the mid to late-2000s whether source code freedom was what we really needed to be worrying about the most, see e.g. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Bray here: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/28/Open-Data https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/28/Open-Data
Sargos 8y ago
Thankfully it looks like we are heading into a world with open technology stacks (Ethereum, IPFS, WASM) and open data formats where all dapps integrate and share data with each other permissionlessly.
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  I see zero evidence that IPFS or Etherum will have substantially market adoption in the near future....
- thejohnconway 8y ago
  How is WASM going to help? It looks like it's further down the road of losing the control of your files by doing stuff in ephemeral environment (the browser), without even the readability of Javascript. Perhaps I'm missing a use case here.
andbberger 8y ago
I really don't understand the sentiment of this comment. Can you go into more detail on what that world would look like? fb and the like have options to pull down your data, generally. It's not thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much work to parse it. Certainly much less work than, say, writing a RDBMS....
- thejohnconway 8y ago
  Parse data? You've already lost. What percentage of the population can do that? What I'm saying is that I believe the main effort should have been in data portability, not in the side-show of source code copyright. But I can give you a concrete example - let's say you're a blogger - it's a large part of your professional output, and a great resource for the people in your field. Now you're not really techie, but you do keep the some original writing locally because you write in Word or whatever. But all the images have to be put in the CMS directly - you can't paste that in - and they are very important. Then there's a bunch of comments, which might greatly add to the post. Then the place that was hosting your blog goes broke/changes business model. Okay maybe you have a techie friend who thinks about this stuff, but they maybe forgot to wget your blog for a few months/year [ahem!]. Those posts are gone. The entire stack of the blogging platform could be, and probably is, open source. It doesn't help one bit. Those open source CMSs could have agreed and maintained a file format for local editing and tools around that. But they didn't because that wasn't seen as the main problem for some reason.

fwip 8y ago

I'm very excited about tools like Dat and Scuttlebutt, because they do promise this exact transformative rethink of the control and ownership of data.

boomboomsubban 8y ago

What free software are you using that is creating a ton of data in a locked format without allowing a local copy? Solving this end of the problem largely solves the data format issue, and that is not the case in reverse.

thejohnconway 8y ago
Well I, like everybody, use the internet which mostly runs on Linux. But that wasn’t my point. Open Source probably hasn’t made things any worse, but the ideological battle was waged at the wrong end, resulting in a hollow victory. Tell some open source advocate from 2001 or so that most people do most of their computing on Linux in 2019, and I think they’ll picture something quite different to what we have in Android and the cloud.
- meruru 8y ago
  Tell that to a Free Software advocate and you might get interesting results :) To be less obtuse: this is exactly what people who say GNU/Linux and Free Software rather than Open Source have been concerned about since the beginning.
  - thejohnconway 8y ago
    Yes, indeed. I think that Richard Stallman and similar have a more balanced message in this respect. At some point the popular focus seemed to shift the notion that open source software needed to “win” in terms of market share, regardless of whether that was helping in the cause of computing freedom.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      That argument was not dominant (though it existed) within the world of people who cared. It was primarily pushed by people who felt that ethics were in the way of business goals. For point of reference, Linus Torvalds only half cares about ethics. He likes all the value of collaboration from a developer perspective and doesn't care so much about whether software treats people well and gives end users any freedom.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Perhaps not 2001. But there were certainly people starting to ask by the mid to late-2000s whether source code freedom was what we really needed to be worrying about the most, see e.g. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Bray here: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/28/Open-Data https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/28/Open-Data

Sargos 8y ago

Thankfully it looks like we are heading into a world with open technology stacks (Ethereum, IPFS, WASM) and open data formats where all dapps integrate and share data with each other permissionlessly.

richardwhiuk 8y ago
I see zero evidence that IPFS or Etherum will have substantially market adoption in the near future....
thejohnconway 8y ago
How is WASM going to help? It looks like it's further down the road of losing the control of your files by doing stuff in ephemeral environment (the browser), without even the readability of Javascript. Perhaps I'm missing a use case here.

andbberger 8y ago

I really don't understand the sentiment of this comment. Can you go into more detail on what that world would look like? fb and the like have options to pull down your data, generally. It's not thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much work to parse it. Certainly much less work than, say, writing a RDBMS....

thejohnconway 8y ago
Parse data? You've already lost. What percentage of the population can do that? What I'm saying is that I believe the main effort should have been in data portability, not in the side-show of source code copyright. But I can give you a concrete example - let's say you're a blogger - it's a large part of your professional output, and a great resource for the people in your field. Now you're not really techie, but you do keep the some original writing locally because you write in Word or whatever. But all the images have to be put in the CMS directly - you can't paste that in - and they are very important. Then there's a bunch of comments, which might greatly add to the post. Then the place that was hosting your blog goes broke/changes business model. Okay maybe you have a techie friend who thinks about this stuff, but they maybe forgot to wget your blog for a few months/year [ahem!]. Those posts are gone. The entire stack of the blogging platform could be, and probably is, open source. It doesn't help one bit. Those open source CMSs could have agreed and maintained a file format for local editing and tools around that. But they didn't because that wasn't seen as the main problem for some reason.