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This quote is particularly biting: "It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new on

This quote is particularly biting: "It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new ones had taken their place in the meantime, and we were letting them win." It's true. We won it all, but we somehow still lost, and that's a difficult and sad thing to realize. Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again.

throwaway2048 7y ago
arguably its an even worse situation, at least in the bad old days of Microsoft hegemony you still had the program itself, and your data. Now cloud providers give you nothing to run if you stop paying them constantly, and in a lot of cases, say goodbye to your data too.
- kebman 7y ago
  The latest move of Flickr feels like my pictures were suddenly taken hostage. I decided to not pay them for that reason. Never negotiate with hostage takers lol! :'( I was a pro member before, when they actually had a good service for pro members, but one day they sudden decided it was going to be free for all time, only to change their mind... That's a goodbye for me.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    I can understand why you're upset, but I can also understand Flickr's point of view: the "they" who decided it was going to be free for all time was Yahoo!, and they were by and large pretty terrible stewards of the service. And it's hard not to think that the stereotypically Silicon Valley "give it away for free and hope you find a way to monetize down the road" attitude is part of what nearly killed Flickr under their management. The "they" who own it now is SmugMug, and I don't think they can be blamed for deciding that the only practical way to monetize Flickr is to, well, charge for the service. Personally, in most cases I'd much rather pay directly for a service than get it for free from a company whose business model is "try and monetize it through advertising, mining user data and/or dark patterns and shut it down if all of those fail."
    - kebman 7y ago
      Oh thank you, I didn't know. Perhaps I'll go a bit more easy on them. But mergers and ownership handovers aside, it still left me feeling betrayed.
      - Xelbair 7y ago
        Of course you felt betrayed - because you were betrayed for profit margins. A customer shouldn't care at all for the reason why the service suddenly sucks. Customer should only care about the quality and value the service provides to him/her.
  - owenversteeg 7y ago
    Be glad you didn't pay... I did, it's atrocious. They've been removing critical features and claiming they'll come back "after a vacation", stranding users, completely breaking the service... It's been months with no updates (total radio silence!) on when the critical features will come back, if ever, when they were originally promised to return in weeks at most. They've completely broken the workflow of many professional photographers paying a good bit of money for Pro, leaving them stranded with no news for months. It's unacceptable. I don't think I've ever been so upset at a service before... I've been recommending people stay far, far away from Flickr and I advise anyone reading this to do the same.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      What are these critical features? I've been a Flickr Pro subscriber for years and it still works fine for me.
      - owenversteeg 7y ago
        Camera Roll, which many people (me included) used as the main part of our work flow, is completely gone, despite them claiming it'd be back quickly. For those that used it, it basically _was_ Flickr, and despite claims to the contrary there are a number of workflows in Camera Roll that cannot be easily replicated with the handful of remaining Flickr features.
    - onethumb 7y ago
      Feeling frustrated is totally justified. I'd feel frustrated, too. And no-one is more sorry that you're feeling frustrated than I am. However, "total radio silence" is not fair. We're very active, and very vocal, about our status updates and progress we're making on the Flickr Help Forum, on our blog, on Twitter, etc. In particular, Flickr now has a CEO (me) who frequently engages with the community and customers to keep them informed, something Flickr hasn't enjoyed since ~2005. We even have a status page, with frequent realtime updates, which I believe is a first for Flickr: https://status.flickr.net https://status.flickr.net There is a single feature, Camera Roll, which is still offline undergoing maintenance. No-one is happy it's offline, but it is what it is. It relied on technology internal to Yahoo, which we had to leave behind when we recently exited their datacenters. Given the hard deadline and the vast size, scale, and scope of the Flickr service, we managed to move everything (while keeping it online) except this. It will be returning shortly, but it's not quite ready yet. I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on building again instead of just copying. The future is bright. Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug, the company that acquired Flickr from Yahoo last year.
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  I don't know why this comment was downvoted. The core Microsoft software, like Office, from 20 years ago still work today. The data is still retrievable today. In contrast, the recent wave of SaaS with poor data portability and various services shutting down represents a massive step backwards.
  - darkwater 7y ago
    Maybe because half of HN audience is trying to sell some SaaS/IaaS and advocates for non-GNU opensource licenses? To be clear: these are IMO part of the reasons for what GP is saying.
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      It’s always funny to me to read some of the posts and comments on HN. A lot of (most?) HNers are working to silo off and rent seek. Yet we see posts about how we lost software freedom here.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        Rent seeking is trying to capture value without creating any. Most startups are trying to capture value after creating some, IMO. If you're tracking engaged users [or even growth of revenue and churn from individuals], you're probably not on a path towards rent seeking.
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    MS office 2010 on windows 7 still runs OK in a VM.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Why not native LibreOffice? Does MS Office from 10 years ago offer something that LibreOffice doesn't?
      - 7y ago
- Anders1234 7y ago
  This here! This is what is indeed really frightening for me. They have the entire control over the whole system. This is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Anders https://bluetoothhøjtaler.dk/test https://xn--bluetoothhjtaler-uxb.dk/test
thecupisblue 7y ago
>It's true. We won it all, but we somehow still lost, and that's a difficult and sad thing to realize. Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again. It's always like that. Creation vs Entropy, Hackers vs Systems. One won't work without the other. We can't win software freedom in the current world, we can only fight against losing it and it's going to be a constant battle. But it's the battle enables everyone and raises the tech bar.
User23 7y ago
RMS was right. He was always right, but now all we have is the cold comfort of saying so.
- oaiey 7y ago
  Very valid point. This is the elementary difference between open source (which won) and free software (which lost).
- stock_toaster 7y ago
  In some ways, perhaps RMS is who led us here? Or maybe it was Eric Raymond (and "open source") who led us astray? The "Cloud" is certainly a clever means to extract value from GPLv2 software stacks that many of the services are built upon, frequently without having to give much of anything back. How many "cloudy" services run on Linux and other GPLv2 software? I sometimes wonder what the world would look like had more free licenses (such as MIT/BSD) been just a bit more popular during critical points in history, or had less free options like GPLv3 or AGPL come a bit sooner as viable options. Would we have to pay for more software, and if so, would the privacy equation have turned out differently? Would software simply not have advanced as quickly as it did? Would the direction tech is moving still be a web-centric one, or would it be a bit more of a desktop/local centric world with more shrink-wrapped software?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    RMS would have probably said "If you didn't want it in their control don't put it on their computer." And really paying for software is no guarantee that you won't also be the product - I'm not sure where that naive notion came from. Paying for the software isn't what keeps your privacy safe - keeping your privacy safe does. That it is an inane tautology is the point - they are separate aspects.
    - jerf 7y ago
      Past tense need not be used. You are not forced to give all your data to others, even today. It's just less than trivial to get it running yourself. Reminds me I need to check in on https://Sandstorm.io https://Sandstorm.io and see how they're doing. I've tried to install it a couple of times and bounced off of it a couple times, not always due to things that are their fault (i.e., they do sensible things with DNS but my managed DNS provider won't let me set up the requisite records in their "easy" interface, and I'm not quite motivated to go all the way back to running my own bind).
flukus 7y ago
> we didn't win software freedom Between clouds, binary blobs and SoC devices I think we're losing in hardware freedom on the back of FOSS as well.
- pas 7y ago
  The recent licence changes (MongoDB, Redis, CockroachDB), and GCloud SaaS statement/announcement about working with the corresponding upstream teams to make stuff cloud ready are clear steps against AWS (and Azure too probably). At the same time we finally got a phone that is built with some security in mind (Librem). AMD using an open graphics driver is also a nice development of the last few years. ... And we can mourn the loss of easily hackable PCs, but a lot of kids these days are just as exposed to tech as 20-30 years ago. (Eg Minecraft redstone programming, mobile app development, high quality YouTube videos about all things electronic, digital.) So while naturally a higher tech aware populace would be nice, without cultural shifts and accompanying changes in education the status quo is not surprising.
  - grumdan 7y ago
    > At the same time we finally got a phone that is built with some security in mind (Librem). If it ever materializes. It's already more than half a year behind schedule and after preordering it close to when it was announced, I'm very skeptical I'll ever receive it.
    - pas 7y ago
      Alas it seems that there is simply not enough people willing to pay for "it". (I haven't, and likely won't.) :( Fortune 500 companies, various nation states are willing to use random Android phones. Why shouldn't "we"?
  - FakeComments 7y ago
    Arduino is lightyears more accessible than PICs a decade ago; it’s never been easier to use a free or OSS tool to design a board and have it mailed to you. There actually used to be a every Sunday workshop where you made one from scratch in 3 hours (including board fab) with a grab bag of components to populate with — within the past couple years. (That shop closed due to lack of patrons.) You can’t modify simple electronics as easily — but how many people built their own drones in the 80s? I’d guess RC cars and drones have about the same number of DIY whatever, and that we’re not seeing a fall off (because of difficulty — availability and community are different issues). The simple truth is most people don’t care and don’t want to manage their stuff all the time: I make my own electronics, but my laptop is still Windows with minimal config. My desktop is parts and Linux — but only because I needed it to mirror what I do at work, as a test bed. The company itself found data centers to be too much fuss, and lifted-and-shifted most of it to the cloud. Why don’t I bother? Because fighting the laptop constantly to keep FOSS working (and secure!) detracts from my time building my own electronics (or other forms of living life). If you really care, our failure to create broader technical skill is not technical: it’s social. We allowed RadioShack to be gutted, we allowed ”hacker spaces” to be priced out of business as cities grew, etc.
mikorym 7y ago
I always think of cURL [1] in these circumstances. The list of companies that uses his tool is amazing (but expected). Even BMW is there (of course) [2]. If you had to valuate cURL I guess it would be worth much more than "top" (10 maybe?) tech companies (what a farce). It's pretty funny that people tried to steal his tool's name. He even has "testimonials" [3] which I guess is some form of dramatic irony. [1] https://curl.haxx.se https://curl.haxx.se [2] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html [3] https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/theysay.html https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/theysay.html
- amelius 7y ago
  Yes but a huge amount of companies use /bin/true either directly or indirectly. Following your logic it should be worth millions ... I think we should look at FOSS more as we regard math or science. Everybody uses it, but nobody pays for it (edit: once it exists).
  - ISL 7y ago
    As a scientist, I am so very glad every day that someone pays for science. Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States. It is tricky to figure out how to allocate funds, but software underlies our nation's infrastructure, too. Having federal grants for the maintenance of core open-source infrastructure sure sounds like a cheap investment to me.
    - mikorym 7y ago
      And if you are not in the US, EU, or an Asian developed country, your stability of funding is pretty much at a level where you are taking an unnecessary and big risk by going into academia as a livelihood.
    - checktheorder 7y ago
      >Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States. One of my favourite scientists of all-time is Harrison Brown. He was most known for his role in launching George Tilton and Clair Patterson's dating-the-Earth project. But he had a most amazing ability to convince the cold-war era US government to fund civilian science that had no real military value whatsoever. He was a kind of science-funding Robin Hood, an ethical con artist.
yholio 7y ago
I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry. Android is free precisely because an open kernel is available that could empower a competitor. Google is absolutely paranoid about this possibility, and is severly limited in the Microsoft-esque moves they can make. I think what precludes the final victory of open source is that the world itself changed for the better. The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions. These are people who wouldn't have been able to touch a PC twenty years ago, let alone understand or care about what source code is. They have vastly different expectations than the professional software users that created the free source movement in the image of the hackers of the 70s and 80s. Just look at the number of rooted phones sold. It's an appliance model of computing. In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development. What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security. The walled gardens of Google and Apple can be replicated. What is lacking is a free software business model that can gather the $1 billion or so required.
- draw_down 7y ago
  What does it mean to say that “Android is free”?
- nailer 7y ago
  > I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry. Outside mobile: Linux (the OS not the kernel) won the web. Way back in the 'Linux on the desktop' days, KDE needed something like gtkhtml so KDE made KHTML and Konqueror. Apple needed a web browser and couldn't make one from scratch, so webkit was forked from KHTML. Chrome needed to fork webkit so made blink. Edge adopted blink too. KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
jasoneckert 7y ago
A lot of this had to do with how open source grew over the last decade - it grew into startup culture, not FOSS/copyleft culture. As a result, most open source licenses are permissive (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc.) and not true copyleft like GPLv3. And permissive open source licenses benefit companies tremendously.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  If companies are going to benefit from permissive licensed open source, they have obvious selection pressure towards that end for the code they create. I agree with you on the outcome; I'm not sure that I think it was startup culture that caused it, but rather any ecosystem where software was important and near ubiquitous would have evolved roughly the same way. For my own hobby code, I don't see any practical benefit to GPL over MIT. I want my code to be reusable in as many cases as possible. I've seen the toxic treatment AGPL code gets (AFAICT, the main value of that license is to companies who offer dual licenses) and the wary treatment GPL v3 (or worse "v3 or later") code gets.
- mxuribe 7y ago
  > ...grew into startup culture, not FOSS/copyleft culture Your comment there is quite powerful - and i believe true! So, ok, what are next steps in discovering similar high quality content like Linux Journal? Because as it happens, my discovery mode for finding good content is hacker news...though half of the things i ignore because they tend to shift the way of startup culture, which while entertaining, isn't as fulfilling as true FOSS/copyleft culture. So, do you - or anyone else here - have any recommendations to find good content like Linux Journal or any other FOSS/copyleft culture content but through an aggregated site like hacker news? (I use HN not because i'm lazy but because of lack of time; again half of stuff discovered is meh, the other half is good.)
  - dragonquest 7y ago
    LWN.net (mentioned elsewhere on the thread) is quite good for finding FOSS related content.
duxup 7y ago
Yeah it's all about the cloud services and FOSS doesn't ... just make a FOSS cloud or services. It doesn't seem likely to in the near term either.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Maybe? Something similar to FileCoin for FOSS cloud services could work pretty well.
Iv 7y ago
Freedom is never won forever. Every generation has to fight to keep it back. We got great gifts from our elders: an internet that is based on open specs. Open source licenses that are legally tested. An ethos of sharing. Organizations with real power. Cryptography. We have to continue on new fronts. Right now people are making open source silicon, but it is still in its infancy, it is to Intel as Linux 1.0 was to Microsoft: a laughable threat. We need to find better licenses for AI models, promote the Affero GPL. Forge new tools to protect privacy. Maybe work more closely with governments that have understood that privacy is not just a geek's concern? Enjoy your freedoms, but don't take them for granted. Fighting for them, forging the tools to preserve them, it is worth a bit of your money and a bit of your time.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  And freedom of speech. Without that, code will become the domain of only big industry. Code is speech. And when speech is free, even when dangerous, so is code.
- CodeMage 7y ago
  You can see the same patterns in the society, in the erosion of workers' rights that our ancestors bought literally with their blood and suffering. It's the same force acting on all fronts.
  - pathseeker 7y ago
    Which workers rights laws have been repealed?
    - capdeck 7y ago
      Gig economy and driving an Uber are good examples. The latter doesn't even recognize you as an employee -- hence no rights.
      - pathseeker 7y ago
        It's been that way forever. Contractors/individual proprietors/whatever are not employees.
ptero 7y ago
> Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again. I think one of the dominant causes of this is the fact that hackers and tinkerers became viewed by many/most FOSS products not as key users, but as mild annoyances or even outright pests (and the process has been going on for a long time, at least 10 years). As FOSS projects fought with proprietary and limited use options they worked to provide convenience that mass users needed to switch. Then to gain wider acceptance they added polish -- "plug and play", "no configuration needed" that mom and pop users wanted. There is nothing sinister there, but this step puts projects a stone's throw from corporate IT that offers a lot of support / development money, but wants to lock everything to a few "approved" configurations (because crypto, corporate policy or something else). Project remains open source, everyone can fork it (but good luck making sense of it), but from this point tinkerers become persona non grata. What they want (freedom to change things) is against the payer's desire for a locked setup. And from this point on, the system is free only in name. If you want your software to stay FOSS in spirit, do not drive away tinkerers as your system matures. Leave enough hooks for them to access low level capabilities, enough knobs for them to do "what no sane user would want" and do not see them as a threat even when they stand between you and that $50k support contract from some megacorp. My 2c. Just my 2c.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Can you blame anyone? The population of users who want plug and play is like four orders of magnitude larger than the population of tinkerers.
  - ptero 7y ago
    I am not blaming anyone. But the same was mostly true when FOSS was young -- most users wanted convenience, not tinkering. But early FOSS supported tinkering regardless, probably because FOSS was frequently a hobby, developers (not users) did want tinkering and built it for themselves.
redler 7y ago
Linux: Technology's Giving Tree.
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
But Gnome and Redhat need to have a brand, or how will they gain marketshare? I mean, getting everyone's grandma (and her java server, I guess?) on Linux, is the goal - right? Surely the well behaved user will fight for openness?!
- Accujack 7y ago
  It's a strange game... the only winning move is not to play. If any project accepts that its goal is to gain users by displacing other products (commercial or not) then that project is committing to a fight it can't win simply because of the nature of open source projects - in the present day world, whoever has the most money tends to win. Open source needs to find a way to exist as partially commercial software, or else projects won't have longevity, which inevitably means they'll be displaced by commercial products because while the motivation to develop open source isn't constant, the motivation to find a way to sell software for money IS constant. The ideal that Stallman and others have always aimed for - that all software should be free - is impractical in the real world until the real world changes significantly, like most utopian ideals.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    The problem with FOSS ideals is that the rest of the world still likes money as exchange for goods and one cannot get a steady stream of it just by donations. It is like playing on the street, yes you can make it for the supermarket, but don't expect to pay for rent and pension out of it.
decoyworker 7y ago
Why is it always talked about as a battle with winners and losers? I think that everyone "wins" and the only real losers are those who see this as a battle at all. To me everyone has been elevated by the Linux and FOSS movement.
- rrix2 7y ago
  'cept for the Linux Journal editors and writers
  - decoyworker 7y ago
    The market has spoken.
bachmeier 7y ago
> Even though FOSS ate the world FOSS ate "sell to the end user" software companies. FOSS won not because of open source, but because the price was $0. Companies like Facebook realized that. As long as it doesn't cost anything out of pocket, people will use it, even if they have to give up all of their privacy and personal information.
burtonator 7y ago
It's because it's never been about freedom. It's about economics. The money just continually pools preferentially to a few players. As long as this happens we will never be free.
MisterTea 7y ago
Linux/FOSS: always the bridesmaid, never the bride. They sit under massive proprietary stacks silently churning through data making large corps billions. They run the internet yet no one sees them. Beasts of burden really. Facebook, Google, Android, pretty much all of these large orgs and their products use FOSS and Linux but none of it is visible. And it never will be because there's no profit in free software. There's only profit in controlling users. You can control users using FOSS unless you cripple it using proprietary upper layers.

throwaway2048 7y ago

arguably its an even worse situation, at least in the bad old days of Microsoft hegemony you still had the program itself, and your data. Now cloud providers give you nothing to run if you stop paying them constantly, and in a lot of cases, say goodbye to your data too.

kebman 7y ago
The latest move of Flickr feels like my pictures were suddenly taken hostage. I decided to not pay them for that reason. Never negotiate with hostage takers lol! :'( I was a pro member before, when they actually had a good service for pro members, but one day they sudden decided it was going to be free for all time, only to change their mind... That's a goodbye for me.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I can understand why you're upset, but I can also understand Flickr's point of view: the "they" who decided it was going to be free for all time was Yahoo!, and they were by and large pretty terrible stewards of the service. And it's hard not to think that the stereotypically Silicon Valley "give it away for free and hope you find a way to monetize down the road" attitude is part of what nearly killed Flickr under their management. The "they" who own it now is SmugMug, and I don't think they can be blamed for deciding that the only practical way to monetize Flickr is to, well, charge for the service. Personally, in most cases I'd much rather pay directly for a service than get it for free from a company whose business model is "try and monetize it through advertising, mining user data and/or dark patterns and shut it down if all of those fail."
  - kebman 7y ago
    Oh thank you, I didn't know. Perhaps I'll go a bit more easy on them. But mergers and ownership handovers aside, it still left me feeling betrayed.
    - Xelbair 7y ago
      Of course you felt betrayed - because you were betrayed for profit margins. A customer shouldn't care at all for the reason why the service suddenly sucks. Customer should only care about the quality and value the service provides to him/her.
- owenversteeg 7y ago
  Be glad you didn't pay... I did, it's atrocious. They've been removing critical features and claiming they'll come back "after a vacation", stranding users, completely breaking the service... It's been months with no updates (total radio silence!) on when the critical features will come back, if ever, when they were originally promised to return in weeks at most. They've completely broken the workflow of many professional photographers paying a good bit of money for Pro, leaving them stranded with no news for months. It's unacceptable. I don't think I've ever been so upset at a service before... I've been recommending people stay far, far away from Flickr and I advise anyone reading this to do the same.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    What are these critical features? I've been a Flickr Pro subscriber for years and it still works fine for me.
    - owenversteeg 7y ago
      Camera Roll, which many people (me included) used as the main part of our work flow, is completely gone, despite them claiming it'd be back quickly. For those that used it, it basically _was_ Flickr, and despite claims to the contrary there are a number of workflows in Camera Roll that cannot be easily replicated with the handful of remaining Flickr features.
  - onethumb 7y ago
    Feeling frustrated is totally justified. I'd feel frustrated, too. And no-one is more sorry that you're feeling frustrated than I am. However, "total radio silence" is not fair. We're very active, and very vocal, about our status updates and progress we're making on the Flickr Help Forum, on our blog, on Twitter, etc. In particular, Flickr now has a CEO (me) who frequently engages with the community and customers to keep them informed, something Flickr hasn't enjoyed since ~2005. We even have a status page, with frequent realtime updates, which I believe is a first for Flickr: https://status.flickr.net https://status.flickr.net There is a single feature, Camera Roll, which is still offline undergoing maintenance. No-one is happy it's offline, but it is what it is. It relied on technology internal to Yahoo, which we had to leave behind when we recently exited their datacenters. Given the hard deadline and the vast size, scale, and scope of the Flickr service, we managed to move everything (while keeping it online) except this. It will be returning shortly, but it's not quite ready yet. I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on building again instead of just copying. The future is bright. Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug, the company that acquired Flickr from Yahoo last year.
TAForObvReasons 7y ago
I don't know why this comment was downvoted. The core Microsoft software, like Office, from 20 years ago still work today. The data is still retrievable today. In contrast, the recent wave of SaaS with poor data portability and various services shutting down represents a massive step backwards.
- darkwater 7y ago
  Maybe because half of HN audience is trying to sell some SaaS/IaaS and advocates for non-GNU opensource licenses? To be clear: these are IMO part of the reasons for what GP is saying.
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    It’s always funny to me to read some of the posts and comments on HN. A lot of (most?) HNers are working to silo off and rent seek. Yet we see posts about how we lost software freedom here.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Rent seeking is trying to capture value without creating any. Most startups are trying to capture value after creating some, IMO. If you're tracking engaged users [or even growth of revenue and churn from individuals], you're probably not on a path towards rent seeking.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  MS office 2010 on windows 7 still runs OK in a VM.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Why not native LibreOffice? Does MS Office from 10 years ago offer something that LibreOffice doesn't?
    - 7y ago
Anders1234 7y ago
This here! This is what is indeed really frightening for me. They have the entire control over the whole system. This is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Anders https://bluetoothhøjtaler.dk/test https://xn--bluetoothhjtaler-uxb.dk/test

thecupisblue 7y ago

>It's true. We won it all, but we somehow still lost, and that's a difficult and sad thing to realize. Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again. It's always like that. Creation vs Entropy, Hackers vs Systems. One won't work without the other. We can't win software freedom in the current world, we can only fight against losing it and it's going to be a constant battle. But it's the battle enables everyone and raises the tech bar.

User23 7y ago

RMS was right. He was always right, but now all we have is the cold comfort of saying so.

oaiey 7y ago
Very valid point. This is the elementary difference between open source (which won) and free software (which lost).
stock_toaster 7y ago
In some ways, perhaps RMS is who led us here? Or maybe it was Eric Raymond (and "open source") who led us astray? The "Cloud" is certainly a clever means to extract value from GPLv2 software stacks that many of the services are built upon, frequently without having to give much of anything back. How many "cloudy" services run on Linux and other GPLv2 software? I sometimes wonder what the world would look like had more free licenses (such as MIT/BSD) been just a bit more popular during critical points in history, or had less free options like GPLv3 or AGPL come a bit sooner as viable options. Would we have to pay for more software, and if so, would the privacy equation have turned out differently? Would software simply not have advanced as quickly as it did? Would the direction tech is moving still be a web-centric one, or would it be a bit more of a desktop/local centric world with more shrink-wrapped software?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  RMS would have probably said "If you didn't want it in their control don't put it on their computer." And really paying for software is no guarantee that you won't also be the product - I'm not sure where that naive notion came from. Paying for the software isn't what keeps your privacy safe - keeping your privacy safe does. That it is an inane tautology is the point - they are separate aspects.
  - jerf 7y ago
    Past tense need not be used. You are not forced to give all your data to others, even today. It's just less than trivial to get it running yourself. Reminds me I need to check in on https://Sandstorm.io https://Sandstorm.io and see how they're doing. I've tried to install it a couple of times and bounced off of it a couple times, not always due to things that are their fault (i.e., they do sensible things with DNS but my managed DNS provider won't let me set up the requisite records in their "easy" interface, and I'm not quite motivated to go all the way back to running my own bind).

flukus 7y ago

> we didn't win software freedom Between clouds, binary blobs and SoC devices I think we're losing in hardware freedom on the back of FOSS as well.

pas 7y ago
The recent licence changes (MongoDB, Redis, CockroachDB), and GCloud SaaS statement/announcement about working with the corresponding upstream teams to make stuff cloud ready are clear steps against AWS (and Azure too probably). At the same time we finally got a phone that is built with some security in mind (Librem). AMD using an open graphics driver is also a nice development of the last few years. ... And we can mourn the loss of easily hackable PCs, but a lot of kids these days are just as exposed to tech as 20-30 years ago. (Eg Minecraft redstone programming, mobile app development, high quality YouTube videos about all things electronic, digital.) So while naturally a higher tech aware populace would be nice, without cultural shifts and accompanying changes in education the status quo is not surprising.
- grumdan 7y ago
  > At the same time we finally got a phone that is built with some security in mind (Librem). If it ever materializes. It's already more than half a year behind schedule and after preordering it close to when it was announced, I'm very skeptical I'll ever receive it.
  - pas 7y ago
    Alas it seems that there is simply not enough people willing to pay for "it". (I haven't, and likely won't.) :( Fortune 500 companies, various nation states are willing to use random Android phones. Why shouldn't "we"?
- FakeComments 7y ago
  Arduino is lightyears more accessible than PICs a decade ago; it’s never been easier to use a free or OSS tool to design a board and have it mailed to you. There actually used to be a every Sunday workshop where you made one from scratch in 3 hours (including board fab) with a grab bag of components to populate with — within the past couple years. (That shop closed due to lack of patrons.) You can’t modify simple electronics as easily — but how many people built their own drones in the 80s? I’d guess RC cars and drones have about the same number of DIY whatever, and that we’re not seeing a fall off (because of difficulty — availability and community are different issues). The simple truth is most people don’t care and don’t want to manage their stuff all the time: I make my own electronics, but my laptop is still Windows with minimal config. My desktop is parts and Linux — but only because I needed it to mirror what I do at work, as a test bed. The company itself found data centers to be too much fuss, and lifted-and-shifted most of it to the cloud. Why don’t I bother? Because fighting the laptop constantly to keep FOSS working (and secure!) detracts from my time building my own electronics (or other forms of living life). If you really care, our failure to create broader technical skill is not technical: it’s social. We allowed RadioShack to be gutted, we allowed ”hacker spaces” to be priced out of business as cities grew, etc.

mikorym 7y ago

I always think of cURL [1] in these circumstances. The list of companies that uses his tool is amazing (but expected). Even BMW is there (of course) [2]. If you had to valuate cURL I guess it would be worth much more than "top" (10 maybe?) tech companies (what a farce). It's pretty funny that people tried to steal his tool's name. He even has "testimonials" [3] which I guess is some form of dramatic irony. [1] https://curl.haxx.se https://curl.haxx.se [2] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html [3] https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/theysay.html https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/theysay.html

amelius 7y ago
Yes but a huge amount of companies use /bin/true either directly or indirectly. Following your logic it should be worth millions ... I think we should look at FOSS more as we regard math or science. Everybody uses it, but nobody pays for it (edit: once it exists).
- ISL 7y ago
  As a scientist, I am so very glad every day that someone pays for science. Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States. It is tricky to figure out how to allocate funds, but software underlies our nation's infrastructure, too. Having federal grants for the maintenance of core open-source infrastructure sure sounds like a cheap investment to me.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    And if you are not in the US, EU, or an Asian developed country, your stability of funding is pretty much at a level where you are taking an unnecessary and big risk by going into academia as a livelihood.
  - checktheorder 7y ago
    >Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States. One of my favourite scientists of all-time is Harrison Brown. He was most known for his role in launching George Tilton and Clair Patterson's dating-the-Earth project. But he had a most amazing ability to convince the cold-war era US government to fund civilian science that had no real military value whatsoever. He was a kind of science-funding Robin Hood, an ethical con artist.

yholio 7y ago

I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry. Android is free precisely because an open kernel is available that could empower a competitor. Google is absolutely paranoid about this possibility, and is severly limited in the Microsoft-esque moves they can make. I think what precludes the final victory of open source is that the world itself changed for the better. The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions. These are people who wouldn't have been able to touch a PC twenty years ago, let alone understand or care about what source code is. They have vastly different expectations than the professional software users that created the free source movement in the image of the hackers of the 70s and 80s. Just look at the number of rooted phones sold. It's an appliance model of computing. In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development. What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security. The walled gardens of Google and Apple can be replicated. What is lacking is a free software business model that can gather the $1 billion or so required.

draw_down 7y ago
What does it mean to say that “Android is free”?
nailer 7y ago
> I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry. Outside mobile: Linux (the OS not the kernel) won the web. Way back in the 'Linux on the desktop' days, KDE needed something like gtkhtml so KDE made KHTML and Konqueror. Apple needed a web browser and couldn't make one from scratch, so webkit was forked from KHTML. Chrome needed to fork webkit so made blink. Edge adopted blink too. KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.
- blattimwind 7y ago

jasoneckert 7y ago

A lot of this had to do with how open source grew over the last decade - it grew into startup culture, not FOSS/copyleft culture. As a result, most open source licenses are permissive (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc.) and not true copyleft like GPLv3. And permissive open source licenses benefit companies tremendously.

sokoloff 7y ago
If companies are going to benefit from permissive licensed open source, they have obvious selection pressure towards that end for the code they create. I agree with you on the outcome; I'm not sure that I think it was startup culture that caused it, but rather any ecosystem where software was important and near ubiquitous would have evolved roughly the same way. For my own hobby code, I don't see any practical benefit to GPL over MIT. I want my code to be reusable in as many cases as possible. I've seen the toxic treatment AGPL code gets (AFAICT, the main value of that license is to companies who offer dual licenses) and the wary treatment GPL v3 (or worse "v3 or later") code gets.
mxuribe 7y ago
> ...grew into startup culture, not FOSS/copyleft culture Your comment there is quite powerful - and i believe true! So, ok, what are next steps in discovering similar high quality content like Linux Journal? Because as it happens, my discovery mode for finding good content is hacker news...though half of the things i ignore because they tend to shift the way of startup culture, which while entertaining, isn't as fulfilling as true FOSS/copyleft culture. So, do you - or anyone else here - have any recommendations to find good content like Linux Journal or any other FOSS/copyleft culture content but through an aggregated site like hacker news? (I use HN not because i'm lazy but because of lack of time; again half of stuff discovered is meh, the other half is good.)
- dragonquest 7y ago
  LWN.net (mentioned elsewhere on the thread) is quite good for finding FOSS related content.

duxup 7y ago

Yeah it's all about the cloud services and FOSS doesn't ... just make a FOSS cloud or services. It doesn't seem likely to in the near term either.

lallysingh 7y ago
Maybe? Something similar to FileCoin for FOSS cloud services could work pretty well.

Iv 7y ago

Freedom is never won forever. Every generation has to fight to keep it back. We got great gifts from our elders: an internet that is based on open specs. Open source licenses that are legally tested. An ethos of sharing. Organizations with real power. Cryptography. We have to continue on new fronts. Right now people are making open source silicon, but it is still in its infancy, it is to Intel as Linux 1.0 was to Microsoft: a laughable threat. We need to find better licenses for AI models, promote the Affero GPL. Forge new tools to protect privacy. Maybe work more closely with governments that have understood that privacy is not just a geek's concern? Enjoy your freedoms, but don't take them for granted. Fighting for them, forging the tools to preserve them, it is worth a bit of your money and a bit of your time.

whenchamenia 7y ago
And freedom of speech. Without that, code will become the domain of only big industry. Code is speech. And when speech is free, even when dangerous, so is code.
CodeMage 7y ago
You can see the same patterns in the society, in the erosion of workers' rights that our ancestors bought literally with their blood and suffering. It's the same force acting on all fronts.
- pathseeker 7y ago
  Which workers rights laws have been repealed?
  - capdeck 7y ago
    Gig economy and driving an Uber are good examples. The latter doesn't even recognize you as an employee -- hence no rights.
    - pathseeker 7y ago
      It's been that way forever. Contractors/individual proprietors/whatever are not employees.

ptero 7y ago

> Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again. I think one of the dominant causes of this is the fact that hackers and tinkerers became viewed by many/most FOSS products not as key users, but as mild annoyances or even outright pests (and the process has been going on for a long time, at least 10 years). As FOSS projects fought with proprietary and limited use options they worked to provide convenience that mass users needed to switch. Then to gain wider acceptance they added polish -- "plug and play", "no configuration needed" that mom and pop users wanted. There is nothing sinister there, but this step puts projects a stone's throw from corporate IT that offers a lot of support / development money, but wants to lock everything to a few "approved" configurations (because crypto, corporate policy or something else). Project remains open source, everyone can fork it (but good luck making sense of it), but from this point tinkerers become persona non grata. What they want (freedom to change things) is against the payer's desire for a locked setup. And from this point on, the system is free only in name. If you want your software to stay FOSS in spirit, do not drive away tinkerers as your system matures. Leave enough hooks for them to access low level capabilities, enough knobs for them to do "what no sane user would want" and do not see them as a threat even when they stand between you and that $50k support contract from some megacorp. My 2c. Just my 2c.

UncleMeat 7y ago
Can you blame anyone? The population of users who want plug and play is like four orders of magnitude larger than the population of tinkerers.
- ptero 7y ago
  I am not blaming anyone. But the same was mostly true when FOSS was young -- most users wanted convenience, not tinkering. But early FOSS supported tinkering regardless, probably because FOSS was frequently a hobby, developers (not users) did want tinkering and built it for themselves.

redler 7y ago

Linux: Technology's Giving Tree.

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

But Gnome and Redhat need to have a brand, or how will they gain marketshare? I mean, getting everyone's grandma (and her java server, I guess?) on Linux, is the goal - right? Surely the well behaved user will fight for openness?!

Accujack 7y ago
It's a strange game... the only winning move is not to play. If any project accepts that its goal is to gain users by displacing other products (commercial or not) then that project is committing to a fight it can't win simply because of the nature of open source projects - in the present day world, whoever has the most money tends to win. Open source needs to find a way to exist as partially commercial software, or else projects won't have longevity, which inevitably means they'll be displaced by commercial products because while the motivation to develop open source isn't constant, the motivation to find a way to sell software for money IS constant. The ideal that Stallman and others have always aimed for - that all software should be free - is impractical in the real world until the real world changes significantly, like most utopian ideals.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  The problem with FOSS ideals is that the rest of the world still likes money as exchange for goods and one cannot get a steady stream of it just by donations. It is like playing on the street, yes you can make it for the supermarket, but don't expect to pay for rent and pension out of it.

decoyworker 7y ago

Why is it always talked about as a battle with winners and losers? I think that everyone "wins" and the only real losers are those who see this as a battle at all. To me everyone has been elevated by the Linux and FOSS movement.

rrix2 7y ago
'cept for the Linux Journal editors and writers
- decoyworker 7y ago
  The market has spoken.

bachmeier 7y ago

> Even though FOSS ate the world FOSS ate "sell to the end user" software companies. FOSS won not because of open source, but because the price was $0. Companies like Facebook realized that. As long as it doesn't cost anything out of pocket, people will use it, even if they have to give up all of their privacy and personal information.

burtonator 7y ago

It's because it's never been about freedom. It's about economics. The money just continually pools preferentially to a few players. As long as this happens we will never be free.

MisterTea 7y ago

Linux/FOSS: always the bridesmaid, never the bride. They sit under massive proprietary stacks silently churning through data making large corps billions. They run the internet yet no one sees them. Beasts of burden really. Facebook, Google, Android, pretty much all of these large orgs and their products use FOSS and Linux but none of it is visible. And it never will be because there's no profit in free software. There's only profit in controlling users. You can control users using FOSS unless you cripple it using proprietary upper layers.