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> I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up. That's because you've made a personal choice that free software is not important to

> I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up. That's because you've made a personal choice that free software is not important to you. Many people take public transport even though it takes them longer because they believe that, say, driving a car is bad. Not everyone feels that way. It's not an important issue to them. In that sense the argument revolves primarily about how much priority you assign to a particular belief (e.g. belief in free software, belief in environmentalism, etc). Before you think I'm going on some sort of holier-than-thou rant - there's no directionality to this. It's a fairly general thing. If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas. Presumably you have some goal that you think is more important than these other issues. That's the thing that has your priority - you want to spend time doing that, because you care about it more.

nexuist 7y ago
My point isn't that the people who care about free software are misdirected. My point is that they don't focus enough on making the free software experience painless. Take, for example, F-Droid, the free software package manager for Android. In my opinion it is free software done right. Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to publish. At no point do you have to pop a shell and interact with a dozen low level bash executables or edit deeply nested configuration files (each written in their own markup language of choice) to Get Things Done. > If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas. My response is that believers in X who want to make a difference will put in the effort to reduce the sacrifices others have to make to join X. As another example, consider the roles the Toyota Prius and then later the Tesla Model S/3/X played in mainstreaming the idea of owning an electric car. It wasn't that long ago that hybrid-electric cars were relegated to small columns in PopSci rather than the front page of MotorTrend. In the next few years we will see a similar transformation with vegetarianism/veganism with Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger - as soon as it costs less to make meat in a lab than it does to grow and care for livestock, you bet everyone is going to leave the cows alone. Not just for morality (although the moral argument is a powerful one), but because the alternative is simply better in every way. If you want to be the truly superior solution, and you want people to believe in your cause, you can't expect them to make sacrifices.
- esotericn 7y ago
  There's a lot to unpick here. I'll write a brief response for now. Ultimately I think there are two parts. You have to realise that free software advocates aren't unlimited in their power. The commercial world is far larger (likely due to feedback effects from, well, money). So there's effectively a race there that free software advocates will find it difficult to win. Having said that, the world is literally built on this stuff. User facing software is the final, difficult, frontier, because marketing costs money, user studies cost money, AB testing costs money, and telemetry and stuff like that allow commercial entities to gain market share using practices that are incompatible with the free software ethos. > you can't expect them to make sacrifices. I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good (unrelated to free software; I'm talking in the general sense here) are either misguided or outright malicious. As a strawman example: "we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice". Because ultimately there won't always be a magical solution. I own a Tesla and I think they're great. But if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up. And that would be a sacrifice, but it would make sense to do so, because it's a personal sacrifice for a greater good.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    I understand that good software costs money. All of the "evil" things listed in this article such as DRM or the SaaS business model all originated from unique attempts to make money and pay developers for their work (among other things, obviously all of this stuff also enriches shareholders and other people who don't directly contribute to the product). You can't have your free cake and afford to eat it too, per say. There is not really a solution to this dilemma other than overthrowing capitalism entirely (which I believe will happen eventually with the rise of automation), but that might be too drastic of a change at this point in time. >I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good...are either misguided or outright malicious Hey, I can agree with you here! >"we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice". Agreed that we should tax them, however...this example ignores that quite a lot of people who drive pickups actually use them for their job. For example, small business owners such as plumbers or electricians benefit greatly from driving pickups that can carry their tools rather than tiny sedans or awkward SUVs. This type of insight is also missing from other morally guided arguments such as removing all cars from cities to promote walking and biking. What do you do about snow plowing, service vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. that modern consumers expect to cater to them directly to their households? Making an electric pick up truck is a far better solution than taxing ICE pickups (although, again, I think that would help) because it benefits everyone without also penalizing the people who truly do need a pickup or something that can perform the role of a pickup. In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping in to make life easier for their customers. They exist for a reason and they could not survive if enough people didn't find them valuable. > if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car? How do you visit friends or family, how do you go to restaurants or grocery stores? How do you get to work if you don't work from home? If your answer is better public transport, then that's not really a sacrifice you are making because there is an equivalent alternative that still does what you want but without the parts you perceive as bad or wrong. Sure you gave up your Tesla, but you'd only do that if you knew there was some other way to get around. I think if your alternative was literally walking or biking everywhere, I"m not sure if you'd be so excited.
algaeontoast 7y ago
This line of reasoning seems to conveniently “forget” that time = money for most people. I’ll prefer OSX or something nonfree if it saves time and is consistent. This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I think you're confusing free software with 'cost-free' software. It's unfortunate that this is the terminology in use. I'm talking specifically about libre software. I have no qualms with paying an expert for a service - in fact that's the basis of my career. I'm happy with SaaS services that provide a paid option which means you don't have to muck about with self hosting, backups, and all of that jazz. Just works(tm). I think that's a great business model. The issue I take is with proprietary software which limits the user in what they can do. Services which derive most of their profit from locking in the user (e.g. come and use our fancy cloud database, there's no way to run it locally, oops we just whacked up the price by 5x, suck it up) > This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals. Damn, my hobby is working out well then. ;)

nexuist 7y ago

My point isn't that the people who care about free software are misdirected. My point is that they don't focus enough on making the free software experience painless. Take, for example, F-Droid, the free software package manager for Android. In my opinion it is free software done right. Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to publish. At no point do you have to pop a shell and interact with a dozen low level bash executables or edit deeply nested configuration files (each written in their own markup language of choice) to Get Things Done. > If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas. My response is that believers in X who want to make a difference will put in the effort to reduce the sacrifices others have to make to join X. As another example, consider the roles the Toyota Prius and then later the Tesla Model S/3/X played in mainstreaming the idea of owning an electric car. It wasn't that long ago that hybrid-electric cars were relegated to small columns in PopSci rather than the front page of MotorTrend. In the next few years we will see a similar transformation with vegetarianism/veganism with Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger - as soon as it costs less to make meat in a lab than it does to grow and care for livestock, you bet everyone is going to leave the cows alone. Not just for morality (although the moral argument is a powerful one), but because the alternative is simply better in every way. If you want to be the truly superior solution, and you want people to believe in your cause, you can't expect them to make sacrifices.

esotericn 7y ago
There's a lot to unpick here. I'll write a brief response for now. Ultimately I think there are two parts. You have to realise that free software advocates aren't unlimited in their power. The commercial world is far larger (likely due to feedback effects from, well, money). So there's effectively a race there that free software advocates will find it difficult to win. Having said that, the world is literally built on this stuff. User facing software is the final, difficult, frontier, because marketing costs money, user studies cost money, AB testing costs money, and telemetry and stuff like that allow commercial entities to gain market share using practices that are incompatible with the free software ethos. > you can't expect them to make sacrifices. I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good (unrelated to free software; I'm talking in the general sense here) are either misguided or outright malicious. As a strawman example: "we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice". Because ultimately there won't always be a magical solution. I own a Tesla and I think they're great. But if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up. And that would be a sacrifice, but it would make sense to do so, because it's a personal sacrifice for a greater good.
- nexuist 7y ago
  I understand that good software costs money. All of the "evil" things listed in this article such as DRM or the SaaS business model all originated from unique attempts to make money and pay developers for their work (among other things, obviously all of this stuff also enriches shareholders and other people who don't directly contribute to the product). You can't have your free cake and afford to eat it too, per say. There is not really a solution to this dilemma other than overthrowing capitalism entirely (which I believe will happen eventually with the rise of automation), but that might be too drastic of a change at this point in time. >I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good...are either misguided or outright malicious Hey, I can agree with you here! >"we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice". Agreed that we should tax them, however...this example ignores that quite a lot of people who drive pickups actually use them for their job. For example, small business owners such as plumbers or electricians benefit greatly from driving pickups that can carry their tools rather than tiny sedans or awkward SUVs. This type of insight is also missing from other morally guided arguments such as removing all cars from cities to promote walking and biking. What do you do about snow plowing, service vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. that modern consumers expect to cater to them directly to their households? Making an electric pick up truck is a far better solution than taxing ICE pickups (although, again, I think that would help) because it benefits everyone without also penalizing the people who truly do need a pickup or something that can perform the role of a pickup. In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping in to make life easier for their customers. They exist for a reason and they could not survive if enough people didn't find them valuable. > if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car? How do you visit friends or family, how do you go to restaurants or grocery stores? How do you get to work if you don't work from home? If your answer is better public transport, then that's not really a sacrifice you are making because there is an equivalent alternative that still does what you want but without the parts you perceive as bad or wrong. Sure you gave up your Tesla, but you'd only do that if you knew there was some other way to get around. I think if your alternative was literally walking or biking everywhere, I"m not sure if you'd be so excited.

algaeontoast 7y ago

This line of reasoning seems to conveniently “forget” that time = money for most people. I’ll prefer OSX or something nonfree if it saves time and is consistent. This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals.

esotericn 7y ago
I think you're confusing free software with 'cost-free' software. It's unfortunate that this is the terminology in use. I'm talking specifically about libre software. I have no qualms with paying an expert for a service - in fact that's the basis of my career. I'm happy with SaaS services that provide a paid option which means you don't have to muck about with self hosting, backups, and all of that jazz. Just works(tm). I think that's a great business model. The issue I take is with proprietary software which limits the user in what they can do. Services which derive most of their profit from locking in the user (e.g. come and use our fancy cloud database, there's no way to run it locally, oops we just whacked up the price by 5x, suck it up) > This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals. Damn, my hobby is working out well then. ;)