5 ms·

We also don't know what the movement would look like today if it weren't dominated by their personalities (and their personality conflicts) in its formative day

by geofft 7y ago

We also don't know what the movement would look like today if it weren't dominated by their personalities (and their personality conflicts) in its formative days. It's pretty clear that a lot of people were interested in the ideals behind their movements and contributed in massive ways to the success of the movements - it's not clear that either of them were needed to get the movement off the ground (see also, Great Man Theory).

kazinator 7y ago
What it would look like: an army of docile microserfs beavering away for free to make FOSS work better for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, ... and the odd government who wants a crypto backdoor or two.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  This is a weird rejoinder to make in a thread about ESR, who was one of the loudest voices arguing for corporate-friendly language ("open-source" not "free software") and licenses (permissive, not copyleft).
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it... Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      > Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
      - SEJeff 7y ago
        One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
        kazinator 7y ago
        I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with. I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM". I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
      - api 7y ago
        There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.
        jraph 7y ago
        Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not. And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels. We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too. The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
        ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter. We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
    - earenndil 7y ago
      BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    Ah, but a license, no matter how permissive, does not ipso facto cause the admission of questionable changes into the upstream of a project that everybody trusts. It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.
  - api 7y ago
    This might be a good thing then. This has become a pet peeve of mine. At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back. FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.
    - ofrzeta 7y ago
      ".. parties who seek to limit the promise of free software" that's an interesting phrase as Free Software has always also been about limiting freedom. After all a license is something that puts certain restrictions on the usage of a piece of software. This is not much different to accusing the GPL of "limiting the promise of free software". Or the AGPL for that matter, which is probably what the OSI proponents are thinking anyway.
      - api 7y ago
        The MongoDB license they are picking on barely differs from the AGPL.
        zozbot234 7y ago
        This doesn't seem to be accurate, especially as far as OSI and OSD is concerned. Say what you want about the AGPL, but the license does not discriminate against any field of endeavour - it does not state "you can't use this software to offer a network-based endpoint" or anything like that. It just triggers a source distribution requirement in case of such use, by analogy with distributing the software itself to the public (an analogy which is in fact supported by copyright law itself, viz. "public performance" of a copyrighted work). The MongoDB approach post-relicensing is very different.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  As opposed to the current open-source movement, which mostly consists of microserfs beavering away for a salary to make FOSS work better for all of the above? Let's face it, when the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Microsoft, the open source movement has very little to do with RMS' ideals.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    It is lamentable indeed, and this infiltrated, subverted movement now wants to purge itself of the old guard, who are not good for business.
korethr 7y ago
I seem to recall a post on his blog where he addressed this point. IIRC, his conclusion was that if it had not been him, then then the culture/movement/whatever would have eventually invented someone else like him. That is, someone would have eventually noticed the same things, come to the same or similar conclusions, recognized (or at least thought) they had the social skills/aptitude needed to successfully promote the ideas to the wider world, and gotten started. I can't disagree with that. The question to me is whether that would have happened around the same time, or if it would have taken several more years for the same things to click for someone else.
atq2119 7y ago
ESR probably wasn't personally needed. RMS may have been. Either way, to your statement about "the movement", I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot of what passes for hacker culture today is quite different from where those two hail from. How much overlap is there between the Tao of Programming and modern web development, for example? Whether that's good, bad, or just a value-neutral observation is pretty much up to the beholder.
- btilly 7y ago
  Strongly agreed. ESR talked up his role and theories about how open source worked, but his writing was the main thing that he contributed. His attempts at contributing actual code did not have nearly the same impact. Nor has his description of how open source worked actually had the same impact. Even the OSI definition owes more to Ian Murdock (the "ian" in "debian") than it does to ESR. However if RMS and Brian Fox had not single-handedly set about reimplementing the Unix toolsystem back in the mid-1980s, the world would today be different. As much as RMS annoyed people by saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux, he had a point. Linus contributed the kernel, but most of what people called Linux at the time was actually written by the FSF.

by geofft 7y ago

kazinator 7y ago

What it would look like: an army of docile microserfs beavering away for free to make FOSS work better for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, ... and the odd government who wants a crypto backdoor or two.

ForHackernews 7y ago
This is a weird rejoinder to make in a thread about ESR, who was one of the loudest voices arguing for corporate-friendly language ("open-source" not "free software") and licenses (permissive, not copyleft).
- DuskStar 7y ago
  And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it... Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    > Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
      - kazinator 7y ago
        I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with. I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM". I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
    - api 7y ago
      There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.
      - jraph 7y ago
        Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not. And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels. We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too. The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter. We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
  - earenndil 7y ago
    BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.
- kazinator 7y ago
  Ah, but a license, no matter how permissive, does not ipso facto cause the admission of questionable changes into the upstream of a project that everybody trusts. It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.
- api 7y ago
  This might be a good thing then. This has become a pet peeve of mine. At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back. FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.
  - ofrzeta 7y ago
    ".. parties who seek to limit the promise of free software" that's an interesting phrase as Free Software has always also been about limiting freedom. After all a license is something that puts certain restrictions on the usage of a piece of software. This is not much different to accusing the GPL of "limiting the promise of free software". Or the AGPL for that matter, which is probably what the OSI proponents are thinking anyway.
    - api 7y ago
      The MongoDB license they are picking on barely differs from the AGPL.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        This doesn't seem to be accurate, especially as far as OSI and OSD is concerned. Say what you want about the AGPL, but the license does not discriminate against any field of endeavour - it does not state "you can't use this software to offer a network-based endpoint" or anything like that. It just triggers a source distribution requirement in case of such use, by analogy with distributing the software itself to the public (an analogy which is in fact supported by copyright law itself, viz. "public performance" of a copyrighted work). The MongoDB approach post-relicensing is very different.
tsimionescu 7y ago
As opposed to the current open-source movement, which mostly consists of microserfs beavering away for a salary to make FOSS work better for all of the above? Let's face it, when the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Microsoft, the open source movement has very little to do with RMS' ideals.
- kazinator 7y ago
  It is lamentable indeed, and this infiltrated, subverted movement now wants to purge itself of the old guard, who are not good for business.

korethr 7y ago

I seem to recall a post on his blog where he addressed this point. IIRC, his conclusion was that if it had not been him, then then the culture/movement/whatever would have eventually invented someone else like him. That is, someone would have eventually noticed the same things, come to the same or similar conclusions, recognized (or at least thought) they had the social skills/aptitude needed to successfully promote the ideas to the wider world, and gotten started. I can't disagree with that. The question to me is whether that would have happened around the same time, or if it would have taken several more years for the same things to click for someone else.

atq2119 7y ago

ESR probably wasn't personally needed. RMS may have been. Either way, to your statement about "the movement", I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot of what passes for hacker culture today is quite different from where those two hail from. How much overlap is there between the Tao of Programming and modern web development, for example? Whether that's good, bad, or just a value-neutral observation is pretty much up to the beholder.

btilly 7y ago
Strongly agreed. ESR talked up his role and theories about how open source worked, but his writing was the main thing that he contributed. His attempts at contributing actual code did not have nearly the same impact. Nor has his description of how open source worked actually had the same impact. Even the OSI definition owes more to Ian Murdock (the "ian" in "debian") than it does to ESR. However if RMS and Brian Fox had not single-handedly set about reimplementing the Unix toolsystem back in the mid-1980s, the world would today be different. As much as RMS annoyed people by saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux, he had a point. Linus contributed the kernel, but most of what people called Linux at the time was actually written by the FSF.