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> The point of open source is not to ritualistically compile our stuff from source. It’s the awareness that technology is not magic: that there is a trail of br

> The point of open source is not to ritualistically compile our stuff from source. It’s the awareness that technology is not magic: that there is a trail of breadcrumbs any of us could follow to liberate our digital lives in case of a potential hostage situation. Should we so desire, open source empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services. This is the best phrasing of this concept that I remember having seen.

smichel17 6y ago
Yes, FLOSS is about the power dynamic between users and developers. Proprietary software gives developers power over users. Typically, Developers seek this power in order to extract money from users (sometimes in reasonable amounts, other times not). Unfortunately, power is abused. By empowering users with the option to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user-hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  It's not about power dynamics, it's about liberty. And ultimately, liberty is about autonomy. Having the freedom to do what you choose if you so need to. Free as in freedom right? Stallman was always talking about liberty.
  - rexpop 6y ago
    > It's not about power dynamics, it's about liberty. There's no liberty without the power to preserve it.
    - dimitrios1 6y ago
      Couldn't think of a better argument for the second amendment myself.
      - hrhrhrd 6y ago
        That came out of left field.
      - xmprt 6y ago
        There's tyranny in parts of the US yet most of the second amendment lovers support what the Federal Government is doing (eg. in Portland or DC).
        Shared404 6y ago
        > yet most of the second amendment lovers Clearly those are not actual second amendment lovers, they are deadly toy lovers, and therefor profess to love the second amendment. There are those who actually believe in the ideals of the second amendment, the question is how many of them A) Live in Portland/DC B) Are willing to put their lives on the line for this. I'd like to think that if I lived there I would be.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    Why not both? Yes, it is to protect liberty to do what you will with the software/source. It is also to make sure that the developers of said software will be in a much more difficult situation when it comes to abusing the users of their software. Stallman talks about this as well.
    - saurik 6y ago
      Aren't those even the same thing? For users to have liberty implies a specific power dynamic between them and developers.
      - Shared404 6y ago
        Indeed. I believe you've phrased it much better then I did.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    Need speech for your guns, guns for your speech; just the way it is. Not that everything is a power dynamic, looking at life that way kills all your friends and family really quickly.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Potayto, potahto. As an example outside of computing, slavery — the antithesis of liberty/autonomy — is the manifestation of an extremely skewed power dynamic.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    Liberty for whom? Most of humanity is not economically privileged enough or digitally literate enough to utilise the available digital liberty, let alone able to know that it exists.
- wtallis 6y ago
  I find it amusing to recall that Stallman's Free Software efforts were more or less kicked off by frustration with crappy closed-source printer drivers. 40 years later, being subjected to abusive behavior from your printer has become a near-universal experience.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    I swear by secondhand Brother HL-2133’s They’re $30 with barely used toner cartridge, and have worked no effort on Mac / Linux / Windows for me.
  - josephg 6y ago
    When I worked on google wave, one of the most requested features was adding print support (to allow users to print waves). Printing support is a super simple feature (especially compared to "make it run faster on IE9"). But print support didn't occur to us at google because was ... well, of course we didn't think of it. Google (and most tech companies I imagine) work in paperless offices. We almost never try to print things ourselves so we didn't think of it or care. I have a working theory that any software used by programmers will eventually get excellent (or be replaced with something excellent). And everything else stays vaguely mediocre. Postgresql? Excellent. The tooling to allow non-programmers to edit data in postgres? Halfbaked. Sound cancellation in macbooks for video calls? Fantastic. The software bank tellers use? Garbage. Github? Fantastic. Github equivalent for non programmers (eg people with folders full of Word docs)? 404 not found. Anyway, the fact that modern printer drivers are garbage should come as no surprise. Who amongst us cares enough to fix them? RMS was probably one of the last competent programmers who will bother writing clean, minimal printer drivers. I expect the world will become paperless before HP cleans up their act. I have the same problem at the moment with my Wacom tablet - the hardware is great but the software is truly awful, and apparently it phones home regularly. Software for artists is unfortunately off the golden path.
    - thomk 6y ago
      How do we get programmers to use bank teller software?
- jeppesen-io 6y ago
  Yet FLOSS often has very poor UX - the users are very self selecting
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > FLOSS often has very poor UX For much of FLOSS software I would agree. However, almost any program I've used I would say is plenty adequate. Of course, I would fall into those users you mention, so this probably doesn't mean much.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    You know what else tends to have poor ux in my experience? Overly priced specialized commercial software targeted towards a specific industry. I think the worst i've ever experienced between floss and commercial software had to be the software to program the waterjet cnc at my last job. For some reason, half the menu items were in german, all the configuration was done in a text file where variables were a mix between english and german, the machine manufacturer stopped officially supporting the program and literally one person at their tech support office even knew how to use it and his knowledge had gotten pretty rusty. That program was an ugly, bug ridden, confusing mess that at one time cost lots of money. According to the tech i talked to, it was written by one german guy who had a poor grasp of english, vanished years before and nobody knew how to contact him.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      The CAM software that came with the 4wK laser I use at work had an amazing nesting algorithm, but was otherwise entirely unsuited to our needs. SigmaTech make SigmaNest which, as of version 1.7, I feel confident in highly recommending. And they’ve put on an additional team member for tech support in my region and I can now confidently praise that aspect of their business too.
      - grawprog 6y ago
        We used alphacam for our routers, but my boss was delaying paying for another alphacam license for as long as possible. It was nearly $10k per license or something.
- vannevar 6y ago
  ...FLOSS is about the power dynamic between users and developers. Developers rarely own the rights to their own code. It's actually about the power dynamic between capital and users. The Golden Rule ("He who has the gold, makes the rules") is nowhere more clear than in the software industry, with its lopsided clickthrough licenses and terms of service.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The first step in getting the rights to code you write is to realise that "Everything Is Negotiable". https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/aug/04/everything-is-negotiable/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/aug/04/everything-is-neg... https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/
- userbinator 6y ago
  By empowering users with the option to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user-hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork. Unfortunately this isn't really true for large and complex FLOSS, e.g. web browsers. For a lot of the little user-hostile decisions they have taken, it would take me far more time to get the source and all its dependencies, figure out how to correctly build it (which can itself include a nontrivial toolchain with its own effort to set up), find where to make that tiny change I wanted to the source, and recompile and test; than to simply use a debugger to find the right place in the binary to modify directly. Open-source doesn't necessarily mean easy to take control; and neither does closed source mean the opposite. I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill, because that's what gives you the true power to take control.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill I want to learn. I've played around a bit with r2, doing a small patch on a unsupported piece of software, but that was nearly trivial. Can you recommend any good places to get started?
    - userbinator 6y ago
      doing a small patch on a unsupported piece of software, but that was nearly trivial. That means you've already started. ;-) I think it's hard to give recommendations regarding learning of RE in general, as I mainly do it a "scratch an itch" and "learn as you go" type of thing --- whether you need to interface with an unknown file format, change the behaviour of a piece of code, change a message in a UI, automate an aspect of a web app, etc. the exact knowledge you'll need will vary widely. However, in all those circumstances the basic idea is to gather knowledge about the target to get a vague understanding of how it works, and then dive in with the specific tools/knowledge you've gathered.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    > Unfortunately this isn't really true for large and complex FLOSS, e.g. web browsers. It is also true for web browsers; all it needs is one developer among the many thousands being able to build and distribute it. > Open-source doesn't necessarily mean easy to take control True, it should be more something like: "it won't be easy to use this source by yourself, but if the company decides to discontinue the product, you can still hire some developers to support and continue it, rather than throw in the trash everything you've based on it, which sometimes could mean your entire business". It rather makes hard for others to take away this control, a concept which is wonderfully explained by the GPL license document. > I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill, because that's what gives you the true power to take control. Agree 100% on this, but definitely not easy especially now that pretty much every damn product contains more horsepower and complexity than the Apollo missions computers. However, if you have books, resources, examples etc. for mere mortals on the subject, I'd love to take a look at them. That topic would probably deserve a post by itself.
throw7 6y ago
But if you don't have the source, isn't it magic?
- Shared404 6y ago
  For me personally at least, discovering open source meant learning that even if something looks like magic, it has source code behind it somewhere. Nothing is magic, everything is science(or engineering), even if that is hidden/obscured from the end user. As a result of this, anything can be reimplemented/replaced, if you or someone else have knowledge on how to do so. This in turn means that it is possible to escape from unethical services, thus the article.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    > even if something looks like magic, it has source code behind it somewhere. This is an incredibly important insight. When technologically illiterate people have difficulties with a gadget, it is extremely common that you can trace their difficulties back to their assumption that the workings of the gadget are magic: they don't attempt to form any kind of mental model for how the device might work, and end up making impossible and contradictory assumptions about it. Even an incorrect mental model would be more useful, because you'd be more conscious of making predictions and realizing that your predictions are wrong for a reason when the machine doesn't respond as expected.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      This thread is a great example of why I think open-source is a distracter for true freedom: it emphasises the notion that source is somehow necessary to understand and modify software, when the truth is far from it. Legal or not, you can always take a disassembler to a binary and find out the truth, just like you can do the same to other devices and understand their workings much like what the "true scientists" do[1]. Crackers and the security industry have been doing that for decades. PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s even told you how to patch your own software --- without source --- to accomplish certain things like fixing bugs or changing "annoyances". I often wonder what the state of software would be like if Stallman emphasised the right to inspect and modify regardless of source code availability; perhaps there would be far less open-source projects, but people would have a much more intimate familiarity with how computers work in general. If I can modify the binary, I don't need the source. Especially for large projects, where trying to figure out how to compile the exact same binary I already have and know works, along with its massive tree of dependencies, can be even more difficult compared to just opening it in a hex editor and patching a few bytes. [1] It seems computer scientists mainly focus on construction unlike physicists, biologists, and chemists who focus on analysis first.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Attention: We have a hostage situation. Might be a world record.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Adobe has entered the chat. All joking aside, I recognize that this is strong language, but it certainly describes the tactics used. Although obviously no one is in immediate physical danger, with the exception of medical equipment. Even that I'm not sure of, I've just heard hearsay.
Legogris 6y ago
This echoes how I think of Bitcoin; an alternative to government and private banking, not as a replacement but its very existence shifts the hostage-like power dynamics we have grown accustomed to.
ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
> liberate our digital lives in case of a potential hostage situation > Should we so desire, open source empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services This person is describing the goals of Free Software and community-driven projects. "Open Source" merely refers to using an OSI-approved license, without any implication about empowering users and improving the power balance.

smichel17 6y ago

Yes, FLOSS is about the power dynamic between users and developers. Proprietary software gives developers power over users. Typically, Developers seek this power in order to extract money from users (sometimes in reasonable amounts, other times not). Unfortunately, power is abused. By empowering users with the option to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user-hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork.

dimitrios1 6y ago
It's not about power dynamics, it's about liberty. And ultimately, liberty is about autonomy. Having the freedom to do what you choose if you so need to. Free as in freedom right? Stallman was always talking about liberty.
- rexpop 6y ago
  > It's not about power dynamics, it's about liberty. There's no liberty without the power to preserve it.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Couldn't think of a better argument for the second amendment myself.
    - hrhrhrd 6y ago
      That came out of left field.
    - xmprt 6y ago
      There's tyranny in parts of the US yet most of the second amendment lovers support what the Federal Government is doing (eg. in Portland or DC).
      - Shared404 6y ago
        > yet most of the second amendment lovers Clearly those are not actual second amendment lovers, they are deadly toy lovers, and therefor profess to love the second amendment. There are those who actually believe in the ideals of the second amendment, the question is how many of them A) Live in Portland/DC B) Are willing to put their lives on the line for this. I'd like to think that if I lived there I would be.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Why not both? Yes, it is to protect liberty to do what you will with the software/source. It is also to make sure that the developers of said software will be in a much more difficult situation when it comes to abusing the users of their software. Stallman talks about this as well.
  - saurik 6y ago
    Aren't those even the same thing? For users to have liberty implies a specific power dynamic between them and developers.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      Indeed. I believe you've phrased it much better then I did.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  Need speech for your guns, guns for your speech; just the way it is. Not that everything is a power dynamic, looking at life that way kills all your friends and family really quickly.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Potayto, potahto. As an example outside of computing, slavery — the antithesis of liberty/autonomy — is the manifestation of an extremely skewed power dynamic.
- pabs3 6y ago
  Liberty for whom? Most of humanity is not economically privileged enough or digitally literate enough to utilise the available digital liberty, let alone able to know that it exists.
wtallis 6y ago
I find it amusing to recall that Stallman's Free Software efforts were more or less kicked off by frustration with crappy closed-source printer drivers. 40 years later, being subjected to abusive behavior from your printer has become a near-universal experience.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I swear by secondhand Brother HL-2133’s They’re $30 with barely used toner cartridge, and have worked no effort on Mac / Linux / Windows for me.
- josephg 6y ago
  When I worked on google wave, one of the most requested features was adding print support (to allow users to print waves). Printing support is a super simple feature (especially compared to "make it run faster on IE9"). But print support didn't occur to us at google because was ... well, of course we didn't think of it. Google (and most tech companies I imagine) work in paperless offices. We almost never try to print things ourselves so we didn't think of it or care. I have a working theory that any software used by programmers will eventually get excellent (or be replaced with something excellent). And everything else stays vaguely mediocre. Postgresql? Excellent. The tooling to allow non-programmers to edit data in postgres? Halfbaked. Sound cancellation in macbooks for video calls? Fantastic. The software bank tellers use? Garbage. Github? Fantastic. Github equivalent for non programmers (eg people with folders full of Word docs)? 404 not found. Anyway, the fact that modern printer drivers are garbage should come as no surprise. Who amongst us cares enough to fix them? RMS was probably one of the last competent programmers who will bother writing clean, minimal printer drivers. I expect the world will become paperless before HP cleans up their act. I have the same problem at the moment with my Wacom tablet - the hardware is great but the software is truly awful, and apparently it phones home regularly. Software for artists is unfortunately off the golden path.
  - thomk 6y ago
    How do we get programmers to use bank teller software?
jeppesen-io 6y ago
Yet FLOSS often has very poor UX - the users are very self selecting
- Shared404 6y ago
  > FLOSS often has very poor UX For much of FLOSS software I would agree. However, almost any program I've used I would say is plenty adequate. Of course, I would fall into those users you mention, so this probably doesn't mean much.
- grawprog 6y ago
  You know what else tends to have poor ux in my experience? Overly priced specialized commercial software targeted towards a specific industry. I think the worst i've ever experienced between floss and commercial software had to be the software to program the waterjet cnc at my last job. For some reason, half the menu items were in german, all the configuration was done in a text file where variables were a mix between english and german, the machine manufacturer stopped officially supporting the program and literally one person at their tech support office even knew how to use it and his knowledge had gotten pretty rusty. That program was an ugly, bug ridden, confusing mess that at one time cost lots of money. According to the tech i talked to, it was written by one german guy who had a poor grasp of english, vanished years before and nobody knew how to contact him.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    The CAM software that came with the 4wK laser I use at work had an amazing nesting algorithm, but was otherwise entirely unsuited to our needs. SigmaTech make SigmaNest which, as of version 1.7, I feel confident in highly recommending. And they’ve put on an additional team member for tech support in my region and I can now confidently praise that aspect of their business too.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      We used alphacam for our routers, but my boss was delaying paying for another alphacam license for as long as possible. It was nearly $10k per license or something.
vannevar 6y ago
...FLOSS is about the power dynamic between users and developers. Developers rarely own the rights to their own code. It's actually about the power dynamic between capital and users. The Golden Rule ("He who has the gold, makes the rules") is nowhere more clear than in the software industry, with its lopsided clickthrough licenses and terms of service.
- pabs3 6y ago
  The first step in getting the rights to code you write is to realise that "Everything Is Negotiable". https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/aug/04/everything-is-negotiable/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/aug/04/everything-is-neg... https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/
userbinator 6y ago
By empowering users with the option to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user-hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork. Unfortunately this isn't really true for large and complex FLOSS, e.g. web browsers. For a lot of the little user-hostile decisions they have taken, it would take me far more time to get the source and all its dependencies, figure out how to correctly build it (which can itself include a nontrivial toolchain with its own effort to set up), find where to make that tiny change I wanted to the source, and recompile and test; than to simply use a debugger to find the right place in the binary to modify directly. Open-source doesn't necessarily mean easy to take control; and neither does closed source mean the opposite. I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill, because that's what gives you the true power to take control.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill I want to learn. I've played around a bit with r2, doing a small patch on a unsupported piece of software, but that was nearly trivial. Can you recommend any good places to get started?
  - userbinator 6y ago
    doing a small patch on a unsupported piece of software, but that was nearly trivial. That means you've already started. ;-) I think it's hard to give recommendations regarding learning of RE in general, as I mainly do it a "scratch an itch" and "learn as you go" type of thing --- whether you need to interface with an unknown file format, change the behaviour of a piece of code, change a message in a UI, automate an aspect of a web app, etc. the exact knowledge you'll need will vary widely. However, in all those circumstances the basic idea is to gather knowledge about the target to get a vague understanding of how it works, and then dive in with the specific tools/knowledge you've gathered.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  > Unfortunately this isn't really true for large and complex FLOSS, e.g. web browsers. It is also true for web browsers; all it needs is one developer among the many thousands being able to build and distribute it. > Open-source doesn't necessarily mean easy to take control True, it should be more something like: "it won't be easy to use this source by yourself, but if the company decides to discontinue the product, you can still hire some developers to support and continue it, rather than throw in the trash everything you've based on it, which sometimes could mean your entire business". It rather makes hard for others to take away this control, a concept which is wonderfully explained by the GPL license document. > I've been RE'ing for decades and wish more people knew about this valuable skill, because that's what gives you the true power to take control. Agree 100% on this, but definitely not easy especially now that pretty much every damn product contains more horsepower and complexity than the Apollo missions computers. However, if you have books, resources, examples etc. for mere mortals on the subject, I'd love to take a look at them. That topic would probably deserve a post by itself.

throw7 6y ago

But if you don't have the source, isn't it magic?

Shared404 6y ago
For me personally at least, discovering open source meant learning that even if something looks like magic, it has source code behind it somewhere. Nothing is magic, everything is science(or engineering), even if that is hidden/obscured from the end user. As a result of this, anything can be reimplemented/replaced, if you or someone else have knowledge on how to do so. This in turn means that it is possible to escape from unethical services, thus the article.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > even if something looks like magic, it has source code behind it somewhere. This is an incredibly important insight. When technologically illiterate people have difficulties with a gadget, it is extremely common that you can trace their difficulties back to their assumption that the workings of the gadget are magic: they don't attempt to form any kind of mental model for how the device might work, and end up making impossible and contradictory assumptions about it. Even an incorrect mental model would be more useful, because you'd be more conscious of making predictions and realizing that your predictions are wrong for a reason when the machine doesn't respond as expected.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    This thread is a great example of why I think open-source is a distracter for true freedom: it emphasises the notion that source is somehow necessary to understand and modify software, when the truth is far from it. Legal or not, you can always take a disassembler to a binary and find out the truth, just like you can do the same to other devices and understand their workings much like what the "true scientists" do[1]. Crackers and the security industry have been doing that for decades. PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s even told you how to patch your own software --- without source --- to accomplish certain things like fixing bugs or changing "annoyances". I often wonder what the state of software would be like if Stallman emphasised the right to inspect and modify regardless of source code availability; perhaps there would be far less open-source projects, but people would have a much more intimate familiarity with how computers work in general. If I can modify the binary, I don't need the source. Especially for large projects, where trying to figure out how to compile the exact same binary I already have and know works, along with its massive tree of dependencies, can be even more difficult compared to just opening it in a hex editor and patching a few bytes. [1] It seems computer scientists mainly focus on construction unlike physicists, biologists, and chemists who focus on analysis first.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Attention: We have a hostage situation. Might be a world record.

Shared404 6y ago
Adobe has entered the chat. All joking aside, I recognize that this is strong language, but it certainly describes the tactics used. Although obviously no one is in immediate physical danger, with the exception of medical equipment. Even that I'm not sure of, I've just heard hearsay.

Legogris 6y ago

This echoes how I think of Bitcoin; an alternative to government and private banking, not as a replacement but its very existence shifts the hostage-like power dynamics we have grown accustomed to.

ex_amazon_sde 6y ago

> liberate our digital lives in case of a potential hostage situation > Should we so desire, open source empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services This person is describing the goals of Free Software and community-driven projects. "Open Source" merely refers to using an OSI-approved license, without any implication about empowering users and improving the power balance.