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This is a sentiment I do not understand. Expressing a desire for open-source software: > no need to support proprietary platforms and most importantly no need

This is a sentiment I do not understand. Expressing a desire for open-source software: > no need to support proprietary platforms and most importantly no need to be a slave to the Play store, App store or Microsoft store While seemingly replacing it with closed-source web software. Spotify and Figma are listed, but presumably there's others too. Here's the thing. These web apps are much worse from a freedom perspective than the client-side software they're replacing. You're less likely to be able to run them if the company doesn't want you too, e.g., they normally can't be run without having an account. But more importantly, with closed-source web software you've taken the one thing you actually did own, your data (which once lived on your hardware that you have full control over) and now you've given that to the company too. And you still don't have the source code. In a freedom sense, this is absolutely the worst of all worlds. Slowly losing ownership of your data as we move to web apps is a path to a Kafkaesque nightmare where a tech company can arbitrarily cut off access to your life's work on a whim. This is already happening. You can still get by only using apps that let you own your data today, but it becomes harder and harder every year. And at least in the tech community, a lot of this is driven by a mind-bogglingly paradoxical-on-its-face preference among open-source advocates for closed-source web apps over native apps (which are actually "freer" from a data ownership perspective).

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Whether you have to log in or whether any data is stored locally isn't a technical distinction made by whether the client is implemented as a browser application or a native application. Your post is one big non sequitur. Moving from streaming music from my Spotify Javascript client to streaming music from my native iTunes Swift app does nothing for me. I'd say it's actually worse because now my solution isn't cross-platform anymore and I've lost the browser chrome's dev tools like the network inspector. A browser client puts much more control in the hands of the user. It's one of the last bastions of freedom that we have before all software in locked behind app stores and app approval processes.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  The point seems to be that users usually don't control the servers. If the app is entirely local then users may have full control.
  - resfirestar 6y ago
    The fact that users don't usually control the servers with web apps is just a reflection of the fact that users don't usually control anything these days, and most user facing applications these days are implemented as web apps. The average user doesn't have control over their desktop apps either, those apps are dependent on Microsoft/Apple/Adobe servers and even if they aren't "helpfully" syncing everything to a cloud they're sending disturbing amounts of telemetry. As hombre_fatal points out, there's no intrinsic link between the freedom question and the technical question. Enough free software developers (understandably) just prefer a traditional desktop app/local storage design over an API/web client design that people get the impression that freedom respecting apps are always desktop apps. Partly because of that choice, free software is going to keep looking outdated and inconvenient to use while more people flock to SaaSS for the services' superior cross-platform and multi-device capabilities.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      > The average user doesn't have control over their desktop apps either, ... Right, that's why I mentioned "entirely local".
- robenkleene 6y ago
  My native iTunes app supports hosting my entire music collection as MP3 files that I've bought from any number of services (or ripped myself) on my hard disk that I can simply copy to any other computer and it will play them just fine, in any application that supports that format. That's exactly what 100% data ownership looks like, rendering your claim that the post is "one big non sequitur" absolutely ridiculous.
qppo 6y ago
I'd argue that most of the time you never owned your data, it was held under lock and key by proprietary serialization formats. Sure it's physically on your disk, but data is only useful if you own the mechanisms to read and write it. If that software is proprietary you don't own the data.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Whether you have to log in or whether any data is stored locally isn't a technical distinction made by whether the client is implemented as a browser application or a native application. Your post is one big non sequitur. Moving from streaming music from my Spotify Javascript client to streaming music from my native iTunes Swift app does nothing for me. I'd say it's actually worse because now my solution isn't cross-platform anymore and I've lost the browser chrome's dev tools like the network inspector. A browser client puts much more control in the hands of the user. It's one of the last bastions of freedom that we have before all software in locked behind app stores and app approval processes.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
The point seems to be that users usually don't control the servers. If the app is entirely local then users may have full control.
- resfirestar 6y ago
  The fact that users don't usually control the servers with web apps is just a reflection of the fact that users don't usually control anything these days, and most user facing applications these days are implemented as web apps. The average user doesn't have control over their desktop apps either, those apps are dependent on Microsoft/Apple/Adobe servers and even if they aren't "helpfully" syncing everything to a cloud they're sending disturbing amounts of telemetry. As hombre_fatal points out, there's no intrinsic link between the freedom question and the technical question. Enough free software developers (understandably) just prefer a traditional desktop app/local storage design over an API/web client design that people get the impression that freedom respecting apps are always desktop apps. Partly because of that choice, free software is going to keep looking outdated and inconvenient to use while more people flock to SaaSS for the services' superior cross-platform and multi-device capabilities.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    > The average user doesn't have control over their desktop apps either, ... Right, that's why I mentioned "entirely local".
robenkleene 6y ago
My native iTunes app supports hosting my entire music collection as MP3 files that I've bought from any number of services (or ripped myself) on my hard disk that I can simply copy to any other computer and it will play them just fine, in any application that supports that format. That's exactly what 100% data ownership looks like, rendering your claim that the post is "one big non sequitur" absolutely ridiculous.

qppo 6y ago

I'd argue that most of the time you never owned your data, it was held under lock and key by proprietary serialization formats. Sure it's physically on your disk, but data is only useful if you own the mechanisms to read and write it. If that software is proprietary you don't own the data.