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> While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software I would say the actual most egregious violations of u

> While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software I would say the actual most egregious violations of user freedom and privacy come from companies that are powered by open source infrastructure and that actually are big backers of open source. "Software freedom" is the big enabler and partial driver of centralized computing. It is the big enabler in that if you were paying a per CPU license for Windows NT Server, you would go out of your way to make sure that as much as possible was being done on the users computer. In addition, the most widely used copyleft license, the GPL, actually penalizes you if you make a client program that uses GPL libraries(by requiring you be release the source code for your program if the user asks for it), but happily allows you to instead run the program in a datacenter and never have to share the code with the user. Thus you are incentivized to put as much of your program in the datacenter as possible and not on the user's computer. The thing is, if software is on the user's computer, whatever the license, they actually have far more de facto control. They can control what is getting shared. They can reverse engineer the files to allow perfect export and backups. They can own their data. They can also verify what the software is doing with the data (even if it might take a lot of efforts). Once computation happens in a data center, the user is at the complete mercy of the corporation. The corporation can make it impossible to get a true copy of their data, requiring use of legal means instead of technical means. The corporation can store and share and process the data in ways the user has no control or even awareness about. Sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off from a society point of view and user freedom and privacy, if the old Microsoft vision of the PC as the hub of a users digital life, and users paying money for software they find useful, instead of what we have now where the cloud is the hub of a users digital life (even stuff that could work on a local network, will by default try to contact the cloud), and users are provided useful software in exchange for their engagement, privacy, and attention.

atoav 6y ago
While you are making valid points here I think the primary driver in the push for cloud was the rise of the smartphone. Suddenly regular people wanted to have the same view into their data both on a phone and on a computer. There are ways to do this peer to peer of course, but google and apple clouds became default. Google already was a website so it only made sense for them to put their office suite next to the other web stuff as it was "their turf". Of course license cost would have become an issue here. But they could have developed their own backend as well. I would rather see it as: there was demand and it was useful. Google knew they wouldn't beat microsoft on a Windows machine or Apple on ios/Mac. So they created their own plattform and made sure it is as much web as possible (so Andeoid was/is only a way of pushing their web plattforms).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think cloud had little to do with smartphones per se. The transition started earlier, and I believe the main drivers were what pg made his money on and praised so much in his early essays - the ability to write your software in whatever stack you wish, bugfix and update it for all users instantly, without having to ship anything to anyone... and ultimately, having a justification for subscription revenue. There were a lot of technical things that had to fell into place for the cloud to spread everywhere - web technologies, ubiquitous Internet access, and perhaps even smartphones - but ultimately, the driver was always the same: if you control access to something, you can charge rent for it.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    I'm convinced that the biggest thing the Free Software movement could do, is build a convenient voluntary payment model (and software implementing it very conveniently). Right now, by far the most convenient model is ads/tracking - it's literally on every platform that respectively can display images/text and doesn't have extensive privacy features, which is basically every platform on the planet. And it's so convenient it requires zero clicks to pay with it! Ads/tracking cause the "you're not the user, you're the product" problem, which IMO is the reason why everything needs to be online - if you're offline, they can't send you ads or receive your data. And a proper user-based funding mechanism would also make corporate funding less necessary, which will enable Free Software devs to prioritize consumer users instead of having e.g. Canonical's "but most of our money comes from servers" problem that ends up de-emphasizing the desktop despite their best intentions.
m463 6y ago
> I would say the actual most egregious violations of user freedom and privacy come from companies that are powered by open source infrastructure and that actually are big backers of open source. they shy away from the Affero GPL, and their key elements are proprietary.
- p_l 6y ago
  That's why AGPL software can be divided into small ideologically motivated camp (won't use it, but I respect the choice) and "due diligence mine" as part of dual-licensing AGPL/proprietary setup where the point is to trip people into becoming paying clients.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > ideologically motivated camp The idea that GPL is ideological and other licenses aren't is false. Allowing companies to proprietarize software and not caring about user's freedom is just a different set of values.
    - p_l 6y ago
      I'm not saying other licenses aren't. In fact, I'll repeat, I respect AGPL used for ideological reasons. But I find it rarer than cases where it's used as part of bait-and-switch tactic by startups preying on other startups (a bit of simplification, but that's non-trivial component of it).

atoav 6y ago

While you are making valid points here I think the primary driver in the push for cloud was the rise of the smartphone. Suddenly regular people wanted to have the same view into their data both on a phone and on a computer. There are ways to do this peer to peer of course, but google and apple clouds became default. Google already was a website so it only made sense for them to put their office suite next to the other web stuff as it was "their turf". Of course license cost would have become an issue here. But they could have developed their own backend as well. I would rather see it as: there was demand and it was useful. Google knew they wouldn't beat microsoft on a Windows machine or Apple on ios/Mac. So they created their own plattform and made sure it is as much web as possible (so Andeoid was/is only a way of pushing their web plattforms).

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I think cloud had little to do with smartphones per se. The transition started earlier, and I believe the main drivers were what pg made his money on and praised so much in his early essays - the ability to write your software in whatever stack you wish, bugfix and update it for all users instantly, without having to ship anything to anyone... and ultimately, having a justification for subscription revenue. There were a lot of technical things that had to fell into place for the cloud to spread everywhere - web technologies, ubiquitous Internet access, and perhaps even smartphones - but ultimately, the driver was always the same: if you control access to something, you can charge rent for it.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  I'm convinced that the biggest thing the Free Software movement could do, is build a convenient voluntary payment model (and software implementing it very conveniently). Right now, by far the most convenient model is ads/tracking - it's literally on every platform that respectively can display images/text and doesn't have extensive privacy features, which is basically every platform on the planet. And it's so convenient it requires zero clicks to pay with it! Ads/tracking cause the "you're not the user, you're the product" problem, which IMO is the reason why everything needs to be online - if you're offline, they can't send you ads or receive your data. And a proper user-based funding mechanism would also make corporate funding less necessary, which will enable Free Software devs to prioritize consumer users instead of having e.g. Canonical's "but most of our money comes from servers" problem that ends up de-emphasizing the desktop despite their best intentions.

m463 6y ago

> I would say the actual most egregious violations of user freedom and privacy come from companies that are powered by open source infrastructure and that actually are big backers of open source. they shy away from the Affero GPL, and their key elements are proprietary.

p_l 6y ago
That's why AGPL software can be divided into small ideologically motivated camp (won't use it, but I respect the choice) and "due diligence mine" as part of dual-licensing AGPL/proprietary setup where the point is to trip people into becoming paying clients.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > ideologically motivated camp The idea that GPL is ideological and other licenses aren't is false. Allowing companies to proprietarize software and not caring about user's freedom is just a different set of values.
  - p_l 6y ago
    I'm not saying other licenses aren't. In fact, I'll repeat, I respect AGPL used for ideological reasons. But I find it rarer than cases where it's used as part of bait-and-switch tactic by startups preying on other startups (a bit of simplification, but that's non-trivial component of it).