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> From what I see the proprietary operating systems are in decline now It is a very slow decline, but it's being largely going on unnoticed. Rewind the clock 2

> From what I see the proprietary operating systems are in decline now It is a very slow decline, but it's being largely going on unnoticed. Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone. Unless you were a Linux rebel running slackware or whatever. We can do a lot on Linux now. We have thousands of Steam games running on the Proton+Wine+Vulkan combination (often with similar performance, in some cases even better). Most of the missing apps are available in the browser - which is a blessing and a curse. Everything is moving to open source software. The issue now is different: we have commercial offerings on top of open source, closing their gardens. Take Android. Ridiculous amount of open source software, arguably the most deployed software worldwide. Controlled by a corporation. Lots of apps have moved to the web, where we have a similar problem. Their foundations are most often based on open-source. But they are behind some corporation or another. Heck, the big cloud providers all have in their core a whole plethora of open source software. The operating system concept, as we know it, is in decline. This may be a global maxima for FOSS OS. I hope it isn't.

gonehome 5y ago
For the vast majority of users the OS is just a way to get to the web. The web (browser) is the OS, but the apps are centralized, incompatible, and primarily SaaS subscriptions (or worse, ad based). Desktop operating systems are primarily thin clients to these services. Native apps on the existing stack are dead outside of a few niche applications. It's why I think Urbit is cool, if you built an OS from first principles to take into account the web what would it look like? It's basically moving the API layer up the stack to include auth and application distribution.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
Is android or iOS proprietary? The desktop is declining, it’s market share is so bad that windows literally build an android emulator and Linux subsystem. I’d say it’s less on desktop but all the computing is mobile. It would be better to move away from all OS and just have ISA software.
jodrellblank 5y ago
> "Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone." Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help. You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine? The GDPR at least gives Europeans some rights to download their data from cloud services in a machine readable format, but strangely you don't seem to have that right to your data in a proprietary game stored on your local machine with access gated through a proprietary online service.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  >> "Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone." > Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help. Free as in beer. Not FLOSS. > You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine? Stallman about non-free games on linux: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html

gonehome 5y ago

For the vast majority of users the OS is just a way to get to the web. The web (browser) is the OS, but the apps are centralized, incompatible, and primarily SaaS subscriptions (or worse, ad based). Desktop operating systems are primarily thin clients to these services. Native apps on the existing stack are dead outside of a few niche applications. It's why I think Urbit is cool, if you built an OS from first principles to take into account the web what would it look like? It's basically moving the API layer up the stack to include auth and application distribution.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

Is android or iOS proprietary? The desktop is declining, it’s market share is so bad that windows literally build an android emulator and Linux subsystem. I’d say it’s less on desktop but all the computing is mobile. It would be better to move away from all OS and just have ISA software.

jodrellblank 5y ago

> "Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone." Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help. You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine? The GDPR at least gives Europeans some rights to download their data from cloud services in a machine readable format, but strangely you don't seem to have that right to your data in a proprietary game stored on your local machine with access gated through a proprietary online service.

marcodiego 5y ago
>> "Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone." > Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help. Free as in beer. Not FLOSS. > You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine? Stallman about non-free games on linux: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html