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> If we were talking about free software, users would have control of their data; not some distant programmers Example Gnome3, which is free software, even a o

> If we were talking about free software, users would have control of their data; not some distant programmers Example Gnome3, which is free software, even a officially sanctioned GNU project. Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor, against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it, but nobody has the ressources to modify it. Nobody has even the ressources to keep Gnome2 alive, let alone fork Gnome3. Yes, in theory users could make only those changes they want, but only in theory. In practice, if a significantly influential player says that Gnome2 is gone, Gnome2 is gone. Even if iOS was free software, if Apple decided to make a change, they would be still big enough to force a majority of users to accept their way.

danssig 15y ago
Wonderful comment. This is one reason I always laughed at the argument "yea, but... we have all the source code!". Great, so the solution is we pay to maintain it? How is this free again?
- seabee 15y ago
  The unsaid thing about freedoms is you cannot exercise them unless you have the means to do so. If you don't have that, the only value freedoms afford you is aspirational. Given that the potential to do something is worth a whole lot less than the activity itself, it's easy to see why FOSS is in is current state and will remain that way for a long time.
  - gbog 15y ago
    Then you would drop freedom of speech just because it is useless unless you own CNN?
    - seabee 15y ago
      Nobody is suggesting that. In any case it's a false comparison, since anybody has the ability to fully exercise their freedom of speech. To exercise your open-source freedoms fully require skills, time, and/or money (to pay others to do it for you).
      - gbog 15y ago
        If the overall noise level is too high and you don't own a microphone, your freedom of speech can't be used effectively, you talk any nobody hears you. It is not a reason to drop freedom of speech, right? It's just the same with free software, the mere fact that you are allowed to read, change and distribute source code IS the key. Doing so is hard but not a reason to dismiss this freedom as irrelevant.
- LiveTheDream 15y ago
  This is an example of the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".
pja 15y ago
Ubuntu has put hard money into an alternative to Gnome3, yet they chose not to put effort into Gnome2 either. Which suggests that perhaps Gnome2 has been abandoned for good reasons, even if you don't agree with them. If you're not paying for their time (or willing to put your own time in), you don't get to chose how the people who are putting the effort in spend their programming time. With free software, you have the option to do whatever you like to it, but no-one has the obligation to work on it on your behalf.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  > With free software, you have the option to do whatever you like to it, but no-one has the obligation to work on it on your behalf. Absolutely and that's the problem. Say my wife (not a programmer) doesn't like it, she isn't going to learn to program, understand the code, make the changes she wants and implement them. While it's theoretically possible, it's so impractical as to effectively be impossible. The number of people for whom free as in speech software is actually freer than close software is a very small percentage - for others, such as my wife, Android or Linux is no freer (as in speech) than iOS or Windows.
  - nooneelse 15y ago
    But it is possible in the free software domain, for your new-Gnome hating wife to read a blog or article about other people who also hate new-Gnome and who have put together, or suggest, an alternative. That alternative can be as little work for her as installing something else from the package manager (which can be at the skill level of a search and point and click). This doesn't take skill in programming, no more than (in the venerable tradition of car metaphors) it takes mechanical skil to know that the dealer can install the leather seat or roof-rack options for your car if you request that of them. You drastically understate the percentage of people who have alternatives to choose from at their skill level.
    - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
      Yes and no. I think you're over estimating how IT literate my wife and many others are. I bought her a MacBook because she used to shout at the PC too much. And it's not just her. My mum wouldn't get a Mac as she didn't want to have to relearn Windows. My aunty had Linux installed by one of her sons on her PC (for security reasons) and couldn't do a thing (another one returned it to Windows so she could go back to reading her mail and looking at the funny things her friends sent her). And before anyone asks about how all these examples are about women, my father is so IT illiterate I can't even form a coherent example of his lack of knowledge because there's so little of it (though he still surfs the web and looks at his photos). For these people the idea that you'd go and look for an alternative is a pretty big stretch and that's before you ask whether they actually have the skills to carry out a proper assessment of what is available, what meets their needs, what's robust, what's actively developed (a major consideration in the FOSS world) and so on to make a choice. And even if they do do all that suddenly a major part of their world changes and there is (for them) a major investment in relearning how things work. If you've got the skills and genuinely worry about these things then I agree FOSS is great but for a massive, massive number of people they just want something basic that makes some sensible choices they can live with and get on with doing stuff. Right now that's a need FOSS is doing little to meet.
sudoman 15y ago
Yes, there is the inconvenience of people having different ideas of what makes an optimal program. However, in the case of Gnome3, the Gnome team has been developing fallback mode, which will be used in some GNU/Linux distros in their next releases. So there is still a good deal of original functionality still in place. (And yes there are still variants like XFCE, and other alternatives.) However, the main point isn't whether we can get as much eye-candy as humanly possible. Free software operating systems may always be lacking some set of features that are present in proprietary systems. But the real issue is how many _anti-features_ there are. We know about Apple's decision on storage policies because it is blatant and they were up-front about it. But there is so much in a proprietary program that we can't easily monitor. It may sound paranoid, but there are likely backdoors, etc. in many of our cell phones, allowing paying governments to listen to converstaions, even when it's sitting in your pocket, or it looks like it's off but still has the battery in. http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/29/gmail-hackers-used-us-government-backdoor/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/29/gmail-hackers-used-us-go... Gmail and others are _known_ to have backdoors to user data for governments, for example. How comfortable are you with that? And it's not limited to backdoors and spying. Apple once installed a hardware chip in one of their computers to remove certain features and sell it at a cheaper price. Removing the chip allowed users to use those features. While we usually don't have much control at the hardware level, I personally don't want to use an operating system that is defective by design http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ , with forced obsolescence just being one example of a dirty tactic that is often used. (Get the latest phone, the previous one isn't cool anymore and the new OS works like crap on your "old" hardware!) If it weren't for Firefox, there would hardly be any web standards to speak of, and the internet would basically cater to Microsoft Windows' Internet Explorer. Microsoft resisted the development of the internet in its current form because it allows users of virtually any operating system to use the web to its fullest potential. I don't think Apple is very much above that kind of thinking. When there weren't many apps for the iPhone, Apple touted the idea of web-based apps, because it was an easy entry point, and there weren't many binary alternatives in the "ecosystem". Once there were lots of programs in Apple's (censored) store, they began discouraging the use of web-based applications and encouraged everyone to make programs compiled for the iPhone, largely because a user of any device can use a web-based app, but you have to buy an iPhone to use the any of the programs that have been written by programmers for that device. (No cross-compiling allowed by Apple, btw.) So whether or not we like where development is heading with a given free software project, there is a sanity to the development process in that there are no anti-features that I can really think of. If any get made, then all it takes is _one_ programmer to say, "I don't like that idea, I'll just delete that code and share the change with others, because it suits me, and because I can." edit: spelling
darklajid 15y ago
"Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor, against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it..." Seriously? I'm not a Wikipedia guy, but.. Care to provide some sources here? Back up - "overnight" - Versus an open discussion among everyone interested, with lots of early prototypes available to discuss the changes. - "against the majority of their users" - Got numbers? Reasonable surveys? Or are we just trusting that the loud crowd that curses about this change is not a vocal minority, but really 'the userbase'? - "the detriment of the whole linux desktop" - Puh - lease.. That's not even funny. This part is just sad.. - "Users hated it and are still hating it" - Generalization, care to provide numbers, surveys - ah, right. It's just a repetition of the second point, right? To really make it stick? Really, that was uncalled for and totally useless. You could've made your point about not being able to 'use the source' without adding unqualified attacks.

danssig 15y ago

Wonderful comment. This is one reason I always laughed at the argument "yea, but... we have all the source code!". Great, so the solution is we pay to maintain it? How is this free again?

seabee 15y ago
The unsaid thing about freedoms is you cannot exercise them unless you have the means to do so. If you don't have that, the only value freedoms afford you is aspirational. Given that the potential to do something is worth a whole lot less than the activity itself, it's easy to see why FOSS is in is current state and will remain that way for a long time.
- gbog 15y ago
  Then you would drop freedom of speech just because it is useless unless you own CNN?
  - seabee 15y ago
    Nobody is suggesting that. In any case it's a false comparison, since anybody has the ability to fully exercise their freedom of speech. To exercise your open-source freedoms fully require skills, time, and/or money (to pay others to do it for you).
    - gbog 15y ago
      If the overall noise level is too high and you don't own a microphone, your freedom of speech can't be used effectively, you talk any nobody hears you. It is not a reason to drop freedom of speech, right? It's just the same with free software, the mere fact that you are allowed to read, change and distribute source code IS the key. Doing so is hard but not a reason to dismiss this freedom as irrelevant.
LiveTheDream 15y ago
This is an example of the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".

pja 15y ago

Ubuntu has put hard money into an alternative to Gnome3, yet they chose not to put effort into Gnome2 either. Which suggests that perhaps Gnome2 has been abandoned for good reasons, even if you don't agree with them. If you're not paying for their time (or willing to put your own time in), you don't get to chose how the people who are putting the effort in spend their programming time. With free software, you have the option to do whatever you like to it, but no-one has the obligation to work on it on your behalf.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
> With free software, you have the option to do whatever you like to it, but no-one has the obligation to work on it on your behalf. Absolutely and that's the problem. Say my wife (not a programmer) doesn't like it, she isn't going to learn to program, understand the code, make the changes she wants and implement them. While it's theoretically possible, it's so impractical as to effectively be impossible. The number of people for whom free as in speech software is actually freer than close software is a very small percentage - for others, such as my wife, Android or Linux is no freer (as in speech) than iOS or Windows.
- nooneelse 15y ago
  But it is possible in the free software domain, for your new-Gnome hating wife to read a blog or article about other people who also hate new-Gnome and who have put together, or suggest, an alternative. That alternative can be as little work for her as installing something else from the package manager (which can be at the skill level of a search and point and click). This doesn't take skill in programming, no more than (in the venerable tradition of car metaphors) it takes mechanical skil to know that the dealer can install the leather seat or roof-rack options for your car if you request that of them. You drastically understate the percentage of people who have alternatives to choose from at their skill level.
  - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
    Yes and no. I think you're over estimating how IT literate my wife and many others are. I bought her a MacBook because she used to shout at the PC too much. And it's not just her. My mum wouldn't get a Mac as she didn't want to have to relearn Windows. My aunty had Linux installed by one of her sons on her PC (for security reasons) and couldn't do a thing (another one returned it to Windows so she could go back to reading her mail and looking at the funny things her friends sent her). And before anyone asks about how all these examples are about women, my father is so IT illiterate I can't even form a coherent example of his lack of knowledge because there's so little of it (though he still surfs the web and looks at his photos). For these people the idea that you'd go and look for an alternative is a pretty big stretch and that's before you ask whether they actually have the skills to carry out a proper assessment of what is available, what meets their needs, what's robust, what's actively developed (a major consideration in the FOSS world) and so on to make a choice. And even if they do do all that suddenly a major part of their world changes and there is (for them) a major investment in relearning how things work. If you've got the skills and genuinely worry about these things then I agree FOSS is great but for a massive, massive number of people they just want something basic that makes some sensible choices they can live with and get on with doing stuff. Right now that's a need FOSS is doing little to meet.

sudoman 15y ago

Yes, there is the inconvenience of people having different ideas of what makes an optimal program. However, in the case of Gnome3, the Gnome team has been developing fallback mode, which will be used in some GNU/Linux distros in their next releases. So there is still a good deal of original functionality still in place. (And yes there are still variants like XFCE, and other alternatives.) However, the main point isn't whether we can get as much eye-candy as humanly possible. Free software operating systems may always be lacking some set of features that are present in proprietary systems. But the real issue is how many _anti-features_ there are. We know about Apple's decision on storage policies because it is blatant and they were up-front about it. But there is so much in a proprietary program that we can't easily monitor. It may sound paranoid, but there are likely backdoors, etc. in many of our cell phones, allowing paying governments to listen to converstaions, even when it's sitting in your pocket, or it looks like it's off but still has the battery in. http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/29/gmail-hackers-used-us-government-backdoor/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/29/gmail-hackers-used-us-go... Gmail and others are _known_ to have backdoors to user data for governments, for example. How comfortable are you with that? And it's not limited to backdoors and spying. Apple once installed a hardware chip in one of their computers to remove certain features and sell it at a cheaper price. Removing the chip allowed users to use those features. While we usually don't have much control at the hardware level, I personally don't want to use an operating system that is defective by design http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ , with forced obsolescence just being one example of a dirty tactic that is often used. (Get the latest phone, the previous one isn't cool anymore and the new OS works like crap on your "old" hardware!) If it weren't for Firefox, there would hardly be any web standards to speak of, and the internet would basically cater to Microsoft Windows' Internet Explorer. Microsoft resisted the development of the internet in its current form because it allows users of virtually any operating system to use the web to its fullest potential. I don't think Apple is very much above that kind of thinking. When there weren't many apps for the iPhone, Apple touted the idea of web-based apps, because it was an easy entry point, and there weren't many binary alternatives in the "ecosystem". Once there were lots of programs in Apple's (censored) store, they began discouraging the use of web-based applications and encouraged everyone to make programs compiled for the iPhone, largely because a user of any device can use a web-based app, but you have to buy an iPhone to use the any of the programs that have been written by programmers for that device. (No cross-compiling allowed by Apple, btw.) So whether or not we like where development is heading with a given free software project, there is a sanity to the development process in that there are no anti-features that I can really think of. If any get made, then all it takes is _one_ programmer to say, "I don't like that idea, I'll just delete that code and share the change with others, because it suits me, and because I can." edit: spelling

darklajid 15y ago

"Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor, against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it..." Seriously? I'm not a Wikipedia guy, but.. Care to provide some sources here? Back up - "overnight" - Versus an open discussion among everyone interested, with lots of early prototypes available to discuss the changes. - "against the majority of their users" - Got numbers? Reasonable surveys? Or are we just trusting that the loud crowd that curses about this change is not a vocal minority, but really 'the userbase'? - "the detriment of the whole linux desktop" - Puh - lease.. That's not even funny. This part is just sad.. - "Users hated it and are still hating it" - Generalization, care to provide numbers, surveys - ah, right. It's just a repetition of the second point, right? To really make it stick? Really, that was uncalled for and totally useless. You could've made your point about not being able to 'use the source' without adding unqualified attacks.