3 ms·

Open source. Learn it, use it, develop it, don't try to ruin it by blocking innovation, help answer questions on the forums, annoy people till the try it(But do

Open source. Learn it, use it, develop it, don't try to ruin it by blocking innovation, help answer questions on the forums, annoy people till the try it(But don't try to make them use stuff no regular user wants, like sed scripts and emacs)... FOSS is doing amazingly well. I also think open hardware will probably have it's day eventually. The IoT needs a bit of a push to stop being a pile of SASS poop, and we especially need a free alternative to things like Tile trackers before the EU kills them or something. What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch?

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? The hard work is still to be done on the legal and cultural levels. I don't want to use free software as a marginalised, "not supported" exception and constant "inconvenience" to others who have been deceived or bullied into domesticated monopoly silos. I want a right to choose (or build for myself) software that fits my needs, practical, ethical, technical, financial and cultural, and to have those choices work at least as well as for a big-tech consumer for most common tasks in a modern digital society. Surely the real action is now on the protocol and interoperability level? Things have essentially not improved since the late 80s when you couldn't load a DOS file on a Mac, except now the barriers are on the network. In this regard I am pleased to live in Europe which I think is doing good things to promote software freedom and diversity - though I hear you have reservations. Do you think the dangers (in Europe) are that we simply replace corporations with governments as enemies of freedom? If so, how can a free market (rather than top-down legislation) address the seemingly insoluble problem of forcing giants to open and interoperate?
- eternityforest 5y ago
  I love right to repair and data portability, and USB C port, and I am a big fan of opening up the Apple platform. But I don't like quite that level of extreme stance on privacy. I do believe it's absolutely a right, but I don't want it to be a duty. Not all personal data is a top level military secret, and there are many legitimate uses(Look at HAM radio) for even plaintext systems. I think I'd rather they just require honest privacy policies in a simple machine readable format with an accompanying human readable version. Something needs to be done, because it's definitely not right to lie to consumers, but I also don't want it to be any harder to log data for debugging and attack mitigation, to use CCTV, or to use technologies that are decentralized and inherently don't support revoking rights to process. I mostly like the GDPR, but there's a few things I don't quite like, and the possibility of even more strict stuff is a bit scary. I'd hate to see AirTags, CCTV, and Amazon Sidewalk outright banned with no chance of even a FOSS version, and I personally know people who would love that to happen. Here in the US most states forbid one person from secretly recording a conversation that they are part of without specific exceptions, and even that has some scary side effects, because a hidden recorder is a powerful self defense tool. Other than that, I'm a fan of 95% of what I've seen from the EU on tech. It's probably not enough to really fix things though. Data portability doesn't fully solve things when so much is in the cloud. Sure you can move to some other provider, but it's gonna be a lot of work, and then you'll just have a different single point of failure. I think what we really need is for a really good open protocol to really take over. Something like WebDav, but extended to support synced redundant accounts, domainless self hosting(With pubkey/DHT based domains that don't require asking a registrar's permission to make one), and so on. It's just way too convenient to make stuff sync in the cloud, without it, FOSS doesn't have full parity. We need something like SOLID, making that cloud sync a separate reusable thing and letting us choose our providers, while making it easy to add to apps, and not involving crypto tokens or 7729 different accounts on a million custom sync systems, some of which may be insecure.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    Thanks. It's great to get some other honest personal perspectives.
gyulai 5y ago
> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? I work with a lot of purists who run Linux on their desktops. I can totally relate, and I have a lot admiration for how they have their principles and are willing to put in the work to uphold them. I frequently find myself in video conferences where someone can't get their audio to work, and, predictably, it's always one of those guys. I can equally-well relate to the frustration they must be feeling when that happens, and I remember it well from when I ran Linux on the desktop. I installed my first Linux on desktop when I was 12 years old (that's 25 years ago) and even developed some OSS for it a few years after that. I used Linux on desktop as a daily driver for work-related stuff ca 2005 - 2012 when I was an academic. And I do periodically try out new distros like elementary OS and so forth. I've been running Linux Mint on a laptop I use for trying out nonessential things. (It recently had to give way to QubesOS). The purist in me has always been at war with the pragmatist in me. When OS X and later WSL came out and gave you the option of running a Linux-like userland on top of a commercial-grade desktop, this established a truce. The obvious thing for me to do was to use OS X or Windows, and then install whatever software I wanted with no regard to whether it was open source or not, as long as the price tag was worth it for me. A price of zero for open source frequently leads to a great cost/benefit ratio, but with some things like InDesign, the price tag is just worth it for me for the functionality. And when things fall short of the standard of "it just works" then the true cost can quickly skyrocket, and I've often found this to be the case for open source. With regard to the software that I most deeply care about because it's most immediately connected to the software that I myself develop, it has always been clear that I wanted to stick with Linux and OSS. But we're talking terminal-stuff here, not GUIs, since I'm a software engineer who deals mostly with data and pure abstraction (like math, NLP, etc). It seems like recently the industry has turned a corner that is upsetting that truce. OS X and Windows, in terms of the corporate politics behind them, have just become too bad to bear, and I am expecting they will get even worse. So this is what is creating the motivation in me to look to the past of commercial software rather than its future, or the future of open source, for my daily computing needs.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  You can have have all the past computing you want with qemu and kvm. I even keep a sparc solaris image around simply because i loved those old screensavers. I finally put linux on my gaming laptop this weekend, because microsoft decided to push linkedin resume builder in my face when I was updating my resume in word. Windows 11 is now bursting with flashy distractions that make it hard to get work done. Screw that noise. Pop!OS worked with the nvidia graphics so I went with that.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? The hard work is still to be done on the legal and cultural levels. I don't want to use free software as a marginalised, "not supported" exception and constant "inconvenience" to others who have been deceived or bullied into domesticated monopoly silos. I want a right to choose (or build for myself) software that fits my needs, practical, ethical, technical, financial and cultural, and to have those choices work at least as well as for a big-tech consumer for most common tasks in a modern digital society. Surely the real action is now on the protocol and interoperability level? Things have essentially not improved since the late 80s when you couldn't load a DOS file on a Mac, except now the barriers are on the network. In this regard I am pleased to live in Europe which I think is doing good things to promote software freedom and diversity - though I hear you have reservations. Do you think the dangers (in Europe) are that we simply replace corporations with governments as enemies of freedom? If so, how can a free market (rather than top-down legislation) address the seemingly insoluble problem of forcing giants to open and interoperate?

eternityforest 5y ago
I love right to repair and data portability, and USB C port, and I am a big fan of opening up the Apple platform. But I don't like quite that level of extreme stance on privacy. I do believe it's absolutely a right, but I don't want it to be a duty. Not all personal data is a top level military secret, and there are many legitimate uses(Look at HAM radio) for even plaintext systems. I think I'd rather they just require honest privacy policies in a simple machine readable format with an accompanying human readable version. Something needs to be done, because it's definitely not right to lie to consumers, but I also don't want it to be any harder to log data for debugging and attack mitigation, to use CCTV, or to use technologies that are decentralized and inherently don't support revoking rights to process. I mostly like the GDPR, but there's a few things I don't quite like, and the possibility of even more strict stuff is a bit scary. I'd hate to see AirTags, CCTV, and Amazon Sidewalk outright banned with no chance of even a FOSS version, and I personally know people who would love that to happen. Here in the US most states forbid one person from secretly recording a conversation that they are part of without specific exceptions, and even that has some scary side effects, because a hidden recorder is a powerful self defense tool. Other than that, I'm a fan of 95% of what I've seen from the EU on tech. It's probably not enough to really fix things though. Data portability doesn't fully solve things when so much is in the cloud. Sure you can move to some other provider, but it's gonna be a lot of work, and then you'll just have a different single point of failure. I think what we really need is for a really good open protocol to really take over. Something like WebDav, but extended to support synced redundant accounts, domainless self hosting(With pubkey/DHT based domains that don't require asking a registrar's permission to make one), and so on. It's just way too convenient to make stuff sync in the cloud, without it, FOSS doesn't have full parity. We need something like SOLID, making that cloud sync a separate reusable thing and letting us choose our providers, while making it easy to add to apps, and not involving crypto tokens or 7729 different accounts on a million custom sync systems, some of which may be insecure.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Thanks. It's great to get some other honest personal perspectives.

gyulai 5y ago

> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? I work with a lot of purists who run Linux on their desktops. I can totally relate, and I have a lot admiration for how they have their principles and are willing to put in the work to uphold them. I frequently find myself in video conferences where someone can't get their audio to work, and, predictably, it's always one of those guys. I can equally-well relate to the frustration they must be feeling when that happens, and I remember it well from when I ran Linux on the desktop. I installed my first Linux on desktop when I was 12 years old (that's 25 years ago) and even developed some OSS for it a few years after that. I used Linux on desktop as a daily driver for work-related stuff ca 2005 - 2012 when I was an academic. And I do periodically try out new distros like elementary OS and so forth. I've been running Linux Mint on a laptop I use for trying out nonessential things. (It recently had to give way to QubesOS). The purist in me has always been at war with the pragmatist in me. When OS X and later WSL came out and gave you the option of running a Linux-like userland on top of a commercial-grade desktop, this established a truce. The obvious thing for me to do was to use OS X or Windows, and then install whatever software I wanted with no regard to whether it was open source or not, as long as the price tag was worth it for me. A price of zero for open source frequently leads to a great cost/benefit ratio, but with some things like InDesign, the price tag is just worth it for me for the functionality. And when things fall short of the standard of "it just works" then the true cost can quickly skyrocket, and I've often found this to be the case for open source. With regard to the software that I most deeply care about because it's most immediately connected to the software that I myself develop, it has always been clear that I wanted to stick with Linux and OSS. But we're talking terminal-stuff here, not GUIs, since I'm a software engineer who deals mostly with data and pure abstraction (like math, NLP, etc). It seems like recently the industry has turned a corner that is upsetting that truce. OS X and Windows, in terms of the corporate politics behind them, have just become too bad to bear, and I am expecting they will get even worse. So this is what is creating the motivation in me to look to the past of commercial software rather than its future, or the future of open source, for my daily computing needs.

smackeyacky 5y ago
You can have have all the past computing you want with qemu and kvm. I even keep a sparc solaris image around simply because i loved those old screensavers. I finally put linux on my gaming laptop this weekend, because microsoft decided to push linkedin resume builder in my face when I was updating my resume in word. Windows 11 is now bursting with flashy distractions that make it hard to get work done. Screw that noise. Pop!OS worked with the nvidia graphics so I went with that.