4 ms·

> 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

> 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Thanks. It's great to get some other honest personal perspectives.

eternityforest 4y 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 4y ago
Thanks. It's great to get some other honest personal perspectives.