28 ms·

We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom (2016)

263 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

chx 4y ago
1. We -- as in, geeks -- won the DRM battle for MP3 stores. We have, however, so thoroughly lost the DRM war people barely care it's there. All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more. 2. We won the battle for Linux -- and have thoroughly lost the free software war. No matter how you count, it is, by far, by very far, the most used operating system. A year ago there were three billion active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. There is no freedom any more. And despite the phones have capable CPUs, practically no one uses it to develop software, the entire development ecosystem is completely absent from Android. By any means you should be able to attach keyboard, mouse and monitor and develop and deploy your own phone apps but who does that? 2a. In the web server space, once again, it's Linux all the way. Although w3tech only says "unix alike" for the 80% it reports it's not unreasonable to think the overwhelming majority of that is Linux. But, guess what? increasingly all of that is in a cloud data center where your control is ... limited. 3. We won the battle for browsers -- everything now runs on top of an open source rendering engine. But, do I need to mention how much we lost the war here? Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? And in a familiar manner, they restrict of what you can install on them.
- rayiner 4y ago
  > But, do I need to mention how much we lost the war here? Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? Not to mention that they killed W3C in its sleep and the web isn’t even based on standards anymore.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    What is the web based on if not standards?
    - rayiner 4y ago
      De facto implementations from a small cabal that overthrew the W3C in a coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        How do the WHATWG 'living standards' differ from w3c standards? Is it the width of the radius of people who have buy-in? At what radius does something transition from a "cabal" to a "standards committee?"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wiz21c 4y ago
  We lost a battle but not the war. The love of being free to do what I want with the most incredible device in history drives me. The conviction that this freedom is one of the pillar of a free future society drives me. Millions of lost battles will never ever change my mind.
- danuker 4y ago
  > All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more. I do not pay for these services. I restrict myself to YouTube and Odysee.
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    Indeed. Sites like gog.com and itch.io indicate to me that the nerd-hate of DRM lives on. I don't have a Netflix subscription and I haven't knowingly bought a DRM 'd device ever. I even go as far as removing the widevine library when forced to use Chrome, for example. We're losing the war, but we do fight on.
    - danuker 4y ago
      > We're losing the war I am not losing any war. Content restricted by DRM is not worth watching to me. The best content is produced by real people (such as commenters on HN), not large companies. DRM customers will have to find out the hard way that as soon as the DRM server has a glitch, they're unable to see the content they paid for. Hell, even an expiring contract might make some ebooks you bought [1] or the music in your game disappear [2]. No thanks. [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989048 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989... [2] https://www.resetera.com/threads/some-of-gta-ivs-music-licenses-expire-later-this-month-and-songs-will-be-removed.35209/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/some-of-gta-ivs-music-licen...
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        > Content restricted by DRM is not worth watching to me. That's a good principle, and a hard bar to meet when the content is free, but still encumbered. A chap from our local dads group was really keen to share his Disney+ account with me. That's actually a "legitimate" thing, I guess Disney want to get other people's kids hooked so they have a "share with a friend" scheme. I have to admit it was a struggle for us to decide against using a free child pacifier service.
        4y ago
- Klonoar 4y ago
  >Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? The important parts of them - the rendering engines - are indeed open source, so this isn't as bad as it seems. One can still build their own browsers on top of those engines (e.g, Ungoogled Chromium). The "war" that's lost here isn't source availability, but two mega-entities (Apple & Google, primarily) getting to steer so much of the web.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    > so this isn't as bad as it seems. I'm not so sure, it's not bad. If Google decided to remove, for sake of example, add-ons. Would un-Googled Chromium be able to keep it?
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      If Google decides to remove addons then it would start losing users fast, and I think we’d find a fork that kept them more than viable. In this sense chrome is very different to for example Internet Explorer where no such fork was possible.
      - _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
        Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions, where presumably it has the largest marketshare anyway.
        Ygg2 4y ago
        Implying people on mobile know there is an alternate browser. I've seen people not know how to open Google drive, let alone go to the Play store, download FFox and add ad blocker.
    - strombofulous 4y ago
      We'll find the answer to this question at the end of the year when manifest v2 extensions are removed
  - 4y ago
- derefr 4y ago
  > All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more. Well, yeah. Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. The existence of infinite accessible libraries of content for flat-fee monthly-subscription prices, is built upon IP licenses which were granted conditional to the consumer's inability to leverage that access into piracy. If we deleted DRM, streaming services would cease to exist overnight — all their license grants being revoked, leaving them with nothing to serve — and we'd go back to just relying upon the iTunes Music Store / Netflix DVD rental model. (Which, to be clear, has still also existed alongside streaming this whole time.) > But, guess what? increasingly all of that is in a cloud data center where your control is ... limited. But with almost every stack deployed to those data centers just using one or another portable open standard (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) for deployment, commodifying the IaaS provider, such that the moment the IaaS provider attempts to assert any constraints developers aren't uncomfortable with, the developer can just move away in an instant. (IaaS providers try their best to offer technologies with actual lock-in, but either no significant fraction of users takes them up on them; or a new open-standard abstraction layer is created that re-commodifies the offering by making it something portable to other IaaS providers + open implementations. The "S3-compatible" object-storage API is one good example of such re-commodification.)
  - Teever 4y ago
    > Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. Why? Is DRM stopping piracy? Like what do you think would happen if DRM didn't exist, would the pirate bay be even bigger? People don't pay for netflix because it's hard to pirate stuff, they pay for netflix because it's easier to do so than to pirate stuff, and it would be the same even if the laws of the universe changed one night and all DRM ceased to function.
  - stackbutterflow 4y ago
    If we deleted DRM, streaming services would cease to exist overnight — all their license grants being revoked, leaving them with nothing to serve — and we'd go back to just relying upon the iTunes Music Store / Netflix DVD rental model. Why is that? You can download everything for free. I don't think people use Netflix to access otherwise inaccessible content but rather because it's more convenient than searching for the right torrent link.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  "We" also stopped caring. People used to prefer GPL over MIT-style licenses for ideological reasons. That thought you are having now, namely that "ideology" is a dirty word, is a symptom of the same change. OSS development moving to internet and hardware companies is the most direct cause, as for them MIT-licensing makes sense (in the sense that others need to use it to be an option for them). But, increasingly, the people writing the software, at those companies and elsewhere, not just prefer MIT over GPL; they actively don't have an opinion and, in many cases, not even an understanding of the issue, or, worst case, the basics of copyright.[0] Some of this is simply due to most of the salient issues being decisively won or, at least, being replaced by a solid truce: Linux is everywhere but Microsoft still flourishes. Other software companies have either also found out that co-existence is possible. Or they no longer exist/no longer have the power (Netscape, SCO, Oracle), or never had the chance to get started in this environment (that httpd you are not paying for). Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google were never threatened. Thus, nobody is fighting Open Source, and the need to defend it has seized to be a motivating factor to get acquainted with the old ways of lawfare. But growing up without such challenges leads to a generation trying to find meaning. Having lost ideals of freedom to an assumption of such, they've found much the same ideas as other bored generations: getting rich and, along the way, maybe finding some group or other to occasionally hate-stomp into the curb for shits and giggles. So they're now running GPUs as space- and world-heaters, while whatever capability for political thought they have is busy balancing their love of Ayn Rand and Jordan Peterson with their hatred of women and the New York Times. 0: Note how there was never a thought expended to any moral or legal issues with the use of vast datasets of text, photos, or music to create text-, photo-, or music-generating AI models. But when someone started doing the same to source code, the possibility that their creative use of fopen to open a file provoked outrage usually reserved for female reddit-CEOs or game journalists. Free Software, for someone writing software, was about giving others such freedoms. This was altruism in its purest form (it's in the dictionary close to alt-right, if someone wants to look it up).
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Big corporate ran a campaign to dirty the name of GPL, Richard Stallman and the FSF. They won.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > 2. We won the battle for Linux -- and have thoroughly lost the free software war. No matter how you count, it is, by far, by very far, the most used operating system. If you count only the kernel then yes, we "won". The trouble is a kernel is not an OS. You need also userspace. (linux will panic if no "init" is found). And when we count the userspace, we lost. Android is a closed system. > 3. We won the battle for browsers -- everything now runs on top of an open source rendering engine. Just because the rendering engine is OSS i would not call it a win. The rest (Chrome, Edge, Safari) have nothing to do with OSS. And Firefox is an old impaired browser who still remembers its glory days.
  - black_puppydog 4y ago
    I think the win for 3 (browsers) was to displace IE?
    - herbst 4y ago
      Tell that to any developer that is writing CSS and JS quirks for edge right now. We haven't won when the problem still persists in a different outfit.
      - executesorder66 4y ago
        I haven't done frontend dev for years. So I'm surprised to read this. I thought Edge switched to using Blink. How is it possible for there to be "edge quirks" that you need to cater for? Does microsoft take Blink, and insert their own crap into it? What could they possibly have to gain from doing that? Why not just contribute upstream?
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Vendor differentiation, just like there is no pure Linux distribution or Android phone that is 100% just like upstream. Not only does Edge Chrome offer specific Microsfot features, its developer tools are also customized. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/develop-web-microsoft-edge https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/develop-web-...
- chopin 4y ago
  Re. 2.: I just bought a Fairphone 4 with e/OS preinstalled. I think I can do on that device whatever suits me. Not all is lost but we need to care.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > A year ago there were three billion active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. Huh? I've never seen a device that has sideloading or ADB disabled. Yes, rooting is a different issue, but on the other hand it's not really needed in day-to-day usage and pretty much all phones sold outside of US carriers can be easily rooted. (The fact that US carriers regularly prohibit rooting should be tackled nevertheless)
  - rawbot 4y ago
    Yeah, I have no idea what GP is on about. Maybe Android phones in China (which would make a huge portion of the marketshare of Android)? But there's plenty of reviewers of Chinese-territory-only smartphones running emulators on it, which I'm guessing they installed by sideloading an APK.
- BurningPenguin 4y ago
  > and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. What? You can easily install non-store apps too. It's just a single setting. There's F-Droid as alternative store or you just load the apk on the phone.
  - rawbot 4y ago
    It is so easy, that Android will stop you from installing APKs downloaded from, Chrome, lets say, but provide you with a big button to go DIRECTLY to the setting needed to enable sideloading. It is so easy that Fortnite (the biggest game at the time, and maybe now) was/is distributed directly by APK.
    - BurningPenguin 4y ago
      I once worked in a company that distributed an APK via mail to the customers. It was a customized app, and still in development. "How to install" was a regular question.
    - sky-kedge0749 4y ago
      > It is so easy that Fortnite (the biggest game at the time, and maybe now) was/is distributed directly by APK. Amazon Prime Video used to be like this back in the day. You'd have to allow sideloading, install Amazon's custom store, then install the video app from there. This sort of thing is one of the reasons I like that iPhone is locked down. I know that none of the apps I use will decide they can make reducing my phone's security a condition of using their app. If they want to be in the iPhone store -- and they do -- then they'll have to work with iPhone's strong security.
  - narrator 4y ago
    I find that many iphone people have a misconception that Android is locked down too. It's extraordinarily common and I don't know why. I use the non play store install feature for a few things. For example, I go to Telegram's site and download an APK of it because it lets me look at channels that are explicitly censored by versions downloaded from the Google Play and Apple App store. I do this all on stock, non-root Android.
- mjan22640 4y ago
  The vast majority of people are non developers. They cannot care about things they do not know exist.
- deepstack 4y ago
  If you read Tim Wu's master switch, this is nothing new. There are certain people (technocrates, geeks too) like to consolidate and centralize stuff. Yes it makes things easier to manage and organise, however the cost is freedom. A messier world with more freedom is always better for the public.
- api 4y ago
  The elephant in the room is SaaS. With SaaS it is possible to use 100% free software and even release all your code as FOSS as well and it's meaningless. The service has your data and it's the hub. Even if you can self-host few people do and it's time consuming and hard. SaaS, though often based on FOSS, is far more closed than closed-source commercial software ever was. I can run a closed-source DOS app from 1989 in DosBox today and if I had data in it I could still access it. Same with most commercial PC software for Windows and Mac. Can't do that with SaaS. Even if I can run it the SaaS has my data. If I stop paying it's gone. If the company goes out of business it's gone. If they rev the software in a way that ruins it for me, I'm out of luck and I have to start over. (Sometimes they let you export your data, but never conveniently and never in a good format.) Here's the thing. Software is not actually free. Easy to use mature software is hugely labor-intensive to produce. If you don't design the economic model, the market will design one for you. Usually that model will be worse than what you would have done. The most popular creative way to monetize "free" software is surveillance capitalism followed by adware and cloud-as-DRM SaaS. Oh, and a sure fire get rich quick scheme for quite some time has been to take a promising FOSS software or standard and slap up a SaaS around it. Something tells me none of these companies pay anything to the original creators. TL;DR: FOSS lost the war because it confused free "as in beer" with free "as in freedom" and never figured out an economic model. As a result we got one, SaaS with the cloud as back-door DRM, that is worse in every way than the old closed source shrink wrap model. But the fact that most people in this thread are bringing up DRM for media means that people may care more about free "as in beer" than freedom. Few people are bringing up what FOSS was supposed to be about: control of your own computing environment and ownership of your own stuff. It was never about getting other peoples' stuff for free or even about software not costing any money. It was about software not restricting you and honest freedom-respecting models.
- golergka 4y ago
  > A year ago there were three billion active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. There is no freedom any more. Practice showed that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the apps user chooses to "install" is malware that he is not aware of.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    Weird, I thought the majority of cases were Fortnite downloads. But maybe that's malware in some sense. :)
- cbolton 4y ago
  1. I agree we lost the DRM war. But I think the reason no one fights it anymore is that most people only cared for convenience reasons. Netflix, Spotify, etc. have largely solved the convenience issue. So we could say most people were actually fighting a different (temporarily aligned) war and won. 2. On the contrary, it's remarkable that the majority of smartphones now run an operating system that provides both good security (compared to desktops) and openness, and not just the kernel: Developers can write highly privileged apps like MicroG and F-Droid using official APIs to manage the phone (what MicroG does talking to the Google servers is a separate issue). Users can choose to use these apps using the sideloading feature, which is officially supported. For even more access, several smartphone manufacturers offer an official way of "getting root" and replacing the ROM with a custom one. For me this was a rather unexpected and welcome development! Then there are several communities of Android ROMs and companies build all sorts of devices using the AOSP source code. There is actually an ecosystem of apps for writing code on Android. It's indeed small and little used. My guess is that it's due to a combination of factors: IDEs that require huge ressources, separation of work and private devices, something else? 2a. Of course web servers are in data centers. What's your point? It's still nice that they are using open source software. There's a point to be made however about the closed SaaS apps like Google Docs that have replaced open source apps like LibreOffice. I don't care much: people/companies can run whatever they want on their own computers to provide me with a service. What matters for services are 1) data privacy issues (I agree with you on that) and 2) data export options (the SaaS apps I use are generally satisfying on this front). 3. Firefox's market share is small but it's still a perfectly capable browser. And I'm still amazed the whole of Chromium can be built from open source for both desktop and mobile. Sure Chromium is not Chrome but it's not far and many people use it as main browser. There's probably some meat here for a discussion.
  - Octoth0rpe 4y ago
    > On the contrary, it's remarkable that the majority of smartphones now run an operating system that provides both good security (compared to desktops) and openness The security is only as good as your security update availability, which is still a major problem for those 3b devices.
  - ghaff 4y ago
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  I'm untroubled by DRM on all-you-can-eat streaming services because I'm explicitly making a very different deal. It's transparently gross if music SOLD to me that I'm supposed to be able to listen to in perpetuity is DRM'd so I can't shift platforms or devices or whatever. That's shitty, and I'm glad we're done with that. However, the deal with a streaming service is that for the price we used to pay to "own" a single CD or album, we get access to an enormous body of music we can listen to at will. That, to me, is a service that I'm paying for. I'm not troubled by the music being locked in, because what I'm paying for is access to that library. It's definitely a shift in how music works, and it's not without its downsides (especially as I understand it for artists), but in a world where most people don't have access to great record stores I think it's overall better. We never "won" with video purchases at all, which was predictable (we only got free-access formats on music because it happened outside the industry), but also less of a problem for me personally. I might "buy" something from Apple or whatever, but I understand it as a long-term rental. If I really want to own a film, I buy the BluRay. As for Linux, man, that's an unalloyed victory. Does anyone even SELL commercial Unix anymore? When I was younger there was still AIX and HP/UX and obviously Solaris, but I never heard of any of those anymore.
  - simonh 4y ago
    >Does anyone even SELL commercial Unix anymore? Apple. And before anyone says yes well but it runs a proprietary application layer so it doesn't count, it also runs all the open ones too just fine. The fact it's barely used for that despite a massive user base (by Unix standards) is hardly Apple's problem, or fault even. It just goes to show how deeply and thoroughly the open source software community has failed in getting the vast majority of ordinary people to care about open source desktop software. Even when all the barriers to access are completely eliminated.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      edit:lay blame where it ought Rarely have there been such obvious and one-sided manipulation of public source repos on strictly licensed code, as have been published by Apple Inc. It appears that they go out of their way to insult and dismiss any "power" over the code itself, like a steering committee especially, but as simple as an open repo maintainer. There is simply no profit in making current, working source code available in the same way as a published book at a public library is.. and so there is infinite Chutzpah at Apple Inc to say, not our affair. There is no way that current active source code works the way it is supposed to, if you cannot find it, build it, change it and thereby learn it and apply it. Emperor Apple has no clothes here
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Not all "geeks" oppose DRM. I for example think DRM is great.
  - sky-kedge0749 4y ago
    You don't really think it's "great", do you? More like, an acceptable trade-off? I'd love to hear the argument if you actually are pro-DRM as a thing in itself.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      I’m not claiming there are no downsides to DRM — the fact that it makes it hard or impossible to copy things one has legitimately purchased is clearly a negative. However, I think making piracy more difficult is valuable and more socially important than the downsides. In an ideal world we would subsidize content consumption for those who can’t afford it (we already do this via public libraries, and public funding of content creation in many countries, but we should do more) and also more strictly enforce laws against piracy by shutting down torrent trackers. Then we wouldn’t need DRM. But until this pipe dream comes true, I think DRM is valuable.
  - api 4y ago
    I thought about creating "OpenDRM" once, an open source DRM library. It was with another job in the past. "But that's silly! You can strip it off!" Of course you can, and you can strip DRM off proprietary DRM schemes too. All of them are cracked. That's not the point. The point is that there's a way for someone to indicate their usage terms along with a piece of media. An OpenDRM would not even necessarily encrypt, or would do so only in a very trivial way. It would instead be a standard for indicating terms of use and automatically checking for licensing entitlements.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    https://www.defectivebydesign.org/ https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
- spiffytech 4y ago
  > We have, however, so thoroughly lost the DRM war people barely care it's there. It's even worse than that: NFTs are basically an argument that DRM is a great idea and we should have more of it. The aspiration for NFTs is that sites, apps, and games will treat owning a file's NFT differently from possessing the file itself, possibly even restricting usage to NFT owners.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  We all became enamored with the cloud, streaming services, and centralized social media. If you don’t control your own means of producing on the web, you ultimately have no say.
pjmlp 4y ago
It was a pyrrhic victory. On the modern server room, what matters are type 1 hypervisors running managed runtimes or container orchestrators, the real kernel matters very little to most typical cloud workloads. Even if they depend on the Linux kernel in some form, it hardly matters to the large majority of cloud customers. On mobile space, only one platform uses the Linux kernel, and it is so abstracted from userspace that Google could change it at any time and no one would notice, while at the same time OEMs pretend GPL doesn't exist anyway. On the desktop, the Year of Desktop Linux seems to be bound to running the Linux kernel on top of virtualization. Meanwhile on IoT, there is an increasing set of options of alternative POSIX OSes with BSD/MIT/Apache licenses. Then there is the whole question what will happen when the generation that made Linux happen is no longer around to guarantee it keeps standing for its original goals.
- enasterosophes 4y ago
  I mostly agree with you. But there was this, where I beg to differ: > On the desktop, the Year of Desktop Linux seems to be bound to running the Linux kernel on top of virtualization. In my experience as soon as your IaaS starts offering virtualized desktops, all the users start wondering why you aren't offering Windows VMs. Then the pressure starts to build to bow to that demand. If you tell users that it's Linux desktops or nothing, they just change to another utility company who gives them the experience they find least challenging, even if it's less secure, less reliable and costs them more. Reminding people about the freedom and other benefits of Linux they'll be missing out on just provokes shrugs and the old retort of "but I need to get work done, I don't have time for your religious principals." The future is definitely Linux, but that old chestnut about Year of the Linux Desktop is never, ever going to happen. Linux is optimized for large servers and small devices. For such magisteria, you can attract skilled engineers to make things work, and naturally those same engineers can make Linux work on the meso-devices of the desktop realm. But the desktop realm will always be dominated by OSes optimized for that in-between area, where people balk at needing to do their own systems administration, especially when it puts them at odds with what they perceive to be a consensus.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
DeathArrow 4y ago
I don't care about OS wars, nor do I care about the freedom in the GPL sense of it. I would like to have a diverse OS landscape so we can chose what suits us best. I would like to have most software available on most platforms. I would like to have open standards for hardware, to be able to run what software we want on what hardware we want. I would like to not being forced to "rent" commercial software, but have also the option to buy it. I would like less bloated JS apps running on mobile and desktops and have instead some optimized and cleverly designed apps that doesn't require a monster of a CPU to do things that required very little computing power decades ago. I would like to have the option to run the software locally as opposed to have to run it in the cloud.
- gyulai 4y ago
  Sounds like all you really want is proper enforcement of antitrust laws.
  - skohan 4y ago
    Proper anti-trust enforcement in the US probably in the top handful of things you could do to improve life for the average person.
- enasterosophes 4y ago
  I hear you. The battle has many fronts. I venture that if we could successfully fight the GPL battle, then your other concerns would also fall into line. Then again, fighting the GPL battle is hard. If you aren't yet feeling the importance of GPL, then I still applaud you if you can make any headway on the other issues you mentioned.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Not getting this idea that Linux is freedom per se. Since the article was written, RedHat was acquired by IBM, and even before, Linux was largely controlled by enterprise demands (systemd, namespaces/docker) and folks with their own agenda (glibc, gnome). Freedom is choice. Choice requires alternative implementations. Alternatives can and will be developed if there's a common spec, like POSIX, SUS, LSB, X, OpenGL used to be, all of which have atrophied. Linux doesn't inspire anyone to create new end-user apps (with the exception of Blender and Krita, which were started well over ten years ago). Instead, we're loosing the apps we had, and march towards dumb UIs and needlessly containerized apps a la snap/flatpack. It's of no use and only frustrating to lament and decry the past without also showing a perspective to get out of our situation, or clean up the mess for those who follow after us. F/OSS is clearly not the solution, as can be seen by the demise of the web going the way of all previous digital communication mechanisms: it has been foobar'd by the ad industry, like email, Usenet, XMPP before. Open, meaningful standards are the only solution. Not like "web standards" eg WHATWG and W3C. Who thought it was a good idea to hand standard development to an ad company in the first place? We now have a closed-loop web where the content provider and the user agent are from the same party. We had that with CompuServe et al before the web; there was no need for a craptastic CSS and JS detour to arrive at that situation.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  Over the last few years I've begun to understand that freedom in a too-real sense is the reward we experience for loving the truth, to the extent that we do.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Instead, we're loosing the apps we had, and march towards dumb UIs and needlessly containerized apps a la snap/flatpack. There is a very real need behind app containerization: distributions are exceedlingly slow to pick up updates in a time where web applications routinely run on a "merge request passed, 5 minutes later it's on production" model. On top of that, distributions routinely run into the problem that package A wants a new version of library B, but the other applications haven't been updated to use the new version yet, so everyone is stuck until all applications in the distribution have been updated. Also: Most people use LTS distributions and let's be real no one wants to be stuck with a 2 year old browser that only gets backported security patches. Distributions had the chance to move to a model of "the core is stable but the applications the user uses are flexibly updateable", and they blew it completely.
wildmanx 4y ago
What keeps things open source / free software in practice is not a philosophical desire for freedom but the very practical desire to be able to get things done. That's why the Linux kernel is so popular and there is an open source ecosystem for systems tooling and web dev libs and all that. Not because people are hippies who want everything to be free (as in gratis) but because it's just so much easier than going through convoluted licensing requirements. In the end it's just evolution. If there is a free and open tool doing something better than some hard-to-license alternative, or at least well enough, then it will win. Once there isn't then the proprietary alternative will win in the space. In other words, once the demand for open hackable mobile phone ecosystems is high enough, they will be open and hackable. The demand is just not there. Similar for other areas raised in threads in here.
28304283409234 4y ago
"Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb." -Lord Helmet
temptemptemp111 4y ago
lbriner 4y ago
I understand the desire for freedom of choice or configuration but the bit that is missing is who is supposed to do this? Sure, Google have ringfenced Android for most people and then they restrict it, yes, but Android is open source so everyone is free to create their own version that isn't so encumbered but it is also an enormous amount of work, not just to build it but to maintain it as hardware changes. Who does the work and how do they get paid? Sure, some people can and do this work for free but what is the reward for them when Google etc. can outspend them on everything and most people would choose a polished expensive and locked-down version of phone OS over one that is less so. Same with OSs. You might not like Windows so don't use it, use Linux. Ultimately every enterprise is looking to make sales but let's not paint this as inherently evil because these same businesses employ an enormous number of people directly and indirectly. If there is a solution, then do it and prove it works but it seems like the amount of effort consistently increases over time and makes it even harder to create e.g. a rival browser or whatever so maybe we need a rethink at a much higher level.
- lvass 4y ago
  I can think of some players with trillions of dollars of annual budget that really should do it. They'd favor millions or billions of people whose interest they theoretically represent. Unfortunately, in practice they seem more likely to represent the interests of the few who exploit people's lack of privacy, but there's no reason this couldn't change.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think the royal we here presumes too much on the part of the free software advocates. Nothing against them but GNU software predates linux and the marriage of the two in typical linux distributions was a convenience marriage. Linus Torvalds wasn't really doing anything else than tinkering with a kernel on his PC and the Gnu tools were there and he respected the license since depending on those tools meant using the license. The typical linux distribution includes a lot of software; only some of which is licensed under GNU licenses. And of course the most popular uses of Linux are no longer on freedom advocates personal computing devices but on servers, on mobile phones, or in embedded devices/appliances/etc. where there typically is a lot of not so free software. Running that stuff is kind of the point of using Linux: it's a means to an end. Like Linus Torvalds used the GNU tools, people use Linux (as in the wider ecosystem of packages that come with it) because it's there and does the job. And because it is free as in beer. Only some people use it because they buy into the idealism as well. Nothing against that of course. Freedom includes the freedom to have different points of view. But the reality is that idealism and business use of software rarely mix well. In a way, GPLv2 was a happy accident in that it had some loop holes that allowed the likes of Google to build Android without leaking their and their implementation partner's proprietary tech. Arguably most commercial usage of Linux on phones, servers, etc. typically involves lots of proprietary software. IMHO that loophole was key to the success of Linux. It's what allowed the industry to back open source with billions of R&D investment and bootstrapped the whole ecosystem. Arguably a lot of that activity is more centered around less hairy licenses such as Apache2 and MIT/BSD style licenses. GPL has a well deserved reputation for being a PITA to deal with for lawyers partly because of the wording and also because of its fierce advocates.
- usrn 4y ago
  The GPL isn't a pain in the ass, just publish your code under the GPL. That's all you have to do.
- arminiusreturns 4y ago
  IMHO that loophole was key to the success of Linux. It's what allowed the industry to back open source with billions of R&D investment and bootstrapped the whole ecosystem. When do we have the discussion about how that's the very problem, from a lack of user freedom perspective? We want to talk about dictators and technocrats unjustly abusing the powers of surveillance, why not start at the fact that we allowed our FOSS ecosystem that could have given more freedom and power to billions to be loopholed into a corporate hellscape of uninstallable apps, lack of root on devices (without root, you aren't the owner), and other fundamental underminings of what ownership means! To me, all this and more is exactly why gplv3+ is actually so important, and honestly I just feel like HN is so full of corporate types who have forgotten the hacker mentality in it's curious, freedom loving base type, instead espousing stockholm syndromed repeating points about why linux doesn't matter, why YOTLD (year of the linux desktop) is never going to happen, why gpl is a bad license, etc. Right to root. Right to repair. Right to see the source code on your device. Right to see and modify code and make your device do what you want it to. Right to share that source code. It's been here the whole time, RMS and Eben Moglen were truly men far ahead of their time, visionaries of the dystopian future battles that were to come. Users are losing the war right now. When are we going to have this conversation?
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
The article starts with a lament over closed hardware, like Apple, which I expected. Yes, the open platform of “PC” is closing. However, we also have a rise in open hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi, which are powerful enough to run a desktop and a web browser, and which only costs tens of dollars! No, it can’t compete with Apple or Microsoft of Google, but it IS an open and free platform. Despite giving up and going all in on Apple, after 19 years of Linux on the desktop, I take comfort knowing it’s there.
jokoon 4y ago
There are a lot of open smartphones and laptops, so it's an ongoing battle. The RPI is quite a big win even though the soc is not open. It's more a problem of capitalism, in my view. I think that the foundries and the chip industry being centered around Asia, it's one reason that it's more difficult to make good open chips. I just hope that a new wave of minimalist software will come soon, because that would be a massive opportunity for open stuff to thrive while being cost effective. The law of wirth allows manufacturers to sell faster chips to consumers, but that can't go on forever.
jksmith 4y ago
Destroy aggregation - whether it's amazon or msft or airbnb or statism or whatever it's ultimately evil with the advance of technology. Codify trust reciprocation (objectives responded to with evidence) directly into every aspect of the network. Then aggregation becomes a middleman. Windows won't support this model, neither with android or macos. Currently only linuxes have the inertia to play a role in this space.
- 0des 4y ago
  the irony of saying this on a news aggregator is stunning.
  - jksmith 4y ago
    Hah, we are the creators, the self-created. Ironies are journey swag. Display proudly... Doesn't mean we don't have to iterate a bit. Iterate from problem to solution, inspecting and adapting along the way.
  - msmenardi 4y ago
    fight fire with fire, aggregation with...
akagusu 4y ago
We won nothing, we lose everything. Linux and other opensource software were just tools big corps used to build the stack they use to control users today. There is no freedom anymore, because developers didn't care about it and I doubt there is something that can be done to free ourselves from big tech corporate slavery.

263 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

chx 4y ago

1. We -- as in, geeks -- won the DRM battle for MP3 stores. We have, however, so thoroughly lost the DRM war people barely care it's there. All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more. 2. We won the battle for Linux -- and have thoroughly lost the free software war. No matter how you count, it is, by far, by very far, the most used operating system. A year ago there were three billion active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. There is no freedom any more. And despite the phones have capable CPUs, practically no one uses it to develop software, the entire development ecosystem is completely absent from Android. By any means you should be able to attach keyboard, mouse and monitor and develop and deploy your own phone apps but who does that? 2a. In the web server space, once again, it's Linux all the way. Although w3tech only says "unix alike" for the 80% it reports it's not unreasonable to think the overwhelming majority of that is Linux. But, guess what? increasingly all of that is in a cloud data center where your control is ... limited. 3. We won the battle for browsers -- everything now runs on top of an open source rendering engine. But, do I need to mention how much we lost the war here? Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? And in a familiar manner, they restrict of what you can install on them.

rayiner 4y ago
> But, do I need to mention how much we lost the war here? Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? Not to mention that they killed W3C in its sleep and the web isn’t even based on standards anymore.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  What is the web based on if not standards?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    De facto implementations from a small cabal that overthrew the W3C in a coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      How do the WHATWG 'living standards' differ from w3c standards? Is it the width of the radius of people who have buy-in? At what radius does something transition from a "cabal" to a "standards committee?"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wiz21c 4y ago
We lost a battle but not the war. The love of being free to do what I want with the most incredible device in history drives me. The conviction that this freedom is one of the pillar of a free future society drives me. Millions of lost battles will never ever change my mind.
danuker 4y ago
> All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more. I do not pay for these services. I restrict myself to YouTube and Odysee.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  Indeed. Sites like gog.com and itch.io indicate to me that the nerd-hate of DRM lives on. I don't have a Netflix subscription and I haven't knowingly bought a DRM 'd device ever. I even go as far as removing the widevine library when forced to use Chrome, for example. We're losing the war, but we do fight on.
  - danuker 4y ago
    > We're losing the war I am not losing any war. Content restricted by DRM is not worth watching to me. The best content is produced by real people (such as commenters on HN), not large companies. DRM customers will have to find out the hard way that as soon as the DRM server has a glitch, they're unable to see the content they paid for. Hell, even an expiring contract might make some ebooks you bought [1] or the music in your game disappear [2]. No thanks. [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989048 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989... [2] https://www.resetera.com/threads/some-of-gta-ivs-music-licenses-expire-later-this-month-and-songs-will-be-removed.35209/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/some-of-gta-ivs-music-licen...
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      > Content restricted by DRM is not worth watching to me. That's a good principle, and a hard bar to meet when the content is free, but still encumbered. A chap from our local dads group was really keen to share his Disney+ account with me. That's actually a "legitimate" thing, I guess Disney want to get other people's kids hooked so they have a "share with a friend" scheme. I have to admit it was a struggle for us to decide against using a free child pacifier service.
      - 4y ago
Klonoar 4y ago
>Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? The important parts of them - the rendering engines - are indeed open source, so this isn't as bad as it seems. One can still build their own browsers on top of those engines (e.g, Ungoogled Chromium). The "war" that's lost here isn't source availability, but two mega-entities (Apple & Google, primarily) getting to steer so much of the web.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > so this isn't as bad as it seems. I'm not so sure, it's not bad. If Google decided to remove, for sake of example, add-ons. Would un-Googled Chromium be able to keep it?
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    If Google decides to remove addons then it would start losing users fast, and I think we’d find a fork that kept them more than viable. In this sense chrome is very different to for example Internet Explorer where no such fork was possible.
    - _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
      Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions, where presumably it has the largest marketshare anyway.
      - Ygg2 4y ago
        Implying people on mobile know there is an alternate browser. I've seen people not know how to open Google drive, let alone go to the Play store, download FFox and add ad blocker.
  - strombofulous 4y ago
    We'll find the answer to this question at the end of the year when manifest v2 extensions are removed
- 4y ago
derefr 4y ago
> All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more. Well, yeah. Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. The existence of infinite accessible libraries of content for flat-fee monthly-subscription prices, is built upon IP licenses which were granted conditional to the consumer's inability to leverage that access into piracy. If we deleted DRM, streaming services would cease to exist overnight — all their license grants being revoked, leaving them with nothing to serve — and we'd go back to just relying upon the iTunes Music Store / Netflix DVD rental model. (Which, to be clear, has still also existed alongside streaming this whole time.) > But, guess what? increasingly all of that is in a cloud data center where your control is ... limited. But with almost every stack deployed to those data centers just using one or another portable open standard (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) for deployment, commodifying the IaaS provider, such that the moment the IaaS provider attempts to assert any constraints developers aren't uncomfortable with, the developer can just move away in an instant. (IaaS providers try their best to offer technologies with actual lock-in, but either no significant fraction of users takes them up on them; or a new open-standard abstraction layer is created that re-commodifies the offering by making it something portable to other IaaS providers + open implementations. The "S3-compatible" object-storage API is one good example of such re-commodification.)
- Teever 4y ago
  > Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. Why? Is DRM stopping piracy? Like what do you think would happen if DRM didn't exist, would the pirate bay be even bigger? People don't pay for netflix because it's hard to pirate stuff, they pay for netflix because it's easier to do so than to pirate stuff, and it would be the same even if the laws of the universe changed one night and all DRM ceased to function.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  If we deleted DRM, streaming services would cease to exist overnight — all their license grants being revoked, leaving them with nothing to serve — and we'd go back to just relying upon the iTunes Music Store / Netflix DVD rental model. Why is that? You can download everything for free. I don't think people use Netflix to access otherwise inaccessible content but rather because it's more convenient than searching for the right torrent link.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
"We" also stopped caring. People used to prefer GPL over MIT-style licenses for ideological reasons. That thought you are having now, namely that "ideology" is a dirty word, is a symptom of the same change. OSS development moving to internet and hardware companies is the most direct cause, as for them MIT-licensing makes sense (in the sense that others need to use it to be an option for them). But, increasingly, the people writing the software, at those companies and elsewhere, not just prefer MIT over GPL; they actively don't have an opinion and, in many cases, not even an understanding of the issue, or, worst case, the basics of copyright.[0] Some of this is simply due to most of the salient issues being decisively won or, at least, being replaced by a solid truce: Linux is everywhere but Microsoft still flourishes. Other software companies have either also found out that co-existence is possible. Or they no longer exist/no longer have the power (Netscape, SCO, Oracle), or never had the chance to get started in this environment (that httpd you are not paying for). Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google were never threatened. Thus, nobody is fighting Open Source, and the need to defend it has seized to be a motivating factor to get acquainted with the old ways of lawfare. But growing up without such challenges leads to a generation trying to find meaning. Having lost ideals of freedom to an assumption of such, they've found much the same ideas as other bored generations: getting rich and, along the way, maybe finding some group or other to occasionally hate-stomp into the curb for shits and giggles. So they're now running GPUs as space- and world-heaters, while whatever capability for political thought they have is busy balancing their love of Ayn Rand and Jordan Peterson with their hatred of women and the New York Times. 0: Note how there was never a thought expended to any moral or legal issues with the use of vast datasets of text, photos, or music to create text-, photo-, or music-generating AI models. But when someone started doing the same to source code, the possibility that their creative use of fopen to open a file provoked outrage usually reserved for female reddit-CEOs or game journalists. Free Software, for someone writing software, was about giving others such freedoms. This was altruism in its purest form (it's in the dictionary close to alt-right, if someone wants to look it up).
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Big corporate ran a campaign to dirty the name of GPL, Richard Stallman and the FSF. They won.
hulitu 4y ago
> 2. We won the battle for Linux -- and have thoroughly lost the free software war. No matter how you count, it is, by far, by very far, the most used operating system. If you count only the kernel then yes, we "won". The trouble is a kernel is not an OS. You need also userspace. (linux will panic if no "init" is found). And when we count the userspace, we lost. Android is a closed system. > 3. We won the battle for browsers -- everything now runs on top of an open source rendering engine. Just because the rendering engine is OSS i would not call it a win. The rest (Chrome, Edge, Safari) have nothing to do with OSS. And Firefox is an old impaired browser who still remembers its glory days.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  I think the win for 3 (browsers) was to displace IE?
  - herbst 4y ago
    Tell that to any developer that is writing CSS and JS quirks for edge right now. We haven't won when the problem still persists in a different outfit.
    - executesorder66 4y ago
      I haven't done frontend dev for years. So I'm surprised to read this. I thought Edge switched to using Blink. How is it possible for there to be "edge quirks" that you need to cater for? Does microsoft take Blink, and insert their own crap into it? What could they possibly have to gain from doing that? Why not just contribute upstream?
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Vendor differentiation, just like there is no pure Linux distribution or Android phone that is 100% just like upstream. Not only does Edge Chrome offer specific Microsfot features, its developer tools are also customized. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/develop-web-microsoft-edge https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/develop-web-...
chopin 4y ago
Re. 2.: I just bought a Fairphone 4 with e/OS preinstalled. I think I can do on that device whatever suits me. Not all is lost but we need to care.
mschuster91 4y ago
> A year ago there were three billion active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. Huh? I've never seen a device that has sideloading or ADB disabled. Yes, rooting is a different issue, but on the other hand it's not really needed in day-to-day usage and pretty much all phones sold outside of US carriers can be easily rooted. (The fact that US carriers regularly prohibit rooting should be tackled nevertheless)
- rawbot 4y ago
  Yeah, I have no idea what GP is on about. Maybe Android phones in China (which would make a huge portion of the marketshare of Android)? But there's plenty of reviewers of Chinese-territory-only smartphones running emulators on it, which I'm guessing they installed by sideloading an APK.
BurningPenguin 4y ago
> and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. What? You can easily install non-store apps too. It's just a single setting. There's F-Droid as alternative store or you just load the apk on the phone.
- rawbot 4y ago
  It is so easy, that Android will stop you from installing APKs downloaded from, Chrome, lets say, but provide you with a big button to go DIRECTLY to the setting needed to enable sideloading. It is so easy that Fortnite (the biggest game at the time, and maybe now) was/is distributed directly by APK.
  - BurningPenguin 4y ago
    I once worked in a company that distributed an APK via mail to the customers. It was a customized app, and still in development. "How to install" was a regular question.
  - sky-kedge0749 4y ago
    > It is so easy that Fortnite (the biggest game at the time, and maybe now) was/is distributed directly by APK. Amazon Prime Video used to be like this back in the day. You'd have to allow sideloading, install Amazon's custom store, then install the video app from there. This sort of thing is one of the reasons I like that iPhone is locked down. I know that none of the apps I use will decide they can make reducing my phone's security a condition of using their app. If they want to be in the iPhone store -- and they do -- then they'll have to work with iPhone's strong security.
- narrator 4y ago
  I find that many iphone people have a misconception that Android is locked down too. It's extraordinarily common and I don't know why. I use the non play store install feature for a few things. For example, I go to Telegram's site and download an APK of it because it lets me look at channels that are explicitly censored by versions downloaded from the Google Play and Apple App store. I do this all on stock, non-root Android.
mjan22640 4y ago
The vast majority of people are non developers. They cannot care about things they do not know exist.
deepstack 4y ago
If you read Tim Wu's master switch, this is nothing new. There are certain people (technocrates, geeks too) like to consolidate and centralize stuff. Yes it makes things easier to manage and organise, however the cost is freedom. A messier world with more freedom is always better for the public.
api 4y ago
The elephant in the room is SaaS. With SaaS it is possible to use 100% free software and even release all your code as FOSS as well and it's meaningless. The service has your data and it's the hub. Even if you can self-host few people do and it's time consuming and hard. SaaS, though often based on FOSS, is far more closed than closed-source commercial software ever was. I can run a closed-source DOS app from 1989 in DosBox today and if I had data in it I could still access it. Same with most commercial PC software for Windows and Mac. Can't do that with SaaS. Even if I can run it the SaaS has my data. If I stop paying it's gone. If the company goes out of business it's gone. If they rev the software in a way that ruins it for me, I'm out of luck and I have to start over. (Sometimes they let you export your data, but never conveniently and never in a good format.) Here's the thing. Software is not actually free. Easy to use mature software is hugely labor-intensive to produce. If you don't design the economic model, the market will design one for you. Usually that model will be worse than what you would have done. The most popular creative way to monetize "free" software is surveillance capitalism followed by adware and cloud-as-DRM SaaS. Oh, and a sure fire get rich quick scheme for quite some time has been to take a promising FOSS software or standard and slap up a SaaS around it. Something tells me none of these companies pay anything to the original creators. TL;DR: FOSS lost the war because it confused free "as in beer" with free "as in freedom" and never figured out an economic model. As a result we got one, SaaS with the cloud as back-door DRM, that is worse in every way than the old closed source shrink wrap model. But the fact that most people in this thread are bringing up DRM for media means that people may care more about free "as in beer" than freedom. Few people are bringing up what FOSS was supposed to be about: control of your own computing environment and ownership of your own stuff. It was never about getting other peoples' stuff for free or even about software not costing any money. It was about software not restricting you and honest freedom-respecting models.
golergka 4y ago
> A year ago there were three billion active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. There is no freedom any more. Practice showed that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the apps user chooses to "install" is malware that he is not aware of.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  Weird, I thought the majority of cases were Fortnite downloads. But maybe that's malware in some sense. :)
cbolton 4y ago
1. I agree we lost the DRM war. But I think the reason no one fights it anymore is that most people only cared for convenience reasons. Netflix, Spotify, etc. have largely solved the convenience issue. So we could say most people were actually fighting a different (temporarily aligned) war and won. 2. On the contrary, it's remarkable that the majority of smartphones now run an operating system that provides both good security (compared to desktops) and openness, and not just the kernel: Developers can write highly privileged apps like MicroG and F-Droid using official APIs to manage the phone (what MicroG does talking to the Google servers is a separate issue). Users can choose to use these apps using the sideloading feature, which is officially supported. For even more access, several smartphone manufacturers offer an official way of "getting root" and replacing the ROM with a custom one. For me this was a rather unexpected and welcome development! Then there are several communities of Android ROMs and companies build all sorts of devices using the AOSP source code. There is actually an ecosystem of apps for writing code on Android. It's indeed small and little used. My guess is that it's due to a combination of factors: IDEs that require huge ressources, separation of work and private devices, something else? 2a. Of course web servers are in data centers. What's your point? It's still nice that they are using open source software. There's a point to be made however about the closed SaaS apps like Google Docs that have replaced open source apps like LibreOffice. I don't care much: people/companies can run whatever they want on their own computers to provide me with a service. What matters for services are 1) data privacy issues (I agree with you on that) and 2) data export options (the SaaS apps I use are generally satisfying on this front). 3. Firefox's market share is small but it's still a perfectly capable browser. And I'm still amazed the whole of Chromium can be built from open source for both desktop and mobile. Sure Chromium is not Chrome but it's not far and many people use it as main browser. There's probably some meat here for a discussion.
- Octoth0rpe 4y ago
  > On the contrary, it's remarkable that the majority of smartphones now run an operating system that provides both good security (compared to desktops) and openness The security is only as good as your security update availability, which is still a major problem for those 3b devices.
- ghaff 4y ago
ubermonkey 4y ago
I'm untroubled by DRM on all-you-can-eat streaming services because I'm explicitly making a very different deal. It's transparently gross if music SOLD to me that I'm supposed to be able to listen to in perpetuity is DRM'd so I can't shift platforms or devices or whatever. That's shitty, and I'm glad we're done with that. However, the deal with a streaming service is that for the price we used to pay to "own" a single CD or album, we get access to an enormous body of music we can listen to at will. That, to me, is a service that I'm paying for. I'm not troubled by the music being locked in, because what I'm paying for is access to that library. It's definitely a shift in how music works, and it's not without its downsides (especially as I understand it for artists), but in a world where most people don't have access to great record stores I think it's overall better. We never "won" with video purchases at all, which was predictable (we only got free-access formats on music because it happened outside the industry), but also less of a problem for me personally. I might "buy" something from Apple or whatever, but I understand it as a long-term rental. If I really want to own a film, I buy the BluRay. As for Linux, man, that's an unalloyed victory. Does anyone even SELL commercial Unix anymore? When I was younger there was still AIX and HP/UX and obviously Solaris, but I never heard of any of those anymore.
- simonh 4y ago
  >Does anyone even SELL commercial Unix anymore? Apple. And before anyone says yes well but it runs a proprietary application layer so it doesn't count, it also runs all the open ones too just fine. The fact it's barely used for that despite a massive user base (by Unix standards) is hardly Apple's problem, or fault even. It just goes to show how deeply and thoroughly the open source software community has failed in getting the vast majority of ordinary people to care about open source desktop software. Even when all the barriers to access are completely eliminated.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    edit:lay blame where it ought Rarely have there been such obvious and one-sided manipulation of public source repos on strictly licensed code, as have been published by Apple Inc. It appears that they go out of their way to insult and dismiss any "power" over the code itself, like a steering committee especially, but as simple as an open repo maintainer. There is simply no profit in making current, working source code available in the same way as a published book at a public library is.. and so there is infinite Chutzpah at Apple Inc to say, not our affair. There is no way that current active source code works the way it is supposed to, if you cannot find it, build it, change it and thereby learn it and apply it. Emperor Apple has no clothes here
School-Cotton 4y ago
Not all "geeks" oppose DRM. I for example think DRM is great.
- sky-kedge0749 4y ago
  You don't really think it's "great", do you? More like, an acceptable trade-off? I'd love to hear the argument if you actually are pro-DRM as a thing in itself.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    I’m not claiming there are no downsides to DRM — the fact that it makes it hard or impossible to copy things one has legitimately purchased is clearly a negative. However, I think making piracy more difficult is valuable and more socially important than the downsides. In an ideal world we would subsidize content consumption for those who can’t afford it (we already do this via public libraries, and public funding of content creation in many countries, but we should do more) and also more strictly enforce laws against piracy by shutting down torrent trackers. Then we wouldn’t need DRM. But until this pipe dream comes true, I think DRM is valuable.
- api 4y ago
  I thought about creating "OpenDRM" once, an open source DRM library. It was with another job in the past. "But that's silly! You can strip it off!" Of course you can, and you can strip DRM off proprietary DRM schemes too. All of them are cracked. That's not the point. The point is that there's a way for someone to indicate their usage terms along with a piece of media. An OpenDRM would not even necessarily encrypt, or would do so only in a very trivial way. It would instead be a standard for indicating terms of use and automatically checking for licensing entitlements.
- blooalien 4y ago
  https://www.defectivebydesign.org/ https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
spiffytech 4y ago
> We have, however, so thoroughly lost the DRM war people barely care it's there. It's even worse than that: NFTs are basically an argument that DRM is a great idea and we should have more of it. The aspiration for NFTs is that sites, apps, and games will treat owning a file's NFT differently from possessing the file itself, possibly even restricting usage to NFT owners.
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
We all became enamored with the cloud, streaming services, and centralized social media. If you don’t control your own means of producing on the web, you ultimately have no say.

pjmlp 4y ago

It was a pyrrhic victory. On the modern server room, what matters are type 1 hypervisors running managed runtimes or container orchestrators, the real kernel matters very little to most typical cloud workloads. Even if they depend on the Linux kernel in some form, it hardly matters to the large majority of cloud customers. On mobile space, only one platform uses the Linux kernel, and it is so abstracted from userspace that Google could change it at any time and no one would notice, while at the same time OEMs pretend GPL doesn't exist anyway. On the desktop, the Year of Desktop Linux seems to be bound to running the Linux kernel on top of virtualization. Meanwhile on IoT, there is an increasing set of options of alternative POSIX OSes with BSD/MIT/Apache licenses. Then there is the whole question what will happen when the generation that made Linux happen is no longer around to guarantee it keeps standing for its original goals.

enasterosophes 4y ago
I mostly agree with you. But there was this, where I beg to differ: > On the desktop, the Year of Desktop Linux seems to be bound to running the Linux kernel on top of virtualization. In my experience as soon as your IaaS starts offering virtualized desktops, all the users start wondering why you aren't offering Windows VMs. Then the pressure starts to build to bow to that demand. If you tell users that it's Linux desktops or nothing, they just change to another utility company who gives them the experience they find least challenging, even if it's less secure, less reliable and costs them more. Reminding people about the freedom and other benefits of Linux they'll be missing out on just provokes shrugs and the old retort of "but I need to get work done, I don't have time for your religious principals." The future is definitely Linux, but that old chestnut about Year of the Linux Desktop is never, ever going to happen. Linux is optimized for large servers and small devices. For such magisteria, you can attract skilled engineers to make things work, and naturally those same engineers can make Linux work on the meso-devices of the desktop realm. But the desktop realm will always be dominated by OSes optimized for that in-between area, where people balk at needing to do their own systems administration, especially when it puts them at odds with what they perceive to be a consensus.
- pjmlp 4y ago

DeathArrow 4y ago

I don't care about OS wars, nor do I care about the freedom in the GPL sense of it. I would like to have a diverse OS landscape so we can chose what suits us best. I would like to have most software available on most platforms. I would like to have open standards for hardware, to be able to run what software we want on what hardware we want. I would like to not being forced to "rent" commercial software, but have also the option to buy it. I would like less bloated JS apps running on mobile and desktops and have instead some optimized and cleverly designed apps that doesn't require a monster of a CPU to do things that required very little computing power decades ago. I would like to have the option to run the software locally as opposed to have to run it in the cloud.

gyulai 4y ago
Sounds like all you really want is proper enforcement of antitrust laws.
- skohan 4y ago
  Proper anti-trust enforcement in the US probably in the top handful of things you could do to improve life for the average person.
enasterosophes 4y ago
I hear you. The battle has many fronts. I venture that if we could successfully fight the GPL battle, then your other concerns would also fall into line. Then again, fighting the GPL battle is hard. If you aren't yet feeling the importance of GPL, then I still applaud you if you can make any headway on the other issues you mentioned.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Not getting this idea that Linux is freedom per se. Since the article was written, RedHat was acquired by IBM, and even before, Linux was largely controlled by enterprise demands (systemd, namespaces/docker) and folks with their own agenda (glibc, gnome). Freedom is choice. Choice requires alternative implementations. Alternatives can and will be developed if there's a common spec, like POSIX, SUS, LSB, X, OpenGL used to be, all of which have atrophied. Linux doesn't inspire anyone to create new end-user apps (with the exception of Blender and Krita, which were started well over ten years ago). Instead, we're loosing the apps we had, and march towards dumb UIs and needlessly containerized apps a la snap/flatpack. It's of no use and only frustrating to lament and decry the past without also showing a perspective to get out of our situation, or clean up the mess for those who follow after us. F/OSS is clearly not the solution, as can be seen by the demise of the web going the way of all previous digital communication mechanisms: it has been foobar'd by the ad industry, like email, Usenet, XMPP before. Open, meaningful standards are the only solution. Not like "web standards" eg WHATWG and W3C. Who thought it was a good idea to hand standard development to an ad company in the first place? We now have a closed-loop web where the content provider and the user agent are from the same party. We had that with CompuServe et al before the web; there was no need for a craptastic CSS and JS detour to arrive at that situation.

JetAlone 4y ago
Over the last few years I've begun to understand that freedom in a too-real sense is the reward we experience for loving the truth, to the extent that we do.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Instead, we're loosing the apps we had, and march towards dumb UIs and needlessly containerized apps a la snap/flatpack. There is a very real need behind app containerization: distributions are exceedlingly slow to pick up updates in a time where web applications routinely run on a "merge request passed, 5 minutes later it's on production" model. On top of that, distributions routinely run into the problem that package A wants a new version of library B, but the other applications haven't been updated to use the new version yet, so everyone is stuck until all applications in the distribution have been updated. Also: Most people use LTS distributions and let's be real no one wants to be stuck with a 2 year old browser that only gets backported security patches. Distributions had the chance to move to a model of "the core is stable but the applications the user uses are flexibly updateable", and they blew it completely.

wildmanx 4y ago

What keeps things open source / free software in practice is not a philosophical desire for freedom but the very practical desire to be able to get things done. That's why the Linux kernel is so popular and there is an open source ecosystem for systems tooling and web dev libs and all that. Not because people are hippies who want everything to be free (as in gratis) but because it's just so much easier than going through convoluted licensing requirements. In the end it's just evolution. If there is a free and open tool doing something better than some hard-to-license alternative, or at least well enough, then it will win. Once there isn't then the proprietary alternative will win in the space. In other words, once the demand for open hackable mobile phone ecosystems is high enough, they will be open and hackable. The demand is just not there. Similar for other areas raised in threads in here.

28304283409234 4y ago

"Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb." -Lord Helmet

temptemptemp111 4y ago

lbriner 4y ago

I understand the desire for freedom of choice or configuration but the bit that is missing is who is supposed to do this? Sure, Google have ringfenced Android for most people and then they restrict it, yes, but Android is open source so everyone is free to create their own version that isn't so encumbered but it is also an enormous amount of work, not just to build it but to maintain it as hardware changes. Who does the work and how do they get paid? Sure, some people can and do this work for free but what is the reward for them when Google etc. can outspend them on everything and most people would choose a polished expensive and locked-down version of phone OS over one that is less so. Same with OSs. You might not like Windows so don't use it, use Linux. Ultimately every enterprise is looking to make sales but let's not paint this as inherently evil because these same businesses employ an enormous number of people directly and indirectly. If there is a solution, then do it and prove it works but it seems like the amount of effort consistently increases over time and makes it even harder to create e.g. a rival browser or whatever so maybe we need a rethink at a much higher level.

lvass 4y ago
I can think of some players with trillions of dollars of annual budget that really should do it. They'd favor millions or billions of people whose interest they theoretically represent. Unfortunately, in practice they seem more likely to represent the interests of the few who exploit people's lack of privacy, but there's no reason this couldn't change.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I think the royal we here presumes too much on the part of the free software advocates. Nothing against them but GNU software predates linux and the marriage of the two in typical linux distributions was a convenience marriage. Linus Torvalds wasn't really doing anything else than tinkering with a kernel on his PC and the Gnu tools were there and he respected the license since depending on those tools meant using the license. The typical linux distribution includes a lot of software; only some of which is licensed under GNU licenses. And of course the most popular uses of Linux are no longer on freedom advocates personal computing devices but on servers, on mobile phones, or in embedded devices/appliances/etc. where there typically is a lot of not so free software. Running that stuff is kind of the point of using Linux: it's a means to an end. Like Linus Torvalds used the GNU tools, people use Linux (as in the wider ecosystem of packages that come with it) because it's there and does the job. And because it is free as in beer. Only some people use it because they buy into the idealism as well. Nothing against that of course. Freedom includes the freedom to have different points of view. But the reality is that idealism and business use of software rarely mix well. In a way, GPLv2 was a happy accident in that it had some loop holes that allowed the likes of Google to build Android without leaking their and their implementation partner's proprietary tech. Arguably most commercial usage of Linux on phones, servers, etc. typically involves lots of proprietary software. IMHO that loophole was key to the success of Linux. It's what allowed the industry to back open source with billions of R&D investment and bootstrapped the whole ecosystem. Arguably a lot of that activity is more centered around less hairy licenses such as Apache2 and MIT/BSD style licenses. GPL has a well deserved reputation for being a PITA to deal with for lawyers partly because of the wording and also because of its fierce advocates.

usrn 4y ago
The GPL isn't a pain in the ass, just publish your code under the GPL. That's all you have to do.
arminiusreturns 4y ago
IMHO that loophole was key to the success of Linux. It's what allowed the industry to back open source with billions of R&D investment and bootstrapped the whole ecosystem. When do we have the discussion about how that's the very problem, from a lack of user freedom perspective? We want to talk about dictators and technocrats unjustly abusing the powers of surveillance, why not start at the fact that we allowed our FOSS ecosystem that could have given more freedom and power to billions to be loopholed into a corporate hellscape of uninstallable apps, lack of root on devices (without root, you aren't the owner), and other fundamental underminings of what ownership means! To me, all this and more is exactly why gplv3+ is actually so important, and honestly I just feel like HN is so full of corporate types who have forgotten the hacker mentality in it's curious, freedom loving base type, instead espousing stockholm syndromed repeating points about why linux doesn't matter, why YOTLD (year of the linux desktop) is never going to happen, why gpl is a bad license, etc. Right to root. Right to repair. Right to see the source code on your device. Right to see and modify code and make your device do what you want it to. Right to share that source code. It's been here the whole time, RMS and Eben Moglen were truly men far ahead of their time, visionaries of the dystopian future battles that were to come. Users are losing the war right now. When are we going to have this conversation?

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

The article starts with a lament over closed hardware, like Apple, which I expected. Yes, the open platform of “PC” is closing. However, we also have a rise in open hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi, which are powerful enough to run a desktop and a web browser, and which only costs tens of dollars! No, it can’t compete with Apple or Microsoft of Google, but it IS an open and free platform. Despite giving up and going all in on Apple, after 19 years of Linux on the desktop, I take comfort knowing it’s there.

jokoon 4y ago

There are a lot of open smartphones and laptops, so it's an ongoing battle. The RPI is quite a big win even though the soc is not open. It's more a problem of capitalism, in my view. I think that the foundries and the chip industry being centered around Asia, it's one reason that it's more difficult to make good open chips. I just hope that a new wave of minimalist software will come soon, because that would be a massive opportunity for open stuff to thrive while being cost effective. The law of wirth allows manufacturers to sell faster chips to consumers, but that can't go on forever.

jksmith 4y ago

Destroy aggregation - whether it's amazon or msft or airbnb or statism or whatever it's ultimately evil with the advance of technology. Codify trust reciprocation (objectives responded to with evidence) directly into every aspect of the network. Then aggregation becomes a middleman. Windows won't support this model, neither with android or macos. Currently only linuxes have the inertia to play a role in this space.

0des 4y ago
the irony of saying this on a news aggregator is stunning.
- jksmith 4y ago
  Hah, we are the creators, the self-created. Ironies are journey swag. Display proudly... Doesn't mean we don't have to iterate a bit. Iterate from problem to solution, inspecting and adapting along the way.
- msmenardi 4y ago
  fight fire with fire, aggregation with...

akagusu 4y ago

We won nothing, we lose everything. Linux and other opensource software were just tools big corps used to build the stack they use to control users today. There is no freedom anymore, because developers didn't care about it and I doubt there is something that can be done to free ourselves from big tech corporate slavery.