4 ms·

> Proprietary software vendors were able to condition users to execute programs they could not inspect or modify. They also attempted to prevent copying with DR

> Proprietary software vendors were able to condition users to execute programs they could not inspect or modify. They also attempted to prevent copying with DRM, but an active cracking & piracy scene stymied that. So people were now blindly executing modified applications. Interesting analysis. But free software is demonstrably more secure. Are you claiming that proprietary vendors intentionally mislead people with FUD? Or was it a cultural zeitgeist in the era of shrinkwrap and slow telecom where free software was simply harder to find? i.e. it’s hard to experience more secure software if you can’t find it.

LtWorf 4y ago
> Are you claiming that proprietary vendors intentionally mislead people with FUD? They don't? They want to sell as much as possible. Customers are in general not allowed to know their internal practices. Audits are short and shallow.
kmeisthax 4y ago
It is a cultural thing but not exactly how you describe. Back then nobody expected Free Software to have a security benefit. That was actually the argument for proprietary software: we'll sell you a blob you can't legally or technically modify, and in exchange we will support the software[0]. Proprietary software was supposed to be superior in quality to Free, because the companies making it had the financial power of the copyright monopoly backing them and legal penalties for selling substandard code. Early FOSS projects imitated the development processes of proprietary with small core teams of hackers only releasing "finished" code as physical media. The first GNU releases were sold on backup tapes, for example. The modern "bazaar" style of having in-progress development done in the open and accepting patches happened later with Linus Torvalds and Linux. This is an artifact of both culture and technology: you have to both be willing to accept and review unsolicited patches and be "online" enough to where this makes sense as your primary development process. That's where you start getting the whole "if everyone can read the code then bugs can get fixed faster" argument that OSI pushed. Concurrently with this, the personal computer market switched from "here's a BASIC interpreter, a manual, and some type-in programs, go nuts" to packaged shrinkwrap software. Free Software really did not exist in the personal computing world; the closest was "public domain" software which often did not come with source and is more akin to what we'd now call "freeware" - zero cost but not a FOSS project. Computer users at the time did not care about the license, or security, and would copy and execute anything they could because nobody had poisoned the well yet. [0] This is still an oversimplification. IBM pushed for proprietary software as a way to head off antitrust concerns, since beforehand they sold source-available software packaged with mainframe hardware.

LtWorf 4y ago

> Are you claiming that proprietary vendors intentionally mislead people with FUD? They don't? They want to sell as much as possible. Customers are in general not allowed to know their internal practices. Audits are short and shallow.

kmeisthax 4y ago

It is a cultural thing but not exactly how you describe. Back then nobody expected Free Software to have a security benefit. That was actually the argument for proprietary software: we'll sell you a blob you can't legally or technically modify, and in exchange we will support the software[0]. Proprietary software was supposed to be superior in quality to Free, because the companies making it had the financial power of the copyright monopoly backing them and legal penalties for selling substandard code. Early FOSS projects imitated the development processes of proprietary with small core teams of hackers only releasing "finished" code as physical media. The first GNU releases were sold on backup tapes, for example. The modern "bazaar" style of having in-progress development done in the open and accepting patches happened later with Linus Torvalds and Linux. This is an artifact of both culture and technology: you have to both be willing to accept and review unsolicited patches and be "online" enough to where this makes sense as your primary development process. That's where you start getting the whole "if everyone can read the code then bugs can get fixed faster" argument that OSI pushed. Concurrently with this, the personal computer market switched from "here's a BASIC interpreter, a manual, and some type-in programs, go nuts" to packaged shrinkwrap software. Free Software really did not exist in the personal computing world; the closest was "public domain" software which often did not come with source and is more akin to what we'd now call "freeware" - zero cost but not a FOSS project. Computer users at the time did not care about the license, or security, and would copy and execute anything they could because nobody had poisoned the well yet. [0] This is still an oversimplification. IBM pushed for proprietary software as a way to head off antitrust concerns, since beforehand they sold source-available software packaged with mainframe hardware.