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Completely agree with you here. Even in my circle of engineer friends I'm generally viewed as the open source zealot for only buying Pixel phones purely because

by S201 4y ago

Completely agree with you here. Even in my circle of engineer friends I'm generally viewed as the open source zealot for only buying Pixel phones purely because I can unlock the bootloader on them and root them still. I only have one app that actually uses it (for making backups of installed apps) but it's the principle of the thing: if I bought and paid for a device I should be allowed to run whatever darn code I want on it, not only code that the manufacturer says I'm allowed to run. It's my device, not theirs. Apparently that's a radical position to have these days and I find it irresponsible that software folks of all people won't stand up more for the right to run their code on their own devices without the approval of the manufacturer. As you said, the existence of our industry is due in large part to the openness of previous systems. We owe it to ourselves and those that will come after to ensure this level of openness persists.

bradgessler 4y ago
The perception of "Free Software" is that it's a lot of extra work, which most people don't want to deal with on a day-to-day basis. I don't know many engineers who actually like how Apple locks down their platform—it's just to them the perceived trade-off of "Apple's polish" vs "configuring free OSS software" isn't worth it. If we're being realistic, most people I encounter want Apple to loosen their grip a bit so they can run software without Apple's permission or paying their 30% App Store tax.
- S201 4y ago
  Right, but my point isn't that "we all need to use only Free Software" (even though I think it would be great if we did), but rather that these companies, let's take Apple for example, consist of engineers like ourselves. Why are we not fighting harder internally that these products & platforms should be less restrictive? There's a myriad of arguments about "security" and whatever else that can be made, but even something like in the case of Apple with macOS just having a checkbox that lets you run unsigned code and if you select that then you acknowledge the risks would go a long way in my book. It's similar to how Pixel devices work. There's a barrier to unlocking the bootloader that requires the user to acknowledge what they're doing, but it is possible. It doesn't need to be everyone using Free Software, but we should at the very least be far more insistent that these companies give us the option to use our devices as if they are truly our devices.
  - bradgessler 4y ago
    Any engineer I've met knows Apple's "security argument" about the App Store and Sandboxing/Isolation are two completely separate things, the problem is most non-technical people believe Apple when they say the App Store keeps them secure. At this point I don't think it's realistic to expect engineers to solve this problem —Apple would retaliate by booting them from the App Store of burying app reviews in red tape. What's probably needed is legislation that mandates hardware manufactures can't restrict what users are allowed to run on their devices.

by S201 4y ago

bradgessler 4y ago

The perception of "Free Software" is that it's a lot of extra work, which most people don't want to deal with on a day-to-day basis. I don't know many engineers who actually like how Apple locks down their platform—it's just to them the perceived trade-off of "Apple's polish" vs "configuring free OSS software" isn't worth it. If we're being realistic, most people I encounter want Apple to loosen their grip a bit so they can run software without Apple's permission or paying their 30% App Store tax.

S201 4y ago
Right, but my point isn't that "we all need to use only Free Software" (even though I think it would be great if we did), but rather that these companies, let's take Apple for example, consist of engineers like ourselves. Why are we not fighting harder internally that these products & platforms should be less restrictive? There's a myriad of arguments about "security" and whatever else that can be made, but even something like in the case of Apple with macOS just having a checkbox that lets you run unsigned code and if you select that then you acknowledge the risks would go a long way in my book. It's similar to how Pixel devices work. There's a barrier to unlocking the bootloader that requires the user to acknowledge what they're doing, but it is possible. It doesn't need to be everyone using Free Software, but we should at the very least be far more insistent that these companies give us the option to use our devices as if they are truly our devices.
- bradgessler 4y ago
  Any engineer I've met knows Apple's "security argument" about the App Store and Sandboxing/Isolation are two completely separate things, the problem is most non-technical people believe Apple when they say the App Store keeps them secure. At this point I don't think it's realistic to expect engineers to solve this problem —Apple would retaliate by booting them from the App Store of burying app reviews in red tape. What's probably needed is legislation that mandates hardware manufactures can't restrict what users are allowed to run on their devices.