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About choosing phones: I agree, but for newbies the realization may come after the purchase. And the custom ROM experiment may be postponed until the next purch

About choosing phones: I agree, but for newbies the realization may come after the purchase. And the custom ROM experiment may be postponed until the next purchase... and then forever. I have had a good example of a late realization where choosing the right iirc car/phone in advance would have been needed to avoid incompatibility, but I forgot what it was. About the laptops: I looked at Tuxedo first, I liked the big battery but disliked the rest. As I continued reading, I found out they are reusing OEM laptop chassis, so their only contribution is branding an a distro customization (probably to integrate it better with hardware). I suppose it's what most others do too. After this realization I began looking at mainstream manufacturers and "compromised" on a good model without an OS pre-installed or proprietary plugs. Would I want to compromise on price or features to set a clear signal? At least MS didn't get paid for the license :) About FSF: oh that Emacs story is terrible. Outside of this idiotic disablement, I can understand both sides. "I cater to users, but at the same time I don't want to spend my time enriching an Apple/MS ecosystem for free". Ranted about by wm4 of mpv[1]. This doesn't apply to willing maintainers :) [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200709194653/https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/a20ae0417f2d1e1a2c173f5eaf66a81974df0008 https://web.archive.org/web/20200709194653/https://github.co... Another point about GPL licensing was brought up in no pretty words by digdeeper[2]. Someplaces twisting words and the intended logic, but it is an argument close to OpenBSDs: > GPLv3 is (in our opinion) not actually free, and we are not able import anything encumbered by it. GCC 2.4.1 and Binutils 2.17 are the last GPLv2 releases. [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210122132451/https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/freetardism.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210122132451/https://digdeeper... My own conclusion: if you want a revolution, an opposition to the closed source (enterprise world) then you show it with a GPL license. To make sure the fruits of your labor are not exploited and only the FOSS part of the software world grows richer. You see where the rhetoric is going. The good examples are coreutils and GNU libc. The bad examples: only few giant companies care to follow the license terms. Many avoid GPL, many exploit it ignoring the terms. TLDR: If you want improve some part of computing in the world, BSD or MIT. If you want to have a FOSS project, a variant of GPL (imho). About politics: I wonder how many are actually still developers and not some... non-developing profession? Although FSFE (Europe; with no affiliation to FSF) exists, I was surprised to learn they only have lawyer and related positions to offer. No development happening apparently.

rollcat 4y ago
> About choosing phones: I agree, but for newbies the realization may come after the purchase. And the custom ROM experiment may be postponed until the next purchase... and then forever. Well it means it's not an important factor for those people. 99.99% of the market is served by a device that runs WhatsApp, TikTok, Google Maps, and the local banking app. For most people, "freedom" is the freedom to have the free time to talk to their parents who are half a world away from them; NOT the freedom to mess up their bootloader. I stand by my claim: if you care about these issues, you know what to buy. > My own conclusion: if you want a revolution, an opposition to the closed source (enterprise world) then you show it with a GPL license. I don't want any revolution, I want Free Software to be objectively better - because using bad software just sucks. Free Software should be able to go toe-to-toe with proprietary software, heck even be just better - it has the clear advantage of accumulating volunteer contributions and so on. And yet rather than building a better product that can win with the alternatives by its own merit, we're caught up in bullshit political games. That's exactly the problem with FSF, they're long done actually improving their software, and are just using their position to leverage themselves politically, while making choices that actively hurt their user base. Their technology is stagnating and becoming more and more irrelevant as alternatives are catching up or surpassing them (clang/llvm), most remaining value is in broad (in)compatibility (glibc, bash, coreutils), which hurts other FS projects too (*BSD, Alpine). I've been using Emacs for 20 years and feel more and more trapped with it - no other editor/IDE comes close, despite FSF's efforts to undermine the project. As a potential contributor, I'm scared away by their practices of turning down improvements on political grounds. As a user, I feel trapped in their staged shitshow. You know the tree by its fruit.
- PinkSheep 4y ago
  > As a potential contributor, I'm scared away by their practices of turning down improvements on political grounds. As a potential contributor I suggest you to be present on their mailing list (filter for OSX and other keywords if you wish) to have a voice when needed. > Their technology is stagnating and becoming more and more irrelevant as alternatives are catching up or surpassing them (clang/llvm) I would say clang+LLVM is a poor example, because for C/C++ they're directly comparable in final performance (state of the art). The Clang suite is newer and I'd argue benefits from this and the lack of legacy. Then Apple has it as their compiler of choice and this entails a lot of dedicated work force. Instead I'd say GNU/FSF have stagnated in their methods of collaboration. I've looked at their GCC website. It probably looked not too different in 1999. That's not a bad thing but mailing lists... I understand the love for e-mail but not the mailing lists. I think if the wonder called Rust didn't embrace the new ways of thinking, communication and tooling, it would not have developed into what it is today and as fast as it has. Finally GNU/FSF may have served their purpose. They spawned the idea of radically free and open source software. A decade later (1990s-2000s) the thousands of neat programs were being made for Win32 and very few developers chose to open source their creations even when the software was perpetually free. "I dont want others to see my code" sometimes out of fear of being judged, remember those arguments? Think of the developer effort wasted in discontinued programs that are no longer available/working and either have no successors or their successors had to be remade from scratch. Thankfully nowadays the mentality has changed and it's rare to see a free/shareware program that still remains closed to the public.

rollcat 4y ago

> About choosing phones: I agree, but for newbies the realization may come after the purchase. And the custom ROM experiment may be postponed until the next purchase... and then forever. Well it means it's not an important factor for those people. 99.99% of the market is served by a device that runs WhatsApp, TikTok, Google Maps, and the local banking app. For most people, "freedom" is the freedom to have the free time to talk to their parents who are half a world away from them; NOT the freedom to mess up their bootloader. I stand by my claim: if you care about these issues, you know what to buy. > My own conclusion: if you want a revolution, an opposition to the closed source (enterprise world) then you show it with a GPL license. I don't want any revolution, I want Free Software to be objectively better - because using bad software just sucks. Free Software should be able to go toe-to-toe with proprietary software, heck even be just better - it has the clear advantage of accumulating volunteer contributions and so on. And yet rather than building a better product that can win with the alternatives by its own merit, we're caught up in bullshit political games. That's exactly the problem with FSF, they're long done actually improving their software, and are just using their position to leverage themselves politically, while making choices that actively hurt their user base. Their technology is stagnating and becoming more and more irrelevant as alternatives are catching up or surpassing them (clang/llvm), most remaining value is in broad (in)compatibility (glibc, bash, coreutils), which hurts other FS projects too (*BSD, Alpine). I've been using Emacs for 20 years and feel more and more trapped with it - no other editor/IDE comes close, despite FSF's efforts to undermine the project. As a potential contributor, I'm scared away by their practices of turning down improvements on political grounds. As a user, I feel trapped in their staged shitshow. You know the tree by its fruit.

PinkSheep 4y ago
> As a potential contributor, I'm scared away by their practices of turning down improvements on political grounds. As a potential contributor I suggest you to be present on their mailing list (filter for OSX and other keywords if you wish) to have a voice when needed. > Their technology is stagnating and becoming more and more irrelevant as alternatives are catching up or surpassing them (clang/llvm) I would say clang+LLVM is a poor example, because for C/C++ they're directly comparable in final performance (state of the art). The Clang suite is newer and I'd argue benefits from this and the lack of legacy. Then Apple has it as their compiler of choice and this entails a lot of dedicated work force. Instead I'd say GNU/FSF have stagnated in their methods of collaboration. I've looked at their GCC website. It probably looked not too different in 1999. That's not a bad thing but mailing lists... I understand the love for e-mail but not the mailing lists. I think if the wonder called Rust didn't embrace the new ways of thinking, communication and tooling, it would not have developed into what it is today and as fast as it has. Finally GNU/FSF may have served their purpose. They spawned the idea of radically free and open source software. A decade later (1990s-2000s) the thousands of neat programs were being made for Win32 and very few developers chose to open source their creations even when the software was perpetually free. "I dont want others to see my code" sometimes out of fear of being judged, remember those arguments? Think of the developer effort wasted in discontinued programs that are no longer available/working and either have no successors or their successors had to be remade from scratch. Thankfully nowadays the mentality has changed and it's rare to see a free/shareware program that still remains closed to the public.