7 ms·

A lot of people are quick to lock themselves into a gatekeeper's walled garden, and throw away the keys. That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thri

A lot of people are quick to lock themselves into a gatekeeper's walled garden, and throw away the keys. That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers. FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices. Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought. It was revolutionary, and many of the giants that exist now were built literally on the backs of that openness.

wilg 3y ago
> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices, and I think many do in fact exist but are not popular.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices Anti-competitive practices do. Example of a struggle: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/ https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/
  - wilg 3y ago
    That article is about how they weren't stopped, and there's nothing anticompetitive in it.
    - fsflover 3y ago
      Purism almost went bankrupt due to challenges like this one. They had to choose a relatively outdated, slow hardware and reverse engineer many things to make them work, e.g., camera. All companies producing the required chips refuse to work with FLOSS -- if this isn't anti-competitive and destroying competition, I don't know what is.
      - wilg 3y ago
        Yeah, I mean you have to do the work. It doesn't seem like they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, just that it's difficult to them.
        fsflover 3y ago
        >It doesn't seem like they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, just that it's difficult to them. Do you have anything to back that up? Only one manufacturer agreed, who doesn't even work in the smartphone industry (NXP). > I mean you have to do the work This is extremely dishonest. Do you imply that reverse engineering is a normal part of writing software? Do you imply that Apple or Google don't have detailed specifications of hardware they buy from other vendors?
        wilg 3y ago
        > Do you have anything to back that up? I'm saying you need to back up the claim that they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, if you want to make it. > This is extremely dishonest. ??? If you want to build a phone that works in a particular way, you have to do the work of finding suppliers and parts and such that fit your design goals. It's not someone else's responsibility to supply it to you in the exact way you want.
        fsflover 3y ago
        It's easy: If there was a good hardware with open specs, FLOSS drivers would be written quickly from the community. Case in point: Pinephone.
- margana 3y ago
  Openness is about people being able to run their own software on hardware that they buy. It is a completely unreasonable argument to state that "if you want to run your own software, first build your own hardware".
  - wilg 3y ago
    I think it is a completely unreasonable argument to say I have to insert and support some kind of public API surface somewhere within any hardware product I want to make to satisfy your nebulous ideology. I think its okay if people make open or closed products and they should compete on the merits.
staplers 3y ago
A parallel is Disney taking public domain stories and then dramatically manipulating copyright law to monopolize them. The "pull the ladder up behind you" mentality is so pervasive in modern business it's amazing anything new gets built at all.
handwarmers 3y ago
> FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices. Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world. >Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch? > That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers. That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about. >Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought. Techie kids growing up now are on average an order of magnitudes better than their equivalent from last century. As a matter of fact, there are more great and creative coders nowadays compared to any time in history. Just look at the amount of open source projects on github. Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.
- stcredzero 3y ago
  Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. Let's unpack this even more. A quite potent problem, is when something else is posing as or sneaking into activism and movements like Open Source and FOSS. This something else can take the form of cliques, hipsterism, or the use of movements to vent anger or aggression. The best way to hurt a cause is to represent it badly. > FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices. Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world. Scapegoating people and groups merely by taxonomy has had a bad record across history. Hold people and companies to account for the things they do, not for their characteristics. That's the only fair form of accountability.
ryanobjc 3y ago
As a long time Linux user, a long time Mac and iPhone user.... In terms of "capabilities that could exist" - I honestly have no idea what you are talking about! I use iOS and Mac because it has _more capabilities_ than anything from the FOSS arena. Last time an "open source competitor" to airdrop came around here it was hilariously unusable! There are undeniable advantages to vertical integration. The miracle of apple bluetooth headphones is a stark example. The enhanced pairing/hand off that airpods have is insanely superior to the stock standard. Even iMessage has superior default encryption than anything short of Signal (maybe). Alas the "product vision" of community developers is rather short sighted and stymied by lack of hardware manufacturing capability. Linux on the desktop is barely usable, so I really wouldn't get too excited about the product vision. There's a lot to be said about Linux and such, but the idea that Apple/Google/etc are limiting innovation is just not based in reality!
- fragmede 3y ago
  iMessage does not have better encryption. If the recipient's phone dies and is unreachable, it will resend the text as a plaintext SMS, which is kind of a problem.
  - daaaaaaan 3y ago
    That's an option (and probably the default option), but it's also configurable to not do that.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      An actual IM system designed for privacy would never default to plaintext on failure. iMessage should never be recommended for privacy.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
Most active FOSS are there just because big companies supports it with their multiple 6 digit salary employees. Only 3.9% of linux changes comes from developers without company attribution[1]. Pytorch and react and lot of other things came from company which is worst violator of their monopoly status. Same with unix, transistors, C etc. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/ https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/
tsimionescu 3y ago
> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. This is a bit of a non-sequitur. Far and away the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created for everyday users existed on Windows, an infamously proprietary platform. Nothing on Linux or Unixes has ever compared (unlike server software, which is the opposite). But, of course, Windows was always open in a different sense, one in which non-PC devices have never been, even those built with open-source software (Android). So yes, I do agree that open-ness is important, but I don't think FOSS has much to do with that.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Also Android is very loosely considered as open. Samsung and Google layer so many proprietary components on top that it's more of an open foundation rather than a true open platform.
- Draiken 3y ago
  But that's merely because of market share. If the majority started using Linux, you'd see the same growth of the app ecosystem. But it's a chicken and the egg problem. Without more users, we don't have more apps/polish on Linux, but without polish, it's not going to get any more users. Do you have stats to back that claim? Isn't the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created on Android (Linux)? We have way more smartphones than PCs.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    By sheer number, probably either iOS or Android have the crown. If you remove all the identical games with different skins and all of the glorified web pages, I'm not as sure that they beat Windows - especially considering how much enterprise productivity software exists on Windows that IT teams built for a single company or two. But either way, they each beat Linux user apps by orders of magnitude.
- margana 3y ago
  While Windows itself may be proprietary, it mostly runs on fairly open hardware. Open in the sense that the manufacturer doesn't impose artificial limitations on what software is allowed to run on it, and also provides very thorough documentation for it, giving no advantage to any party in regards to information. Also Windows itself is open in the sense that it doesn't restrict any software from running on it. You can write user-mode applications and run them on any architecturally compatible Windows system. You can write drivers to run kernel mode code on any Windows system (you can disable signature verification). In the case of Windows, it being proprietary doesn't actually limit what anyone else can do on it nor is it artificially limited to only run on approved hardware. In many ways, it is open.
pembrook 3y ago
> companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing Ah yes. The only reason people chose “closed” source products over FOSS is because they’re less intelligent than you. All the dumb people (not you of course) got tricked by slick marketing! It couldn’t possibly be that the companies behind “closed” products are invested far more in understanding and serving what their users actually need/want, since their users pay them. It couldn’t possibly be that “closed” products focus on actual product-market-fit instead of developer-enthusiasm-fit. Open source has absolutely made some amazing contributions to the software ecosystem of today. But let’s not kid ourselves, we need those “evil” profit-seeking companies as well.
mvkel 3y ago
> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. What has not been holding Linux etc back, but has been holding smartphones etc back? To expect people to contribute their minds out of the kindness of their hearts and not deserve compensation feels a lot like "greed," too. And let's not understate the value of vertical integration, something that open source fundamentally diverges from
tsunamifury 3y ago
FOSS has been a narrow and self-congratulatory group of people who, while making great core contributions, have done little in the way of product development required to actually help the world compute.
noapologies 3y ago
I'm going to reply here to provide a bit more context, since many of the threads are diving too deep into the specifics of linux/foss/openness/ideology, which was unfortunately not the point. The main crux of my comment is about being able to "own" your own device. A hackable device is better than a closed device, more choice is better than no choice. Is it so hard to believe that if Microsoft or Apple had a death grip on Windows and MacOs respectively, restricting completely the kinds of things you could do on these platforms unless individually blessed, that there would be a far less interesting ecosystem of apps / capabilities available than what we have today? As an example, one cannot build AWS on an iPad. Like literally cannot - the tools are either not available or are significantly crippled, since you may use them to circumvent Apple's gatekeeper cut. That's the main idea, make smartphones and tablets, smartwatches, vr headsets etc. more like traditional desktop devices.

wilg 3y ago

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices, and I think many do in fact exist but are not popular.

fsflover 3y ago
> Nothing is stopping anyone from making these devices Anti-competitive practices do. Example of a struggle: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/ https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/
- wilg 3y ago
  That article is about how they weren't stopped, and there's nothing anticompetitive in it.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    Purism almost went bankrupt due to challenges like this one. They had to choose a relatively outdated, slow hardware and reverse engineer many things to make them work, e.g., camera. All companies producing the required chips refuse to work with FLOSS -- if this isn't anti-competitive and destroying competition, I don't know what is.
    - wilg 3y ago
      Yeah, I mean you have to do the work. It doesn't seem like they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, just that it's difficult to them.
      - fsflover 3y ago
        >It doesn't seem like they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, just that it's difficult to them. Do you have anything to back that up? Only one manufacturer agreed, who doesn't even work in the smartphone industry (NXP). > I mean you have to do the work This is extremely dishonest. Do you imply that reverse engineering is a normal part of writing software? Do you imply that Apple or Google don't have detailed specifications of hardware they buy from other vendors?
        wilg 3y ago
        > Do you have anything to back that up? I'm saying you need to back up the claim that they refuse to work with FLOSS on principle, if you want to make it. > This is extremely dishonest. ??? If you want to build a phone that works in a particular way, you have to do the work of finding suppliers and parts and such that fit your design goals. It's not someone else's responsibility to supply it to you in the exact way you want.
        fsflover 3y ago
        It's easy: If there was a good hardware with open specs, FLOSS drivers would be written quickly from the community. Case in point: Pinephone.
margana 3y ago
Openness is about people being able to run their own software on hardware that they buy. It is a completely unreasonable argument to state that "if you want to run your own software, first build your own hardware".
- wilg 3y ago
  I think it is a completely unreasonable argument to say I have to insert and support some kind of public API surface somewhere within any hardware product I want to make to satisfy your nebulous ideology. I think its okay if people make open or closed products and they should compete on the merits.

staplers 3y ago

A parallel is Disney taking public domain stories and then dramatically manipulating copyright law to monopolize them. The "pull the ladder up behind you" mentality is so pervasive in modern business it's amazing anything new gets built at all.

handwarmers 3y ago

> FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices. Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world. >Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch? > That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers. That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about. >Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought. Techie kids growing up now are on average an order of magnitudes better than their equivalent from last century. As a matter of fact, there are more great and creative coders nowadays compared to any time in history. Just look at the amount of open source projects on github. Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.

stcredzero 3y ago
Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. Let's unpack this even more. A quite potent problem, is when something else is posing as or sneaking into activism and movements like Open Source and FOSS. This something else can take the form of cliques, hipsterism, or the use of movements to vent anger or aggression. The best way to hurt a cause is to represent it badly. > FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices. Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world. Scapegoating people and groups merely by taxonomy has had a bad record across history. Hold people and companies to account for the things they do, not for their characteristics. That's the only fair form of accountability.

ryanobjc 3y ago

As a long time Linux user, a long time Mac and iPhone user.... In terms of "capabilities that could exist" - I honestly have no idea what you are talking about! I use iOS and Mac because it has _more capabilities_ than anything from the FOSS arena. Last time an "open source competitor" to airdrop came around here it was hilariously unusable! There are undeniable advantages to vertical integration. The miracle of apple bluetooth headphones is a stark example. The enhanced pairing/hand off that airpods have is insanely superior to the stock standard. Even iMessage has superior default encryption than anything short of Signal (maybe). Alas the "product vision" of community developers is rather short sighted and stymied by lack of hardware manufacturing capability. Linux on the desktop is barely usable, so I really wouldn't get too excited about the product vision. There's a lot to be said about Linux and such, but the idea that Apple/Google/etc are limiting innovation is just not based in reality!

fragmede 3y ago
iMessage does not have better encryption. If the recipient's phone dies and is unreachable, it will resend the text as a plaintext SMS, which is kind of a problem.
- daaaaaaan 3y ago
  That's an option (and probably the default option), but it's also configurable to not do that.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    An actual IM system designed for privacy would never default to plaintext on failure. iMessage should never be recommended for privacy.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

Most active FOSS are there just because big companies supports it with their multiple 6 digit salary employees. Only 3.9% of linux changes comes from developers without company attribution[1]. Pytorch and react and lot of other things came from company which is worst violator of their monopoly status. Same with unix, transistors, C etc. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/ https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/

tsimionescu 3y ago

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. This is a bit of a non-sequitur. Far and away the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created for everyday users existed on Windows, an infamously proprietary platform. Nothing on Linux or Unixes has ever compared (unlike server software, which is the opposite). But, of course, Windows was always open in a different sense, one in which non-PC devices have never been, even those built with open-source software (Android). So yes, I do agree that open-ness is important, but I don't think FOSS has much to do with that.

threeseed 3y ago
Also Android is very loosely considered as open. Samsung and Google layer so many proprietary components on top that it's more of an open foundation rather than a true open platform.
Draiken 3y ago
But that's merely because of market share. If the majority started using Linux, you'd see the same growth of the app ecosystem. But it's a chicken and the egg problem. Without more users, we don't have more apps/polish on Linux, but without polish, it's not going to get any more users. Do you have stats to back that claim? Isn't the biggest ecosystem of apps ever created on Android (Linux)? We have way more smartphones than PCs.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  By sheer number, probably either iOS or Android have the crown. If you remove all the identical games with different skins and all of the glorified web pages, I'm not as sure that they beat Windows - especially considering how much enterprise productivity software exists on Windows that IT teams built for a single company or two. But either way, they each beat Linux user apps by orders of magnitude.
margana 3y ago
While Windows itself may be proprietary, it mostly runs on fairly open hardware. Open in the sense that the manufacturer doesn't impose artificial limitations on what software is allowed to run on it, and also provides very thorough documentation for it, giving no advantage to any party in regards to information. Also Windows itself is open in the sense that it doesn't restrict any software from running on it. You can write user-mode applications and run them on any architecturally compatible Windows system. You can write drivers to run kernel mode code on any Windows system (you can disable signature verification). In the case of Windows, it being proprietary doesn't actually limit what anyone else can do on it nor is it artificially limited to only run on approved hardware. In many ways, it is open.

pembrook 3y ago

> companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing Ah yes. The only reason people chose “closed” source products over FOSS is because they’re less intelligent than you. All the dumb people (not you of course) got tricked by slick marketing! It couldn’t possibly be that the companies behind “closed” products are invested far more in understanding and serving what their users actually need/want, since their users pay them. It couldn’t possibly be that “closed” products focus on actual product-market-fit instead of developer-enthusiasm-fit. Open source has absolutely made some amazing contributions to the software ecosystem of today. But let’s not kid ourselves, we need those “evil” profit-seeking companies as well.

mvkel 3y ago

> Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades. What has not been holding Linux etc back, but has been holding smartphones etc back? To expect people to contribute their minds out of the kindness of their hearts and not deserve compensation feels a lot like "greed," too. And let's not understate the value of vertical integration, something that open source fundamentally diverges from

tsunamifury 3y ago

FOSS has been a narrow and self-congratulatory group of people who, while making great core contributions, have done little in the way of product development required to actually help the world compute.

noapologies 3y ago

I'm going to reply here to provide a bit more context, since many of the threads are diving too deep into the specifics of linux/foss/openness/ideology, which was unfortunately not the point. The main crux of my comment is about being able to "own" your own device. A hackable device is better than a closed device, more choice is better than no choice. Is it so hard to believe that if Microsoft or Apple had a death grip on Windows and MacOs respectively, restricting completely the kinds of things you could do on these platforms unless individually blessed, that there would be a far less interesting ecosystem of apps / capabilities available than what we have today? As an example, one cannot build AWS on an iPad. Like literally cannot - the tools are either not available or are significantly crippled, since you may use them to circumvent Apple's gatekeeper cut. That's the main idea, make smartphones and tablets, smartwatches, vr headsets etc. more like traditional desktop devices.