17 ms·

Free software hasn't won

384 points by LorenDB 1y ago

palata 1y ago
I read through half the article, and I don't understand what it's trying to say. Has free software won? Or not? And what does it mean? No clue.
- __del__ 1y ago
  they're suggesting that "open source" has won (attention, mind share, funding, whatever) while "free software" as defined by richard stallman has not
  - schoen 1y ago
    I may have glossed over this detail, but I didn't think the article was saying that "open source" had actually won either (perhaps that people who preferred the term "open source" have tended to accept much narrower wins as "victory" in practice?).
    - protocolture 1y ago
      My takeaway was that the article was looking at common Open Source claims, and then locating the only " 100% true" example of that. Like you cant make a 100% open hardware mobile phone. Theres lots of near enough cases. But that Qualcomm chip is proprietary for the phone bit. So they exaggerate by going back to an old, open source rotary phone.
  - billy99k 1y ago
    It didn't succeed because he was always against making money from software. He also has pushed for governments to be forced to use FOSS. I remember him doing some interviews in the 90s, and he would put his coat over the camera, if it wasn't using FOSS. This sort of zealot mindset will always be on the fringes of society and eventually abandoned for something more liberal (which is what we've seen in the last decade or so).
- schoen 1y ago
  It's quoting people who say that it has won because of extensive adoption. However, that adoption doesn't mean that most people are allowed even in principle to change most of the software in embedded devices they own, or even on most of the computing devices they own. I've also found this really weird. Like, we have Linux kernels on most cloud instances, and most data center servers, and most academic and research computing systems, and probably lately on most embedded microprocessors that are big enough to run it. (And various ecosystems for computing infrastructure and software development are mainly using free software userspace and tools.) Meanwhile, almost all user-facing software that almost all people interact with almost all of the time is proprietary. Why would someone say it's "won"? Thinking really small?
  - okanat 1y ago
    Even Linux hasn't "won" in those areas. It has just replaced what we would call a common API layer or a communication standard. The virtualization products are still proprietary. Servers and their firmware are too. People needed a Unix-like OS that hasn't been riddled with patent issues and wasn't outrageously expensive. They needed it because they were also price-sensitive or outright cheap. They didn't want to change APIs or modularize their software. Linux was there. Startup culture happened which demanded cutting all the costs you can. Linux was free of charge. Linux wasn't the best OS for the job sometimes. But it was there and it was gratis. So it became the middleware for Unix-compatible software. We have open standards and even open/free software for anything that companies aren't making money out of. FOSS by itself cannot make money. In places where software matters the most or, if the software hides the trade secrets the most or, if it is the main money maker, creating FOSS is economically infeasible. For FOSS to win, we need to change the economic and legal system. Current capitalist system in many West-aligned countries is actively hostile against sharing in any kind, except the ones that profit the biggest players in their non-critical areas. In a market where the first one to market gets to buy all competitors, in a market the one that has the biggest secrecy wins and gets all the money from investors like Y-Combinator, there cannot be any truly FOSS software-only products. They need to do rug pulls to support the exponential growth. Startup culture is fundamentally anti-FOSS. It is pro-FOSS in only consuming. Even a startup releasing some middleware can be interpreted as mishandling investment. We need to make sure our governments support FOSS infrastructure and FOSS user-facing software. They need to be equal employers and competitors to Big Tech or they need to directly support smaller competitors for decades. Otherwise, I am afraid, FOSS cannot win.
xwowsersx 1y ago
I think this post overstates the "loss" of free software. Yes, closed firmware and locked hardware are real gaps...but that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack. From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built. I tend to see this kind of absolutist, binary tone a lot from people deeply involved in FOSS... and sometimes I think maybe that mindset is necessary to push the movement forward, but it also feels detached from how much open software has already changed reality.
- api 1y ago
  The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data. Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros. I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
  - xwowsersx 1y ago
    > The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data. That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open. You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.
    - 1y ago
stingraycharles 1y ago
> What picture does this paint? Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version. I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc). When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.
Sytten 1y ago
Complex puzzle, I feel a key part is that the financing / financial sustainability of free software has not been solved. The author touches on it a bit by saying "when you sell hardware..." which kinda means no hardware == no revenue since you can't sell the software. I don't discount that Redhat is a thing, but it is the exception not the norm.
- Geof25 1y ago
  I do see it on exactly same way. A lot of people are conflating opensource with free. That model is not really sustainable if you want to do it for living.
- epolanski 1y ago
  Free Software doesn't imply someone has to write what I need for me for free. It means that if the end user wants to control his devices he/she should be able to.
guyzero 1y ago
Sybase and Ingres disagree.
pooyan2 1y ago
I hate to complain about styling, but when I can’t read it, I have to say something about it. This has a strange CSS styling problem on my phone. There’s no left margin in portrait, so it’s basically unreadable, but if I go landscape it’s fine.
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  Use firefox. Click "reader view" on any page and read it according to your own theme. Maybe help free software win.
  - hnthrowaway738 1y ago
    Flipping into reader mode constantly is clunky and jarring. People shouldn’t use that as an excuse for poor styling.
deleted 1y ago
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sdotdev 1y ago
Blog styling is a bit weird and for the actual copy I kind of don't get its direction
deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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piersolenski 1y ago
Yet ;-)
Animats 1y ago
It's about to get much worse. You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules. If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.
- toast0 1y ago
  > If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over. Why wouldn't you just get another account?
  - themacguffinman 1y ago
    All major platforms have mechanisms to identify ban evasion. It's not so easy to create another account when, for example, they ask for a phone number.
    - TuxSH 1y ago
      Slightly unrelated but GH's ToS clearly only permit one free account per person and I've heard they sometimes enforce this
    - drnick1 1y ago
      In the U.S. at least, it is trivial to buy a new SIM anonymously. But really, you should refuse to use any platform that requires a phone number in the first place. These companies make it implicitly very clear that they want to control you and extract every bit of information that they can from you.
  - EvanAnderson 1y ago
    Age verification laws in the US are chipping away at Internet anonymity. You might not be able to get another account because your legal identity might be required (and can be banned).
    - kube-system 1y ago
      This isn’t just a US thing. Many countries require KYC for a lot of online accounts
ofalkaed 1y ago
Haiku will win in the end, at least win what many in the free software world are trying to win. Or at least what I think this blog is trying to get at, but it is a weird post I am not completely sure what it is trying to get at. But I do appreciate its methods even if I am somewhat confused by them. The year of the linux desktop is not going to happen, far too much baggage. The year of the Haiku deaktop will happen; they are doing everything right and staying under the radar until they are ready.
- christophilus 1y ago
  That is a hot take. I’d take the other side of that bet.
  - ofalkaed 1y ago
    What do you want to bet and which assertion are we betting on? Haiku has stayed out of the open source drama and focused on its goals; slowly and steadily working towards them even when the goalposts move. The big thing is their determination and staying focused on the user experience in a way Linux has not and can not without a single distro wining which is not going to happen. When it comes to the desktop, Haiku is offering everything Linux doesn't.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Huh? I like haiku and all but have never seen it running anywhere. At least Linux has a few percent market share. While not huge it is in the millions of folks successfully using it across the world every day.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  I've been using desktop linux for 15 years, at least. I play Steam Games on my Linux Desktop. I work on one. It's not prefect, but neither are the other OSes.
  - ofalkaed 1y ago
zzo38computer 1y ago
In many cases you shouldn't need a computer, and for many where a computer is helpful, a very simple one should be possible which can use less power and with small enough ROM and RAM, and not needing any Wi-Fi and stuff like that. You also should not rely on computers too much even in the circumstances where they are helpful. I do think that different computers (and other stuff) can be made which do not use proprietary software (and which do not use excessive software; I think it is also important, for a different reason). Free open specifications can also be made, too. Many people don't, but it can be done (although in some cases it is difficult, for various reasons).
- movedx 1y ago
  Well said. “When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.” — Star Trek: Insurrection. A month ago I watched animatronic dogs herd sheep around a paddock just minutes after some Border Collie did the same thing. What came to mind straight away was: that’s not a problem that needs solving. Yet here we are, injecting technology into every nook and cranny we can and ultimately all it’ll do is free us from our own freedom as people and enslave us to the rich, who will own all the tech and knowledge to support those animatronic dogs.
tolerance 1y ago
As a quasi-tech person I can’t imagine what more can be (or what isn’t being) achieved within reason by FOSS. And when it comes to Life’s Big Problems™ showing me someone playing Snake on an ULTRAK 435 Digital Pitch Counter doesn’t instill me with confidence that free software is as big a solution as its proponents would like to think.
- squigz 1y ago
  "Within reason" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence, isn't it? What I define as reasonable FOSS solutions, many executives would not agree with, but that doesn't mean they're not practical or acheivable. Your Snake example also doesn't seem very fair - there are many large, concentrated FOSS movements and organizations that are doing good. More and more - albeit very slowly and sporadically - there are governments and organizations choosing to invest in self-hosted FOSS solutions. And you focus on hackers expressing curiosity doing silly but interesting things on various types of systems. Come on.
  - tolerance 1y ago
    Well, you seem capable enough at shouldering the load that the phrase imposed.
- daemin 1y ago
  The main benefit that I see it of having the source code to the software running on the devices you own is that you can always fix or modify it if and when you want to. Lots of things can happen such as the law changing, the company going out of business, the company stopping support for your device, or you just wanting to make some changes to how it works to better suit your lifestyle. This doesn't mean that everyone will dive right in and make the code changes by themselves, but it does allow for paying someone knowledgeable to come in and make the changes for you. The same kind of way that you can (or used to be able to) get someone knowledgeable in cars to come in to fix or change things for you. Think of it as having access to the device's schematics so that you (or someone knowledgable) can make repairs to the device when you need to. This brings me to another point, that in addition to having the source code for the device available, there way to build and deploy the code to the device also has to be made available, otherwise it's only a shadow of a solution.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
If AI is actually a software revolution, OS/Freeware will close the gap with non-gaming proprietary software.
pheggs 1y ago
I am quite convinced a lot of open source is not open for ideology reasons but rather are a result of competition and the market itself. When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads. Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this. Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.
- ezoe 1y ago
  I don't think things can be explained by competition alone. People don't use free software Compiler and Web browser and OS just because it's free software, but there is no better alternative.
codedokode 1y ago
Note that non-free firmware in a network card, for example, doesn't affect anything, if the traffic is encrypted (and ideally routed through VPN so that the card has no direct Internet connection). So in some cases we can isolate non-free components so that they cannot do any harm. Modem in a phone, probably can be isolated also.
- fsflover 1y ago
  A non-free firmware in a network card can 1) deny you service at the will of its true owner, 2) stop receiving updates rendering this piece of hardware dangerous to use with no recourse.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    It cannot deny you service if it is routed through a router that allows only communication with a VPN server, for which the malicious firmware has no access credentials.
neilv 1y ago
With branding like "free software", it could have have lost the battle for hearts and minds for that reason alone, if not for all the other reasons. Of course the public thinks "free software" is software for which you do not pay money. And everyone immediately goes on their way with their downloads, without you getting the chance to give your hour-long spiel on "I'm glad you asked what I mean by 'free software'." Because no one would ever ask what "free software" means, because they already know what it means. It is the advocates who are terrible at advocacy who keep trying to give a term new meaning, and failing for a few decades to get the public to understand or pay attention. You could even say that's the philosophical/awareness barrier, right there: people thinking in terms of free software, rather than in terms of Free Software(tm)(R). (If you liked this comment, please subscribe to my newsletter about renewable clean energy, called Burn Fossil Fuels. My team has been working to get the message out, with a clever bit of wordplay there, in which we actually mean more the opposite of what we're saying. This is all explained in our hundred-page manifesto whitepaper, and we are also available for speaking engagements, at select events where we can preach to the choir.)
- squigz 1y ago
  This touches on something I've noticed the past few years - it seems to me many advocates of most topics often do more harm than good for their cause - taking hardline positions normal people simply can't relate to, even if they do agree in theory. Anyway, on the topic of "free" software - how might you recommend we try to frame this to be more clear to the public? I think people tried to make "libre software" a thing, but doesn't that have the exact same issue - that is, that people will misunderstand what it is?
  - luxpir 1y ago
    Freedom Software? Beats Open Software because open is still ambiguous to non-technical people. "Freedom Apps" if you truly want to talk to the masses.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      Libre software (as in Liberty).
billy99k 1y ago
What's not mentioned here is that every single successful OSS project is funded by multi-million dollar corporations and the reason it's so prevalent today. The rest usually become abandonware because maintainers don't have the time or energy to continue with it for years at a time, especially if they can't make money from it.
glitchc 1y ago
Isn't the author confusing closed platforms for closed software? There are open platforms out there (Mastodon, Bluesky), but they lack traction. For any closed platform, the owner of the platform gets to decide what the stack looks like.
AfterHIA 1y ago
[flagged]
GMoromisato 1y ago
The fundamental conflict here is that software developers want/need to get paid. We have mortgages/rent/medical bills/groceries and none of those are free. The root problem, in my opinion, is combining "free as in beer" with "free as in speech". The latter cannot be achieved if you insist on the former. I.e., if your solution to privacy is only use free-as-in-beer software then you will fail because developers want/need to get paid. What we need is a business model in which people are willing to pay for privacy-respecting software. That's the only sustainable path. And it's frustrating to me that the people who are most vocal about software freedom are actively working against that with this kind of article. [p.s.: I realize I'm ranting and not offering enough detail to change minds, much less offer a solution. Sorry about that.]
- squigz 1y ago
  Blender seems like a good example of how this can actually happen.
  - GMoromisato 1y ago
    Sure--but the article is saying that there are many cases where it doesn't work--where no good free software exists. Could the Blender model replace YouTube, for example? I don't think it can, until hosting costs drop significantly. Maybe that's part of the answer.
    - hshdhdhehd 1y ago
      What replaces YouTube is a symmetrical internet where people can upload lots, and probably something like popcorn time. Then some discoverability. The only issue is lack of moderation because of "bad videos". Can't have nice things :(
- porcoda 1y ago
  I think people are willing to pay for privacy protecting software. The problem is I don’t think people trust companies who claim that because there are too many instances of that “privacy” coming with a subtle asterisk. Businesses can’t seem to resist eroding trust in the interest of $ (growth! Shareholder value!) or caving to authorities. Plus, it’s rare that companies are transparent enough to earn the trust they claim we should give them. I do agree with the sentiment: people need to get paid to write software, and people want freedoms to be respected by that software. It seems to be challenging to rectify the two in most cases (yes, there are cases where it works - those are the exception not the norm).
redwood 1y ago
Microsoft, Google, Amazon. They will all open source wash themselves and have a cadre of former red hat and other equivalent employees speaking about how they are the center of open source. Meanwhile there's an entire parallel universe where people view things using different terms than these tired 1990s battles. The next generation of software cannot be controlled by a small number of hyperscalers.. that is the new center of freedom focus. Times change
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Nothing is truly free. All developer time is bought and paid for. Even leisure time. What pays for the software developer to be able to not starve and be able to spend leisure time on free software? Paid software. Obviously. Somewhere in the equation someone needs to be paid. Usually if software is open source, it won't be paid for. So whatever is funding it... well if it's a software company funding open source software where does the money come from? Obviously paid software. And people won't pay for open source software because it's basically free. Follow the money trail it ends at roughly three places: 1. donations, 2. tech support 3. ads 4. closed source software. 1 and 2 are too miniscule to be effective.
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
  And 3 is worse than 4.
- 28304283409234 1y ago
  All this time and people still do not understand the difference between Freedom and Gratis.
jrapdx3 1y ago
This topic provokes a question, what exactly is "winning" anyway? As others point out, how could there be absolute winning, or complete dominance of the whole gamut of software used for every purpose. Of course, no one ever proposed such a definition of open-source success. Since the 1990s I've been thoroughly committed to using and developing open-source programs. I strongly prefer using open-source products even when they've been less robust than proprietary options. In recent years, that's changed in favor of open-source, a number of open-source programs have become best-in-class. To name a few Blender, postgresql, Firefox, most developer tools. Still, proprietary products dominate areas like OSs, enterprise programs, etc., and will probably continue to do so. But even if not as widely used, the fact that quality alternatives exist to a significant share of proprietary offerings speaks to open-source success. It's noteworthy that giants like Microsoft have open-sourced some of their products, a practice unheard of a couple of decades ago that shows influence of the open-source movement. A winner-take-all philosophy is bound to be as deleterious to open-source advocacy as in any other endeavor. Realistically, producing excellent, bug-free, well-documented open-source software is what it takes to find an appreciative user-base. Perhaps not the majority of users of that category of software, but is that necessary to call a project successful? To say it is seems a prelude to enduring a constant sense of failure and missing out on authentic victories.
- bjourne 1y ago
  The goal of the Free Software movement is to build a usable computing environment for which all software (i.e., "code") is free. If you include things like cell phones, tablets, web services, firmware, or basically anything other than core os components in the computing environment, that goal is very far off.
  - jrapdx3 1y ago
    Sure, the FSF is as idealistic as it has been influential. Can't fault FSF for unrelenting commitment to stated purposes. While the totally free OS was a goal that never quite materialized, a large proportion of modern open-source systems is composed of free (in the FSF sense) software. What FSF advocates has indeed mattered. I think the question is this: is having totally free cell phones, etc., the essential criterion of success? Or is something less than embodying FSF-style ideology acceptable? To be sure, there's no definitive answer to such a question. But ideological purity is a luxury in the real world that even FSF acknowledges, compromises sometimes have to be made, pragmatic considerations have to be taken into account. Nothing wrong with keeping lofty goals, but as practical necessity frequently dictates, graciously accepting less than total victory more often than not best serves our interests. (Edited re: grammar.)
signa11 1y ago
how does Linux's world domination feel ?
bad_haircut72 1y ago
People seem to think Free Software ought to have won purely as being free, as if that was somehow going to overcome the heinous acts f profit motivated groups to try and take away your end user freedom for their own gain. Its an idealogical battle not an economic one, though sadly we havent won its true
deleted 1y ago
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sarchertech 1y ago
So much software is “open source”, but it’s either de jure or de facto controlled by a single company. Sure you could fork it, but for complex projects you’re not gonna. 99.99% of users of open source software will never meaningfully contribute. So the only option most people have is to hope someone else forks the project if something goes wrong, and for complex projects maintaining a fork requires serious resources. We really need to distinguish between generic “open source” and actual community built and controlled projects. The term open source itself was popularized by the open source initiative. A group funded by Tim O’Reilly and big tech to co-opt the free software movement and make it more business friendly. They’ve spent so much time and money promoting the term, that there’s an enormous amount of good will around it. To the point that any project that doesn’t use an OSI approved license is widely considered dirty. You could have a project controlled by the community with a nearly completely free license with the caveat that companies making more than $100 million in annual revenue can’t resell it, and the majority of devs would trust it less than an “open source” project completely controlled by a trillion dollar company.
sexyman48 1y ago
It's 2025. Code is worthless and becoming more so. The distinction of free versus open-source is moot.
- zoobab 1y ago
  "The distinction of free versus open-source is moot." Access to source code and subsequent modifications are still a concern by end users. Sorry to say the experience of 'open source' was not very successful in that regard, because it was designed to not force vendors to publish their changes.
zelcon 1y ago
Why would anyone want free software to win? Dont most of us here draw an income from software that’s explicitly not free?
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
  Yeah I'm not exactly sure what the appeal is of a world in which none of us are rewarded for our time and labor...
- phito 1y ago
  Free as in Freedom not as in free beer.
- tmtvl 1y ago
  To me, having different ideals, that sounds as strange as saying 'why would anyone help an old lady cross the street without getting paid for it?'. Sometimes one may want to do something without needing to get money for it.
wilg 1y ago
Fundamentally, the issue is that only a small number of people know what free/"libre" software is, and only a small subset of those people think it is a good tradeoff. For that reason alone, there's just not going to be a lot of people working on building something the vast majority of people very clearly do not want.
vednig 1y ago
I think being a programmer we must understand that there's never a one size fits all needs. Each project has different needs having an option never hurts, as long as there is competition, there will exist a chance of open sourcing the source. Because, closed source softwares die faster in their lifetimes, while open source remain remembered even after being unmaintained. Had it not been for GitHub(a closed source software) we'd had never reached this stage of open source expansion and understanding, because hosting a git to open source a project was and still isn't cost effective solution. Meanwhile torrents are mildly successful with this, yet faced by the lawful resistance in many regions. Basic goals, should be to always have a choice, if there isn't much then create one if you can. Rest is just fog in hindsight, I'd say.
- vednig 1y ago
  Gaming is one such usecase that requires and works well, currently, with proprietary software. As such, gaming is a sport and as long as a game is competitive, there's always a chance to bypass a n obstacle with a hack, just as there was misconceptions with OSes. But unlike OSes, games don't have a commercial application yet, we still have a long time before the realisation of freeware gaming.
akst 1y ago
I think the free software model underestimates how much people dislike being compelled to operate on other peoples terms when it comes to exercising discrete with their intellectual property. Even if they get "free" software. The suggestion free software is free is intellectually dishonest, I don't think free software is really free, the nature of it is very controlling towards those who decide to depend it. I publish most of the code I do for small side projects publicly, but I would never use free software if I arbitrary forgo to my ability to make the decision for myself. It deprives contributions of dignity, any suggestion a contribution comes from a willingness to share is undermined by the fact they are compelled to do so. There's a reason why their interpretation of free is prefaced by a bunch of precondition, because it's a force framing that is odds with what people actually understand to be free.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  It's free as in freedom/libre - liberty. Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be. Same is true in software.
  - akst 1y ago
    But it literally isn't that, as an author in depending on it you reduce your liberty. The software is free, those dependent on are not free. You could argue well it's free to users, but there's a level of survivorship bias due to the fact this is confined to the software people will publish under this license. Edit: Back to "free software losing" is unsurprising given the above. All the benefit to the user are ultimately irrelevant to the growth of software when doesn't come from users, it comes from people weighing up if they want to forgo this ability to exercise control over software they made. And the portion of users who actually care are negligible to the point it has zero incentive to the software provider. The one exception I would say is, the "Free" softwares model works well for public goods like shared infrastructure like database software and such, but for end user software it is insane licensing model. > Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be Do you even hear yourself. This is the rhetoric why no one takes this seriously. Your suggesting my desire not to be deprived of my own personal liberty and act on my own terms (without causing harm to anyone else) is somehow authoritarian? It's such a narcissistic / manipulative entitled framing, to suggest this embodies anything resembling liberty.
drnick1 1y ago
Free software has won on servers. It is making inroads into desktop/gaming PCs (above 5% market share now), and the exodus from Windows 10 could well push it over 10% soon. But the computing landscape has shifted towards mobile devices and this is where our freedoms are now the most at risk. It is time that we turn our back on Apple and Google and exclusively buy devices that can run operating systems that are community-controlled such as Linux phones, and devices that can be flashed to Lineage and Graphene.
indigoabstract 1y ago
I guess there will always be people who think in black and white. I'm pretty sure that if Stallman had been born in the 19th century, he would have been the first to write "The Communist Manifesto" before the other two guys had a chance.
- rahen 1y ago
  I highly doubt that, considering Stallman's stance on freedom and personal sovereignty. Free software often operates like market anarchy (pure meritocracy), similar to the Internet. Coercive structures of centralized power that dictate what the 'common good' is do not align with the principles of the GPL. Also the GPL is focused on enforcing property rights ("this is yours unconditionally"), while communism emphasizes transferring property to the government ("this is ours but you might have some if you behave").
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
As someone who recently made a post on how to change it just recently and has been thinking about why[1] Here are some of my thoughts. Your article is great and that is a reality I also want to live in where everyone completely "owns" their device and lives free from proprietory stuff and you are approaching things from a hardware perspective because you maybe more familiar with that and I am more familiar with software (as compared to hardware) but here's the shocking part that I want to share People don't even use open source software. Something which just works as compared to hardware. There are sooo many low hanging fruits for privacy in this world that we haven't picked. Even if I have a completely open source laptop, if the only way to message my school's teacher some message that he will look or send me is whatsapp, all of that falls apart. We need to advocate on both sides & I 100% agree that we should want the same thing for hardware as well (proprietory blobs Intel ME are scary with proprietory blobs) but we need to definitely prioritize in the process as well. What are some low hanging fruits of privacy/open source we can share that people aren't using because they are unaware. Also, as someone deeply interested in advocating for open source and to those comments on that ask HN I made, I am deeply saddened to see the state. Since I feel from those comments on my post that there is no hope. Everyone expects a better UI/UX but nobody said anything about donating to the contributors. We expect so much from open source and we give so little back as a society. And its just funny that on my post which is about how to give back to open source contributors so that they might work full time on it so that they can make a better UI/UX, people expect the better UI/UX first. I can understand them but... It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Open source is itself a chicken and egg problem. Why do we want unpaid labour abused by big tech which is then used for surveillance/ad-tech and then if we can't create a better UI/UX then stop trying to expect any payment. Why do we want perfection before giving open source guys some donations. They are competing with a company which might have full time guys working on a project funded by a VC fund only to enshitten stuff later. Please, I genuinely want to change it. Give me any ideas on how we, the people interested in open source, can change/fix this chicken and egg problem. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that) (also I should've probably changed it to say how can we change that but the HN limits the text of a title and I had to modify some of it, and now after writing it, I am genuinely not sure if we even a "how can we change" or if my title was correct and its now "can we even change")
wiz21c 1y ago
Free software will win in the long run. But it depends on what you call "win". For me it means that, provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others. They will write free software and each year, that free software, although years behind commercial offerings, will be better than the software of ten years ago. With the GPL, that software will stick and won't be appropriated. So in the long run, free software will produce value. See KiCad, Inkscape, emacs, etc. Are those better than commercial offering ? Sure not. But compare that with 10 years ago: it's much better. And in the long run (say, 50-100 years), it will come out positively. Just keep the spirit alive.
- hobofan 1y ago
  > Just keep the spirit alive. And to do that, blog posts like this one are necessary. > provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others They don't spawn in a vacuum and rarely arrive at a significant formed idea of Free Software from first principles, so providing education and awareness into that direction is important. In the last decade free software discourse (at least in my perception) has significantly quieted down, to a point where I'm not sure that newcomers to the topic satisfy a replacement rate. If one wants to keep the spirit alive, now would definitely be a time to push!
pabs3 1y ago
We need a right to repair for software, perhaps embedded in copyright law. No right to repair software by replacing it, no copyright.
andersmurphy 1y ago
I mean the reactions to posts on HN when a developer dares to make their OSS/MIT project sustainable by adding paid extensions is part of the problem. Almost to the point where I believe most developers are acting in the interest of the large corperations by bullying OSS developers into keeping their work free as in gratis. The same people lose their minds if a project is GPL or copyleft.
donatj 1y ago
I would kill for decent NURBS oriented 3D CAD software. I feel like the 3D printing community would absolutely thrive if they stopped dealing with polygons for things meant to exist in the real world. Rhino is really the only fully featured tool in town, at least available to the general public at a somewhat "affordable" price (~$700 from the right reseller). I end up paying to upgrade every few years when compatibility with my existing OS finally breaks. Apple announced the removal of Rosetta in 2027 (dear god why?! I use so many apps that'll likely never be made native) so I'm gonna have to pay again then. At least, so far, it's software I'm allowed to *own* rather than rent. I can run my old versions in perpetuity, particularly on an emulator. As someone who has 3D models going back to around the year 2000 in his collection, the idea of using any of these hosted solutions just sends absolute shivers down my spine. OpenSCAD is really the best we have in open source non-polygonal modeling tools, and it honestly wouldn't be too bad if someone could slap a decent WYSIWYG GUI on it.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  FreeCAD is actually pretty good since the 1.0 release. Far better than OpenSCAD for anything but highly regular and parametric objects (basically fasteners and art).
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    And better still in the upcoming 1.1 release. Lots of improvements.
- starky 1y ago
  This and a good RAW image processor are the two reasons I ever boot up the Windows VM these days. None of the options available on Linux come close to the software I use on Windows for those tasks. You can get Fusion360 to work on Linux through some scripts someone created, but I don't like how Fusion works at all after using SolidWorks (and Pro/E) professionally.
  - zipy124 1y ago
    Are raw therapee or dark table not enough?
not--felix 1y ago
But I would say Free software also has not lost. It also has the advantage that it will get better with time and a lot of commercial software gets worse throug enshittification. We also saw this with blender, I think free software will win eventually
- sbuk 1y ago
  Blender is an interesting case. It's seeing wider adoption in studios generally - an Oscar win has helped and the recent Blender Conference had talks from Framestores vizdev[1] and Paramounts in-house teams[2]. Blender 5.0 is around the corner, which is adding more and more industry standard features[3][4], though recently there was a discussion about pulling away from the VFX Reference Platform[5][6], which they have walked back from[7]. It's not there yet, but it's gaining mindshare rapidly. Enshittification in DCCs is interesting. Arguably the two dominant companies, Autodesk (Maya, 3ds Max) and Maxon (Cinema 4D) are on that path, whereas SideFX (Houdini) is kicking ass! [1] https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk [2] https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o [3] https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc [4] https://landscape.aswf.io https://landscape.aswf.io [5] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-platform-feedback/37123 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-plat... [6] https://vfxplatform.com https://vfxplatform.com [7] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-statement/37863 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-stateme...
wolvesechoes 1y ago
I am baffled that people in this thread write something along "well, depends what you call win" - the goal of Free Software is quite clear. The goal is freedom, computing freedom, freedom of the software user. It is very easy to notice that in 2025 users have less freedom even if they run some Libre Linux distro on their Thinkpads than they had running Win98, because of everything that happens OUTSIDE PC software ecosystem (phones, SaaS etc), and even inside PC world things sometimes are not obvious. Free Software is losing, simple as that. Even with Kubernetes, as the goal was never to provide free labor and free software infra to companies.
- thefz 1y ago
  The vast majority of software now runs on personal devices and the average user has no knowledge nor interest in it, as long as they press the button and the action is done. The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
  - WJW 1y ago
    This is not unique to software. There's no "free&open ball bearing" design out there, let alone for a machine capable of making them, even though the modern world couldn't work without them. The only people caring about ball bearing design are technical minded people already working in the field. Same as for a thousand other fields essential to operating the modern world. Nobody has time to learn them all, so we specialize.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - sevensor 1y ago
      Even their own manufacturers don’t know what’s in a bearing assembly they manufactured ten years ago, all they can do is sell you a new one with the same spec. Rolling element bearings are specified by application; shaft diameter, load direction, and so on. Manufacturers change important things about bearings, like how many rolling elements they have, without necessarily changing the part number. It’s worse than closed: after some time has passed, nobody anywhere knows how it was made.
ChaoPrayaWave 1y ago
FOSS used to win by being able to run on anything. Now hardware chooses you. If you’re not running the sanctioned OS, even the browser might be crippled. I’m not sure if that’s progress, but it’s definitely not freedom.
karel-3d 1y ago
Prusa has already said they will start closing their devices to fight against Chinese clones.
- jezek2 1y ago
  That's unfortunate, mainly because they will find out that they can clone closed devices as well, in fact it's their default mode (not much of HW is open). They even clone stuff that you send them to manufacture but forgot to include the sources (or have them outdated) as part of providing a good service :)
eleveriven 1y ago
Soo open source "won" commercially, but Free Software hasn't won philosophically
werdl 1y ago
Free software has been killed by all the companies offering 'open source' solutions...
agoodusername63 1y ago
It sounds to me like the biggest problem are the users. There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening. I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. I don’t think anybody can at this point now that Google and Microsoft are having extremely successful trial runs with fully managed systems.
- phito 1y ago
  > I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. Better education, which is definitely not the current trend.
  - agoodusername63 1y ago
    You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink Yeah we can Properly Educate non techies all day, but when they sit down to watch Netflix and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors, I’ve yet to get a single person to care after that.
    - phito 1y ago
      > and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors They shouldn't have to if the software is properly made. I am not talking about teaching normies to install Docker apps, but teaching them why FOSS is important and the implications of using corporate-owned tools.
      - agoodusername63 1y ago
        My point is that DRM isn’t something that FOSS has any control over, and is becoming an increasingly common strategy to discourage using third party software because it forces compromises. So when the DRM doesn’t work and you get a degraded experience, pitching anybody who isn’t really interested in the ecosystem of technology is pretty much impossible. One tech stack works well, one doesn’t. That’s all one cares about
elric 1y ago
The pacemaker example is an interesting one. Medical devices are shrouded in secrecy, ostensibly for "good reasons", but in reality they're often insecure garbage. I'm not sure if an open source pacemaker would be safer than a proprietary one. It would be nice to be able to audit the source code, but I'm not sure whether contributions from random committers would have a net positive impact in this space?
kovac 1y ago
If winning means mass adoption, I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free. If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it. The de facto strategy in our era for commercializing any tech is surveilling its users. If a technology can't be harnessed, corporations will contain if not outright kill it. We've seen this time and time again. So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Remain in the hands of individuals who care and build it for themselves. In that sense, there are many free software that have already won. My question is, why on earth are people obsessed with things like the year of the Linux desktop, and more people adopting their software. Fragmentation is probably the only way free software will remain free.
- einpoklum 1y ago
  > I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free. The Linux kernel is widely adopted and remains kind-of-free. LibreOffice is widely adopted and remains quite free. > If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it Not necessarily. That is, they may engage in commercial activity surrounding it, but that's not the same thing. > So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Your "winning" requires not-winning, i.e. most people not using the relevant software.
puterbonga 1y ago
The title undersells it, it retreated. We open sourced the visible parts and then built a surveillance and firmware monoculture underneath. Every “smart” thing is a dumb terminal for code we can’t audit. The GPL didn’t fail, we just stopped applying it where it mattered most.
Paianni 1y ago
The reality is that since the invention of ICs, electronic devices have become 'black-boxes' that the vast majority of people can't hope to understand the entire workings of. Free software licenses were never going to change that.
aeon_ai 1y ago
I think we vastly underestimate the impact that AI will have on open-source capabilities and technology.
tsoukase 1y ago
I have no problem with closed source firmware as long as I can install Linux, with proprietary junk apps as long as I can side load open source ones, with ads as long as I have Ublock. Currently, especial Google is passing over my red lines and I am preparing for retaliation (ungoogle).
realaaa 1y ago
what are the good modern examples of true FOSS projects which are still managing to make OK money? even services like MSP are all relying on M$FT and similar vendors there are some attempts at building open-source stack, but that ends up not viable in the end :(

384 points by LorenDB 1y ago

I read through half the article, and I don't understand what it's trying to say. Has free software won? Or not? And what does it mean? No clue.

__del__ 1y ago
they're suggesting that "open source" has won (attention, mind share, funding, whatever) while "free software" as defined by richard stallman has not
- schoen 1y ago
  I may have glossed over this detail, but I didn't think the article was saying that "open source" had actually won either (perhaps that people who preferred the term "open source" have tended to accept much narrower wins as "victory" in practice?).
  - protocolture 1y ago
    My takeaway was that the article was looking at common Open Source claims, and then locating the only " 100% true" example of that. Like you cant make a 100% open hardware mobile phone. Theres lots of near enough cases. But that Qualcomm chip is proprietary for the phone bit. So they exaggerate by going back to an old, open source rotary phone.
- billy99k 1y ago
  It didn't succeed because he was always against making money from software. He also has pushed for governments to be forced to use FOSS. I remember him doing some interviews in the 90s, and he would put his coat over the camera, if it wasn't using FOSS. This sort of zealot mindset will always be on the fringes of society and eventually abandoned for something more liberal (which is what we've seen in the last decade or so).
schoen 1y ago
It's quoting people who say that it has won because of extensive adoption. However, that adoption doesn't mean that most people are allowed even in principle to change most of the software in embedded devices they own, or even on most of the computing devices they own. I've also found this really weird. Like, we have Linux kernels on most cloud instances, and most data center servers, and most academic and research computing systems, and probably lately on most embedded microprocessors that are big enough to run it. (And various ecosystems for computing infrastructure and software development are mainly using free software userspace and tools.) Meanwhile, almost all user-facing software that almost all people interact with almost all of the time is proprietary. Why would someone say it's "won"? Thinking really small?
- okanat 1y ago
  Even Linux hasn't "won" in those areas. It has just replaced what we would call a common API layer or a communication standard. The virtualization products are still proprietary. Servers and their firmware are too. People needed a Unix-like OS that hasn't been riddled with patent issues and wasn't outrageously expensive. They needed it because they were also price-sensitive or outright cheap. They didn't want to change APIs or modularize their software. Linux was there. Startup culture happened which demanded cutting all the costs you can. Linux was free of charge. Linux wasn't the best OS for the job sometimes. But it was there and it was gratis. So it became the middleware for Unix-compatible software. We have open standards and even open/free software for anything that companies aren't making money out of. FOSS by itself cannot make money. In places where software matters the most or, if the software hides the trade secrets the most or, if it is the main money maker, creating FOSS is economically infeasible. For FOSS to win, we need to change the economic and legal system. Current capitalist system in many West-aligned countries is actively hostile against sharing in any kind, except the ones that profit the biggest players in their non-critical areas. In a market where the first one to market gets to buy all competitors, in a market the one that has the biggest secrecy wins and gets all the money from investors like Y-Combinator, there cannot be any truly FOSS software-only products. They need to do rug pulls to support the exponential growth. Startup culture is fundamentally anti-FOSS. It is pro-FOSS in only consuming. Even a startup releasing some middleware can be interpreted as mishandling investment. We need to make sure our governments support FOSS infrastructure and FOSS user-facing software. They need to be equal employers and competitors to Big Tech or they need to directly support smaller competitors for decades. Otherwise, I am afraid, FOSS cannot win.

xwowsersx 1y ago

I think this post overstates the "loss" of free software. Yes, closed firmware and locked hardware are real gaps...but that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack. From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built. I tend to see this kind of absolutist, binary tone a lot from people deeply involved in FOSS... and sometimes I think maybe that mindset is necessary to push the movement forward, but it also feels detached from how much open software has already changed reality.

api 1y ago
The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data. Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros. I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
- xwowsersx 1y ago
  > The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data. That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open. You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.
  - 1y ago

stingraycharles 1y ago

> What picture does this paint? Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version. I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc). When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.

Sytten 1y ago

Complex puzzle, I feel a key part is that the financing / financial sustainability of free software has not been solved. The author touches on it a bit by saying "when you sell hardware..." which kinda means no hardware == no revenue since you can't sell the software. I don't discount that Redhat is a thing, but it is the exception not the norm.

Geof25 1y ago
I do see it on exactly same way. A lot of people are conflating opensource with free. That model is not really sustainable if you want to do it for living.
epolanski 1y ago
Free Software doesn't imply someone has to write what I need for me for free. It means that if the end user wants to control his devices he/she should be able to.

guyzero 1y ago

Sybase and Ingres disagree.

pooyan2 1y ago

I hate to complain about styling, but when I can’t read it, I have to say something about it. This has a strange CSS styling problem on my phone. There’s no left margin in portrait, so it’s basically unreadable, but if I go landscape it’s fine.

abdullahkhalids 1y ago
Use firefox. Click "reader view" on any page and read it according to your own theme. Maybe help free software win.
- hnthrowaway738 1y ago
  Flipping into reader mode constantly is clunky and jarring. People shouldn’t use that as an excuse for poor styling.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

sdotdev 1y ago

Blog styling is a bit weird and for the actual copy I kind of don't get its direction

deleted 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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piersolenski 1y ago

Yet ;-)

Animats 1y ago

It's about to get much worse. You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules. If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.

toast0 1y ago
> If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over. Why wouldn't you just get another account?
- themacguffinman 1y ago
  All major platforms have mechanisms to identify ban evasion. It's not so easy to create another account when, for example, they ask for a phone number.
  - TuxSH 1y ago
    Slightly unrelated but GH's ToS clearly only permit one free account per person and I've heard they sometimes enforce this
  - drnick1 1y ago
    In the U.S. at least, it is trivial to buy a new SIM anonymously. But really, you should refuse to use any platform that requires a phone number in the first place. These companies make it implicitly very clear that they want to control you and extract every bit of information that they can from you.
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  Age verification laws in the US are chipping away at Internet anonymity. You might not be able to get another account because your legal identity might be required (and can be banned).
  - kube-system 1y ago
    This isn’t just a US thing. Many countries require KYC for a lot of online accounts

ofalkaed 1y ago

Haiku will win in the end, at least win what many in the free software world are trying to win. Or at least what I think this blog is trying to get at, but it is a weird post I am not completely sure what it is trying to get at. But I do appreciate its methods even if I am somewhat confused by them. The year of the linux desktop is not going to happen, far too much baggage. The year of the Haiku deaktop will happen; they are doing everything right and staying under the radar until they are ready.

christophilus 1y ago
That is a hot take. I’d take the other side of that bet.
- ofalkaed 1y ago
  What do you want to bet and which assertion are we betting on? Haiku has stayed out of the open source drama and focused on its goals; slowly and steadily working towards them even when the goalposts move. The big thing is their determination and staying focused on the user experience in a way Linux has not and can not without a single distro wining which is not going to happen. When it comes to the desktop, Haiku is offering everything Linux doesn't.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Huh? I like haiku and all but have never seen it running anywhere. At least Linux has a few percent market share. While not huge it is in the millions of folks successfully using it across the world every day.
nathan_compton 1y ago
I've been using desktop linux for 15 years, at least. I play Steam Games on my Linux Desktop. I work on one. It's not prefect, but neither are the other OSes.
- ofalkaed 1y ago

zzo38computer 1y ago

In many cases you shouldn't need a computer, and for many where a computer is helpful, a very simple one should be possible which can use less power and with small enough ROM and RAM, and not needing any Wi-Fi and stuff like that. You also should not rely on computers too much even in the circumstances where they are helpful. I do think that different computers (and other stuff) can be made which do not use proprietary software (and which do not use excessive software; I think it is also important, for a different reason). Free open specifications can also be made, too. Many people don't, but it can be done (although in some cases it is difficult, for various reasons).

movedx 1y ago
Well said. “When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.” — Star Trek: Insurrection. A month ago I watched animatronic dogs herd sheep around a paddock just minutes after some Border Collie did the same thing. What came to mind straight away was: that’s not a problem that needs solving. Yet here we are, injecting technology into every nook and cranny we can and ultimately all it’ll do is free us from our own freedom as people and enslave us to the rich, who will own all the tech and knowledge to support those animatronic dogs.

tolerance 1y ago

As a quasi-tech person I can’t imagine what more can be (or what isn’t being) achieved within reason by FOSS. And when it comes to Life’s Big Problems™ showing me someone playing Snake on an ULTRAK 435 Digital Pitch Counter doesn’t instill me with confidence that free software is as big a solution as its proponents would like to think.

squigz 1y ago
"Within reason" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence, isn't it? What I define as reasonable FOSS solutions, many executives would not agree with, but that doesn't mean they're not practical or acheivable. Your Snake example also doesn't seem very fair - there are many large, concentrated FOSS movements and organizations that are doing good. More and more - albeit very slowly and sporadically - there are governments and organizations choosing to invest in self-hosted FOSS solutions. And you focus on hackers expressing curiosity doing silly but interesting things on various types of systems. Come on.
- tolerance 1y ago
  Well, you seem capable enough at shouldering the load that the phrase imposed.
daemin 1y ago
The main benefit that I see it of having the source code to the software running on the devices you own is that you can always fix or modify it if and when you want to. Lots of things can happen such as the law changing, the company going out of business, the company stopping support for your device, or you just wanting to make some changes to how it works to better suit your lifestyle. This doesn't mean that everyone will dive right in and make the code changes by themselves, but it does allow for paying someone knowledgeable to come in and make the changes for you. The same kind of way that you can (or used to be able to) get someone knowledgeable in cars to come in to fix or change things for you. Think of it as having access to the device's schematics so that you (or someone knowledgable) can make repairs to the device when you need to. This brings me to another point, that in addition to having the source code for the device available, there way to build and deploy the code to the device also has to be made available, otherwise it's only a shadow of a solution.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

If AI is actually a software revolution, OS/Freeware will close the gap with non-gaming proprietary software.

pheggs 1y ago

I am quite convinced a lot of open source is not open for ideology reasons but rather are a result of competition and the market itself. When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads. Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this. Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.

ezoe 1y ago
I don't think things can be explained by competition alone. People don't use free software Compiler and Web browser and OS just because it's free software, but there is no better alternative.

codedokode 1y ago

Note that non-free firmware in a network card, for example, doesn't affect anything, if the traffic is encrypted (and ideally routed through VPN so that the card has no direct Internet connection). So in some cases we can isolate non-free components so that they cannot do any harm. Modem in a phone, probably can be isolated also.

fsflover 1y ago
A non-free firmware in a network card can 1) deny you service at the will of its true owner, 2) stop receiving updates rendering this piece of hardware dangerous to use with no recourse.
- codedokode 1y ago
  It cannot deny you service if it is routed through a router that allows only communication with a VPN server, for which the malicious firmware has no access credentials.

neilv 1y ago

With branding like "free software", it could have have lost the battle for hearts and minds for that reason alone, if not for all the other reasons. Of course the public thinks "free software" is software for which you do not pay money. And everyone immediately goes on their way with their downloads, without you getting the chance to give your hour-long spiel on "I'm glad you asked what I mean by 'free software'." Because no one would ever ask what "free software" means, because they already know what it means. It is the advocates who are terrible at advocacy who keep trying to give a term new meaning, and failing for a few decades to get the public to understand or pay attention. You could even say that's the philosophical/awareness barrier, right there: people thinking in terms of free software, rather than in terms of Free Software(tm)(R). (If you liked this comment, please subscribe to my newsletter about renewable clean energy, called Burn Fossil Fuels. My team has been working to get the message out, with a clever bit of wordplay there, in which we actually mean more the opposite of what we're saying. This is all explained in our hundred-page manifesto whitepaper, and we are also available for speaking engagements, at select events where we can preach to the choir.)

squigz 1y ago
This touches on something I've noticed the past few years - it seems to me many advocates of most topics often do more harm than good for their cause - taking hardline positions normal people simply can't relate to, even if they do agree in theory. Anyway, on the topic of "free" software - how might you recommend we try to frame this to be more clear to the public? I think people tried to make "libre software" a thing, but doesn't that have the exact same issue - that is, that people will misunderstand what it is?
- luxpir 1y ago
  Freedom Software? Beats Open Software because open is still ambiguous to non-technical people. "Freedom Apps" if you truly want to talk to the masses.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Libre software (as in Liberty).

billy99k 1y ago

What's not mentioned here is that every single successful OSS project is funded by multi-million dollar corporations and the reason it's so prevalent today. The rest usually become abandonware because maintainers don't have the time or energy to continue with it for years at a time, especially if they can't make money from it.

glitchc 1y ago

Isn't the author confusing closed platforms for closed software? There are open platforms out there (Mastodon, Bluesky), but they lack traction. For any closed platform, the owner of the platform gets to decide what the stack looks like.

AfterHIA 1y ago

[flagged]

GMoromisato 1y ago

The fundamental conflict here is that software developers want/need to get paid. We have mortgages/rent/medical bills/groceries and none of those are free. The root problem, in my opinion, is combining "free as in beer" with "free as in speech". The latter cannot be achieved if you insist on the former. I.e., if your solution to privacy is only use free-as-in-beer software then you will fail because developers want/need to get paid. What we need is a business model in which people are willing to pay for privacy-respecting software. That's the only sustainable path. And it's frustrating to me that the people who are most vocal about software freedom are actively working against that with this kind of article. [p.s.: I realize I'm ranting and not offering enough detail to change minds, much less offer a solution. Sorry about that.]

squigz 1y ago
Blender seems like a good example of how this can actually happen.
- GMoromisato 1y ago
  Sure--but the article is saying that there are many cases where it doesn't work--where no good free software exists. Could the Blender model replace YouTube, for example? I don't think it can, until hosting costs drop significantly. Maybe that's part of the answer.
  - hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    What replaces YouTube is a symmetrical internet where people can upload lots, and probably something like popcorn time. Then some discoverability. The only issue is lack of moderation because of "bad videos". Can't have nice things :(
porcoda 1y ago
I think people are willing to pay for privacy protecting software. The problem is I don’t think people trust companies who claim that because there are too many instances of that “privacy” coming with a subtle asterisk. Businesses can’t seem to resist eroding trust in the interest of $ (growth! Shareholder value!) or caving to authorities. Plus, it’s rare that companies are transparent enough to earn the trust they claim we should give them. I do agree with the sentiment: people need to get paid to write software, and people want freedoms to be respected by that software. It seems to be challenging to rectify the two in most cases (yes, there are cases where it works - those are the exception not the norm).

redwood 1y ago

Microsoft, Google, Amazon. They will all open source wash themselves and have a cadre of former red hat and other equivalent employees speaking about how they are the center of open source. Meanwhile there's an entire parallel universe where people view things using different terms than these tired 1990s battles. The next generation of software cannot be controlled by a small number of hyperscalers.. that is the new center of freedom focus. Times change

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Nothing is truly free. All developer time is bought and paid for. Even leisure time. What pays for the software developer to be able to not starve and be able to spend leisure time on free software? Paid software. Obviously. Somewhere in the equation someone needs to be paid. Usually if software is open source, it won't be paid for. So whatever is funding it... well if it's a software company funding open source software where does the money come from? Obviously paid software. And people won't pay for open source software because it's basically free. Follow the money trail it ends at roughly three places: 1. donations, 2. tech support 3. ads 4. closed source software. 1 and 2 are too miniscule to be effective.

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
And 3 is worse than 4.
28304283409234 1y ago
All this time and people still do not understand the difference between Freedom and Gratis.

jrapdx3 1y ago

This topic provokes a question, what exactly is "winning" anyway? As others point out, how could there be absolute winning, or complete dominance of the whole gamut of software used for every purpose. Of course, no one ever proposed such a definition of open-source success. Since the 1990s I've been thoroughly committed to using and developing open-source programs. I strongly prefer using open-source products even when they've been less robust than proprietary options. In recent years, that's changed in favor of open-source, a number of open-source programs have become best-in-class. To name a few Blender, postgresql, Firefox, most developer tools. Still, proprietary products dominate areas like OSs, enterprise programs, etc., and will probably continue to do so. But even if not as widely used, the fact that quality alternatives exist to a significant share of proprietary offerings speaks to open-source success. It's noteworthy that giants like Microsoft have open-sourced some of their products, a practice unheard of a couple of decades ago that shows influence of the open-source movement. A winner-take-all philosophy is bound to be as deleterious to open-source advocacy as in any other endeavor. Realistically, producing excellent, bug-free, well-documented open-source software is what it takes to find an appreciative user-base. Perhaps not the majority of users of that category of software, but is that necessary to call a project successful? To say it is seems a prelude to enduring a constant sense of failure and missing out on authentic victories.

bjourne 1y ago
The goal of the Free Software movement is to build a usable computing environment for which all software (i.e., "code") is free. If you include things like cell phones, tablets, web services, firmware, or basically anything other than core os components in the computing environment, that goal is very far off.
- jrapdx3 1y ago
  Sure, the FSF is as idealistic as it has been influential. Can't fault FSF for unrelenting commitment to stated purposes. While the totally free OS was a goal that never quite materialized, a large proportion of modern open-source systems is composed of free (in the FSF sense) software. What FSF advocates has indeed mattered. I think the question is this: is having totally free cell phones, etc., the essential criterion of success? Or is something less than embodying FSF-style ideology acceptable? To be sure, there's no definitive answer to such a question. But ideological purity is a luxury in the real world that even FSF acknowledges, compromises sometimes have to be made, pragmatic considerations have to be taken into account. Nothing wrong with keeping lofty goals, but as practical necessity frequently dictates, graciously accepting less than total victory more often than not best serves our interests. (Edited re: grammar.)

signa11 1y ago

how does Linux's world domination feel ?

bad_haircut72 1y ago

People seem to think Free Software ought to have won purely as being free, as if that was somehow going to overcome the heinous acts f profit motivated groups to try and take away your end user freedom for their own gain. Its an idealogical battle not an economic one, though sadly we havent won its true

deleted 1y ago

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sarchertech 1y ago

So much software is “open source”, but it’s either de jure or de facto controlled by a single company. Sure you could fork it, but for complex projects you’re not gonna. 99.99% of users of open source software will never meaningfully contribute. So the only option most people have is to hope someone else forks the project if something goes wrong, and for complex projects maintaining a fork requires serious resources. We really need to distinguish between generic “open source” and actual community built and controlled projects. The term open source itself was popularized by the open source initiative. A group funded by Tim O’Reilly and big tech to co-opt the free software movement and make it more business friendly. They’ve spent so much time and money promoting the term, that there’s an enormous amount of good will around it. To the point that any project that doesn’t use an OSI approved license is widely considered dirty. You could have a project controlled by the community with a nearly completely free license with the caveat that companies making more than $100 million in annual revenue can’t resell it, and the majority of devs would trust it less than an “open source” project completely controlled by a trillion dollar company.

sexyman48 1y ago

It's 2025. Code is worthless and becoming more so. The distinction of free versus open-source is moot.

zoobab 1y ago
"The distinction of free versus open-source is moot." Access to source code and subsequent modifications are still a concern by end users. Sorry to say the experience of 'open source' was not very successful in that regard, because it was designed to not force vendors to publish their changes.

zelcon 1y ago

Why would anyone want free software to win? Dont most of us here draw an income from software that’s explicitly not free?

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
Yeah I'm not exactly sure what the appeal is of a world in which none of us are rewarded for our time and labor...
phito 1y ago
Free as in Freedom not as in free beer.
tmtvl 1y ago
To me, having different ideals, that sounds as strange as saying 'why would anyone help an old lady cross the street without getting paid for it?'. Sometimes one may want to do something without needing to get money for it.

wilg 1y ago

Fundamentally, the issue is that only a small number of people know what free/"libre" software is, and only a small subset of those people think it is a good tradeoff. For that reason alone, there's just not going to be a lot of people working on building something the vast majority of people very clearly do not want.

vednig 1y ago

I think being a programmer we must understand that there's never a one size fits all needs. Each project has different needs having an option never hurts, as long as there is competition, there will exist a chance of open sourcing the source. Because, closed source softwares die faster in their lifetimes, while open source remain remembered even after being unmaintained. Had it not been for GitHub(a closed source software) we'd had never reached this stage of open source expansion and understanding, because hosting a git to open source a project was and still isn't cost effective solution. Meanwhile torrents are mildly successful with this, yet faced by the lawful resistance in many regions. Basic goals, should be to always have a choice, if there isn't much then create one if you can. Rest is just fog in hindsight, I'd say.

vednig 1y ago
Gaming is one such usecase that requires and works well, currently, with proprietary software. As such, gaming is a sport and as long as a game is competitive, there's always a chance to bypass a n obstacle with a hack, just as there was misconceptions with OSes. But unlike OSes, games don't have a commercial application yet, we still have a long time before the realisation of freeware gaming.

akst 1y ago

I think the free software model underestimates how much people dislike being compelled to operate on other peoples terms when it comes to exercising discrete with their intellectual property. Even if they get "free" software. The suggestion free software is free is intellectually dishonest, I don't think free software is really free, the nature of it is very controlling towards those who decide to depend it. I publish most of the code I do for small side projects publicly, but I would never use free software if I arbitrary forgo to my ability to make the decision for myself. It deprives contributions of dignity, any suggestion a contribution comes from a willingness to share is undermined by the fact they are compelled to do so. There's a reason why their interpretation of free is prefaced by a bunch of precondition, because it's a force framing that is odds with what people actually understand to be free.

thedevilslawyer 1y ago
It's free as in freedom/libre - liberty. Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be. Same is true in software.
- akst 1y ago
  But it literally isn't that, as an author in depending on it you reduce your liberty. The software is free, those dependent on are not free. You could argue well it's free to users, but there's a level of survivorship bias due to the fact this is confined to the software people will publish under this license. Edit: Back to "free software losing" is unsurprising given the above. All the benefit to the user are ultimately irrelevant to the growth of software when doesn't come from users, it comes from people weighing up if they want to forgo this ability to exercise control over software they made. And the portion of users who actually care are negligible to the point it has zero incentive to the software provider. The one exception I would say is, the "Free" softwares model works well for public goods like shared infrastructure like database software and such, but for end user software it is insane licensing model. > Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be Do you even hear yourself. This is the rhetoric why no one takes this seriously. Your suggesting my desire not to be deprived of my own personal liberty and act on my own terms (without causing harm to anyone else) is somehow authoritarian? It's such a narcissistic / manipulative entitled framing, to suggest this embodies anything resembling liberty.

drnick1 1y ago

Free software has won on servers. It is making inroads into desktop/gaming PCs (above 5% market share now), and the exodus from Windows 10 could well push it over 10% soon. But the computing landscape has shifted towards mobile devices and this is where our freedoms are now the most at risk. It is time that we turn our back on Apple and Google and exclusively buy devices that can run operating systems that are community-controlled such as Linux phones, and devices that can be flashed to Lineage and Graphene.

indigoabstract 1y ago

I guess there will always be people who think in black and white. I'm pretty sure that if Stallman had been born in the 19th century, he would have been the first to write "The Communist Manifesto" before the other two guys had a chance.

rahen 1y ago
I highly doubt that, considering Stallman's stance on freedom and personal sovereignty. Free software often operates like market anarchy (pure meritocracy), similar to the Internet. Coercive structures of centralized power that dictate what the 'common good' is do not align with the principles of the GPL. Also the GPL is focused on enforcing property rights ("this is yours unconditionally"), while communism emphasizes transferring property to the government ("this is ours but you might have some if you behave").

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

As someone who recently made a post on how to change it just recently and has been thinking about why[1] Here are some of my thoughts. Your article is great and that is a reality I also want to live in where everyone completely "owns" their device and lives free from proprietory stuff and you are approaching things from a hardware perspective because you maybe more familiar with that and I am more familiar with software (as compared to hardware) but here's the shocking part that I want to share People don't even use open source software. Something which just works as compared to hardware. There are sooo many low hanging fruits for privacy in this world that we haven't picked. Even if I have a completely open source laptop, if the only way to message my school's teacher some message that he will look or send me is whatsapp, all of that falls apart. We need to advocate on both sides & I 100% agree that we should want the same thing for hardware as well (proprietory blobs Intel ME are scary with proprietory blobs) but we need to definitely prioritize in the process as well. What are some low hanging fruits of privacy/open source we can share that people aren't using because they are unaware. Also, as someone deeply interested in advocating for open source and to those comments on that ask HN I made, I am deeply saddened to see the state. Since I feel from those comments on my post that there is no hope. Everyone expects a better UI/UX but nobody said anything about donating to the contributors. We expect so much from open source and we give so little back as a society. And its just funny that on my post which is about how to give back to open source contributors so that they might work full time on it so that they can make a better UI/UX, people expect the better UI/UX first. I can understand them but... It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Open source is itself a chicken and egg problem. Why do we want unpaid labour abused by big tech which is then used for surveillance/ad-tech and then if we can't create a better UI/UX then stop trying to expect any payment. Why do we want perfection before giving open source guys some donations. They are competing with a company which might have full time guys working on a project funded by a VC fund only to enshitten stuff later. Please, I genuinely want to change it. Give me any ideas on how we, the people interested in open source, can change/fix this chicken and egg problem. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that) (also I should've probably changed it to say how can we change that but the HN limits the text of a title and I had to modify some of it, and now after writing it, I am genuinely not sure if we even a "how can we change" or if my title was correct and its now "can we even change")

wiz21c 1y ago

Free software will win in the long run. But it depends on what you call "win". For me it means that, provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others. They will write free software and each year, that free software, although years behind commercial offerings, will be better than the software of ten years ago. With the GPL, that software will stick and won't be appropriated. So in the long run, free software will produce value. See KiCad, Inkscape, emacs, etc. Are those better than commercial offering ? Sure not. But compare that with 10 years ago: it's much better. And in the long run (say, 50-100 years), it will come out positively. Just keep the spirit alive.

hobofan 1y ago
> Just keep the spirit alive. And to do that, blog posts like this one are necessary. > provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others They don't spawn in a vacuum and rarely arrive at a significant formed idea of Free Software from first principles, so providing education and awareness into that direction is important. In the last decade free software discourse (at least in my perception) has significantly quieted down, to a point where I'm not sure that newcomers to the topic satisfy a replacement rate. If one wants to keep the spirit alive, now would definitely be a time to push!

pabs3 1y ago

We need a right to repair for software, perhaps embedded in copyright law. No right to repair software by replacing it, no copyright.

andersmurphy 1y ago

I mean the reactions to posts on HN when a developer dares to make their OSS/MIT project sustainable by adding paid extensions is part of the problem. Almost to the point where I believe most developers are acting in the interest of the large corperations by bullying OSS developers into keeping their work free as in gratis. The same people lose their minds if a project is GPL or copyleft.

donatj 1y ago

I would kill for decent NURBS oriented 3D CAD software. I feel like the 3D printing community would absolutely thrive if they stopped dealing with polygons for things meant to exist in the real world. Rhino is really the only fully featured tool in town, at least available to the general public at a somewhat "affordable" price (~$700 from the right reseller). I end up paying to upgrade every few years when compatibility with my existing OS finally breaks. Apple announced the removal of Rosetta in 2027 (dear god why?! I use so many apps that'll likely never be made native) so I'm gonna have to pay again then. At least, so far, it's software I'm allowed to *own* rather than rent. I can run my old versions in perpetuity, particularly on an emulator. As someone who has 3D models going back to around the year 2000 in his collection, the idea of using any of these hosted solutions just sends absolute shivers down my spine. OpenSCAD is really the best we have in open source non-polygonal modeling tools, and it honestly wouldn't be too bad if someone could slap a decent WYSIWYG GUI on it.

IshKebab 1y ago
FreeCAD is actually pretty good since the 1.0 release. Far better than OpenSCAD for anything but highly regular and parametric objects (basically fasteners and art).
- exasperaited 1y ago
  And better still in the upcoming 1.1 release. Lots of improvements.
starky 1y ago
This and a good RAW image processor are the two reasons I ever boot up the Windows VM these days. None of the options available on Linux come close to the software I use on Windows for those tasks. You can get Fusion360 to work on Linux through some scripts someone created, but I don't like how Fusion works at all after using SolidWorks (and Pro/E) professionally.
- zipy124 1y ago
  Are raw therapee or dark table not enough?

not--felix 1y ago

But I would say Free software also has not lost. It also has the advantage that it will get better with time and a lot of commercial software gets worse throug enshittification. We also saw this with blender, I think free software will win eventually

sbuk 1y ago
Blender is an interesting case. It's seeing wider adoption in studios generally - an Oscar win has helped and the recent Blender Conference had talks from Framestores vizdev[1] and Paramounts in-house teams[2]. Blender 5.0 is around the corner, which is adding more and more industry standard features[3][4], though recently there was a discussion about pulling away from the VFX Reference Platform[5][6], which they have walked back from[7]. It's not there yet, but it's gaining mindshare rapidly. Enshittification in DCCs is interesting. Arguably the two dominant companies, Autodesk (Maya, 3ds Max) and Maxon (Cinema 4D) are on that path, whereas SideFX (Houdini) is kicking ass! [1] https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk [2] https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o [3] https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc [4] https://landscape.aswf.io https://landscape.aswf.io [5] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-platform-feedback/37123 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-plat... [6] https://vfxplatform.com https://vfxplatform.com [7] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-statement/37863 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-stateme...

wolvesechoes 1y ago

I am baffled that people in this thread write something along "well, depends what you call win" - the goal of Free Software is quite clear. The goal is freedom, computing freedom, freedom of the software user. It is very easy to notice that in 2025 users have less freedom even if they run some Libre Linux distro on their Thinkpads than they had running Win98, because of everything that happens OUTSIDE PC software ecosystem (phones, SaaS etc), and even inside PC world things sometimes are not obvious. Free Software is losing, simple as that. Even with Kubernetes, as the goal was never to provide free labor and free software infra to companies.

thefz 1y ago
The vast majority of software now runs on personal devices and the average user has no knowledge nor interest in it, as long as they press the button and the action is done. The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
- WJW 1y ago
  This is not unique to software. There's no "free&open ball bearing" design out there, let alone for a machine capable of making them, even though the modern world couldn't work without them. The only people caring about ball bearing design are technical minded people already working in the field. Same as for a thousand other fields essential to operating the modern world. Nobody has time to learn them all, so we specialize.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - sevensor 1y ago
    Even their own manufacturers don’t know what’s in a bearing assembly they manufactured ten years ago, all they can do is sell you a new one with the same spec. Rolling element bearings are specified by application; shaft diameter, load direction, and so on. Manufacturers change important things about bearings, like how many rolling elements they have, without necessarily changing the part number. It’s worse than closed: after some time has passed, nobody anywhere knows how it was made.

ChaoPrayaWave 1y ago

FOSS used to win by being able to run on anything. Now hardware chooses you. If you’re not running the sanctioned OS, even the browser might be crippled. I’m not sure if that’s progress, but it’s definitely not freedom.

karel-3d 1y ago

Prusa has already said they will start closing their devices to fight against Chinese clones.

jezek2 1y ago
That's unfortunate, mainly because they will find out that they can clone closed devices as well, in fact it's their default mode (not much of HW is open). They even clone stuff that you send them to manufacture but forgot to include the sources (or have them outdated) as part of providing a good service :)

eleveriven 1y ago

Soo open source "won" commercially, but Free Software hasn't won philosophically

werdl 1y ago

Free software has been killed by all the companies offering 'open source' solutions...

agoodusername63 1y ago

It sounds to me like the biggest problem are the users. There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening. I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. I don’t think anybody can at this point now that Google and Microsoft are having extremely successful trial runs with fully managed systems.

phito 1y ago
> I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. Better education, which is definitely not the current trend.
- agoodusername63 1y ago
  You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink Yeah we can Properly Educate non techies all day, but when they sit down to watch Netflix and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors, I’ve yet to get a single person to care after that.
  - phito 1y ago
    > and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors They shouldn't have to if the software is properly made. I am not talking about teaching normies to install Docker apps, but teaching them why FOSS is important and the implications of using corporate-owned tools.
    - agoodusername63 1y ago
      My point is that DRM isn’t something that FOSS has any control over, and is becoming an increasingly common strategy to discourage using third party software because it forces compromises. So when the DRM doesn’t work and you get a degraded experience, pitching anybody who isn’t really interested in the ecosystem of technology is pretty much impossible. One tech stack works well, one doesn’t. That’s all one cares about

elric 1y ago

The pacemaker example is an interesting one. Medical devices are shrouded in secrecy, ostensibly for "good reasons", but in reality they're often insecure garbage. I'm not sure if an open source pacemaker would be safer than a proprietary one. It would be nice to be able to audit the source code, but I'm not sure whether contributions from random committers would have a net positive impact in this space?

kovac 1y ago

If winning means mass adoption, I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free. If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it. The de facto strategy in our era for commercializing any tech is surveilling its users. If a technology can't be harnessed, corporations will contain if not outright kill it. We've seen this time and time again. So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Remain in the hands of individuals who care and build it for themselves. In that sense, there are many free software that have already won. My question is, why on earth are people obsessed with things like the year of the Linux desktop, and more people adopting their software. Fragmentation is probably the only way free software will remain free.

einpoklum 1y ago
> I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free. The Linux kernel is widely adopted and remains kind-of-free. LibreOffice is widely adopted and remains quite free. > If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it Not necessarily. That is, they may engage in commercial activity surrounding it, but that's not the same thing. > So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Your "winning" requires not-winning, i.e. most people not using the relevant software.

puterbonga 1y ago

The title undersells it, it retreated. We open sourced the visible parts and then built a surveillance and firmware monoculture underneath. Every “smart” thing is a dumb terminal for code we can’t audit. The GPL didn’t fail, we just stopped applying it where it mattered most.

Paianni 1y ago

The reality is that since the invention of ICs, electronic devices have become 'black-boxes' that the vast majority of people can't hope to understand the entire workings of. Free software licenses were never going to change that.

aeon_ai 1y ago

I think we vastly underestimate the impact that AI will have on open-source capabilities and technology.

tsoukase 1y ago

I have no problem with closed source firmware as long as I can install Linux, with proprietary junk apps as long as I can side load open source ones, with ads as long as I have Ublock. Currently, especial Google is passing over my red lines and I am preparing for retaliation (ungoogle).

realaaa 1y ago

what are the good modern examples of true FOSS projects which are still managing to make OK money? even services like MSP are all relying on M$FT and similar vendors there are some attempts at building open-source stack, but that ends up not viable in the end :(