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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 sof

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.
  - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
    "FOSS won so decisively on the supply side" because it's basically giving away something that would ordinarily cost money. Anyone can "win" by giving away something of value away for free; it's not a victory that's worth anything. What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.
  - api 1y ago
    You are so close. Or maybe you’re there and I misread that. FOSS killed the profit margin in just making software. That shifted profits to hosting it, and in so doing shifted the industry to a more closed model than it had before. In other words the net effect over time on the system from FOSS was to close things more. It had the opposite of the intended effect. We incentivized closed. The result had been horribly dystopian. Before we had PCs that ran closed source but still local software and had our own data. Now we have cloud they runs opaque software we can’t even run ourselves and our data is not ours and is subject to mass surveillance. (By “our” I mean most people. Tech savvy people can opt out with some effort.) This is super common. It’s hard to predict the actual incentive structure that something will create, and it is incentives not intentions that determine outcomes. Large scale socioeconomic systems are mindless gradient descent machines that chase profits of various kinds the way a plant grows toward sunlight.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  >he infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to. >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. I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.
- skissane 1y ago
  > 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. The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release. It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers. It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)
  - mustache_kimono 1y ago
    > it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release. Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.
    - skissane 1y ago
      I think there can be a difference between the literal and official meaning of a term, and what it most commonly means in practice - and that’s a descriptive claim about how words get used, not a prescriptive claim that anyone has some moral or legal obligation to do anything in particular
getpokedagain 1y ago
As someone not deeply involved in FOSS I am starting to get the absolutist mindset. I run graphene on my phone and this new restricted security patch limit by google is nothing short of a shit show.
- abnercoimbre 1y ago
  Can you shed light on this new patch? Does it hinder your freedoms as a user of graphene OS? I wonder if switching to a Jolla C2 [0] is a reasonable alternative. [0] https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    Google recently changed their security policy regarding Android, where there's now a 3-4 month delay between when OEMs get access to security patches and when they're posted to AOSP (it was previously 1 month). The patches are broadly distributed to OEMs, so there's no significant barrier to attackers and companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite obtaining them. GrapheneOS has access to the patches, but the embargoed nature means they're not able to publish the patch source code or any details about what vulnerabilities are being patched. This means that GrapheneOS users are forced to choose whether to opt into the closed source patches and get recent vulnerabilities patched, but lose out on having an open OS.
    - reedciccio 1y ago
      That means that Graphene OS is "eventually open source", which is a practice as old as open source (call it free software, if you prefer) itself. More on https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication
      - getpokedagain 1y ago
        sure but for an end user of GrapheneOS there's more and more code i cannot see but I must trust. The closed driver modules are bad enough.
makeitdouble 1y ago
I think the article properly addresses that: > Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version What devs can build without much oversight or business pressure usually works well open sourced. Almost everything else (hardware, non technical "productivity" software, services) doesn't, and that's most of our life. We live in a world that's still massively closed source. I wouldn't call someone absolutist for wanting printers, coffee machines, laptops, TVs, cars, "smart" lights to be more open than closed.
- xwowsersx 1y ago
  That's true. Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier. Of course we'd all prefer open printers and cars, but those domains aren't mainly limited by software ideology; they're limited by regulation, liability, and econ. The fact that programmers can build entire OSs, compilers, and global infra as open projects is already astonishing. So yes, the world is still full of closed systems... but that doesn't mean FOSS lost. It means it's reached the layer where the obstacles are social, legal, and physical, not technical. IMO that's a harder, slower battle, not evidence that the earlier ones were meaningless.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier. It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
    - NetMageSCW 1y ago
      That’s predicated on the assumption that FOSS is preferable to the alternative- maybe it isn’t.
  - 1y ago
the_gipsy 1y ago
I don't think the article was absolutist, binary, at all. The issue is that for a lot of things, there is exactly zero foss options. The problem is not, and the article doesn't imply, that there should be a 100% foss, so that foss finally "wins".
- squigz 1y ago
  Can you provide some examples of things for which there are zero FOSS options?
  - the_gipsy 1y ago
    Read the article, it has examples.
  - epolanski 1y ago
    Modern TVs are a simple one. You can't control any of them fully. Most you can't root.
    - drnick1 1y ago
      But there is a simple alternative here: don't connect your TV to the Internet, use it as a dumb monitor for a FOSS streaming box (Linux PC or Lineage Android TV among others).
      - makeitdouble 1y ago
        That's not an alternative: at the end you don't get a TV, you get a streaming box. Perhaps you don't care about OTA TVs in the first place, but that's a different point.
      - epolanski 1y ago
        How's that relevant to me not controlling the device?
      - kuschku 1y ago
        That doesn't necessarily work anymore, some TVs now have Amazon WhisperNet built in, and will just update ads via your neighbor's Alexa.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor It absolutely does. Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now. They discriminate against us for it. Installed your own open source software? All services denied. Can't even log into your own bank account. We're marginalized. Second class citizens. There is no choice, it's either corporate owned computers or nothing. What good is free software if we can't run it?
- almostgotcaught 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - tinfoilhatter 1y ago
    [dead]
- nebula8804 1y ago
  Its a lost battle not a lost war. You have to adapt for the circumstances of the time. Today that seems to be using a device that is closed but gapped only to get the essentials done(government services, banking etc.) For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings. In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow). I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    Multiple devices is the answer. Otherwise you end up with people having their banking hacked because they installed a game mod.
    - Zak 1y ago
      This leads to a massive transfer of power from end users to corporations and governments. User-owned computers and the open web limit the ability of such institutions to place demands on users. Is that worth a slight reduction in the rate of bank fraud?
goalieca 1y ago
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built. I remember when winning meant you can modify your computer as you please because you have all the sources. We’re locked down in a world of apps, saas, and whatnot.
belorn 1y ago
Winning does has many different outcomes, only some which is similar enough that the historical records will see it as such. A comparison I would make is the war on encryption that was won. It is no longer illegal to sell encryption. The question becomes how much of a victory that is if then government impose laws that dictate backdoor, like say chat control. What did that NSA official said. They lost the battle over control of encryption, but won the war against privacy?
epolanski 1y ago
I think you completely miss the point. You're focusing on the benefits of open source in booming the technological sector, but his emphasis is that openness ends at the developer's, not consumer's stage and this is particularly bad when more and more of your life is technology dependant and de facto you cannot control nor modify it.
Forgeties79 1y ago
Speaking as one of the less-technically inclined HN users all I know is Linux has never been easier to install for even the slightly motivated and while there are lots of gaps, you really can run a lot of key tasks on FOSS without much fuss. If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.
- devjab 1y ago
  I work in solar, so we have quite a lot of hardware which doesn't run on free software. We couldn't patch part of our inverter pipeline because the hardware was proprietary and had no open alternatives. We had to pay quite a lot of money to find one of the original engineers and have them flown in to help us unlock it, so that we could replace the firmware with some we had a security clearance holding contractor write for us. To be fair this is a story about not doing your due diligence and buying the wrong hardware, but I think it can give you some insight into what the article talks about. Because yes, you can install Linux, but can you install something on your blender when "BRAND" decides you need to pay a subscription to run the self-cleaning program?
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    Oh I definitely don’t have a choice at work unfortunately so I’m all too aware of this. I’m mostly just talking about personal computing. But point taking!
  - surajrmal 1y ago
    Do vendors give you schematics for boards they make or RTL for asics? Where do you draw the line as to what is expected? From a hardware vendors perspective, firmware they give you which is locked down is simply an extension of the hardware that enables them to more cheaply iterate on it. Not a feature for customers to use to arbitrarily modify and add complexity to the test matrix and technical support for the vendor. Vendors who give away full configurability tend to see their costs rise rather than fall.
- 1y ago
xg15 1y ago
You're not wrong, but "reshaped" can mean all kinds of things. If the goal was user freedom for the broad public, than it clearly hasn't won. Getting put to good use by your opponent isn't winning.
eduction 1y ago
> that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack What stack? You give a bunch of web stack examples, great. The vast majority of people will never run a server nor benefit from the licenses of the code running on the server. They overwhelming give their money to the companies benefiting from those licenses and get typical crummy consumer EULAs in return. Meanwhile phones tablets iot tvs appliances cars tractors pacemakers videogame consoles security cameras coffee makers printers juicers friggin Christmas lights routers, all that stuff, is overwhelmingly closed source.
JuniperMesos 1y ago
> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built. It doesn't matter if software published under free licenses sets the norms and powers most of what is built if critical transistors that are necessary to use important hardware at all are powered by unfree software. That is precisely what this article is decrying. If you don't own every transistor, whoever does own those transistors can use their control over them to prevent you from using your hardware as you wish, or attempting to get money out of you for the privilege; and preventing this state of affairs is actually more important in many ways than being able to use free software to create novel internet applications.
drnick1 1y ago
Free software may have won on the infrastructure side, but it is people's computing that deserves freedom first and foremost. The good news is that Linux is gaining ground on the desktop, and we may eventually see the "year of the Linux desktop." The issue is that most people's computing has now shifted to mobile devices, and these are quickly becoming fully locked down. Apple has been a lost cause for a long time, but Google is now aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. Projects like Lineage and Graphene are more important than ever for this reason.
- surajrmal 1y ago
  Google is not aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. It has always been 99% developed by Google and a handful of close partners like Samsung. It is simply aligning workflows to make this arrangement less costly to maintain. The fact that Graphene is hurt by the change was simply not part of the consideration. I'm sure they can alter their arrangement to get similar access to other partners and continue on as before.
pjmlp 1y ago
In most places that I have been, free software is basically the way to not pay for software, for most companies free === gratis. In the 1980's and 1990's, the same kind of places would be pirating software. In Portugal, we used to have shops with catalogs during those days, hardly anyone at goverment level cared about software sales, nowadays it is controlled by an economic agency and those kind of shops aren't as easy to find as they were up to early 2000's. Free software allows them to now be in a legal state, yet the authors get the same as before most of the time, nothing. Which is why in the end many FOSS projects end up pivoting for something commercial, preferbly in ways where even piracy isn't possible, like SaaS.
pwdisswordfishy 1y ago
> From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. I may be unable to control the software in the device I am holding in my hands right now, but the important thing is that a few corporations can externalize the costs of maintaining their infrastructure to "the open-source community". And even get free publicity from doing so!
eleveriven 1y ago
Maybe it's not "overstating the loss"... it's just focusing on a different kind of loss
tempodox 1y ago
> setting the norms But it doesn’t set the norms. Enshittification is setting the norms. The positive effects of free software being tangible for the users is very much the exception.

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.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  "FOSS won so decisively on the supply side" because it's basically giving away something that would ordinarily cost money. Anyone can "win" by giving away something of value away for free; it's not a victory that's worth anything. What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.
- api 1y ago
  You are so close. Or maybe you’re there and I misread that. FOSS killed the profit margin in just making software. That shifted profits to hosting it, and in so doing shifted the industry to a more closed model than it had before. In other words the net effect over time on the system from FOSS was to close things more. It had the opposite of the intended effect. We incentivized closed. The result had been horribly dystopian. Before we had PCs that ran closed source but still local software and had our own data. Now we have cloud they runs opaque software we can’t even run ourselves and our data is not ours and is subject to mass surveillance. (By “our” I mean most people. Tech savvy people can opt out with some effort.) This is super common. It’s hard to predict the actual incentive structure that something will create, and it is incentives not intentions that determine outcomes. Large scale socioeconomic systems are mindless gradient descent machines that chase profits of various kinds the way a plant grows toward sunlight.
fluoridation 1y ago
>he infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to. >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. I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.
skissane 1y ago
> 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. The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release. It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers. It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)
- mustache_kimono 1y ago
  > it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release. Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.
  - skissane 1y ago
    I think there can be a difference between the literal and official meaning of a term, and what it most commonly means in practice - and that’s a descriptive claim about how words get used, not a prescriptive claim that anyone has some moral or legal obligation to do anything in particular

getpokedagain 1y ago

As someone not deeply involved in FOSS I am starting to get the absolutist mindset. I run graphene on my phone and this new restricted security patch limit by google is nothing short of a shit show.

abnercoimbre 1y ago
Can you shed light on this new patch? Does it hinder your freedoms as a user of graphene OS? I wonder if switching to a Jolla C2 [0] is a reasonable alternative. [0] https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone
- ndiddy 1y ago
  Google recently changed their security policy regarding Android, where there's now a 3-4 month delay between when OEMs get access to security patches and when they're posted to AOSP (it was previously 1 month). The patches are broadly distributed to OEMs, so there's no significant barrier to attackers and companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite obtaining them. GrapheneOS has access to the patches, but the embargoed nature means they're not able to publish the patch source code or any details about what vulnerabilities are being patched. This means that GrapheneOS users are forced to choose whether to opt into the closed source patches and get recent vulnerabilities patched, but lose out on having an open OS.
  - reedciccio 1y ago
    That means that Graphene OS is "eventually open source", which is a practice as old as open source (call it free software, if you prefer) itself. More on https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication
    - getpokedagain 1y ago
      sure but for an end user of GrapheneOS there's more and more code i cannot see but I must trust. The closed driver modules are bad enough.

makeitdouble 1y ago

I think the article properly addresses that: > Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version What devs can build without much oversight or business pressure usually works well open sourced. Almost everything else (hardware, non technical "productivity" software, services) doesn't, and that's most of our life. We live in a world that's still massively closed source. I wouldn't call someone absolutist for wanting printers, coffee machines, laptops, TVs, cars, "smart" lights to be more open than closed.

xwowsersx 1y ago
That's true. Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier. Of course we'd all prefer open printers and cars, but those domains aren't mainly limited by software ideology; they're limited by regulation, liability, and econ. The fact that programmers can build entire OSs, compilers, and global infra as open projects is already astonishing. So yes, the world is still full of closed systems... but that doesn't mean FOSS lost. It means it's reached the layer where the obstacles are social, legal, and physical, not technical. IMO that's a harder, slower battle, not evidence that the earlier ones were meaningless.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier. It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
  - NetMageSCW 1y ago
    That’s predicated on the assumption that FOSS is preferable to the alternative- maybe it isn’t.
- 1y ago

the_gipsy 1y ago

I don't think the article was absolutist, binary, at all. The issue is that for a lot of things, there is exactly zero foss options. The problem is not, and the article doesn't imply, that there should be a 100% foss, so that foss finally "wins".

squigz 1y ago
Can you provide some examples of things for which there are zero FOSS options?
- the_gipsy 1y ago
  Read the article, it has examples.
- epolanski 1y ago
  Modern TVs are a simple one. You can't control any of them fully. Most you can't root.
  - drnick1 1y ago
    But there is a simple alternative here: don't connect your TV to the Internet, use it as a dumb monitor for a FOSS streaming box (Linux PC or Lineage Android TV among others).
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      That's not an alternative: at the end you don't get a TV, you get a streaming box. Perhaps you don't care about OTA TVs in the first place, but that's a different point.
    - epolanski 1y ago
      How's that relevant to me not controlling the device?
    - kuschku 1y ago
      That doesn't necessarily work anymore, some TVs now have Amazon WhisperNet built in, and will just update ads via your neighbor's Alexa.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor It absolutely does. Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now. They discriminate against us for it. Installed your own open source software? All services denied. Can't even log into your own bank account. We're marginalized. Second class citizens. There is no choice, it's either corporate owned computers or nothing. What good is free software if we can't run it?

almostgotcaught 1y ago
[flagged]
- tinfoilhatter 1y ago
  [dead]
nebula8804 1y ago
Its a lost battle not a lost war. You have to adapt for the circumstances of the time. Today that seems to be using a device that is closed but gapped only to get the essentials done(government services, banking etc.) For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings. In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow). I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Multiple devices is the answer. Otherwise you end up with people having their banking hacked because they installed a game mod.
  - Zak 1y ago
    This leads to a massive transfer of power from end users to corporations and governments. User-owned computers and the open web limit the ability of such institutions to place demands on users. Is that worth a slight reduction in the rate of bank fraud?

goalieca 1y ago

> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built. I remember when winning meant you can modify your computer as you please because you have all the sources. We’re locked down in a world of apps, saas, and whatnot.

belorn 1y ago

Winning does has many different outcomes, only some which is similar enough that the historical records will see it as such. A comparison I would make is the war on encryption that was won. It is no longer illegal to sell encryption. The question becomes how much of a victory that is if then government impose laws that dictate backdoor, like say chat control. What did that NSA official said. They lost the battle over control of encryption, but won the war against privacy?

epolanski 1y ago

I think you completely miss the point. You're focusing on the benefits of open source in booming the technological sector, but his emphasis is that openness ends at the developer's, not consumer's stage and this is particularly bad when more and more of your life is technology dependant and de facto you cannot control nor modify it.

Forgeties79 1y ago

Speaking as one of the less-technically inclined HN users all I know is Linux has never been easier to install for even the slightly motivated and while there are lots of gaps, you really can run a lot of key tasks on FOSS without much fuss. If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.

devjab 1y ago
I work in solar, so we have quite a lot of hardware which doesn't run on free software. We couldn't patch part of our inverter pipeline because the hardware was proprietary and had no open alternatives. We had to pay quite a lot of money to find one of the original engineers and have them flown in to help us unlock it, so that we could replace the firmware with some we had a security clearance holding contractor write for us. To be fair this is a story about not doing your due diligence and buying the wrong hardware, but I think it can give you some insight into what the article talks about. Because yes, you can install Linux, but can you install something on your blender when "BRAND" decides you need to pay a subscription to run the self-cleaning program?
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  Oh I definitely don’t have a choice at work unfortunately so I’m all too aware of this. I’m mostly just talking about personal computing. But point taking!
- surajrmal 1y ago
  Do vendors give you schematics for boards they make or RTL for asics? Where do you draw the line as to what is expected? From a hardware vendors perspective, firmware they give you which is locked down is simply an extension of the hardware that enables them to more cheaply iterate on it. Not a feature for customers to use to arbitrarily modify and add complexity to the test matrix and technical support for the vendor. Vendors who give away full configurability tend to see their costs rise rather than fall.
1y ago

xg15 1y ago

You're not wrong, but "reshaped" can mean all kinds of things. If the goal was user freedom for the broad public, than it clearly hasn't won. Getting put to good use by your opponent isn't winning.

eduction 1y ago

> that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack What stack? You give a bunch of web stack examples, great. The vast majority of people will never run a server nor benefit from the licenses of the code running on the server. They overwhelming give their money to the companies benefiting from those licenses and get typical crummy consumer EULAs in return. Meanwhile phones tablets iot tvs appliances cars tractors pacemakers videogame consoles security cameras coffee makers printers juicers friggin Christmas lights routers, all that stuff, is overwhelmingly closed source.

JuniperMesos 1y ago

> "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built. It doesn't matter if software published under free licenses sets the norms and powers most of what is built if critical transistors that are necessary to use important hardware at all are powered by unfree software. That is precisely what this article is decrying. If you don't own every transistor, whoever does own those transistors can use their control over them to prevent you from using your hardware as you wish, or attempting to get money out of you for the privilege; and preventing this state of affairs is actually more important in many ways than being able to use free software to create novel internet applications.

drnick1 1y ago

Free software may have won on the infrastructure side, but it is people's computing that deserves freedom first and foremost. The good news is that Linux is gaining ground on the desktop, and we may eventually see the "year of the Linux desktop." The issue is that most people's computing has now shifted to mobile devices, and these are quickly becoming fully locked down. Apple has been a lost cause for a long time, but Google is now aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. Projects like Lineage and Graphene are more important than ever for this reason.

surajrmal 1y ago
Google is not aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. It has always been 99% developed by Google and a handful of close partners like Samsung. It is simply aligning workflows to make this arrangement less costly to maintain. The fact that Graphene is hurt by the change was simply not part of the consideration. I'm sure they can alter their arrangement to get similar access to other partners and continue on as before.

pjmlp 1y ago

In most places that I have been, free software is basically the way to not pay for software, for most companies free === gratis. In the 1980's and 1990's, the same kind of places would be pirating software. In Portugal, we used to have shops with catalogs during those days, hardly anyone at goverment level cared about software sales, nowadays it is controlled by an economic agency and those kind of shops aren't as easy to find as they were up to early 2000's. Free software allows them to now be in a legal state, yet the authors get the same as before most of the time, nothing. Which is why in the end many FOSS projects end up pivoting for something commercial, preferbly in ways where even piracy isn't possible, like SaaS.

pwdisswordfishy 1y ago

> From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. I may be unable to control the software in the device I am holding in my hands right now, but the important thing is that a few corporations can externalize the costs of maintaining their infrastructure to "the open-source community". And even get free publicity from doing so!

eleveriven 1y ago

Maybe it's not "overstating the loss"... it's just focusing on a different kind of loss

tempodox 1y ago

> setting the norms But it doesn’t set the norms. Enshittification is setting the norms. The positive effects of free software being tangible for the users is very much the exception.