12 ms·

I (like many of us) have been reading and following RMS for many years now. It is fascinating how things that I used to feel were impractical about his ideas ("

by memset 13y ago

I (like many of us) have been reading and following RMS for many years now. It is fascinating how things that I used to feel were impractical about his ideas ("if proprietary software gets the job done, then why shun it? We live in a world where we must be practical, etc.") now seem imperative. This point struck home with his mention of education: how frustrating it is that so much of it lives in, say, Matlab, as compared to any other numerical package! How frustrating that we all depend on Microsoft Excel (or Google Docs) to do pivot tables! How frustrating that we depend on github to store our code. How frustrating that we depend on AWS for our servers. I spend a lot of my professional life migrating from one closed system (eg, deployments on Rackspace to AWS; cc processing from PayPal to Braintree; accounting from Quickbooks to Netsuite) to another. I wonder if, in practice, so many of these frustrations would have been alleviated if we, as an industry, had adopted the "impractical" view of insisting on using only free software.

hnriot 13y ago
Nonsense, we don't depend on Excel for pivot tables, lots of other software can do that, likewise we don't depend on github, AWS or any of the other examples. This is total hogwash.
Udo 13y ago
I don't think Github belongs on that list.
- cscurmudgeon 13y ago
  Last I checked Github itself is neither open source nor free.
  - Udo 13y ago
    It's a service designed around a free and open protocol, the other examples are binary software packages. You can use any local git repository as a drop-in replacement. Github is neither a dependency nor a walled garden for most people, but the other software on that list definitely is. Git is the tool people use, Github is just a public repository. There is no question that Github is itself closed source, but it doesn't really share key attributes with the other examples mentioned either.
    - zanny 13y ago
      People are getting very dependent on Github workflows beyond just the act of being a git repository. If all you need is a remote git repo, use gitorious, it is open source. No, people use github for the social features, the wiki, the issue tracker, comments, etc. These features are not portable, and as a result if github went down, your entire workflow suffers.
      - Karunamon 13y ago
        Every single bit of which can be replaced with Gitlab, and in some cases, Gitlab has more and better features.
    - jm3 13y ago
      His point was that people could use bare git without github, but many use Github, which isn't free according to three of the four freedoms RMS lists in the essay [1], no matter how much we hackers might love it. Lots of people love Excel, too, but that doesn't make it free software. [1] Github: (0) freedom to run the program as you wish - YUP (1) freedom to study & change the source - NOPE (2) freedom to make and distribute exact copies - NOT SO MUCH (3) freedom to make and distribute copies of your modified versions - NO
      - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
        Sure, and I can eat Ramen noodles instead prime rib but I don't see how that's relevant. Github provides a service: hosting, a "community," etc. This isn't the same kind tyranny as presumably binary distributed software. Right? That should be obvious, unless I am losing my mind.
        dllthomas 13y ago
        In what respect do you have more control with a service than with a binary?
        rcxdude 13y ago
        It's actually worse: you don't heave the freedom to use old versions when they push out an update, and you may lose access to it completely for any number of reasons, including 'we don't like you'. Granted, part of this lack of freedom is fair due to hosted services being different from just plain software, but the power over the users are there nonetheless.
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    Isn't it weird to refer to Github or any other company providing a service as "not open source" or "not free" in a libre software sense? What is the alternative for you all? Charity? I'm being serious.
    - jjsz 13y ago
      The alternative is for the whole US to strive for actually being the alternative; the self sufficient decentralized yet United States. If Germany, Singapore, China and Japan provided alternatives, while we continue to hold on to old ways, like: not investing as much into energy efficiency, or thinking outside the box like Germany -> we will lose to white labeled and foreign hosted OSS. To solve this we would need a social market economy [0] or at least a mandate to tax for fractionally financed civic OSS, open hardware (self sufficient micro servers), data, and R&D. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
      - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
        I'm really struggling to understand what this means ... It doesn't makes sense. Can you help? This thing you are talking about United States and this and that ... It is some kind of alternative to Github or hosted services? I don't know if it makes sense ... Oh wait how would these governments get money to support all charity?
        jjsz 13y ago
        I knew I went too off topic...What I mean by Singapore is the mandated efficient renewable buildings, Germany: it's social market economy and how they are paying people for energy, China: it's investment in renewable energy, Japan: the same. The alternative of a centralized structure is a decentralized or hybrid one. The equipment for what I suggested in other terms would have to be treated as a public good, taxed by the services it provides or as a government subsidized one. Which as an efficient microserver: communication, entertainment, and the option to subscribe to private services. The ideology here is getting the most people to use a box by paying for them to maintain it. The box just happens to be energy efficient to the point where one can exchange selling their excess electricity or storage for private services / nodes / other microservers. Another form of continuing this route is to be able to use energy, storage, or cpu / gpu as a currency or collateral. Also if one decides to give up control of their servers for hosting, or scientific research one can. It's this idea we're trying to evangelize at r/Nucleus. I believe freeing software will eventually free the regulation on transactions, energy, and communications. Something like a government subsidized team that controls a vagrant-mesos-docker for connecting CJDNS nodes (the SaaSS). Time Warner cable and all of these other companies who don't run OSS are stopping the digital divide and prohibiting peer communications. WebRTC and websockets are enough! The topic should be on why BSD software is more important right now than GPL. Since we're talking about freedom.
  - mikelat 13y ago
    It's a service, doesn't really fall into the same category as software you install on your machine (which you trust). You have no reason to trust their servers, but ultimately you're not giving them control over your hardware anyway.
- Myrmornis 13y ago
  I love github, but as it is not open source there's no point pretending it doesn't share some of the frustrations that closed-source software bring. Out of all the software I use day-to-day it is the only one that regularly has me thinking "I wish I could change this, or look for an issue or PR discussing changing it". I want mathjax support!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
forrestthewoods 13y ago
Frustrating? Are you fucking serious? How god damned magical is it that not only do all of these things exist but that they are cheap and easy to access. The many, many, many orders of magnitude increase in productivity and possibilities enabled by software in the last 50 years is beyond astounding. It's not frustrating. It's AMAZING.
- nightski 13y ago
  I don't believe he said that the services themselves are frustrating, but rather the fact that we rely on individual providers (with proprietary implementations) of these services so much.
- angersock 13y ago
  And my, how these golden handcuffs glitter!
  - cscurmudgeon 13y ago
    False analogy. For the average person, these things add more freedom (freedom to tinker) while removing the freedom to look at the source. For example, most scientists don't care about the latter when it comes to using Matlab. A honest analogy would be a golden rocket.
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
I think you are looking at it wrongly. Most would look at this and say "How wonderful it is that we can use these things to do X." Honestly, no one put a gun to your head to use Matlab. No one prevented anyone from creating libre free Matlab. For some reason I think someone was incentivized with something, not sure what it was, to create such a useful system for doing numerical analysis. You say you've spent your "professional" life doing these migrations ... Do you regret the money you've made? =) I mean working with proprietary formats has issues but I don't think it is always intentional vendor lockin. As far as the integrating payment systems and github etc etc ... It makes wonder if you're under the impression that there are no integration issues with free software systems??
- dingaling 13y ago
  > Do you regret the money you've made? =) I'm not the OP but I do these sort of grinding transitions from one proprietary system to another in project after project. Yes it pays my salary but it is mind-numbing, soulless work that offers no intellectual stimulation or prospect for technical learning. So I regret that it is what I have to do to make money.
  - roel_v 13y ago
    So, do you think if these proprietary systems didn't exist, you would be able to do more interesting work, or not have a job at all, or just spend your time on writing scripts that convert file formats between version2.forka of database software x and version48.forkb of software x? If you find your work mind-numbing, maybe you should have a look at yourself and find other work, rather than blaming others for the problems in your life. (ooh those evil software companies, they make me work a job where I get to sit on my ass in an office all day and still get paid double (/triple/ten times, depending on where you live) the median salary).
- mariusz79 13y ago
  You're forgetting that it may seem like no one put a gun to our heads to use Matlab, if you're in school - you're required to use it. The same goes for MS Office, Visio, and hundreds of other programs. Can you imagine how good Octave, LibreOffice or any other open source application would be, if instead of forcing users to buy proprietary versions of software schools and/or students were required to donate just 1% of the cost of proprietary software to open source alternative?
abalone 13y ago
A fundamental weakness in the free software argument is that it lacks a solid, broadly applicable proposal for remunerating the effort of software engineers. A similar argument could be made for the abolition of copyright -- with the same weakness. It helps explain why the free software community has not yet delivered things like Google Docs, Github and AWS. This does not necessarily invalidate Stallman's argument about the benefits of free software. But without a clear mechanism for producing free software it's little more than a letter to santa claus. Here's a thought -- what about government support? My impression is that FSF tends to focus on volunteerism and heroics. But government support has produced a lot of the free and open core science in high tech (e.g. DARPA), and via procurement, even supported bringing it to market. Why not steer the FSF troops towards advocating direct government funding for free software projects and services like a public cloud?
- ISL 13y ago
  ... has not yet delivered things like... Github http://gitlab.org/ http://gitlab.org/ Open source software alone can't spin up hardware. It makes sense to pay someone for providing a physical service. Github is getting paid already for developing what will someday influence a definitive open-source interface to git and collaboration. Photoshop is really nice software. The GIMP is too, and perpetually improving. Closed-source programs are sometimes the vanguard to show the world that a particular idea is important and useful. Any sufficiently useful closed-source program will be cloned into open source in today's environment. 15-20 years ago, the world had a plethora of closed-source options for a gui-based OS. These days, open-source offerings compete on near-equal footing. It's almost as easy as typing: apt-get install debian on any keyboard anywhere to get access to a functional GNU/Linux system. A lot of closed-source programmers earned a lot of money showing us what features of that system have mass appeal. Is a government-funded public cloud not beholden to the government which funds it?
  - frozenport 13y ago
    I think you are overly optimistic, LibreOffice remains less functional than Office 97 and GIMP is a study in bad GUI design - not to mention the rest of the Creative Suite being missing in action. I was recently shocked to learn that I can't rotate text inside a table. Also LibreOffice at one point included the full source code of Thunderbird, some OSS is well written but I am not convinced that it is better at the architecture level when compared to Microsoft's offerings. After 15-20 years the OpenSource user-land remains confusingly fragmented. Multiple monitors are a pain and applications don't have the understanding of full-screen. Working with icons on the desktops was hard, so now we have launchers, and now we are doing away with the desktop all together - my theory being that drag-able icon interaction was too hard to implement. Distro's are fragmented by their philosophies on software rather then their GUI's - resulting in horrible user experiences. Why the hell does Linux mint come in so many flavors? Drivers remain a problem, I recently had to recompile modify the kernel because my elan mouse was being detected incorrectly. Ubuntu has made large leaps but I have noticed that their GUI burns power and shutters on systems that are about 5 years old. Also, remember when computers could hibernate? But, I use Gentoo for work, 'cause kcachegrind is good. I think OSS has delivered something unique to its users but it is whole different from a general purpose operating system like Windows. I think the comparison between Latex and Word is a good comparison between he OpenSource and propriety world. When people speak to highlight the progress of OSS I am tempted to ask: How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait?
FrojoS 13y ago
I too believe that our civilization should be build on free software and I think the best existing financing solution is crowdfunding. The idea is based on free market capitalism and while it has been around for a while we now know that it works. Kickstarter has demonstrate that it can not only raise millions to finance hardware development and commercial games [2] but also substantial money for free software [3]. I truly believe that at this point, all we need is to propagate this idea and help FOSS developers to crowdfund their projects. Once a project has collected enough money for a first working version, subsequent development can be financed by donations, support or merchandizing. Major updates could again be financed over crowd funding. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android?ref=most-funded http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper... [2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-anni... [3] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...
- briandear 13y ago
  It's hard to get cheapskates to pay $.99 for an app, let alone donate -- at least not at a level to compensate for a company to make any money or even pay the bills. When clothing stores start operating as donationwear then maybe donationwaring the software industry could follow. The problem is that many people fail to see software as an actual product that needs to be produced. Hopefully Ducati can lead the way with a donation-sponsored business model. Maybe that could illustrate the free-rider principle more clearly.
  - FrojoS 13y ago
    > many people fail to see software as an actual product that needs to be produced True, but many is not all, by far. Star Citizen (a software product) raised over 19 million dollars [1] in crowdfunding! Way more than .99$ per app and yes, it does make enough money to compensate for a company. And FOSS is already developed today and will be in the future, based on donations in terms of money and time as well as other income sources like support and merchandise. Just like I stated in my post. The difference between the traditional donation model and the newer crowd funding model, ala Kickstarter, is that there is a clear feedback to the supporter. To me this is a game changer. When I spend money on, say, git-annex (which raised over 25,000 USD!) I know that the project won't get build in the proposed form if the goal is not reached and there are clearly defined stretch goals as well. Depending on the amount I also get a corresponding rewards, e.g. my name in the credits or special merchandise articles. Its also great feedback for the developer. If they can't raise the money they know that there time might be better spend on something else. I'm really surprised that seemingly every commercial business is getting crazy about Kickstarter now, but so few FOSS proponents see the appeal. PS: What is Ducati? Google only shows the motorcycle brand. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_citizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_citizen
ISL 13y ago
This point struck home with his mention of education: how frustrating it is that so much of it lives in, say, Matlab, as compared to any other numerical package! Check out GNU Octave: www.octave.org It's not Matlab (particularly toolboxes), but for day-to-day work, it's fine, and it will run a lot of *.m files. All of my thesis data analysis is done in Octave. I could choose Matlab (we have a site license), but I want anyone in the world to be able to check my work exactly.
- roel_v 13y ago
  "but I want anyone in the world to be able to check my work exactly." The problem is not that they can't, the problem is they don't want to. Solve the real problems first before worrying about imaginary ones. (this is one of the main flaws in most of GNU rhetoric, btw, and I say this as someone who 10 years ago made the 'access to source code is a moral right' argument and actually believed it).
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    Once you solved "real problems" you made a lot of choices you're going to regret. But it's too late. We have enough solutions for real problems but few good ones. Good enough is not good enough. Time to think up front.
  - ISL 13y ago
    I've no illusion that most people will never be interested in my source. For the 2-10 people that are, being able to duplicate my working environment may be of great use.
infinitegravity 13y ago
"I wonder if, in practice, so many of these frustrations would have been alleviated if we, as an industry, had adopted the "impractical" view of insisting on using only free software." We'd live in a world with a lot less software and where computing was restricted to hobbyists. Propietary software exists for a reason, and its not because the world is run by the selfish and evil. I love free software, too, but the thing to remember, and this is true for any discipline -- a massive amount of people will support something because they have the incentive to get money from it. A lot of people love programming, but a lot of people love money even more, and if the geniuses who went to Harvard and Stanford and UC Berkeley decided that they could make much more money in biotechnology or surgery, then that's one less Microsoft or Google in the world that's bad for us users. If these people loved programming more than money, their software wouldn't be proprietary. It's much much easier to make money off proprietary software than free software. Yes, there is dual-licensing and support and donations, but ultimately you cannot directly and legally charge users, your biggest market, to use your program; this logic is supported by some evidence: recently Red Hat reached a billion dollar valuation, making it the most valuable company to be majorly devoted to free software. That's amazing. Bill Gates on his own is worth $56B, though. I think most people, and most people encompasses the people that make the proprietary software that we rely on most, look for money first and idealism next. We'd have RMS's work and some of the early MIT and UCB hacker's work without the incentive of money, but to get so far as multibillion dollar companies that produce programs 99% of us are reliant on? Impossible without the incentive of money.
- olivier1664 13y ago
  Money isn't only incentive. It also measures the peoples needs. "Do my clients need XXX?" correlates with "Do my clients will pay $$$ for XXX?". For organisation, replacing the need by the money allow to take explainable decision. Fame, power, influence or passion are far less easier to measure than money.

by memset 13y ago

hnriot 13y ago

Nonsense, we don't depend on Excel for pivot tables, lots of other software can do that, likewise we don't depend on github, AWS or any of the other examples. This is total hogwash.

Udo 13y ago

I don't think Github belongs on that list.

cscurmudgeon 13y ago
Last I checked Github itself is neither open source nor free.
- Udo 13y ago
  It's a service designed around a free and open protocol, the other examples are binary software packages. You can use any local git repository as a drop-in replacement. Github is neither a dependency nor a walled garden for most people, but the other software on that list definitely is. Git is the tool people use, Github is just a public repository. There is no question that Github is itself closed source, but it doesn't really share key attributes with the other examples mentioned either.
  - zanny 13y ago
    People are getting very dependent on Github workflows beyond just the act of being a git repository. If all you need is a remote git repo, use gitorious, it is open source. No, people use github for the social features, the wiki, the issue tracker, comments, etc. These features are not portable, and as a result if github went down, your entire workflow suffers.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      Every single bit of which can be replaced with Gitlab, and in some cases, Gitlab has more and better features.
  - jm3 13y ago
    His point was that people could use bare git without github, but many use Github, which isn't free according to three of the four freedoms RMS lists in the essay [1], no matter how much we hackers might love it. Lots of people love Excel, too, but that doesn't make it free software. [1] Github: (0) freedom to run the program as you wish - YUP (1) freedom to study & change the source - NOPE (2) freedom to make and distribute exact copies - NOT SO MUCH (3) freedom to make and distribute copies of your modified versions - NO
    - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      Sure, and I can eat Ramen noodles instead prime rib but I don't see how that's relevant. Github provides a service: hosting, a "community," etc. This isn't the same kind tyranny as presumably binary distributed software. Right? That should be obvious, unless I am losing my mind.
      - dllthomas 13y ago
        In what respect do you have more control with a service than with a binary?
      - rcxdude 13y ago
        It's actually worse: you don't heave the freedom to use old versions when they push out an update, and you may lose access to it completely for any number of reasons, including 'we don't like you'. Granted, part of this lack of freedom is fair due to hosted services being different from just plain software, but the power over the users are there nonetheless.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  Isn't it weird to refer to Github or any other company providing a service as "not open source" or "not free" in a libre software sense? What is the alternative for you all? Charity? I'm being serious.
  - jjsz 13y ago
    The alternative is for the whole US to strive for actually being the alternative; the self sufficient decentralized yet United States. If Germany, Singapore, China and Japan provided alternatives, while we continue to hold on to old ways, like: not investing as much into energy efficiency, or thinking outside the box like Germany -> we will lose to white labeled and foreign hosted OSS. To solve this we would need a social market economy [0] or at least a mandate to tax for fractionally financed civic OSS, open hardware (self sufficient micro servers), data, and R&D. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
    - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      I'm really struggling to understand what this means ... It doesn't makes sense. Can you help? This thing you are talking about United States and this and that ... It is some kind of alternative to Github or hosted services? I don't know if it makes sense ... Oh wait how would these governments get money to support all charity?
      - jjsz 13y ago
        I knew I went too off topic...What I mean by Singapore is the mandated efficient renewable buildings, Germany: it's social market economy and how they are paying people for energy, China: it's investment in renewable energy, Japan: the same. The alternative of a centralized structure is a decentralized or hybrid one. The equipment for what I suggested in other terms would have to be treated as a public good, taxed by the services it provides or as a government subsidized one. Which as an efficient microserver: communication, entertainment, and the option to subscribe to private services. The ideology here is getting the most people to use a box by paying for them to maintain it. The box just happens to be energy efficient to the point where one can exchange selling their excess electricity or storage for private services / nodes / other microservers. Another form of continuing this route is to be able to use energy, storage, or cpu / gpu as a currency or collateral. Also if one decides to give up control of their servers for hosting, or scientific research one can. It's this idea we're trying to evangelize at r/Nucleus. I believe freeing software will eventually free the regulation on transactions, energy, and communications. Something like a government subsidized team that controls a vagrant-mesos-docker for connecting CJDNS nodes (the SaaSS). Time Warner cable and all of these other companies who don't run OSS are stopping the digital divide and prohibiting peer communications. WebRTC and websockets are enough! The topic should be on why BSD software is more important right now than GPL. Since we're talking about freedom.
- mikelat 13y ago
  It's a service, doesn't really fall into the same category as software you install on your machine (which you trust). You have no reason to trust their servers, but ultimately you're not giving them control over your hardware anyway.
Myrmornis 13y ago
I love github, but as it is not open source there's no point pretending it doesn't share some of the frustrations that closed-source software bring. Out of all the software I use day-to-day it is the only one that regularly has me thinking "I wish I could change this, or look for an issue or PR discussing changing it". I want mathjax support!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

forrestthewoods 13y ago

Frustrating? Are you fucking serious? How god damned magical is it that not only do all of these things exist but that they are cheap and easy to access. The many, many, many orders of magnitude increase in productivity and possibilities enabled by software in the last 50 years is beyond astounding. It's not frustrating. It's AMAZING.

nightski 13y ago
I don't believe he said that the services themselves are frustrating, but rather the fact that we rely on individual providers (with proprietary implementations) of these services so much.
angersock 13y ago
And my, how these golden handcuffs glitter!
- cscurmudgeon 13y ago
  False analogy. For the average person, these things add more freedom (freedom to tinker) while removing the freedom to look at the source. For example, most scientists don't care about the latter when it comes to using Matlab. A honest analogy would be a golden rocket.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

I think you are looking at it wrongly. Most would look at this and say "How wonderful it is that we can use these things to do X." Honestly, no one put a gun to your head to use Matlab. No one prevented anyone from creating libre free Matlab. For some reason I think someone was incentivized with something, not sure what it was, to create such a useful system for doing numerical analysis. You say you've spent your "professional" life doing these migrations ... Do you regret the money you've made? =) I mean working with proprietary formats has issues but I don't think it is always intentional vendor lockin. As far as the integrating payment systems and github etc etc ... It makes wonder if you're under the impression that there are no integration issues with free software systems??

dingaling 13y ago
> Do you regret the money you've made? =) I'm not the OP but I do these sort of grinding transitions from one proprietary system to another in project after project. Yes it pays my salary but it is mind-numbing, soulless work that offers no intellectual stimulation or prospect for technical learning. So I regret that it is what I have to do to make money.
- roel_v 13y ago
  So, do you think if these proprietary systems didn't exist, you would be able to do more interesting work, or not have a job at all, or just spend your time on writing scripts that convert file formats between version2.forka of database software x and version48.forkb of software x? If you find your work mind-numbing, maybe you should have a look at yourself and find other work, rather than blaming others for the problems in your life. (ooh those evil software companies, they make me work a job where I get to sit on my ass in an office all day and still get paid double (/triple/ten times, depending on where you live) the median salary).
mariusz79 13y ago
You're forgetting that it may seem like no one put a gun to our heads to use Matlab, if you're in school - you're required to use it. The same goes for MS Office, Visio, and hundreds of other programs. Can you imagine how good Octave, LibreOffice or any other open source application would be, if instead of forcing users to buy proprietary versions of software schools and/or students were required to donate just 1% of the cost of proprietary software to open source alternative?

abalone 13y ago

A fundamental weakness in the free software argument is that it lacks a solid, broadly applicable proposal for remunerating the effort of software engineers. A similar argument could be made for the abolition of copyright -- with the same weakness. It helps explain why the free software community has not yet delivered things like Google Docs, Github and AWS. This does not necessarily invalidate Stallman's argument about the benefits of free software. But without a clear mechanism for producing free software it's little more than a letter to santa claus. Here's a thought -- what about government support? My impression is that FSF tends to focus on volunteerism and heroics. But government support has produced a lot of the free and open core science in high tech (e.g. DARPA), and via procurement, even supported bringing it to market. Why not steer the FSF troops towards advocating direct government funding for free software projects and services like a public cloud?

ISL 13y ago
... has not yet delivered things like... Github http://gitlab.org/ http://gitlab.org/ Open source software alone can't spin up hardware. It makes sense to pay someone for providing a physical service. Github is getting paid already for developing what will someday influence a definitive open-source interface to git and collaboration. Photoshop is really nice software. The GIMP is too, and perpetually improving. Closed-source programs are sometimes the vanguard to show the world that a particular idea is important and useful. Any sufficiently useful closed-source program will be cloned into open source in today's environment. 15-20 years ago, the world had a plethora of closed-source options for a gui-based OS. These days, open-source offerings compete on near-equal footing. It's almost as easy as typing: apt-get install debian on any keyboard anywhere to get access to a functional GNU/Linux system. A lot of closed-source programmers earned a lot of money showing us what features of that system have mass appeal. Is a government-funded public cloud not beholden to the government which funds it?
- frozenport 13y ago
  I think you are overly optimistic, LibreOffice remains less functional than Office 97 and GIMP is a study in bad GUI design - not to mention the rest of the Creative Suite being missing in action. I was recently shocked to learn that I can't rotate text inside a table. Also LibreOffice at one point included the full source code of Thunderbird, some OSS is well written but I am not convinced that it is better at the architecture level when compared to Microsoft's offerings. After 15-20 years the OpenSource user-land remains confusingly fragmented. Multiple monitors are a pain and applications don't have the understanding of full-screen. Working with icons on the desktops was hard, so now we have launchers, and now we are doing away with the desktop all together - my theory being that drag-able icon interaction was too hard to implement. Distro's are fragmented by their philosophies on software rather then their GUI's - resulting in horrible user experiences. Why the hell does Linux mint come in so many flavors? Drivers remain a problem, I recently had to recompile modify the kernel because my elan mouse was being detected incorrectly. Ubuntu has made large leaps but I have noticed that their GUI burns power and shutters on systems that are about 5 years old. Also, remember when computers could hibernate? But, I use Gentoo for work, 'cause kcachegrind is good. I think OSS has delivered something unique to its users but it is whole different from a general purpose operating system like Windows. I think the comparison between Latex and Word is a good comparison between he OpenSource and propriety world. When people speak to highlight the progress of OSS I am tempted to ask: How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait? How many years do I have to wait?

FrojoS 13y ago

I too believe that our civilization should be build on free software and I think the best existing financing solution is crowdfunding. The idea is based on free market capitalism and while it has been around for a while we now know that it works. Kickstarter has demonstrate that it can not only raise millions to finance hardware development and commercial games [2] but also substantial money for free software [3]. I truly believe that at this point, all we need is to propagate this idea and help FOSS developers to crowdfund their projects. Once a project has collected enough money for a first working version, subsequent development can be financed by donations, support or merchandizing. Major updates could again be financed over crowd funding. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android?ref=most-funded http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper... [2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-anni... [3] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

briandear 13y ago
It's hard to get cheapskates to pay $.99 for an app, let alone donate -- at least not at a level to compensate for a company to make any money or even pay the bills. When clothing stores start operating as donationwear then maybe donationwaring the software industry could follow. The problem is that many people fail to see software as an actual product that needs to be produced. Hopefully Ducati can lead the way with a donation-sponsored business model. Maybe that could illustrate the free-rider principle more clearly.
- FrojoS 13y ago
  > many people fail to see software as an actual product that needs to be produced True, but many is not all, by far. Star Citizen (a software product) raised over 19 million dollars [1] in crowdfunding! Way more than .99$ per app and yes, it does make enough money to compensate for a company. And FOSS is already developed today and will be in the future, based on donations in terms of money and time as well as other income sources like support and merchandise. Just like I stated in my post. The difference between the traditional donation model and the newer crowd funding model, ala Kickstarter, is that there is a clear feedback to the supporter. To me this is a game changer. When I spend money on, say, git-annex (which raised over 25,000 USD!) I know that the project won't get build in the proposed form if the goal is not reached and there are clearly defined stretch goals as well. Depending on the amount I also get a corresponding rewards, e.g. my name in the credits or special merchandise articles. Its also great feedback for the developer. If they can't raise the money they know that there time might be better spend on something else. I'm really surprised that seemingly every commercial business is getting crazy about Kickstarter now, but so few FOSS proponents see the appeal. PS: What is Ducati? Google only shows the motorcycle brand. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_citizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_citizen

ISL 13y ago

This point struck home with his mention of education: how frustrating it is that so much of it lives in, say, Matlab, as compared to any other numerical package! Check out GNU Octave: www.octave.org It's not Matlab (particularly toolboxes), but for day-to-day work, it's fine, and it will run a lot of *.m files. All of my thesis data analysis is done in Octave. I could choose Matlab (we have a site license), but I want anyone in the world to be able to check my work exactly.

roel_v 13y ago
"but I want anyone in the world to be able to check my work exactly." The problem is not that they can't, the problem is they don't want to. Solve the real problems first before worrying about imaginary ones. (this is one of the main flaws in most of GNU rhetoric, btw, and I say this as someone who 10 years ago made the 'access to source code is a moral right' argument and actually believed it).
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  Once you solved "real problems" you made a lot of choices you're going to regret. But it's too late. We have enough solutions for real problems but few good ones. Good enough is not good enough. Time to think up front.
- ISL 13y ago
  I've no illusion that most people will never be interested in my source. For the 2-10 people that are, being able to duplicate my working environment may be of great use.

infinitegravity 13y ago

"I wonder if, in practice, so many of these frustrations would have been alleviated if we, as an industry, had adopted the "impractical" view of insisting on using only free software." We'd live in a world with a lot less software and where computing was restricted to hobbyists. Propietary software exists for a reason, and its not because the world is run by the selfish and evil. I love free software, too, but the thing to remember, and this is true for any discipline -- a massive amount of people will support something because they have the incentive to get money from it. A lot of people love programming, but a lot of people love money even more, and if the geniuses who went to Harvard and Stanford and UC Berkeley decided that they could make much more money in biotechnology or surgery, then that's one less Microsoft or Google in the world that's bad for us users. If these people loved programming more than money, their software wouldn't be proprietary. It's much much easier to make money off proprietary software than free software. Yes, there is dual-licensing and support and donations, but ultimately you cannot directly and legally charge users, your biggest market, to use your program; this logic is supported by some evidence: recently Red Hat reached a billion dollar valuation, making it the most valuable company to be majorly devoted to free software. That's amazing. Bill Gates on his own is worth $56B, though. I think most people, and most people encompasses the people that make the proprietary software that we rely on most, look for money first and idealism next. We'd have RMS's work and some of the early MIT and UCB hacker's work without the incentive of money, but to get so far as multibillion dollar companies that produce programs 99% of us are reliant on? Impossible without the incentive of money.

olivier1664 13y ago
Money isn't only incentive. It also measures the peoples needs. "Do my clients need XXX?" correlates with "Do my clients will pay $$$ for XXX?". For organisation, replacing the need by the money allow to take explainable decision. Fame, power, influence or passion are far less easier to measure than money.