I think the impractical goal of free software at any cost has hurt Linux. It's radical and it's a type of gatekeeping around here. There is always a post about Linux tech / adoption that deserves praise and some Stallman acolyte will chime in to remind us it's not a real accomplishment.

This is turning into a rant but has anyone checked out the approved distros on FSF? Many popular distros do not make the cut not because they include nonfree software but make it a little too easy to acquire nonfree software.

> I think the impractical goal of free software at any cost has hurt Linux. It's radical and it's a type of gatekeeping around here.

Completely disagree. The fact is, if you want to innact real change you need to be quite 'radical', because various pressure groups will inevitably weaken whatever gets done. So you starting position cannot be a mild/moderate one, otherwise you won't get anything done.

There's already plenty to choose from if the free software vision does not suit you. I don't need Linux to just be another Windows/macOS. I can just go straight for them if that's what I want, or go for one of the BSDs if I want a free as in cost option with no concern for software freedom.

But in the world, there's room (and need) for uniqueness. If everything would be the same, just with a different badge, you would not like to live in that world, you'd strive for diversity of opinions, foods, colors, books etc. Why should software be any different?

Proprietary software has a strong base, backed by some of the largest corporations on this planet. I think free software having a little corner for itself, one that is not under constant pressure to become just like the others, is warranted.

I don’t know about radical; if you’re talking about the same sorts of Linux environments I’m thinking of (e.g. a desktop running GNOME, using FOSS GUI apps), then, ignoring the kernel itself [which is a special case in many ways], their developers are—by volume of commits—mostly community contributors.

Would you expect that said community contributors would have any contribution/engagement at all, if the product they were contributing to wasn’t 1. sitting there with its source available on GitHub, in a state where you can compile and run your own copy of it from said source, and 2. accepting PRs from all comers, with project direction mostly up to either “the guy who wrote the code originally”, or “the whims of the people who do the most PRs”, such that 3. you gain in decision-making power in the project to the degree you contribute?

Once you have those three properties, you’ve essentially got FOSS. It doesn’t really matter if you charge for the binary distro (like e.g. RedHat does) if the developers behind the source code are essentially their own little monastery/guild, run by the will of the people who write the code, that can just up and strike if the product’s corporate owner does something stupid. If it isn’t FOSS, it’ll be forked or re-built from the ground up by said developers to be FOSS; not out of principle, but in order to put “the people writing the code” in power over the code project’s direction. (See e.g. LibreOffice.)

I wouldn’t say that making a specifically-FOSS piece of software was ever a “goal” of any of these projects, outside of Stallman’s GNU itself; rather, these projects being FOSS is just a sort of emergent property from the “anthropic principle of community-driven software engineering”: for software to exist, people—a lot of people—have to have had a hand in making it; and, unless they all worked for the same company, there has to have been some legal infrastructure in place to make many different parties able to push the project forward. That legal infrastructure is a license like the GPL or BSD. The projects that had that infrastructure thrived; the projects that didn’t have it—and there are many—stagnated or died.

(This effect only applies above a certain level of complexity, mind you; there are small software packages that are “free” but where nobody but their author has ever contributed to them. Compression libraries like zlib, and format libraries like libpng, tend to be like this; as do smaller library-ecosystem packages like your average NPM package is. In those cases, there isn’t much to grow, so stagnation is just fine. But, don’t be confused, stagnating still is what those packages are doing.)

I'm not against FOSS, in fact I'm extremely pro FOSS. I'm against the idea that simply using FOSS is the goal. My goal is productivity and most of the time that deals with leveraging free software which is great.

FOSS at any and all costs is radical. It's the very definition of radical. It's an absolute. It bugs me when the no true Scotsman argument is used to shame a well designed but partially closed or entirely closed software rather than blaming itself for not providing an equal user experience.

Most people just want to do work on their computers. Most don't give a shit about using their computer to push some everything-free ideology.

Most people are short sighted and reactionary.

For example people like me expressed massive problems with privacy @ facebook years before the recent "scandals" apparently "shocked" these normal computer users that just want to "work on their computers" with out caring about little things like privacy, ethics, or liberty.

I am sure you will consider me a "Stallman acolyte" even though i am not

Having said that, I think the compromises the "Open Source" community has given to commercial companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle have done much much much more harm to the community and goals than " Stallman acolytes" ever have.

Nor do i believe the goals of Free Software were impractical and as we move into a more connected world where privacy, censorship, and security are more important than ever due to automation, IoT and the normalization of technology the fact that more or less 4 corporations control the underlying fabric of that technology to the point were even the "open standards" are bought and paid for by them should be terrifying to everyone.

Of course I am just fear mongering Stallman acolyte right....

>"Open Source" community has given to commercial companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle

What are some examples of these 'compromises'. From what I have seen, all these companies publish source code and abide by copyright law for any open-source code they use in their products.

Or are you simply against the principle of for-profit companies making money from open-source?

Open Source vs Free Software is very simple

The Open Source community only cares about the Source Code, they are generally developer centrist, and generally work with "open sourcing" tools, libraries, languages and components used to build applications.

Looks on github's open source projects, what is the ratio of Full Applications, compared to libraries, tools, and components? Probably over 100 libraries, tools, and components for every 1 application

Open Source community has become a purely developer community that does not give 2 shits about the freedom of users or consumers. Most of the devs in open source today are building SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services that are closed source or non-source distributed "open source" services meaning that is perfectly legal to incorporate open source in to a SaaS product and not release the source code.

Free Software however believe all users of the software have a equal right to the source code as the developers. The recent Nest development of them closing their API is a clear example of the difference, if it was a Free Software based API I would have the ability to run my own Nest API server, but while Nest uses many open source libraries the service itself is Closed Source.

That is main compromise and divergence that happened between Free Software and Open Source.

As to making money off Free Software, I have no problems with that, it is not part of this issue. Open Source advocates like to bring that up as a red herring to divert the conversation from the primary debate. Often claiming that if they can not close their final product "they can not make any money" as an excuse why they do not support Free (Libre) software

>The recent Nest development of them closing their API is a clear example of the difference, if it was a Free Software based API I would have the ability to run my own Nest API server.

What changes in GPL / FSF licensing would enforce the changes that you want to achieve?

There is no change in licensing that could achieve those changes. Companies will just use other software/rewrite the libraries, and blacklist the license.

https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/

From a certain perspective it's not compromise at all.

>Having said that, I think the compromises the "Open Source" community has given to commercial companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle have done much much much more harm to the community and goals than " Stallman acolytes" ever have.

So what? First, when you develop software you get to choose the best licence for you. Open source means that big companies can use your software. If you open the source under a permissive licence then it's because you wanted that to happen and didn't expect anything in exchange.

Second, users have the choice of what software they run, and they aren't going the way of Stallman acolytes. Why? Well, we all have our reasons.

But all in all everybody wins.

I guess that depends on your definition of "wins" which I am sure differs greatly from mine.

>Second, users have the choice of what software they run, and they aren't going the way of Stallman acolytes. Why?

yes they do have a choice, as it is given they are manipulated by marketing and ignorance of the topic. As recent as 2017 survey's showed most people (like 80% of the population) where still classified as technologically illiterate. Companies with m/billions of dollars for marketing generally win the consumer race, it has nothing to do with the technology.

>So what?

Do I really need to lay out all the issues that have already resulted from the undue influence of google has over the IETF and W3C, or the issues Orcale has caused due to their influence over java and their lawsuits against google, or Entire history of Microsoft and their anti-competitive practices?

Do I need to layout the dystopia that is on the horizon?

> Do I need to layout the dystopia that is on the horizon?

Yes. Not because I disagree, but because I’m not seeing it as potentially being a part of that 80%

For starters, consider that Stallman, and his kind set the goal posts far enough away that the field we get to play on is very large. Without them, there wouldnt be a field or anything to play with. We would be paying a subscription to watch it at home and it would probably have commercials.

This is a great point. Stallman and the FSF have an extremely positive impact merely by widening the Overton window.

Possibly. I do admire the way they put their foot down, but admittedly sometimes I just want a binary GPU driver without a lot of hassle. There's certainly an argument that getting most of the benefit of free software is better than "all-or-nothing" if that mostly results in "nothing". Especially if growing the user base of free software would give the all-or-nothing crowd more leverage with corporations in the future.

> I just want a binary GPU driver without a lot of hassle

Unfortunately, those two things tend to be incompatible. Kernel interfaces that a GPU driver might need to hook into can change from release to release. A solid GPU driver that is part of the kernel is what you _really_ want. The AMDGPU driver in the kernel is very good and gets better every release, and it is there substantially because AMD opened up their docs so such a driver could be developed. That's why I went with Team Red on my last GPU purchase and why I will on my next one. See also Intel.

I forgot where I read it, but from Microsoft's analytics it was found that majority of crashes were result of a driver bug (often) in the Graphics stack which was a decision driver for them to move the graphics stack into the userspace. The drivers still do have a kernel mode component but it is much smaller than it was in the XP days and the results show how (relatively) stable things have gotten since.

I’d question how well supported and stable the binary driver would be if the hardware company behind it isn’t willing to take basic steps to be acceptable to the wider community.

You would switch from Windows because the Linux kernel has become so ubiquitous that all the software you need is now developed for it. That's the future that this makes me hopeful for.

Aren't we almost there with software being developed for the web instead of Linux?

It's only my plain text editor that still runs on my desktop, but even that runs on electron, hehe

I wish electron would die a thousand deaths. Even excel, word, ppt and skyp are being reimplemented in it (or something similar) and the result is not an improvement (for the user)

This is the Open Source vs Free (libre) software debate

Today the trend is more open source, than free software, even with in linux.

Dev's and Companies want the source to be open but do not care if the end product is open. Free Software is losing

From a developer perspective, why would I develop software for Windows only, if I can develop it against Linux and have it work in Windows, traditional Linux desktops, and ChromeOS? (Games may still have trouble because I doubt that WSL2 will allow direct hardware access to the GPU). Once more desktop software is Linux compatible to take advantage of this cross-platform Linux API experience, it becomes easier for consumers to choose to forgo Windows all together.

The pragmatic reason is the idealistic reason: control. It manifests itself in things like forced Windows updates, even if you're actually using the computer at the time.

I wish that were enough, but even though having my computer restart when I don't want it to is annoying and microsoft's forced updates infuriate me, at the end of the day I use my computer to get work done and using linux would really make that a lot harder, unfortunately.

> even if you're actually using the computer at the time.

?? Windows 10 pops up a "schedule updates" dialog when there's an update to install. And when the time comes, I can still postpone it.

The issue with updates is that they sometimes need to be installed during restart, but many people (that I know) never power cycle their computer and then complain that it asked them to restart the computer while they were using it.

It could be like how the iPod through the last decade lured me into the Apple ecosystem. Initially it was exactly for having good music experience without having to commit to the Mac world. Then I got the iPod touch, iPad, even an iPhone. Finally it’s like what the hell, I might as well go full Mac with an MBP.

I find it sad that developers at BigCorps actually implement these kind of solutions, knowing that the resulting product is not what they themselves would want as a customer.

Apart from this particular issue, it reflects how a company with intelligent people "thinks", i.e. with only a small portion of its brain.

Replace “at BigCorps” with the more accurate “for BigCorps” and the answer is more apparent.

Morally abject behavior in the name of money exists since the oldest profession. However, most developers have a choice.

Why would giving up Adobe programs/games be a reason to switch before?

I don't think the reasons have changed much at all, just the execution. The above is an example of why one might dual boot, or run one OS in a VM, it's also a reason for chrome books/windows to ship a Linux kernel.

Maybe I lacked clarity making my point, what I meant was that a large reason for why I don't switch is that I need adobe programs and I like playing games. There are aspects of the linux desktop that would get me to switch though, hypothetically, if they really outweighed those two things, but now that I can have those things on Windows without giving up the programs I like I have less practical incentive to switch.

I feel like Linux itself (including the various FOSS Desktop Environments under that aegis) is a viable replacement for Windows/macOS, as is evidenced by ChromeOS, and by governments and enterprises deploying Linux on their workstations.

The problem is actually the opposite, at this point; Linux has seen tons of effort and been polished to hell, but all the FOSS apps that would be alternatives to proprietary ones haven’t seen nearly so much contribution.

Linux “as a product”—the kernel, the common libraries, plus any random distro’s bits chosen at random—probably has as many (if not more) cumulative man-hours put into it, per year, as the “products” of Windows or macOS have.

But can you say the same about, say, GIMP vs. Photoshop? About Audacity vs. Reason?

Even Blender, which sees tons of work put into it and is sort of a “reference platform” that graphics orgs use to demonstrate new tech (once they decide it’s not valuable enough any more to keep it proprietary), doesn’t have the same power as the proprietary equivalents.

But in many of these cases, I think the problem isn’t so much “FOSS vs. proprietary” as it is “every other solution, vs. the solution hacked on and extended by industry professionals and academics who are trying to get something novel done.” When there is such a solution, nobody else is going to be able to match its features, because its features are commercializations of R&D that may have not even been published outside of its bounds. (See e.g. Photoshop’s implementation of PatchMatch when it was first introduced; or hundreds of the technniques used in Pixar’s Renderman currently.)

In cases where the FOSS solution is the industry workhorse, the FOSS solution ends up being the thing that gets extended. LLVM is FOSS, and is also where research into optimizing compilers happens. R is FOSS, and is also the usual choice of platform to bind to for projects like WordNet, because they want to use R to do analysis against their project’s specialized data structures.

But that just means that for those industries, Linux is the locked-in platform, since it’s where these tools (or more specifically, their ecosystems of libraries and tooling, which may not always be as multiplatform as the runtime itself) run natively and/or best. But this is just as bad a situation, in many ways, as having the “industry workhorse” be a proprietary solution like Photoshop or Mathematica. Either way, you’ve got one system with all the effort concentrated on it, where sloppy algorithms get a pass because they’re the only implementation of said algorithm, and there’s no real competition to force the ecosystem forward. Sure, you could read the source and implement a competitor yourself—but given industry-developer network effects, few people start out hopeful for their prospects when they do so.

One of the things I've noticed about FOSS is that it tends to be very good at replicating proprietary solutions, but it very frequently stumbles when innovating on new ones. I think it's because there's a shortage of qualified designers and marketers that are interested in contributing. Or maybe it's just easier to get people on the same page when it's very clear what the thing is meant to be. Or maybe if you have a new idea, you want to try commercializing it before you give it away. Probably all three really. But TBH that's what makes me skeptical that userland FOSS is ever really going to be dominant.

The biggest successes of FOSS have pretty much all been by technical people for technical people (linux kernel, developer tools, servers, etc.). Those are great things, but it seems like things aimed at non-technical users almost always end up being pretty niche. (I will slightly disagree on Blender though, the latest release 2.8 release is shaping up to be really impressive -- I've been a long time Maya user and I'm actually considering switching)