Maybe we don't live in the same world???
> The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions.
Yes, but this software is not empowering the users, it is controlling them, isolating them, radicalizing them and making them feel more depressed.
And:
>In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development.
What, exactly, is supposed to be new here? I see nothing distinguishing the economics of this "new consumer environment" from 1995, except maybe that Redhat doesn't sell CDs anymore.
What has changed since the 90s is increasingly onerous intellectual property law, anti-reverse-engineering laws, and the continued creep of the belief that ideas should be owned.
And this is precisely backwards:
> What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security.
If everybody's crazy uncle RMS had been more accommodating, more willing to compromise on ideology, things never would have changed in the 90s. One slightly cynical way of looking at it is that he was could play Bad Cop to ESR and others' more corporate-friendly, accommodationist "Open Source" promotion, somewhat similar (for much lower stakes) to how Huey Newton played bad-cop to MLK's nonviolence.
If you drop the principle of always putting the user first, you'll eventually compromise on everything else.
The free software model failed all the same in 1995 for a certain class of applications. It's great for high performance, challenging pieces of code, for kernels, servers and databases. Things with a large community of devolopers among the users, willing to push patches back. Things that look good on a CV. Software that needs to customized for professional users.
It's less good for mass market software. It's flawed for complete games (as opposed to game engines). It's bad for professional software not used by developers and that does not require customization. For example, it has never been able to displace most Adobe products, despite the numerous attempts and the revolting behavior of that company towards it's clients.
What changed was not the economic realities of free software. It's simply that the type of projects where it shines have grown much slower than the rest of the consumer software ecosystem. The world of computing moved ahead from the needs of programmers to the needs of ordinary people, many of whom are willing to pay .99 to solve them.
Insisting on "free to use" today stops you from realizing the other, more substantial free software freedoms, and deprives the projects from much needed resources in their competition with closed software.
On the computer side of things, for less than $100 ($200 if you need a screen), you can have a full, general purpose computer you can code on, new. And with internet access you can have all the documentation you need to get you started.
And the "web revolution" not empowering users? A simple example: buying an uncommon book used to take weeks, if possible at all. Now a few clicks on Amazon and you get it delivered the next day. Realtime communication to people anywhere in the world is almost a given now, it was somewhat possible 10 years ago but at a much different price. And what about navigation? If you have a working smartphone and data connection, getting lost is more or less impossible.
The part about controlling, isolating, radicalizing, and depressing people is debatable. Tech certainly has an effect but is it a net positive or a net negative? It is used to control people but also raises awareness. It makes people stay at home but facilitates communication. It radicalizes people but also expose them to mind opening diversity. It makes some people more depresses but provides outlets.
That's a horribly lopsided analysis. That's not to say that there are no examples or truth to the issues you raise, but it's far from the whole story. People do extract massive value from the communication, education, and entertainment features offered by the software in question.
The world is clearly better in many ways over the last 20 years - more productivity, more literacy, less crime, less poverty, more accessibility, more communication. Those improvements have also brought new problems: more radicalization, more surveillance, more exposure to “keeping up with the Jones’” that might lead to depression.
Are we creating more than we’ve solved? Maybe? There have been radicals and electric eyes online since BBS’ in the 80s, we just haven’t societally kept up with what was obviously going to happen when you drop the cost and barriers to communicating. I’m think we will fix things.
Outside mobile: Linux (the OS not the kernel) won the web.
Way back in the 'Linux on the desktop' days, KDE needed something like gtkhtml so KDE made KHTML and Konqueror. Apple needed a web browser and couldn't make one from scratch, so webkit was forked from KHTML. Chrome needed to fork webkit so made blink. Edge adopted blink too.
KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.
On the one hand yes, on the other Apple tried as hard as it could without technically violating the license that KHTML would get as little back from webkit as legally possible.
Reminds me of the 90s when RedHat's source CD wouldn't actually build their binary distro, but since almost noone ever tries, almost noone cares.
Amazing for whom? How much control does KDE have over the code they originally wrote? Last time i checked KHTML and Konqueror were abandoned.
The only major open source browser remains Firefox.
If Chrome etc were actually open source then the vendors would have less control of the browsers and users would have more control. End users could then build Chrome themselves.
Since these browsers are in reality proprietary it would make little difference to end users vs vendors level of control if they used 0% code from open source projects rather than 99% as they do at the moment. No one but Google can build Chrome either way.
So we broadly agree that there is nothing amazing about the current situation.
I however claim that if these browsers were Foss this would be different.
--- Yes I am aware of Chromium. But Chromium is not Chrome. For example Netflix supports Chrome and blocks Chromium.
Edit Removed suprious '?'
I said browser engines initially so I meant the browser engines. I also brought up Electron. Which doesn’t depend on Chrome. But the browser engine.
So I could’ve for a third time repeated WebKit, Edge’s open source Blink, and Blink/Chromium. I’m not sure if that’s the only point of your comment? Based on another comment it seems like being pedantic is your only point.
So what does it matter if the browser itself or as it is now, the engines are open source? Since that is still my question. What difference does it make?
The pedantry doesn’t change anything.
Foss comes with the requirement that you as the user have certain freedoms. With Chrome etc you do not have those freedoms.
Still you have said nothing of substance or use. It’s pedantic in this thread because I had already referred to the browser engines as open source and referred to electron. I didn’t explain what electron was either. You didn’t find a big problem with that.
And I’ll ask again, what differences would there be if the browsers themselves were open source? We already have Chromium vs Chrome. So what would be different if Chrome was open source?
Not to mention responding to anything else.
I wrote about this a few years back:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...
A) Linus won't stablize kernel ABI
B) Device manufacturers won't release driver code to allow recompilation of an updated kernel.
So this means an upgraded kernel needs upgraded drivers from manufacturers that match the kernel version, but manufacturers don't want to do this.
Not sure where I heard it but I thought that was one of things about Fuschia is the device ABI is a separate, stable layer.
Yes, but this is for very good reasons. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
Where classical Linux drivers are considered legacy (Passthrough HALs) and all new drivers since Android 8 are user space, written in either Java or C++ and talk to the kernel via Android IPC (Binderized HALs).
I wonder for how long we'll be able to use Gmail before it follows the G+ road.
Or are you saying you aren’t going to use anything new by them? That is probably the case and I misunderstood. Though it’s not like Google has any major hits this decade anyway. Everything mentioned is quite old.
Basically, yes. I don't even make the effort to log in to use any of their services, except for the Google account on my phone for the purposes of Play Store access. I'm just tired of being Charlie Brown trying to kick Google-Lucy's exciting-new-product-football.
I could be forgetting a few.
ART is being ported to run on top of Fucshia.
That's the real strength of Linux, creating appliances from commonly available hardware. The biggest mistake is therefore to copy Apple and MS and their general purpose approach, it will never work because the community isn't united like a company, every Linux camp seeks to make the best thing for their own purpose, and constantly clashes with other camps that want to do the same for themselves. A general purpose Linux OS is an anti pattern.
There is a need for general purpose computing, and Linux is one of the very few options there. That won't change.
One major beauty of Linux is its flexibility, so it can also provide niche/embedded products.
I think what precludes the final victory of open source is that the world itself changed for the better. The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions. These are people who wouldn't have been able to touch a PC twenty years ago, let alone understand or care about what source code is. They have vastly different expectations than the professional software users that created the free source movement in the image of the hackers of the 70s and 80s. Just look at the number of rooted phones sold. It's an appliance model of computing.
In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development. What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security.
The walled gardens of Google and Apple can be replicated. What is lacking is a free software business model that can gather the $1 billion or so required.