> My interest in free or open source software has never been either political or industrial. My interest has always been educational. That is, access to the source code provided the opportunity to learn from it. So, in the same spirit as the Open Source / Free Software distinction, I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.
As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.
> I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.
I can find no evidence of this term being used anywhere outside of this piece; FLOSS is consistently expanded by people discussing the term as “Free/Libre and Open Source", where “Libre” disambiguates the sense of “free”.
The author may have coined a term that happens to spelled identically to a popular term, but the clear insinuation that the popular term refers to the authors hobby horse is grossly misleading and obviously deliberately so.
Richard Stallmann has an interesting piece on FLOSS and FOSS definition, containing this:
> A researcher studying practices and methods used by developers in the free software community decided that these questions were independent of the developers' political views, so he used the term “FLOSS,”
Unfortunately he doesn't name that researcher, whom he is attributing FLOSS to. Anyone knows?
According to Stallmann "FLOSS" is the most inclusive term including open source with a non-free license though:
> Thus, if you want to be neutral between free software and open source, and clear about them, the way to achieve that is to say “FLOSS,” not “FOSS.”
So and I'm suprised by that, while L stands for libre according to Stallman, the acronym FLOSS is a actually a more liberal term because it is neutral to whether the software in question free or only open source.
People are focusing on the "liberal software" part but boy is the article full of dismissiveness of the real concerns of people who care about freedom and social justice where it connects with software. "Software vendors won’t usually be inserting spyware into their wares." Are you sure about that? It sounds like someone has been selectively reading the news for the last decade or so, somehow the author skipped the Snowden leaks and if you need something more recent, the controversy around Zoom.
This is a terrible document that is riddled with so many inaccuracies that it doesn't convince anyone other than the uninformed. If anything, the last few years have highlighted the need for Free Software and proved many of the alarmist warnings of advocates were prescient actually and not so alarmist.
> In the GPLv3 (and it was there in GPLv2 and v1) clauses 15 and 16 are the Disclaimer of Warranty and the Limitation of Liability. To be fair, proprietary software licenses have the same clauses, but the free-softers cannot claim the moral high ground here. These licenses assert that if the software causes any harm, the people who wrote it aren’t liable (limitation of liability).
This is an inane argument. Limiting your liability isn't some kind of moral evil. The potential for harm due to defects always exists, and if you provide a good or service to someone, you have to negotiate with that person who will accept the liability for it.
Generic software licenses limit liability because it's usually much cheaper for the end user to assume the liability as they have far greater knowledge of their practical risks.
A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.
> A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.
Hmm... I hadn't though about the implications of this before. Is this a solution to the mythical funding balance the industry is failing to achieve? Enterprise software already operates like this. What if e.g. github reframed its project sponsorship model as something that involved getting maintainers setup with liability insurance and the ability to offer sponsors warranty and liability for their software.
My concern with the rust ecosystem right now is that it goes the way of node and projects just get littered with endless libraries that were fresh and hot at one point in time. Often times you open issues and it takes days or weeks to get a response if at all because the maintainers have moved on.
I'd be super interested in only using dependencies where I could subscribe to liability and warranty service after I've tried them out and they're want I'm going to roll with. And you would even potentially see interesting things like "pure" chains where all software used is covered by somebody.
This model would also have the interesting effect of promoting software design and language selection that results in "easier to warrant" not just "does the job" and maintainers that do a better job at writing good software would bubble to the top since their liability insurance premiums would stay cheap. If you write too much crappy software, at some point it becomes unaffordable and you go work for Facebook (it's a joke! you get the point).
yes. and to add to this, the fitness for use in some safety critical system, and we talk about functional safety here, is strictly regulated. functional safety requires process discipline at the system level, evidence based engineering and evidences for soundness of scrutiny, at the system level and then down to the components.
in that light it is a moral obligation to remind consumers of the technology about their obligations. The legalese may sound just evasive, and motivated by the us environment of litigations by stupid people, but seriously: fitness for use is am obligation of the systems engineer, not the provider of FOSS.
elisa.tech is a community to enable Linux in safety applications. even there, the responsibility is with the consumer of their work, they also just seek methods and inputs for system safety engineering, which, when used by a system safety engineer may lead to a certifiable, and then liability covered device. like an adas system powered by Linux.
What a hugely misinformed, but well coordinated, direct attack. Just look at the timing and how many of them came after RMS was reappointed to the FSF board of directors.
The message behind this guy's article has nothing to do with his views about Free Software; it's rather "Ditch RMS for good or we'll submerge the FSF under a pile of mud".
> So, for example, if it were to turn out that, all other things being equal, providing source code for libraries could be shown to produce software of inferior quality (and there is much evidence to support such a conclusion) [...]
Wait, WHAT?!
This is not an accidental negation, he refers to it in the rest of the paragraph.
This person must be trolling or testing bullshit arguments to see which ones sort of fly, for use in whatever bullshit-oriented job they do.
I share your feeling that the author is throwing a lot of BS onto the wall, knowing that some of it will stick. I believe this is a well-executed tactic because I don't think this article is written for software developers, it's written for slacktivists and the public at large. There are just too many parts where he tries to hide behind generalized statements designed to garner superficial agreement.
The fact that this got a lot of exposure should serve as a warning sign though. The FSF is vulnerable and struggling to maintain relevance. Both the re-hiring and the controversy around RMS illustrate that in my opinion: whenever the discourse gets diverted away from Free software, it's a distraction they can ill afford.
Either they didn't know that this would happen or they wanted it to happen. In any case, they're now even more vulnerable to these kinds of hit pieces, and I'm afraid the RMS issue could generate enough public interest for larger publications to execute successful strikes against the idea of Free software itself.
That statement was what caught my interest in this piece.
What is the "much evidence" which the author refers to? I'm genuinely interested; if anyone here knows of any such evidence, please, tell us! What is it?
My personal experience is the exact opposite; I have not personally found closed-source libraries to offer better quality in general. Of course, there is a lot of junk out there which is open source. But most of the small number of rock-solid, tried-tested-and-true code libraries which I am aware of are open source.
There is so much disinformation from an apparently knowledgeable person, that it has to be intentional. No way an ignorant person would create all those falsehoods in the article by a random chance of being mistaken.
I admit I did not read the whole essay, but I think the idea of free software is more relevant today than ever, and is only getting more so. In fact, I think we're approaching the "runaway" part of an exponential curve.
We're in a place where non-programmers and non-hackers are waking up to the importance of transparency and data ownership, and there's no way to achieve that without free software.
I like the idea of public software mentioned in the article, which I understand to be software which is fully transparent and verifiable by everyone, which also sounds a lot like free software.
I think the term "public" is more understandable by a non-technical person, and I may adopt using it after some consideration.
> In fact, I think we're approaching the "runaway" part of an exponential curve.
Tangential nitpick: There's no "runaway" part of an exponential curve. At every point along the x-axis (typically time), the curve looks exactly the same. This property is often abused by writers who want to make you believe that now is the time when everything changes – although in fairness, they often deceive themselves.
If you don't believe me, look at plots [1] and [2]. In both cases it looks like the past was flat and the "knee" of the curve is right in front of you, promising an exciting future!
I sure as hell won't install a browser extension if its source code isn't publicly available; I don't see how the government should or even could protect us from every update made to all of the software packages I import (even if the punishment for malware is severe); and large corporations may be able to get their hands on source code, but I don't trust them either. The FSF may be stuck in the '80s in some ways, but their fundamental principles are solid. I much prefer their vision to one that has users "freed" from source code, trusting large and opaque companies and government agencies, whose interests may not align with mine, to shield me from malicious actors, of which there are many. Honestly, if anyone is stuck in the past and not relevant anymore, it's not the FSF; it's people who downplay malicious actors, fail to recognize that software is often tiny, or updated frequently, or written by someone anonymous or outside of US jurisdiction whose behavior we can't punish with US law. A lot of software is made up of forks too, and not many software forks end up useless like in his anecdote about his company forking Windows... Yeah, this dude obviously hasn't been keeping up to speed since his retirement.
How much time on average do you spend on reviewing the source code of a given browser extension before you install it? Also, how do you make sure that the published source code is 1:1 with what you are actually installing?
> Protecting myself from bad actors is not my job. It is the government’s job.
Following recent events, the EFF, and the dealings of 3-letter agencies in the US, it seems the bad actor we all want to pretect ourselves from is the government.
Stallman is right, and was right so many times. Also, FLOSS is so ubiquitous that you dont even know yr using it. The internet runs on it. Android OS and Apple's OSes all use a lot of it. MS is even caving in.
As a developer, I agree with the sentiment that FLOSS won.
As a consumer, I think the situation is in some ways worse than ever. Consumer software used to be distributed to the end-users' PCs. You could store your data on your PC, and inspect the source code to make sure that nothing nefarious was going on. Now the code stays with the companies (so you can't modify it or learn from it), and you send your data to them via the browser.
If the author does not like GPL, FSF, etc., why don’t they just not participate in GPL and FSF matters. Why not let people choose what they like?
What do I like? I like diversity, all kinds of wonderfully different people, many types of software licenses, different cultures, etc. I would not tell anyone what kind of software license to use in the same way I would not tell someone who to vote for. The world is a better place when we embrace things and people different from our own tastes and selves.
I would have enjoyed the article more if the author had been brief in their criticisms, spending more time on their ideas about how they would license software and organize large public and proprietary projects.
EDIT: I should have also said that I enjoyed the article.
Strangly fixated on how "free software" is not a metonym. I wonder what the author would make of free speech, let alone the fact that grammer is completely irrelevant to the point at hand.
It then marshalls enough other bad arguments in a short enough period to be a gish gallop, and I gave up halfway through.
Honestly I felt the presise had some promise, software has changed and the FSF not so much, but this article does not convince or educate me of it.
Source-available software that has inoffensive terms and enforcement has allowed people to take Free Software for granted; much in the same manner that the lack on onerous stifling of speech has allowed many to take Free Speech for granted. Many young north americans think speech should face more limits, for instance.
Just to pile on to all of the other fallacies and falsehoods in the article
> This conspiracy theory goes something like this: If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell
How is this a conspiracy theory? We literally see it happening in the news all the time. See Solarwinds, NSA backdoors, etc. And on the flip side catching the insertion of malware into the the Great Suspender Chrome extension. These are just the first things that come to mind in 2 seconds.
You can quite easily inspect the Great Suspender code (since it's just code in a folder), but it's not like Chrome gives you a diff when it updates. For months, nobody noticed, and there are still a lot more people who didn't notice.
> If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell — whereas the bad actor would not be able get away with such nefariousness if you had access to the source code.
But it's true. People act more socially if they think they are watched or they think they could be watched. They don't actually have to be watched. If people think their source code will be examined, they will do less antisocial things. It is very rare to have deliberately malicious features in free software, whereas we have a whole class of dark patterns in dark software.
The exceptions are things like Chrome or Firefox that are such giant and unwieldy codebases that they might as well be opaque boxes. In the case of Chrome, the Chrome builds you use contain secret sauce from Google in order to make it easier for Google to show you ads, different from Chromium.
Firefox occasionally also tries to embed anti-user features, but then distributors such as Debian may notice them and remove them when repackaging the software.
Mostly, I think FSF's original ideas have been achieved. It is possible today to buy a machine running entirely free software. Major problem now is that such machine is either expensive or old.
It looks like the focus now should turn to hardware. The world needs a free hardware foundation today just like it needed FSF in the 80's.
Some of the original ideas might have been achieved, but they are constantly under attack one way or the other -- some more brutal, some more indirect.
There is a war going on against General Purpose Computing, and walled gardens have become the norm. We need the FSF -- or something like it -- more than ever.
I would refer you to my previous comment but - for once! - I don't want to be an asshole. (Plus, dang would probably ban me.)
This is possible in the same way as it's possible to build a nuclear weapon in a garage. There is no theoretical barrier, but out of 7-8 billion people, I'm betting the number of those who actually did it is a close approximation of zero.
Where, exactly, are you going to buy a regular personal computer that comes with free - LIBRE - software in BIOS, microcode, TPM, video card, network card, and finally OS? Asking for a friend.
This definitely riled up a lot of people. The comments point out many flaws, but I’m not seeing rebuttals to what I find to be the core arguments:
* The overlap between what the FSF thinks a majority of users want and what they actually want is minuscule
* The FSF failed to inspire new leaders
* The FSF, a political foundation, has no governance agenda
* The FSF missed the boat on a plurality of software revolutions, causing free software to capture only a small portion of the explosive growth of all FLOSS software
Right or wrong, all these are completely irrelevant. FSF is not a government, they don't HAVE to serve the majority of peoples want. FSF is not a corporation that has to remain relevant for the benefit of it's shareholders. FSF stands for whatever FSF stands for and whoever agrees can sign up. If one disagrees they are welcome to move on with their lives (or kinrly argue about what would be better). What we see here is an attempt to hold FSF accountable to some arbitary standards in order to paint them inadequate, allowing us to conclude they are irrelevant. This is a fallacy. However, this attempt goes even further. So what if they are irrelevant? So what if they have stagnated? What if they are out of touch? What's the harm to society? Why does the author need to compile a bunch of false and childish arguments to put them down?
A more fitting wording of the first point might be "The overlap between (the FSF-backed) software respecting user rights and interests and what users actually want to use in reality is minuscule."
The issue is not that the FSF failed, more that most people simply don't care enough. Similar to privacy, which in the end leads to revelations like Snowden's leaks or the Equifax data breach to be effectively shrugged off by most. Not because it's unimportant, but because in the real world it's very low on the average person's worries. Many non-tech people still struggle with sending emails or telling the difference between SMS and WhatsApp messages; issues that Stallman talks about are simply not relatable for many despite their relevance.
Which, in my opinion, makes the further development of FLOSS(or however you want to call it) software only more important. So that the typical user has a point of comparison and knows what can and should be expected from software products. That weird bugs, intransparent behaviour and dark patterns are not supposed to be the norm.
Yeah that's what i thought, the article is confusing freedom with safety.
So what if the majority of their users want safety instead of freedom, why don't they make their own foundation? Should Toyota start making chocolate because their users like chocolate?
> The FSF failed to inspire new leaders
I thought this has to do more with the sociology of software developers. They are rich now, most of them immigrants with different ambitions, they are going for fast money and early retirement. Easy money makes it hard to grow the idealist in them
Also i think the author has a limited view of freedom. Most people don't have a use for their freedoms, that's true and human reality. But those marginal, extreme freedoms should be available to the few who will use them to expand the human frontier.
When HN goes ad hominem I usually bookmark whatever HN got riled up about to read later. It's a sign that there's something interesting to think about ;)
This guy is a nutcase trying his best to destroy a revolutionary movement and one of the few tools left for the individual to fight corporate domination. Flagged for being a paid attack.
>Almost forty years ago, in 1985, the idea of “Free Software” was born.
Seems kind of nonsense. Free software was a thing from the dawn of software. From Wikipedia:
>In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public-domain software.
[+] [-] cwyers|5 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
I can find no evidence of this term being used anywhere outside of this piece; FLOSS is consistently expanded by people discussing the term as “Free/Libre and Open Source", where “Libre” disambiguates the sense of “free”.
The author may have coined a term that happens to spelled identically to a popular term, but the clear insinuation that the popular term refers to the authors hobby horse is grossly misleading and obviously deliberately so.
[+] [-] dominicl|5 years ago|reply
> A researcher studying practices and methods used by developers in the free software community decided that these questions were independent of the developers' political views, so he used the term “FLOSS,”
Unfortunately he doesn't name that researcher, whom he is attributing FLOSS to. Anyone knows?
According to Stallmann "FLOSS" is the most inclusive term including open source with a non-free license though:
> Thus, if you want to be neutral between free software and open source, and clear about them, the way to achieve that is to say “FLOSS,” not “FOSS.”
So and I'm suprised by that, while L stands for libre according to Stallman, the acronym FLOSS is a actually a more liberal term because it is neutral to whether the software in question free or only open source.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
[+] [-] andrelaszlo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
It's not a brand new construction (the link has the author of the piece using the term several years ago). I think you are right about the L though.
[+] [-] noobermin|5 years ago|reply
This is a terrible document that is riddled with so many inaccuracies that it doesn't convince anyone other than the uninformed. If anything, the last few years have highlighted the need for Free Software and proved many of the alarmist warnings of advocates were prescient actually and not so alarmist.
[+] [-] ben509|5 years ago|reply
This is an inane argument. Limiting your liability isn't some kind of moral evil. The potential for harm due to defects always exists, and if you provide a good or service to someone, you have to negotiate with that person who will accept the liability for it.
Generic software licenses limit liability because it's usually much cheaper for the end user to assume the liability as they have far greater knowledge of their practical risks.
A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.
[+] [-] dcow|5 years ago|reply
Hmm... I hadn't though about the implications of this before. Is this a solution to the mythical funding balance the industry is failing to achieve? Enterprise software already operates like this. What if e.g. github reframed its project sponsorship model as something that involved getting maintainers setup with liability insurance and the ability to offer sponsors warranty and liability for their software.
My concern with the rust ecosystem right now is that it goes the way of node and projects just get littered with endless libraries that were fresh and hot at one point in time. Often times you open issues and it takes days or weeks to get a response if at all because the maintainers have moved on.
I'd be super interested in only using dependencies where I could subscribe to liability and warranty service after I've tried them out and they're want I'm going to roll with. And you would even potentially see interesting things like "pure" chains where all software used is covered by somebody.
This model would also have the interesting effect of promoting software design and language selection that results in "easier to warrant" not just "does the job" and maintainers that do a better job at writing good software would bubble to the top since their liability insurance premiums would stay cheap. If you write too much crappy software, at some point it becomes unaffordable and you go work for Facebook (it's a joke! you get the point).
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
Package registries would shut down overnight.
[+] [-] froh|5 years ago|reply
in that light it is a moral obligation to remind consumers of the technology about their obligations. The legalese may sound just evasive, and motivated by the us environment of litigations by stupid people, but seriously: fitness for use is am obligation of the systems engineer, not the provider of FOSS.
elisa.tech is a community to enable Linux in safety applications. even there, the responsibility is with the consumer of their work, they also just seek methods and inputs for system safety engineering, which, when used by a system safety engineer may lead to a certifiable, and then liability covered device. like an adas system powered by Linux.
[+] [-] robomc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahartmetz|5 years ago|reply
Wait, WHAT?!
This is not an accidental negation, he refers to it in the rest of the paragraph.
This person must be trolling or testing bullshit arguments to see which ones sort of fly, for use in whatever bullshit-oriented job they do.
[+] [-] ud_0|5 years ago|reply
The fact that this got a lot of exposure should serve as a warning sign though. The FSF is vulnerable and struggling to maintain relevance. Both the re-hiring and the controversy around RMS illustrate that in my opinion: whenever the discourse gets diverted away from Free software, it's a distraction they can ill afford.
Either they didn't know that this would happen or they wanted it to happen. In any case, they're now even more vulnerable to these kinds of hit pieces, and I'm afraid the RMS issue could generate enough public interest for larger publications to execute successful strikes against the idea of Free software itself.
[+] [-] alexdowad|5 years ago|reply
What is the "much evidence" which the author refers to? I'm genuinely interested; if anyone here knows of any such evidence, please, tell us! What is it?
My personal experience is the exact opposite; I have not personally found closed-source libraries to offer better quality in general. Of course, there is a lot of junk out there which is open source. But most of the small number of rock-solid, tried-tested-and-true code libraries which I am aware of are open source.
[+] [-] lamp987|5 years ago|reply
There is so much disinformation from an apparently knowledgeable person, that it has to be intentional. No way an ignorant person would create all those falsehoods in the article by a random chance of being mistaken.
[+] [-] forgotmypw17|5 years ago|reply
We're in a place where non-programmers and non-hackers are waking up to the importance of transparency and data ownership, and there's no way to achieve that without free software.
I like the idea of public software mentioned in the article, which I understand to be software which is fully transparent and verifiable by everyone, which also sounds a lot like free software.
I think the term "public" is more understandable by a non-technical person, and I may adopt using it after some consideration.
[+] [-] adwn|5 years ago|reply
Tangential nitpick: There's no "runaway" part of an exponential curve. At every point along the x-axis (typically time), the curve looks exactly the same. This property is often abused by writers who want to make you believe that now is the time when everything changes – although in fairness, they often deceive themselves.
If you don't believe me, look at plots [1] and [2]. In both cases it looks like the past was flat and the "knee" of the curve is right in front of you, promising an exciting future!
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+exp%28x%29+x+%3D+...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+exp%28x%29+x+%3D+...
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
https://publiccode.eu
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Open/Free/Public software is obviously very useful.
But it's the 'copyleft' stuff that I think the author is taking umbrage with.
It's arguably we don't really need copyleft to do any of the things you indicate as being important.
[+] [-] archduck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dt3ft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cies|5 years ago|reply
> Protecting myself from bad actors is not my job. It is the government’s job.
Following recent events, the EFF, and the dealings of 3-letter agencies in the US, it seems the bad actor we all want to pretect ourselves from is the government.
Stallman is right, and was right so many times. Also, FLOSS is so ubiquitous that you dont even know yr using it. The internet runs on it. Android OS and Apple's OSes all use a lot of it. MS is even caving in.
FLOSS won.
[+] [-] mrkeen|5 years ago|reply
As a consumer, I think the situation is in some ways worse than ever. Consumer software used to be distributed to the end-users' PCs. You could store your data on your PC, and inspect the source code to make sure that nothing nefarious was going on. Now the code stays with the companies (so you can't modify it or learn from it), and you send your data to them via the browser.
[+] [-] b1daly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|5 years ago|reply
If the author does not like GPL, FSF, etc., why don’t they just not participate in GPL and FSF matters. Why not let people choose what they like?
What do I like? I like diversity, all kinds of wonderfully different people, many types of software licenses, different cultures, etc. I would not tell anyone what kind of software license to use in the same way I would not tell someone who to vote for. The world is a better place when we embrace things and people different from our own tastes and selves.
I would have enjoyed the article more if the author had been brief in their criticisms, spending more time on their ideas about how they would license software and organize large public and proprietary projects.
EDIT: I should have also said that I enjoyed the article.
[+] [-] BorisTheBrave|5 years ago|reply
It then marshalls enough other bad arguments in a short enough period to be a gish gallop, and I gave up halfway through.
Honestly I felt the presise had some promise, software has changed and the FSF not so much, but this article does not convince or educate me of it.
[+] [-] dleslie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rezonant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmageggy|5 years ago|reply
> This conspiracy theory goes something like this: If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell
How is this a conspiracy theory? We literally see it happening in the news all the time. See Solarwinds, NSA backdoors, etc. And on the flip side catching the insertion of malware into the the Great Suspender Chrome extension. These are just the first things that come to mind in 2 seconds.
[+] [-] herf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedays|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordigh|5 years ago|reply
But it's true. People act more socially if they think they are watched or they think they could be watched. They don't actually have to be watched. If people think their source code will be examined, they will do less antisocial things. It is very rare to have deliberately malicious features in free software, whereas we have a whole class of dark patterns in dark software.
The exceptions are things like Chrome or Firefox that are such giant and unwieldy codebases that they might as well be opaque boxes. In the case of Chrome, the Chrome builds you use contain secret sauce from Google in order to make it easier for Google to show you ads, different from Chromium.
Firefox occasionally also tries to embed anti-user features, but then distributors such as Debian may notice them and remove them when repackaging the software.
Again, these two are rare cases.
[+] [-] marcodiego|5 years ago|reply
It looks like the focus now should turn to hardware. The world needs a free hardware foundation today just like it needed FSF in the 80's.
[+] [-] the_af|5 years ago|reply
There is a war going on against General Purpose Computing, and walled gardens have become the norm. We need the FSF -- or something like it -- more than ever.
[+] [-] fimpartners|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdpopescu|5 years ago|reply
This is possible in the same way as it's possible to build a nuclear weapon in a garage. There is no theoretical barrier, but out of 7-8 billion people, I'm betting the number of those who actually did it is a close approximation of zero.
Where, exactly, are you going to buy a regular personal computer that comes with free - LIBRE - software in BIOS, microcode, TPM, video card, network card, and finally OS? Asking for a friend.
[+] [-] fay59|5 years ago|reply
* The overlap between what the FSF thinks a majority of users want and what they actually want is minuscule * The FSF failed to inspire new leaders * The FSF, a political foundation, has no governance agenda * The FSF missed the boat on a plurality of software revolutions, causing free software to capture only a small portion of the explosive growth of all FLOSS software
Is any of this incorrect?
[+] [-] gtsop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alpaca128|5 years ago|reply
The issue is not that the FSF failed, more that most people simply don't care enough. Similar to privacy, which in the end leads to revelations like Snowden's leaks or the Equifax data breach to be effectively shrugged off by most. Not because it's unimportant, but because in the real world it's very low on the average person's worries. Many non-tech people still struggle with sending emails or telling the difference between SMS and WhatsApp messages; issues that Stallman talks about are simply not relatable for many despite their relevance.
Which, in my opinion, makes the further development of FLOSS(or however you want to call it) software only more important. So that the typical user has a point of comparison and knows what can and should be expected from software products. That weird bugs, intransparent behaviour and dark patterns are not supposed to be the norm.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
So what if the majority of their users want safety instead of freedom, why don't they make their own foundation? Should Toyota start making chocolate because their users like chocolate?
> The FSF failed to inspire new leaders
I thought this has to do more with the sociology of software developers. They are rich now, most of them immigrants with different ambitions, they are going for fast money and early retirement. Easy money makes it hard to grow the idealist in them
Also i think the author has a limited view of freedom. Most people don't have a use for their freedoms, that's true and human reality. But those marginal, extreme freedoms should be available to the few who will use them to expand the human frontier.
[+] [-] heenrik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
https://lwn.net/Articles/712376/
Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
Seems kind of nonsense. Free software was a thing from the dawn of software. From Wikipedia:
>In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public-domain software.
[+] [-] selfhoster11|5 years ago|reply