Free software hasn't won

Good point. Wasn't going to say the fight is useless, just that those who know are the minority.

Ya think? I mean, I agree 100% that was the good fight. But to take a tangent here? That's falling apart, world wide.

It's falling apart because the average person wants to be "smart". I applaud this, the fact that people want to learn, want to know, want to understand.

Yet now, when they try to learn? To understand? They end up with youtube. Tiktok. Pages of AI slop. They're told what is "astonishing" or "proves that scientists don't have a clue!". They're told that gibberish is real, that those lab-coats are all evil, or trying to poison people, and so on. Or even better to their egos, that the lab-coats aren't so smart, and with this "one simple trick", you can be smarter than them!

This is coupled with outrage!!, when this rarely tends to be the case. Yes, there is corporate greed and it gets caught, recalls happen, mistakes happen, yet 99.99999% of the products and services just work. No one notices that aspect, only the "big news" of the tiny, rare, unusual failures of our system.

And then on top of that, politics enters the scene. Now, it's "us vs them" on matters like medicine?! Or health? Or school? What?! And no it's not just "one side", it's both sides, just in different ways.

People used to say things like "I don't know". Now people who can barely write, and read, have opinions on everything. They have no idea of the science behind things, but they'll just say "Oh! I saw this on youtube by a random person I've never heard of before! That's true, not what I learned in school!"

And the worst part is, we want people to think "being smart" is important. We want intellectual betterment. Yet now this is twisted and warped against the light of knowledge, for now everyone craves it, but are given the ashes of burned truths. All provided by false profits, so they can pocket some coin.

As far as I'm concerned, youtube and tiktok need to die. Social media needs to die. There are other solutions, but Google, Meta, the rest only care about cash, profit, and not one iota about fixing this.

So if they won't fix it? Then we must destroy it.

And can we? Nope! Because the public LOVES it. Loves loves loves it.

So back to FOSS. I've dedicated my entire life to FOSS. But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on.

I'm not happy about it, but if you can't get people to even be interested about privacy violations by Google on their Android device? How will you get them to even remotely care about FOSS?

Parent is right. Only geeks care.

> opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness

Surely you can think of more reasons than that.

When I choose to play Mario Kart with my kids, it's not because I'm too lazy to download and install Tux Racer.

There are some attempts at things like this: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs

They're usually very hard to get share because machine manufacturers can smash out cheaper things via processes like castings, mouldings and stampings, then eventually lock down spares (or just don't bother).

The open source option basically only be worse (but maybe more repairable) and/or more expensive than the alternatives, except when there is no alternative in the market. And China is providing so much mid-grade affordable and fairly functional stuff there often is an alternative even in the most isolated places. In 1980, getting a decent lathe in some town in, say, Angola might have been basically impossible. Now, it's still not cheap, but it's not completely impractical. If you can get bearings and induction-hardened shafts you'd need to DIY, you can get the whole thing, and maybe even cheaper.

It's a bit depressing, because of course I want to see the world flooded with high-quality, modular, very standardised, re-usable, repairable, hackable items, but that approach has a limited market in reality.

Even their own manufacturers don’t know what’s in a bearing assembly they manufactured ten years ago, all they can do is sell you a new one with the same spec. Rolling element bearings are specified by application; shaft diameter, load direction, and so on. Manufacturers change important things about bearings, like how many rolling elements they have, without necessarily changing the part number. It’s worse than closed: after some time has passed, nobody anywhere knows how it was made.

Software is unique in a few ways. It has the ability to spy on us, to be insecure and against our best interests if an attacker gains control. It can also lock us in in ways that are harder with just physical objects. Infact printer ink lockin happens using software not e.g. the shape of the cartridge.

This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile computing platforms but if a sizable portion of personal computers remain using free software it will be hard for the big corporations to fully close the web or make platform attestation truly required for everything.

Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.

Multiple devices is the answer. Otherwise you end up with people having their banking hacked because they installed a game mod.

> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to?

Yes.

Well, sort of. They don't actually have to do anything. Nobody wants to force them to work for us, that's slavery.

Just don't get in our way when we start writing and using our own software. That's the "support" we want. Just stay out of our way. Leave us alone, without actively discriminating against us for it.

> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to? By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?

The same mechanism that stops a bank from saying, "sure you can withdraw more than $10,000 from your account and we won't ask any questions about what you plan to do with it" - explicit financial regulation with real penalties attached to it, that banks systematically adhere to. I'm not necessarily a fan of all legal regulations around banks or other financial product providers - this is a huge reason I'm interested in truly decentralized cryptocurrency systems - but given that the regulated fiat financial system does exist and is widely used, we might as well demand that these regulations include provisions that the bank has to let people running free smartphone OSs connect to their systems too.

> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company.

We need nerds who care about this to stop complaining about minor things in existing GNU/Linux phones and other similar devices on the market and go buy them. These hardware companies have been there for years already.

It's hard to build a profitable and sustainable business only basing on the minority that doesn't mind it being "too thick", "too slow", "not high-res enough" or "unable to run modern PC games" (all of these are real things I heard from people here, no kidding). And I assure you that if you really care, you'll easily find a way to live with a (swappable) battery that lasts 20 hours.

> By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software?

Similar to all the accessibility requirements, of course. Do you think the society / government should force banks to provide services to blind or deaf people? Or should we just let the market decide?

> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.

We need nerds that are more politically conscious than that, and are not naive enough to believe they can solve political problems through creating companies and hardware.

I've done research on this, and have considered it but it's capital and time intensive even if I think it's viable.

There are two reasons I think it's viable now:

1. It's possible to wire an agentic system management service into the OS to handle a lot of the routine stuff, so non-technical users will be able to just talk to their computer and it'll be fine tuned to be good at fixing system issues, installing/removing software, managing windows, etc. I developed a scheduling inversion of control executor for enterprise agent control that I've looked into adapting for this use case.

2. The steam deck has proven a new model. Game friendly and a simplified UI is enough to carry Linux. New Arch rices like Omarchy are pushing the envelope of usability. I've been ricing desktops since enlightenment on slackware 96, so I'm pretty familiar with this world.

Regarding form factor, I'm not a huge fan of phones, too many tradeoffs. I think with strong AI voice systems, the optimal setup is buds + tablet. That's a better setup for mobile linux anyhow, and it makes the hardware almost a non-issue.

This is a valid take. I do not agree with it in general: if we look beside the consumer devices, FOSS software us everywhere. and powers almost everything consequential.

But the mobile phones specifically turned from phones into trusted terminal which institutions like banks and governments use to let users control large amounts of money and responsibility. And the first rule of a secure device is to be limited. In particular, the device should limit the ability of its owner to fake its identity, or do unauthorized things with networking, camera, etc.

This junction of a general portable computer and a secure terminal is very unfortunate, because it exerts a very real pressure on the general computing part. Malicious users exist, hence more and more locking, attestation, etc, so that the other side could trust the mobile phone as a secure terminal.

It would be great to have a mobile computer where you can run whatever you please, because it's nobody's business. And additionally there'd be a security attachment that runs software which is limited, vetted, signed, completely locked-up and tamper-proof on the hardware level (also open-source), which sides of the communication would trust. Think about a Yubikey, or a TPM, but larger and more capable. The cellular modem and a SIM card are other examples, even though they may be not as severely hardened. They are still quite severely limited, and this is good.

If I were to offer an open-source phone (and, frankly, any mobile phone), I would consider following this principle. Much like the cellular modem, it would carry a locked up and certified security block, which would not be user-alterable. It would be also quite limited, unable to snoop into the rest of the phone. The rest of the phone would be a general-purpose computer with few limitations. Anything that would want to run on it securely would connect to the unforgeable interface of the security module, and do encryption / decryption / signing / secure storage that other parties, local and remote, would be able to verify and thus trust.

One can dream.

Nerd have been at it since the OpenMoko days, the problem is that they don't understand what the general public cares about, thus all those efforts end up failing, as the few nerds that care about being customers all get a phone, and there isn't anyone left to keep the business going, buying new devices.

Pointless. Silicon fabs currently cost billions of dollars. They are single points of failure. Even if the market starts trending towards openness, governments can just regulate a backdoor into these fabs. They have every incentive in the world to do it. Democratized access to cryptography is subversive.

We need some kind of 3D printer that can print computer chips. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own software at home. Democratized electronics fabrication. That's the only way we'll be saved.

> Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms.

To wit, hardware that I bought is not "their platform", but many corporations sure like to pretend it is.

It's already not illegal to reverse engineer hardware you have bought (for the purpose of maintaining it or compatibility), regardless of how much IP lawyers like to pretend otherwise. (And even if it were illegal, I would contend that reverse engineering is a fundamental right that laws cannot rob you of.)

> Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms.

Yeah? They shouldn't be. Any attempt to deny us service on the basis of the software we use should be classified as discrimination. It should be a crime of the same caliber as racial discrimination.

When BlackRock has stake in 95% of fortune 500 companies, and we are forced to use software and services provided by them because no viable FOSS alternatives exist, it becomes, and already is, a big problem.

You have to own a phone to participate in society these days. I need one to even log onto my laptop for work. Eventually I'm sure some form of digital ID / biometric information will be required for verifying my online identity.

It's a slippery slope, and we're sliding into the abyss.

This is indeed a way to cope. But why should we have to merely cope? Why do we accept the world getting objectively worse? The necessary technology is cheaper, better and more abundant than ever – so why are we letting a few megacorps and some power-hungry politicians decide how we use it?

> This looks like a loser's move, but if your bank has no other options except for mobile app, you can…

…switch banks.

I think it's fair to put it as a failure, as the overtone window moved so much it now sounds normal that regulation, liability or econ interfere with openness.

The very fact "right to repair" had to be coined, proclaimed and we're fighting for it is a regression from the early days when repairing a radio wouldn't be violating some clause.

Of course, the openness was more accidental or pragmatic than really intended, and we saw companies slowly put up the barriers as they found technical and legal ways to do it (like forbidding plugging third party phones to the network for instance). If it's a frontier, IMHO it would be more akin to the battlefields front lines than anything else.

Put another way, the battle has always been social and legal.

It has lost in it's goal of giving freedom to the end users which is the real goal.

John Deere has built a great tractor that the company itself prevents you from repairing without their involvement.

The only beneficiary of open source there is John Deere.

> Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier.

It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

Google recently changed their security policy regarding Android, where there's now a 3-4 month delay between when OEMs get access to security patches and when they're posted to AOSP (it was previously 1 month). The patches are broadly distributed to OEMs, so there's no significant barrier to attackers and companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite obtaining them. GrapheneOS has access to the patches, but the embargoed nature means they're not able to publish the patch source code or any details about what vulnerabilities are being patched. This means that GrapheneOS users are forced to choose whether to opt into the closed source patches and get recent vulnerabilities patched, but lose out on having an open OS.

> a large proportion of modern open-source systems is composed of free (in the FSF sense) software.

The critical parts aren't though, and that's where it matters the most, IMHO intentionally so.

An HP printer being 99% based on free components won't be a tangible improvement if the last 1% vehemently prevents it's free use. Open source being the core of the OS doesn't help if nothing can replace iOS on an iPhone.

We're in a world where free software has massively grown, while the day to day impacts are IMHO comparatively small. It feels like we're more free than ever, inside our new confinement cells.

What replaces YouTube is a symmetrical internet where people can upload lots, and probably something like popcorn time. Then some discoverability. The only issue is lack of moderation because of "bad videos". Can't have nice things :(

Back in the day, it was the X/Open group that was muddying the waters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open

Libre software (as in Liberty).

> and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors

They shouldn't have to if the software is properly made. I am not talking about teaching normies to install Docker apps, but teaching them why FOSS is important and the implications of using corporate-owned tools.