Observation of software freedom situation
Hello,
Just thoughts about what I observe around me.
Often I think that I'm frustrated about the situation and I also forget that in the mid 80s there were little to no of the free/libre software we have today.
RMS and friends succeeded, but still, the situation is dire.
There a too much subjects and the majority of the populations in each country is raised with a passive violent* mindset thus creating a strong recursive loop towards positive outcomes.
I observe that even in free/libre software, when conception of software is inefficient it becomes a Big Ball of Mud* and makes more casual users flee. And even in free/libre software that isn't destined for users but also for administrators or developers in which the Technical_debt* is so great that they can't follow with the few resources/time they have.
And besides software designs, standards like the "WEB" are almost their own operating system inside browsers, which defeats the purpose of a firewall btw, which was uMatrix doing.
Politics are not helping either, due to money or carrier making decisions m/billions of people still have little to no choice with the OS when they buy computers.
It is also frustrating to see the injected politics that are also tearing free/libre software communities apart and worse of some of these projects after forking the project demoted GPLv3 license to a MIT/Apache one which literally looks as disguised EEE* attempts.
Education combines all of these problems, bad education leads to very bad software, Ms, google, Adobe, amazon etc... and more are also sponsoring their own courses, plus the politics which misses all the irl subjects.
Population/users are extremely uneducated when it comes to computers. They don't know anything that is truly useful to them, even tho the computer should have been.
Their lack of knowledge means that they can be always abused by anyone with immoral goals.
And they have now the habit of never paying their software anymore. Indeed most of computer repairs shops, which are certainly violating the MS/apple licensing, are almost never proposing to pay their software license, and for two reason, the first is that well the repairs would be so high that repairs wouldn't be financially viable, and secondly because they just re-use the license or crack the DRM even tho non-legal.
Hardware is also each year worse and worse be it physical quality speaking or firmware quality/functions.
But I note that there are people trying their best to make Free/libre hardware accessible.
Since windows 7 IT techs have had the habit of not making a big fuss of validating the software or not since it wasn't something that blocked/broke the OS to the contrary of windows XP and I think that it was done on purpose because now win10 doesn't care about their keys being validated 1000 times, they have unlimited activation.
The people in MS knew/predicted that full OS DRM was bad money/future and they almost went to be a shareware but without really being a shareware.
They took the advantage of what GNU distributions had being able to share which each other, except it was still non legal.
MS took advantage of people's gift of naturally sharing with each other to spread even more even tho they knew that it would make people do illegal actions.
It is unfortunate that computers users don't contribute monetarily to free software developers more often. Why ? Because if we had more permanent developers for common users the adoption by them would be more easy. An example of this that I had a few weeks ago was a user of the proprietary email client "Outlook". When I did my repairs/configurations I proposed that person to migrate to thunderbird, that person accepted but after two week they asked me to revert and install "Outlook" instead.
And there would have less devs going to work for proprietary software in between of participating in free/libre software.
The reason is that they can't find themselves in the GUI. That users is part of the people who cannot adapt to another interface and they are many. Same thing for his android devices, the default google software didn't work for some reason, and after installing mutt it worked, but that users couldn't adapt to the GUI.
The story seems ludicrous if you never interacted with such people but they exist.
So what's the relations between money and these sort of users. Well you see in my mind is that if I knew more about software development I would have adapted the GUI to look like Outlooks or add missing/wanted functions. But I am not a developer.
Thus this is why I'd like to require my customers to now donate a minimum of 5 euros monthly for free/libre software development.
Problem is that in my country (France) creating a legal entity is a mazes of documentation/bureaucracy, I haven't yet finished documenting to make my own legal entity.
Take care.
*violent: In the NVC definition of violence https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=VT8KGgDo6TY
*BBoM: http://www.laputan.org/pub/foote/mud.pdf
*Technical_debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
*EEE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Nice post.
You can try to search for an article entitled "Open Source (sic) Saturation". It describes the difficulties that free software (movement) encounter.
Ultimately, software freedom, like any other freedom, is inherently incompatible with capitalism. Any effort to promote software freedom while defending capitalism is self defeating and doomed to total failure.
Shouldn't presenting free software as a way of gaining independence from foreign powers work here?
Also, some people consider efforts like ReactOS useless, because it just focuses on compatibility with proprietary drivers and applications for Windows.
I acknowledge that.
But at the same time I think success of such project would have a huge positive effect on the world. Not excluding the propaganda realm.
Nevertheless, the biggest challenge of Software Freedom Movement isn't developing free software for every need, but rather making ppl realize proprietary sw harms them
>Shouldn't presenting free software as a way of gaining independence from foreign powers work here?
I recall that a country in south America did a wonderful job at telling MS that they won't use MS os:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020607185524/http://www.pimientolinux.com/peru2ms/villanueva_to_ms.html
It works for people who care about their own people/nation. But money talks more with sociopaths and we have loads of them in power positions.
>some people consider efforts like ReactOS useless, because it just focuses on compatibility with proprietary drivers and applications for Windows.
Depends. My experience with migrating people to GNU/linux had made me compromise in some cases.
Ultimately proprietary software will cause the death of being able to control computers and thus besides killing freedom for users it also kills works for independent workers.
But in some cases people are sadly still forced to use proprietary OS, I have a few customers who can't migrate from windows XP or vista because of a proprietary software that isn't compatible with GNU OS and I have not found any replacement and besides that there's a need of reverse engineering to extract the data from the proprietary software.
In such cases I replace most of the proprietary habits/software that the users had, they used a webmail GUI ? I migrated them to thunderbird, adobe reader for PDFs ? SumatraPDF instead, Filmorama ? Blender it is etcetera.... And so having them getting acclimated to these free/libre software will help them and myself when I'll be able to migrate them to a free/libre OS like Trisquel.
I also try to accompany them in the migration process of their new software but it's not easy or impossible in some cases. There are people who are completely dependent on how the GUI looks to use the software. It's almost as if they don't understand what they read and it's frightening.
So the point that I'm trying to make is that in some cases the efforts of ReactOS can be of use. But it people have to understand that it MUST be a temporary approach and not a permanent one. Otherwise it will backslash and create more problems long term.
>but rather making ppl realize proprietary sw harms them
In my surroundings most don't, often, user only see the result and not the in between of how it was made. That mentality is rampant and damaging in every part of society. That's also part of what I meant by passive violence
But in cases where the user are getting frustrated while I explained why I couldn't do more they begin to understand.
> But it people have to understand that it MUST be a temporary approach and not a permanent one. Otherwise it will backslash and create more problems long term.
Yeah, that makes me wonder what we (as a movement) should do about software M$ happens to release as free.
Let's take .NET as an example. A lot (most?) of it has been released under free license(s). However, most of it currently cannot be utilized on free systems because of lack of infrastructure (I once tried setting up Entity Framework under GNU/Linux to do a homework for a university class and failed miserably).
What should we do if M$ suddenly frees Windows (which, as RMS suggests, isn't that impossible)?[1]
>Open Source (sic) Saturation
Thank you I will look/read.
>Ultimately, software freedom, like any other freedom, is inherently incompatible with capitalism
From my point of view any system can work as long as a majority of people agree/ participates in it, then it's a question of morale of how people will choose to do their choice inside of $society and thus either bringing it to a positive or negative future.
The world is as we (a group) domino's it to be.
See post https://trisquel.info/en/forum/anonymous-internet#comment-152485
Western capitalism is getting rid of itself. Its excesses are spiraling out of control. It cannot be sustained for much longer. The big question is what are we going to transition into?