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Joseph Graham has written a very short blog post about software freedom and the direction we might take to achieve it.
The free software movement, founded in the 80s by Richard Stallman and supported by the Free Software Foundations 1, 2, 3, 4, preaches that we need software that gives us access to the code and the copyright permissions to study, modify and redistribute. While I feel this is entirely true, I think it's not the best way to explain Free Software to people.
I think the problem we have is better explained more like this:
"Computer technology is complicated and new. Education about computers is extremely poor among all age groups. Technology companies have taken advantage of this lack of education to brainwash people into accepting absurd abuses of their rights."
Source : The Free Software movement is Barking up the wrong tree
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:21AM (6 children)
One big problem with the Free Software movement is the quality of the software and the design choices made. I think GNOME 3 epitomizes this problem, and the lack of adoption of Linux on the desktop can be directly traced to this DE.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:09PM (2 children)
As bad as Gnome 3 was, I cannot see in which way it was worse than Metro.
And thanks to Open Source, we got Gnome 2 forked as Mate. What did we get on Windows?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:25PM (1 child)
As bad as Gnome 3 was, I cannot see in which way it was worse than Metro.
Metro wasn't a product of the Free/open-source community (or its corporate patrons/overseers), so you can't blame FOSS for Metro. The way that Gnome3 is worse is that it IS a product of FOSS, and one of the goals of FOSS for a long time has been to unseat Microsoft's dominance on the desktop, at least to some reasonable extent, to provide a viable alternative. Gnome3 has been nothing more than FOSS shooting itself in the foot; it hasn't helped bring any new users to Linux-on-the-desktop (it works nothing like the desktops they're used to on proprietary OSes), it's been extremely divisive within the community, yet for some odd reason it's been shoved down our throats by all the largest and most influential distros.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @05:26PM
I forgot to add that while Metro is indeed awful, Microsoft has a LOT of room to make mistakes and to force bad design choices on users because of their dominant position. People will generally use whatever crap that MS shovels at them. FOSS doesn't have that luxury. And instead of exploiting this golden opportunity with Metro and then the addition horrors of Windows 10 (forced updates, spyware, etc.) to increase the popularity of FOSS, instead they shoot themselves in the foot with Gnome3.
It's just like Dark Helmet's quote: "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:10PM (2 children)
It goes beyond this I think. The fact gnome remained the flagship DE in just about every distribution's main branch despite it being unanimously loathed says a lot about the current ecosystem and the mindset driving it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:13PM
PS: If failure and delivery of poor quality has no repercussions at all it will be repeated. They really should've had their collective asses roasted by distro maintainers, at least that would've been a bit harder to ignore than the lowly userbase.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:23PM
it's not *universally* loathed, obviously. ignorant/trolling windows users and curmudgeonly greybeards not withstanding.