An anonymous coward writes:
"An interesting article about the shift in open source from idealistic to pragmatic. The author compares the relative obscurity of FOSS software such as MediaGoblin and KDE's MakePlayLive co-op to commercial software. The article then goes on to discuss the split between FOSS's goal to provide freedom to users and to provide high-quality software. Also mentioned is the split between commercial and non-commercial FOSS."
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What Happened to the Vision in Open Source?
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @08:38PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Insightful) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:13PM
Nope. Reality happened. FOSS became popular and many people who do not care use Open in their business model. Some succeed, some hurt the movement in doing that.
Idealists has always been used, and hypocrites has always outnumbered the rest, and IT is going to float around two poles, free and controlled software. Free is what is aimed at making the user free, controlled is aimed at controlling the market/machine/user. So more than the license or the amount of money, the problem is the intention of the devs.
About carbon copying, pls. Most commercial software starts from ideas developed in university or stealing from each other. Where is the commercial software that was carbon copied in, say, the wiki?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:25PM
Amusing as that comment is, I don't really see a rebuttal here. Is FireFox chasing something a university developed or was it inspired by a popular web browser? Do the origins of that inspiring web browser make any difference to the claim of carbon copying? Nope.
It was called Bomis. But, hey, if you keep looking you'll eventually find an example or two. It will not help your point, though. You already exhausted your list of popular FOSS 'products' to come up with that one, it forced you to think outside the box to come up with an answer. That's proof enough of my point.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:49PM
bomis
Oh, terrible trolling, the precursor of wiki born an year later. I guess it was network lag.
Amusing as that comment is, I don't really see a rebuttal here.
It is not a rebuttal. It puts the theorem that close innovates, open copycats in the right perspective.
Is FireFox chasing something a university developed or was it inspired by a popular web browser?
You know what the NCSA in NCSA Mosaic means, right? Oh, forgot, you were trolling.
But, hey, if you keep looking you'll eventually find an example or two. It will not help your point, though. You already exhausted your list of popular FOSS 'products' to come up with that one, it forced you to think outside the box to come up with an answer. That's proof enough of my point.
I did not exhaust it, think rails or picolisp, I just think one counterexample is enough against a theory.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:12PM
Nope, look again.
No, it doesn't. It's just a vague generalization that, frankly, doesn't survive much ponderance when going through a list of popular software and its origins.
I see, so FireFox has been copying Mosaic this whole time and in no way was motivated by a certain other browser out there. Right.
Then you do not understand the theory. Think about what FOSS's biggest accomplishments are and what their histories were. Think about the most common complaints about popular FOSS applications. Both of those lists are very different from similar lists of commercial counterparts. You cannot one-example it away because it's the direct result of the practicalities that the FOSS philosophy brings to the table. It's not something I invented so I could 'troll' on a sleepy website.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @11:39PM
> Nope, look again.
Links? Mine are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis [wikipedia.org]
> so FireFox has been copying Mosaic this whole time
The concept, sure. Copying is transitive. Sure it had also to compete for features and web interoperability with commercial browsers. Which still proves you wrong when commercial browsers had to do exactly the same, see Adblock and crippled noscript imitations...)
> Then you do not understand the theory.
"FOSS falls on its face when it doesn't have something to carbon copy off of".
False, as proven. If your theory was different, you should have chosen different words. If you refer to GNU explicitly wanting to replace proprietary unix tools with free ones, then you are criticizing GNU and not FOSS, and you are essentially saying that accomplishing their mission was a failure because they did it in the right way.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @12:48AM
You're right, I made a boo boo here. When I read the Bomis page earlier I got the part where they said it was a predecessor to Nupedia and Wikipedia, I didn't go far enough down to read the WikiWikiWeb bit. That's my bad and will concede that point.
Oh, please. "They had to keep copying to keep up, but not really because commercial browsers copy to keep up."
Nope. One of your colleagues in this thread, however, has made a little head-way on that. Not enough, but some. He understood what I said just fine.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Monday March 24 2014, @01:18AM
Make it "They had to keep copying to keep up, but commercial browsers copy to keep up themselves" so we have an instance of innovative FOSS that succeeds so that others need to copy its features.
(Score: 1) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @01:45AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Monday March 24 2014, @11:41AM
You tell me. Go ahead and explain why commercial software is innovative, apart the need to do things differently for the sake of differentiating from the competition, whether the user likes it or not.
(Score: 1) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @04:03PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @04:33PM
The answer was, FF is a web browser, browsing protocols are added/tweaked all the time. Let's see slackware and systemd, for a fitting example.
(Score: 1) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @05:09PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Pav on Monday March 24 2014, @02:48AM
Software should be "done" already, and we should be moving on to GPLed business models etc... We should be looking for ways to sack those overpaid CEOs and take control of our lives instead of just our software, but all of a sudden BSD licenses became popular again and software freedom is going backwards. Was it the influence of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field? How is GPL3 being better for computing and society even controversial? There are so many weasel words, but I've spent long enough in the industry understand them for what they are.
BSD is better for cooperation and standardisation? Utter bollocks - look up the Unix Wars [wikipedia.org] - GPLed Linux won because of code closing, divergence and legal wrangling among BSD derivatives, and this was despite Linux being new and inferior at the time. I wish I had links to certain old Usenet discussions - the geek generation before me hashed this out during my student days - but Linux coming from nowhere to become the defacto standard says it all really. The BSD TCP/IP stack is lauded as proof of the licenses value, perhaps because pointing to the OS would show how ongoing cooperation was undermined. Even so, history [wikipedia.org] doesn't remember the BSD stack as being particularly central. They also tell us that using the BSD license is more altruistic - of course they would. We're being sold the losing... ahem, I mean the "altruistic" side of a prisoners delemma [wikipedia.org] - defectors prosper and scum rises to the top. Yes, successful projects are licensed under BSD, and cooperation is possible when it's in everyones interest, but a community will often be undermined when a closed fork starts smelling profitable. The greybeard Unix War veterans know this, and I daresay desktop BSD users recently learned after their community was mostly cannibalised by Apple - many Slashdoters/Soylenters know a BSD-desktop refugee or two I'm sure.
Open Source "winning" (rather than Free Software) reminds me of winning the Cold War: yes we won... but somehow "we" doesn't include most of us. Slashdot was a powerful place once - we were even newsworthy as a community. People with belief in their own power even seem to interact differently. RMS warned us : we either control our technology or are controlled by it - and (surprise) he was right. Our feeble complaints after the Snowden revelations drove that home - it's our code that is the backbone of this stuff, and yet the decisionmakers at Google, Apple, even Microsoft (with their Linux Skype infrastructure) have all the power after we let them embrace/extend our work. Those companies will take action, complain or collaborate with the NSA as they see fit with no input from us. We don't need to be powerless (and Soylent is a small demonstration of this). Muscular and modern licenses (eg. GPL3) seem to encourage loud bitching from certain quarters, but I'd rather that than being quietly disempowered in Unix Wars - The Empire Strikes Back. The stakes are even higher this time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:44PM
"you cannot generate hype with it any more"
And that's good. The projects referenced are boring, trying to do a good job of filling a very small niche in a hyper competitive marketplace with many entrenched interchangeable commodity solutions. If all they have going for them is trying to use FOSS as a source of hype, maybe they should stop.
We tried this in the 90s when Debian had about 100 mp3 players all slightly different. "mymp3player is an ambitious new player with skin support, made with all organic soy ingredients, and it saves the whales every time you run it". It was pointless, but didn't really hurt anything.
Whatever is the new hotness in 2024, I guarantee they'll be 100 sorta-clone projects of it in FOSS land, and thats OK. Its a constant of the ecosystem. Its healthy, basically.
There is interesting FOSS stuff, but the TLDR of the original article claiming Sturgeons Law applies to FOSS isn't all that insightful. If I didn't feel 90% of FOSS was garbage, I'd be worried I don't know about the entire market.
(Score: 2, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:33PM
(so full of shit)
Hibernate [wikipedia.org] - born from the itches a "commercial product" was creating, finished by reshaping an industry proposed standard (EJB).
Inversion of control [wikipedia.org] - base on the shortcomings of the software architectural practices of the time, first formalized [martinfowler.com] by Martin Fowlers, most of the IoC containers during the history and nowadays [codehaus.org] are Open Source (I personally have troubles in finding one that is strictly commercial).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:42PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 24 2014, @02:42AM
Speak for yourself... indeed, highly dependent on the individual needs... But be aware that the lack of something is in no relation with the usefulness and social impact of whatever else does exists.
I found myself completely satisfied with Open/Libre office (and I don't care if previously there was MSOffice, WordPerfect or ClarisWorks) and I'm in no need for video editing software
However, I can't imagine my life as "complete" as it is right now without the "slashcode" being open source, able to be forked and used as an escape route from under the overlords of a certain green feta site.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @03:04AM
still don't have a good office suite
I guess "good"is relative.
I wish I had a buck for every time M$Office failed to open a MICROS~1-format document and the solution was to use OpenOfffice/LibreOffice to open that item and re-save it.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @02:49AM
Somebody remind me, what does the non-FOSS world have that is comparable to the Mint Software Center [netupd8.com] (or any package manager)?
They've had decades. Surely they have a competitive app.
Warning: If somebody mentions something that only updates the OS and not the apps, he is going to get a Bzzzzzzt.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @02:56AM
Somebody remind me: What does the non-FOSS world have that is comparable to the Mint Software Center [netupd8.com] (or any package manager)?
They've had decades. Surely they have a competitive app.
Warning: If somebody mentions something that only does OS updates and won't find/download/install/update/uninstall[1] the apps, he is going to get a Bzzzzzzt.
[1] Did Windoze uninstallers ever get to the point that they don't leave turds everywhere?
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:58PM
[citation needed]
Many computer functions were not patented. Copy & Paste for example among many others. If IP had interfered with the development of early computers as much as it eventually did with other industries, like pharmaceuticals, advancement would have been as slow as it is in the pharmaceutical industry. There is little to no evidence that IP advances technology. Most of the evidence shows the opposite.
Firefox came up with the many new ideas that Internet explorer stole (the find tab vs a find popup window). Not to mention that (I believe it was) Windows 2000 supposedly stole source code from a linux distro but never gave it credit just because Microsoft could never get their code right (though that's said to be a myth since it's hard to prove but from what I hear the code acts exactly the same and was likely stolen).
I even noticed my Microbiology textbook has stolen images from Wikipedia (they're cropped in the textbook) and the book doesn't give credit (it's the same exact image).
Fact is proprietary software has had a long history of outright stealing free and open source software and not even giving credit and one of the biggest problems that free and open source developers have had is enforcing the license against proprietary software that wants to steal it.
Much of the difficulties open source software faces is proprietary hardware that make it illegal for open source software developers to reverse engineer them and use certain functions or to build new hardware with certain capabilities. Not that the proprietary developers came up with anything innovative just that they have stupid obvious patents that the patent office rubber stamps preventing anyone from creating a decent competing product only because they waste their money hiring a team of lawyers to acquire every patent imaginable and start using it to troll (instead of using that money to innovate). Patents only get in the way of innovation and hinder it for personal gain. Abolish patents.
(Score: 1) by bugamn on Monday March 24 2014, @01:17AM
This is just a small point in your commentary, but are you sure that your textbook got their images from Wikipedia and not the reverse? Or maybe both got it from a common source?
Also, what kind of textbook is that that doesn't give a source for its images?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday March 24 2014, @01:41AM
Usually the only time you see the source cited is because it was required by copyright.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @02:01AM
Required or not, if my book stole the image without citing it this still helps demonstrate my point, that it is IP defenders that are the thieves and not the other way around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @01:52AM
My book doesn't cite any sources and it is cropped in my book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_talk:Gram_stain_ 01.jpg [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Monday March 24 2014, @06:35AM
If you want to claim a copyright you should start being non-anonymous and engage on the same talk page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @07:39AM
It's not my copyright, it's Wikipedias. and it was stolen by my book. and I don't have to be non-anonymous to call the textbook companies out on it. They stole it, IP extremist hypocrite thieves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @07:42AM
Not everyone has the resources of a big corporation to enforce IP. It's mostly the big corporations that have these sorts of resources to go after the little guy but whoever put that image up on Wikipedia is far less likely to have the resources to go after the IP extremist thieves that steal their work without attribution. Yet the big corporations wrongfully accuse everyone else of 'stealing'. Only when others do it I suppose. The hypocrites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @08:13AM
(by the find tab I previously meant the ctrl+f feature where a tab comes up vs a popup window coming up. That wast stolen from firefox). Another stolen feature is the search engine box on the top right. Another stolen feature is tabs. All this came out in Firefox first and was later stolen by Internet explorer. Not to mention many of the command features in the DOS command prompt were designed to look a lot more like Linux in later versions of Windows.
It's perfectly fine for IP extremists to freeload and steal off the FOS community with no attribution whatsoever but don't anyone dare copy an idea from an IP extremist or else they will nail you to a cross and claim that they are the victims always being stolen from. I'm sick of the hypocrisy. If you don't want anyone copying your ideas at the very least be original and ensure that what you build isn't copied from anyone else.
(Score: 1) by cbm on Sunday March 23 2014, @08:56PM
Was there ever any vision? Hasn't the vision always been to create open versions of commercial stuff? The FSF may have a vision of a licensing model, but their efforts have gone into re-implementing Unix.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:13PM
I'm not sure what the official vision is but I knew a guy a years ago who worked for the Brazilian government. He wanted them to go Open Source on *everything* because the data they have belongs to the public. He didn't want to have files created 1990 to not be openable in 2010 because a company like Microsoft evolved its software too much. By keeping it Open Source, it could be maintained to their standards and not to those that a corporation creating off-the-shelf-software motivated by their own pocketbooks. This means the data that belongs to the public is never lost. I wouldn't be surprised if what you said about open versions of commercial stuff turned out to be true, that has already proven to be FOSS's strength. It's just not so hot at inventing new ... for lack of a better term... products. And that is kinda where the article was going.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 24 2014, @02:33AM
You may be right... but only if you impose a restriction on where to look for the innovation in Open Source.
If not accepting the restriction (and many, myself included, will find such a restriction as arbitrary and not relevant for assessing the usefulness and social impact) one can find heap of innovation. Examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @05:58AM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 24 2014, @06:19AM
If positive to the above, don't you ever wonder if there's nothing better as a measure of life fulfillment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:07AM
> Do you often assess the success by the money rewards?
No, and I did not here, either. Nice attempt at a dodge, though.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:58AM
Good to hear.
I didn't dodge (at least, wasn't not my intention).
Just wanted to suggest (coming from the "personal angle") that: while money can be a powerful motivation, it is not the only one - and sometimes not even the most powerful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @05:25PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:40PM
Yes, there was and still is: have an itch that needs scratching. If you manage to scratch it good enough and make the code open, others may finish in using, improving it. The success is usually determined by:
1. how many others have the same itch
2. how well the FOSS code manage to scratch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Drew617 on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:00PM
"FOSS" is pretty goddamn broad. We get two examples of FOSS projects with "vision." Mark Shuttleworth and/or Ubuntu is apparently an example of a project without it, although one is just a guy and the other can hardly be considered a single FOSS project.
For all the anticipation of the Year of Linux on the Desktop, did anyone expect we'd get there without making some pragmatic choices?
A couple examples: Steam vs. centralized media; Ubuntu's domination vs. "making free-licensed hardware an option found in every computer store." It's incorrect to frame these as binary choices.
It's a bad thing for Steam (and therefore Linux) to gain traction? Ubuntu shouldn't be trying to solidify or grow its user base? I think we're as close as we've been to Year of Linux and that has a lot to do with Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. Folks have rightly disagreed with some of their decisions, but they've delivered a high quality, high utility general purpose desktop OS, a nearly standard toolset for many people.
If every idealistic dev and engineer had their way, we'd have thousands of devs and engineers bitching about the relative merits of init daemons and the like, and its resultant fragmentation. It's been bad enough for long enough already.
The author's point about open hardware is well taken, but again I doubt it's a binary choice - the Deb/Ubuntu guys are not likely the same people who'd produce it, and nobody's going to produce it without a real market demand. Something needs to run on that hardware, anyway - Ubuntu's resources are probably well-allocated as is.
Besides, what better way to raise market demand/awareness among normal users than a compelling free OS that's locked out of the latest disposable shitboxes and tablets at Walmart?
(Score: 1) by jon3k on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:10PM
If every idealistic dev and engineer had their way, we'd have thousands of devs and engineers bitching about the relative merits of init daemons and the like, and its resultant fragmentation
Uh, bad news, we do have that. init vs upstart vs systemd.
(Score: 1) by Drew617 on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:15PM
Yes, a poor example. I think it was stuck in my head for that reason.
What I meant to communicate was more like spawning a hundred differentiated projects based the idealistic arguments that were made.
Instead, despite the noise, Ubuntu did the dreaded pragmatic thing.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:55PM
The wholesale "going corporate" or "selling out" is a sign that, yes, open source does work. Remember when the idea of a free office program which could manipulate Microsoft formats was radical? Or a Linux that worked out of the box, including playing any media and wireless? Growing up and going corporate will always happen, and when it does the more ideologically inclined will move on to other things or bail and create an alternative which better suits their needs -- and who knows that better than us?
It's the same problem that I believe is beginning to happen to music -- There's no more low-hanging fruit when it comes to being innovative. All the exciting stuff to be done has already been done, and what's left is mostly pure drudgery. Media players and messengers have now been done many times over. There's a window manager to suit every need and preference, all the new and exciting stuff being done with window managers is again all under-the-hood drudgery, at least until somebody develops a credible and revolutionary 3-D window manager/interface that doesn't look like it's stuck in the late '80's running on an SGI Octane.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @02:18PM
Uh, bad news, we do have that. init vs upstart vs systemd.
No, we don't. We have systemd and that's it, mostly.
In case you haven't noticed, Debian just went through a bunch of drama where they decided to switch to systemd. After that, Canonical conceded, and decided also to switch to systemd in the future, abandoning upstart. The other major distros are already using systemd, or in the process of switching to it. Everyone has now abandoned upstart altogether, and is either currently using, or in the process of adopting systemd, with the exception of some small distros like perhaps Slackware, or Gentoo (which I believe is allowing multiple options).
The OP's point stands and is correct: we're converging on systemd because of pragmatism and because every single idealistic dev doesn't get his way, and projects are governed usually by consensus.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sigterm on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:10PM
Has anything happened to "the Vision of Open Source"? The vision that "everyone should be able to do anything with software", including (but not limited to) using it in locked-down products and projects? If so, I haven't noticed, so I immediately proceeded to read the entire article.
I'm not at all sure I agree with the notion that this was an "interesting" article. The author, Bruce Byfield, points out that two somewhat interesting and quite ambitious F/OSS niche projects languish in obscurity, and extrapolates from those two datapoints that a global decline in the F/OSS community is taking place, and that the F/OSS community has suffered a loss of "vision". I don't believe that is a conclusion one can draw from such a flimsy premise.
I don't believe it's reasonable to expect a horde of developers of Free and/or Open Source software to come running whenever a project expresses a desire to provide an alternative to closed products or platforms. Surely a developer has limited time on his (or her) hands, and will need to evaluate not just the project goals, but also the quality of the code and the feasibility of the entire idea. There could be any number of reasons why developers aren't flocking around "MediaGoblin" and "MakePlayLive", and there's no reason to suspect that "lack of vision" is a significant factor, or indeed a factor at all.
I'm also not sure his interpretations of the birthday greetings to Richard Stallman is in any way valid, or that the contents of birthday greetings in general is a good indicator of a person's importance, for that matter. Many of the greeters pointed out that while they may have disagreed with R.S. is the past, they now recognize the significance of his work. Mr Byfield concludes that they're really saying that everything of importance R.S. may have done lies squarely in the past, and that the FSF is now headed for irrelevance. I would argue the exact opposite; that an increasing number of people who used to disagree with R.S. now recognize him as an almost prophetic visionary and someone well worth listening to.
My Byfield's criticism of the GPLv3 also seems completely unfounded. The FSF has never been about "working harder for consensus" (which he suggests they have failed to do), but rather to promote awareness of freedom issues related to software. The GPLv3 has done just that in its fight against "TiVOization".
It seems the author is unaware of the distinction between "free software" and "open source" to such an extent that he accuses the FSF of being responsible for the "[increasing] pragmatism of open source". I'm sorry, but that's just ignorant rubbish, as this pragmatism is exactly why the FSF rejects "Open Source" both as a movement and as a competing term to "free software". In fact, the "Open Source" movement is entirely about pragmatism while the FSF is all about protecting user freedom. Criticizing the FSF for adhering to its principles while simultaneously criticizing the Open Source movement for taking a pragmatic approach is ridiculous to say the least.
On his web site, Bruce Byfield claims to be "a journalist who specializes in writing about free and open source software", and indeed he has been writing articles for a number of Linux publications and web sites for quite some time. One wonders how on earth the critical distinction between core terms such as "Free Software" and "Open Source" could have escaped him for so long.
Mr Byfield is quite correct in that recent developments points to Linux driving an increasing number of closed or at least semi-closed platforms. Steam is a good example of such a closed platform, but when the article tries to turn Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical/Ubuntu into a representative or spokesperson for the F/OSS movement, the entire train of thought just derails completely.
Mark Shuttleworth is a businessman and a multi-millionaire, and his involvement in ANY project or movement is surely motivated by a desire to capture market share and make money. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but is certainly has nothing to do with either the F/OSS movement or the FSF. One should expect Shuttleworth/Canonical to embrace Steam as a possible generator of revenue, the Open Source community should be somewhat enthusiastic about the increased popularity of Linux, and from the FSF we should expect scepticism over the total lack of freedom associated with Steam. And isn't that exactly what we're seeing?
The article concludes with, well, nothing at all. Mr Byfield seems to like the MediaGoblin and MakePlayLive projects, but admits to not knowing whether these projects' goals are at all attainable. That statement puts the entire premise for the article in a very peculiar light.
All in all, I must say I found the article to be a chaotic bundle of weak criticism and poorly researched arguments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @02:28AM
There's a site that keep a sharp eye on freedom-related subjects, particularly software freedom.
On that site's veracity scale of 0 to 5, Bruce Byfield gets a 3. [techrights.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheloniousToady on Monday March 24 2014, @04:02AM
That's a nice one-sentence summary of the differences between the two, though I'll take it a step further and say that the OSF is about pragmatism whereas the FSF is about idealism. It seems remarkable to me, though, that "freedom" and "pragmatism" are so different as to be a point of division. After all, freedom isn't just an ideal: we also embrace it because we believe that it's the best system.
I make this statement as someone who actually favors the pragmatic approach of the OSF. I've always found it strange that the FSF protects our "freedom" via software licenses that have more restrictions (that is, terms and conditions) than the MIT license and the other do-whatever-you-want-to-except-sue-us licenses that are endorsed by the OSF. I've long thought that when RMS proclaims that "freedom" somehow derives from the use of a restrictive software license, he is using a bit of classic double-think, which has been brilliantly successful.
However, if one recognizes that the term "freedom" is being misused, the apparent paradox that the "free" approach is not also the pragmatic approach disappears. We can then embrace pragmatism and freedom (that is, fewer restrictions) at the same time.
(Please note: this isn't flamebait or a troll, it's my honest opinion. If you disagree and are offended by it, please accept my apologies and just ignore it.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @08:28AM
The FSF uses the term "Freedom" in the same way as it's used in the real world.
Think about it: What part of the planet does "The free world" refer to? The part of the world with constitutions and human rights that restricts removing the freedom of others, or the parts that put no restrictions on e.g. owning slaves?
(Score: 2) by TheloniousToady on Monday March 24 2014, @12:18PM
That's an interesting point, but note that freedom-loving constitutions restrict the rights (powers) of governments relative to individuals. In contrast, the FSF's approach to "freedom" is to restrict the powers of all parties - including governments, corporations, and individuals - in a certain way via "copyleft".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @09:59AM
The fact there is no "OSF" displays your level of knowledge on this subject. If you really don't understand copyleft, here let me explain it to you: The only thing forbidden by copyleft licenses is taking away freedom.
(Score: 2) by TheloniousToady on Monday March 24 2014, @12:06PM
Sorry, I meant "OSI" (opensource.org). You're right that my knowledge is a bit rusty on the subject. (I'm pretty current on the ad hominem fallacy [wikipedia.org] though. ;-).
Thanks for the brief explanation of copyleft, though I've read through the GPL and the related commentary from the FSI (just kidding) enough times to fully understand the concept. I simply disagree that explicitly restricting how users can use software somehow promotes freedom.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @02:27PM
You're rehashing the age-old BSD vs. GPL argument. I hope you're not a troll, but after so many years of this, it's getting really old and annoying.
The FSF only cares about the freedom of users. It doesn't care about the freedom of producers. Just as with the other responder's analogy of "free world" countries versus countries which allow slavery, users can't have complete freedom if software producers/distributors have complete freedom. If I buy a piece of software and don't have access to the source code, I am not free and can be entrapped by secret file formats and other problems stemming from lack of access to source code.
(Score: 2) by TheloniousToady on Monday March 24 2014, @04:25PM
No, I'm not a troll. Sorry to annoy you. I'll shut up about this now and try not to comment on any similar issue in the future.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:28PM
The problem with media goblin is "the idea of an all-in-one". What could possibly better fit linux / foss stylistic architectural guidelines than a giant monolithic application silo. This makes it completely uninteresting to me other than in an abstract sense. J6P only wants to use the dominant market leader. So neither of us care. Furthermore I already have a giant monolithic application for all in one file sharing called a web browser. No content also means no interest and that ship sailed long long ago. If I wanted to play with a federation model for academic or experimental purposes I would have played with Diaspora about 5-10 years ago. It is yesterdays news with a weird architecture/style. Its like writing a text adventure / interactive fiction in 2014, absolutely nothing wrong with that but its not insightful to point out its not going to grab many people. The website has serious issues; I spent a minute or two and can't really figure out what mediagoblin does or why I'd want to use it.
The problem with MakePlayLive is I have no idea what to do with it. It costs twice as much as a rasp pi but doesn't do anything beyond it other than have less support and interest. Its a me too in a big wide marketplace of me too. The primary metric of health in the FOSS community wasn't how many almost identical mp3 player applications existed which were used exclusively by the author and one friend. Go install your FOSS project on a pi or a beaglebone or about a zillion better supported vaguely linux compatible pieces of hardware. Or aim lower level and go arduino or a zillion competitors. I still can't figure out why I'd use this instead of better cheaper faster alternatives. I'm sure its very nice, but hyper optimization for me, very early in a project doesn't make sense. To make an analogy, why should I breathlessly hitch my wagon to a PIC 10F202 microcontroller vs a 10F204 vs a 10F200 when the 10F series is all about the same and I should really be asking myself bigger pix questions like atmel vs mc or microcontroller vs linux system on a chip product etc. Hardware is becoming more of a commodity, just put your "stuff" on whatever. Its a really large world and focusing on a narrowly optimized component is boring, although I'm sure this one is very nice. Their marketing website is beautiful and as usual a beautiful website almost certainly means its content free. I can't figure out in a minute or two why I'd possibly want their board, although I can see they are very talented web designers and marketing people.
The TLDR is two tractionless projects are tractionless because they're really boring.
The proposed explanation was a rewording of the classic "blind dudes encounter elephant and try to rationalize their sensory inputs". So we get random stuff including a GPL-3 complaint, LOL.
In true "blind dudes describing elephant" setting I'll propose that both websites suffer horribly from "talking down" to the general public. You know what, your clients aren't joe 6 pack off the street and never will be. And thats OK. And maybe by not aiming solely and exclusively at J6P you might get some traction, maybe, with people a little more involved in the field. Its essentially a failure of marketing in both cases... you repel the engineer and sysadmin without explaining to J6P why they should use this instead of the dominant leader in the field, then you end up with no one at all interested.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:36PM
This is why rms is always so adamant about the distinction between free software and open source. One is a philosophy and one is simply a development model.