I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc).
When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.
I tend to see this kind of absolutist, binary tone a lot from people deeply involved in FOSS... and sometimes I think maybe that mindset is necessary to push the movement forward, but it also feels detached from how much open software has already changed reality.
Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.
I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open.
You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.
What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.
Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to.
>Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.
>I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.
The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers.
It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)
Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.
I run graphene on my phone and this new restricted security patch limit by google is nothing short of a shit show.
I wonder if switching to a Jolla C2 [0] is a reasonable alternative.
[0] https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone
> Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version
What devs can build without much oversight or business pressure usually works well open sourced.
Almost everything else (hardware, non technical "productivity" software, services) doesn't, and that's most of our life. We live in a world that's still massively closed source.
I wouldn't call someone absolutist for wanting printers, coffee machines, laptops, TVs, cars, "smart" lights to be more open than closed.
Of course we'd all prefer open printers and cars, but those domains aren't mainly limited by software ideology; they're limited by regulation, liability, and econ. The fact that programmers can build entire OSs, compilers, and global infra as open projects is already astonishing.
So yes, the world is still full of closed systems... but that doesn't mean FOSS lost. It means it's reached the layer where the obstacles are social, legal, and physical, not technical. IMO that's a harder, slower battle, not evidence that the earlier ones were meaningless.
It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it.
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.
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.
The issue is that for a lot of things, there is exactly zero foss options. The problem is not, and the article doesn't imply, that there should be a 100% foss, so that foss finally "wins".
You can't control any of them fully. Most you can't root.
It absolutely does.
Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now. They discriminate against us for it. Installed your own open source software? All services denied. Can't even log into your own bank account.
We're marginalized. Second class citizens. There is no choice, it's either corporate owned computers or nothing. What good is free software if we can't run it?
For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings.
In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow).
I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.
Preserving such mindshare into the future might also be much easier 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.
And that's the complexity of this era of computing. We just got finished convincing people that it made sense that they should have the right to run whatever software they wanted on hardware they owned... And then immediately the technology shifted so that most things no longer get done using exclusively hardware that you own. The RMS four freedoms approach is only chipping away at the larger problem: capitalism (I mean that literally in that the problem is that the machines that do the work, the capital, are owned by a tiny ownership class).
If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.
It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.
This is especially important when I just want to run my own OS and not have people go out of their way to deliberately break things because of that.
In general, the obligation has been soft: "If everything adheres to the protocols, it will interoperate" is how we got the Internet. And the Internet was generally useful and so self-incentivized making software work with it with minimal stumbling blocks; nobody was gating FTP clients on only working with Oracle-branded FTP servers because then you couldn't access all the other FTP servers.
But that's not the only model, and I don't see an obvious argument for why should enters into it here. How does that "should" work? Is there legal compulsion? On what moral or philosophical grounds?
> It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.
Yes, and instituting those laws was a messy uphill battle over immutable properties of human beings. That is a far philosophical cry from "No thank you; I'd like to use all that Apple cloud tech without buying an Apple computer please." I suppose, unless we break the back of capitalism as a societal structuring model, in which case... Yep. We can make whatever laws we want if we throw out the current system.
This threatens to destroy everything the word "hacker" stands for. Everything this site is about. Gone.
I can't even get people on Hacker News to care about this. It's over.
It's just very unclear that the force of law is the right tool for the job to address that problem.
(Also, people on Hacker News can care about a lot of things simultaneously. One of them can be that adding the government's cudgel to the problem may very well make it worse; do we really want the government having to well-define things like "protocol" and "communication" to craft that law?)
You should be.
Your device will not attest to this if you install your own operating system, if you root your phone, if you do anything at all that they don'y like.
So you install your bank's app and try to use it. The bank's servers ask for the attestation. You will not have one. They decide you cannot be trusted and deny you service.
Even if you can program your own keys into your device, nobody is gonna trust those keys. Why would your bank trust your own keys? They'll trust Google's keys, Apple's keys, the government's keys. You? You don't get to participate.
The corporations and governments want to own your computer. They demand cryptographic proof that your device is owned by them and that they have complete control. If you don't provide it, you're banned and ostracized from everything.
…switch banks.
Yes, we're awkwardly cornered - hardware used to be open or easily reverse-engineered. Now it isn't. The solution is to demonstrate the demand for open hardware. No one is going to walk away from money that can be made even if the market is smaller.
This movement was strong enough that the incumbents themselves offered Linux-friendly hardware. We continue to see momentum in the mobile space as well with /e/OS, Fairphone, etc. GrapheneOS is pursuing alternatives to Pixel.
Be brave!
Unfortunately the tech industry has shown us that isn't true. For example, look at the iPhone mini - I forget the exact sales numbers others have cited, but it sold very well. There is clearly a solid market there, even if it is smaller. But Apple isn't willing to chase it, and nor are the various Android OEMs. The same may well prove true for open hardware.
I'm not sure I follow. Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms. FOSS didn't start by demanding that MS release the source code for Windows and Office. It started with developers writing their own alternatives. What helped was the open and standardized nature of the IBM/PC stack that made it all possible. Without it, FOSS would have died before birth.
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.)
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.
Open source software lost in this domain fair and absolutely square. Desktop linux has been an extremely accessible and decent option desktops and laptops for, what, three decades; it lost in the open market. I'm typing this comment on arch linux, but even so: It failed to become a force sizable enough to fight back against the tide of corporate-owned attested consumer hardware. Android has been an option for nearly two decades. Its reasonably successful, globally. Google is now toggling the doomsday switch everyone knew they had, to force all applications to go through the Google Mothership. Samsung could fight back; they won't. Motorola could fight back; they won't. The market could revolt; it won't.
Software being open source is not enough to change the tide on what the market wants. 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? You get there by building products people want. Anything else is succumbing to the same authoritarian forces that you're hoping free software will stop, by forcing service providers to behave against their own interests.
If that was unpopular, here's where it gets really unpopular: I don't see a doomsday-level problem with a world where, in addition to whatever awesome FOSS hardware I might have, I also have an iPhone 12 ($130 on swappa) as my "attested device" to do "attested stuff" with, like store my drivers license, banking, whatever. To me, this is... fine. Not ideal; but fine. We should fight like hell to score wins where we can, like in right to repair, parts availability, ensuring old devices are kept up to date for as long as possible (Apple is pretty good at this); but if I have to carry an old iPhone in my backpack to access my bank because they refuse to support my hypothetical GnuPhone 5, the world isn't going to end.
We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.
But even as you say, as you're using Arch as your desktop computer, things may be fine now, but they're only going to get worse.
Should we all have to carry two laptops because anything running a free software core is just utterly unusable due to remote attestation?
> We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.
Didn't you just spend most of your comment talking about how the market forces don't care anyway? Would good is starting up a phone hardware company that will ultimately go bust due to total apathy of the general consumer?
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.
The takeover of "free software" by the enemies of freedom is not the "winning" of free software.
You know… there was time before this latest generation started calling everyone that complained to a manager a karen… that complaining to manager would resolve issues… and if that failed, publishing your story and refusing to do business with someone was seen as proper conduct.
Banks!!! Lol! Are the most fragile institutions ever! Fdic, exists for a reason… get enough people to withdraw their money all at once and see what happens.
Open source people that want to stick to your grit… don’t work with banks that won’t let you use open source software. Oh is that too hard for ya? If you’re not compiling your own slackware distro than you have no leg to stand on (/s)
But seriously, use a local bank and try solving human problems by dealing with human’s. Quit trying to tech everything… if the open source community would get unified and actualize… thats a fuck ton of people!
Here’s another crazy concept that the oss community could do… they could literally just open their own bank… voila (its not as hard as it seems and takes way less money than you think)
We need the equivalent of a Linus Torvalds + Richard Stallman but hardware. We were lucky to have had both for software at the same time. We need the same luck again now.
What else are they supposed to do then? Start Luigi'ing people?
Cloud doesn't have an automatic philosophical match to the way the Freedoms were justified originally. The Freedoms are based on the notion that you should have the right to do what you will with hardware you own; you don't own someone else's hardware in the Cloud.
I remember when winning meant you can modify your computer as you please because you have all the sources. We’re locked down in a world of apps, saas, and whatnot.
What did that NSA official said. They lost the battle over control of encryption, but won the war against privacy?
You're focusing on the benefits of open source in booming the technological sector, but his emphasis is that openness ends at the developer's, not consumer's stage and this is particularly bad when more and more of your life is technology dependant and de facto you cannot control nor modify it.
If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.
Getting put to good use by your opponent isn't winning.
What stack?
You give a bunch of web stack examples, great. The vast majority of people will never run a server nor benefit from the licenses of the code running on the server. They overwhelming give their money to the companies benefiting from those licenses and get typical crummy consumer EULAs in return.
Meanwhile phones tablets iot tvs appliances cars tractors pacemakers videogame consoles security cameras coffee makers printers juicers friggin Christmas lights routers, all that stuff, is overwhelmingly closed source.
It means that if the end user wants to control his devices he/she should be able to.
This has a strange CSS styling problem on my phone. There’s no left margin in portrait, so it’s basically unreadable, but if I go landscape it’s fine.
You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.
If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.
In abstract, probably true, but so vague to be useless.
I can probably vibe code with qwen on debian. But are you then going to pivot from your microsoft example to like, my ISP? And if I point out I can move to an ISP with less than 5 staff, you will probably just move the goalposts further right?
Might be better to let you establish your goalposts first hey.
It's a miracle that open-weight LLMs are even a thing at all, let alone as good as they are (very).
Why wouldn't you just get another account?
People used to claim we'd never fly. Shortly after we started, we reached the moon.
The entirety of the last 60 years of software may have been a low energy local optima.
That said I'm not too worried. Vibe coding is currently slower due to how bad it is at writing software. In several years companies pouring billions into improving LLMs still haven't been able to make them not suck. That suggests to me that it's a fundamental limitation of the tech at present, and won't get better until another research breakthrough happens.
True, but that's also not exactly a good thing to be doing to begin with.
The year of the linux desktop is not going to happen, far too much baggage. The year of the Haiku deaktop will happen; they are doing everything right and staying under the radar until they are ready.
Haiku has stayed out of the open source drama and focused on its goals; slowly and steadily working towards them even when the goalposts move. The big thing is their determination and staying focused on the user experience in a way Linux has not and can not without a single distro wining which is not going to happen. When it comes to the desktop, Haiku is offering everything Linux doesn't.
I do think that different computers (and other stuff) can be made which do not use proprietary software (and which do not use excessive software; I think it is also important, for a different reason). Free open specifications can also be made, too. Many people don't, but it can be done (although in some cases it is difficult, for various reasons).
“When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.” — Star Trek: Insurrection.
A month ago I watched animatronic dogs herd sheep around a paddock just minutes after some Border Collie did the same thing. What came to mind straight away was: that’s not a problem that needs solving. Yet here we are, injecting technology into every nook and cranny we can and ultimately all it’ll do is free us from our own freedom as people and enslave us to the rich, who will own all the tech and knowledge to support those animatronic dogs.
Your Snake example also doesn't seem very fair - there are many large, concentrated FOSS movements and organizations that are doing good. More and more - albeit very slowly and sporadically - there are governments and organizations choosing to invest in self-hosted FOSS solutions. And you focus on hackers expressing curiosity doing silly but interesting things on various types of systems. Come on.
When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads.
Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this.
Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.
Of course the public thinks "free software" is software for which you do not pay money.
And everyone immediately goes on their way with their downloads, without you getting the chance to give your hour-long spiel on "I'm glad you asked what I mean by 'free software'."
Because no one would ever ask what "free software" means, because they already know what it means.
It is the advocates who are terrible at advocacy who keep trying to give a term new meaning, and failing for a few decades to get the public to understand or pay attention.
You could even say that's the philosophical/awareness barrier, right there: people thinking in terms of free software, rather than in terms of Free Software(tm)(R).
(If you liked this comment, please subscribe to my newsletter about renewable clean energy, called Burn Fossil Fuels. My team has been working to get the message out, with a clever bit of wordplay there, in which we actually mean more the opposite of what we're saying. This is all explained in our hundred-page manifesto whitepaper, and we are also available for speaking engagements, at select events where we can preach to the choir.)
Anyway, on the topic of "free" software - how might you recommend we try to frame this to be more clear to the public? I think people tried to make "libre software" a thing, but doesn't that have the exact same issue - that is, that people will misunderstand what it is?
The rest usually become abandonware because maintainers don't have the time or energy to continue with it for years at a time, especially if they can't make money from it.
#jeffreyepstein
The root problem, in my opinion, is combining "free as in beer" with "free as in speech". The latter cannot be achieved if you insist on the former. I.e., if your solution to privacy is only use free-as-in-beer software then you will fail because developers want/need to get paid.
What we need is a business model in which people are willing to pay for privacy-respecting software. That's the only sustainable path. And it's frustrating to me that the people who are most vocal about software freedom are actively working against that with this kind of article.
[p.s.: I realize I'm ranting and not offering enough detail to change minds, much less offer a solution. Sorry about that.]
I do agree with the sentiment: people need to get paid to write software, and people want freedoms to be respected by that software. It seems to be challenging to rectify the two in most cases (yes, there are cases where it works - those are the exception not the norm).
It’s using software for evil. (And if I had to bet I would bet a software engineer was nowhere near that decision. They just implemented it!)
Meanwhile there's an entire parallel universe where people view things using different terms than these tired 1990s battles.
The next generation of software cannot be controlled by a small number of hyperscalers.. that is the new center of freedom focus. Times change
Usually if software is open source, it won't be paid for. So whatever is funding it... well if it's a software company funding open source software where does the money come from? Obviously paid software. And people won't pay for open source software because it's basically free.
Follow the money trail it ends at roughly three places: 1. donations, 2. tech support 3. ads 4. closed source software.
1 and 2 are too miniscule to be effective.
Since the 1990s I've been thoroughly committed to using and developing open-source programs. I strongly prefer using open-source products even when they've been less robust than proprietary options. In recent years, that's changed in favor of open-source, a number of open-source programs have become best-in-class. To name a few Blender, postgresql, Firefox, most developer tools. Still, proprietary products dominate areas like OSs, enterprise programs, etc., and will probably continue to do so.
But even if not as widely used, the fact that quality alternatives exist to a significant share of proprietary offerings speaks to open-source success. It's noteworthy that giants like Microsoft have open-sourced some of their products, a practice unheard of a couple of decades ago that shows influence of the open-source movement.
A winner-take-all philosophy is bound to be as deleterious to open-source advocacy as in any other endeavor. Realistically, producing excellent, bug-free, well-documented open-source software is what it takes to find an appreciative user-base. Perhaps not the majority of users of that category of software, but is that necessary to call a project successful? To say it is seems a prelude to enduring a constant sense of failure and missing out on authentic victories.
palata•2h ago
__del__•2h ago
schoen•2h ago
protocolture•2h ago
Like you cant make a 100% open hardware mobile phone. Theres lots of near enough cases. But that Qualcomm chip is proprietary for the phone bit. So they exaggerate by going back to an old, open source rotary phone.
billy99k•1h ago
I remember him doing some interviews in the 90s, and he would put his coat over the camera, if it wasn't using FOSS. This sort of zealot mindset will always be on the fringes of society and eventually abandoned for something more liberal (which is what we've seen in the last decade or so).
schoen•2h ago
I've also found this really weird. Like, we have Linux kernels on most cloud instances, and most data center servers, and most academic and research computing systems, and probably lately on most embedded microprocessors that are big enough to run it. (And various ecosystems for computing infrastructure and software development are mainly using free software userspace and tools.) Meanwhile, almost all user-facing software that almost all people interact with almost all of the time is proprietary. Why would someone say it's "won"? Thinking really small?
okanat•1h ago
We have open standards and even open/free software for anything that companies aren't making money out of. FOSS by itself cannot make money. In places where software matters the most or, if the software hides the trade secrets the most or, if it is the main money maker, creating FOSS is economically infeasible.
For FOSS to win, we need to change the economic and legal system. Current capitalist system in many West-aligned countries is actively hostile against sharing in any kind, except the ones that profit the biggest players in their non-critical areas. In a market where the first one to market gets to buy all competitors, in a market the one that has the biggest secrecy wins and gets all the money from investors like Y-Combinator, there cannot be any truly FOSS software-only products. They need to do rug pulls to support the exponential growth. Startup culture is fundamentally anti-FOSS. It is pro-FOSS in only consuming. Even a startup releasing some middleware can be interpreted as mishandling investment.
We need to make sure our governments support FOSS infrastructure and FOSS user-facing software. They need to be equal employers and competitors to Big Tech or they need to directly support smaller competitors for decades. Otherwise, I am afraid, FOSS cannot win.
dapperdrake•1h ago