I'm a strong FOSS proponent, most of my software is released under MIT, I use Linux daily and help others to use open source as much as I can.
And yet I find this idea total BS.
The reason I could even migrate to Linux when I was a teen was compatibility. It's because free softwares (VLC, Firefox, OOo...) were ported to Windows, a proprietary plateform, so that I could then feel at home later on Linux. And I made a definitive switch thanks to Ubuntu, because it made using most hardware easy, by accepting to use proprietary drivers when required.
Strong arming the industry into Libre never worked. The GPL is one of the least popular licences for this very reason. I, myself, never uses it.
Representing close source as evil doesn't work either.
It's like being vegetarian (which I am) and guilt triping people about meat. It's completly counter productive.
The result we got is that the year of Linux on the desktop never happened, because playing on Linux is hard, because the last cool gadget doesn't work, because you have to carefully chose your laptop to be sure it will work with it (E.G: my XPS 2-in-1 webcam doesn't work on Linux).
It also adds a lot of work to the kernel devs to try to keep up with the outter world, but they have a limited bandwith.
So Linux BT still sucks (even more than regular BT). Wifi is still not on part with the XP on other OS. Batter life is abysmal (I'm dual booting, and the difference is X2).
All for an ideal we never reached anyway.
Help and encouraging for FOSS makes a better world.
I disagree. For starters, strong arming the industry has worked in a number of cases; this has been covered in a few other comment threads so I won't retread them too much here, but the state of free drivers on Linux is significantly better than it was just a few years ago.
More broadly though: what kind of world do you want to live in? A world where it's easy for companies to create new proprietary software, or a world where it's easy for the users to shape their computing experience?
Look around you, at the consumer devices you own. Can you name one that's: 1) aimed at consumers (i.e. not a dev board, Raspberry Pis and such don't count here) and 2) that you have most or all of the source code to?
Look, if your goal is just "make better software" in general, maybe permissive open source has been a success. But if your goal is to increase practical user freedom, it's been an abject failure. It's just helped companies to make proprietary software more cheaply. And sure, there's some interesting technology that comes out of that for developers, but in the vast majority of cases the users don't see the benefits! Surveillance capitalism marches on, bolstered by the free labor of the community.
This is why I've been so disheartened that parts of the community have turned so anti-copyleft recently. In a world of permissively licensed software, the incentives are stacked against free software for end users. In a world of GPL'd software, you can release your code as GPL too, or you can pay more to write it all yourself.
> the state of free drivers on Linux is significantly better than it was just a few years ago.
Of course, but I think you can thank phones, the internet and the economy of scale for that. Not strong arming.
You will always find examples of times where something worked. But each one I can see 10 examples of companies that said "nope" during one of my mission.
> what kind of world do you want to live in? A world where it's easy for companies to create new proprietary software, or a world where it's easy for the users to shape their computing experience?
It's a false dichotomy. It's not us vs them.
There is no them. It's just all us.
> Surveillance capitalism marches on, bolstered by the free labor of the community.
That's a sociological problem, you won't solve that with software. Or licences.
For that you need to get into politics or business.
> This is why I've been so disheartened that parts of the community have turned so anti-copyleft recently.
I haven't see that at all. Open source has never been so popular. Creative common as well.
What I do see is a complexification of software, that requires more and more resources, which the FOSS world has a hard time to keep up with.
What I do see is a mass of people comming to software that don't care at all about those topics, but only about usability, which the FOSS world has a hard time to keep up with.
I'm glad VLC didn't decide that they couldn't read DVD, or OOo read .doc because there were proprietary formats, otherwise they wouldn't have been the popular softwares of today.
Today LibreOffice is replacing MS office in many administrations and schools. The alternative would have been Google doc.
You think making Linux more restrictive would have forced industrials to be more conciliant?
No, they would just have used more proprietary softwares. The entire stack if necessary, and we would never have had Linux on mobile. Instead, we would have had a black box.
The open source mouvement is not "free to everyone to use and modify, except the ones that don't contribute and profit from it".
That would be a very bitter point of reaction, not positive action.
In many contexts I would agree, but not here. Say I buy a device, and people discover later that it has surveillance code in it. Why can I not just remove it myself? Who do I need to talk to? The developer of that proprietary code. That's "them."
>That's a sociological problem, you won't solve that with software. Or licences.
>For that you need to get into politics or business.
There are many different angles you can take to approach a problem. One of which is politics, sure: we could outlaw software that surveils its users without consent. That's one approach. But a technical approach is also valid: if all software were free, do you really think users would just accept big tech companies surveilling them? Don't you think we'd have people removing the tracking code, and telling their friends how to do the same?
And by the way, one of the things we see over and over again from the business world is that incentives matter. No, I don't think all companies would have freed their code if the GPL were prevalent, but if it's significantly easier to make their code free than it is to make it proprietary, certainly more of them would. Just look at the state of Linux drivers on x86: how many of them are free these days, and how many of them are proprietary? There are a few high-profile proprietary drivers, but by and large most of them are free. That's meaningful progress! How many of your drivers are free on Windows?
>I haven't see that at all. Open source has never been so popular. Creative common as well.
"Open source" has had a surge in popularity, sure, but its current popularity has more to do with corporate interests than an interest in user freedom - which, of course, was why the term was coined in the first place. As a percentage of that software, the use of copyleft licenses has declined in recent years.
>I'm glad VLC didn't decide that they couldn't read DVD, or OOo read .doc because there were proprietary formats, otherwise they wouldn't have been the popular softwares of today.
Of course supporting existing proprietary formats for the purposes of drawing users to free software is a good thing! I just don't think we should be contributing to the development of more proprietary software. VLC and LibreOffice are both extremely valuable free software projects. (And by the way, they're both copyleft - OpenOffice isn't, but most development has shifted to LibreOffice these days.)
>The open source mouvement is not "free to everyone to use and modify, except the ones that don't contribute and profit from it".
Of course not! Anyone is free to use and modify any free software, including copyleft software. But I think copyleft is a valuable tool to help us build a software commons.
And yet I find this idea total BS.
The reason I could even migrate to Linux when I was a teen was compatibility. It's because free softwares (VLC, Firefox, OOo...) were ported to Windows, a proprietary plateform, so that I could then feel at home later on Linux. And I made a definitive switch thanks to Ubuntu, because it made using most hardware easy, by accepting to use proprietary drivers when required.
Strong arming the industry into Libre never worked. The GPL is one of the least popular licences for this very reason. I, myself, never uses it.
Representing close source as evil doesn't work either.
It's like being vegetarian (which I am) and guilt triping people about meat. It's completly counter productive.
The result we got is that the year of Linux on the desktop never happened, because playing on Linux is hard, because the last cool gadget doesn't work, because you have to carefully chose your laptop to be sure it will work with it (E.G: my XPS 2-in-1 webcam doesn't work on Linux).
It also adds a lot of work to the kernel devs to try to keep up with the outter world, but they have a limited bandwith.
So Linux BT still sucks (even more than regular BT). Wifi is still not on part with the XP on other OS. Batter life is abysmal (I'm dual booting, and the difference is X2).
All for an ideal we never reached anyway.
Help and encouraging for FOSS makes a better world.
Being pushy about it hurts us.