[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works creators / maintainers would be good.

The hardware still matters too, and much of why _that_ is under attack are greedy actors who want to have a cartel of control and manipulation; so that they own all things and can have them work against end users.

Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people.

I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.

The big question though is how to run the investment without it being wasted on people aren't helping the project at all.

Some notes (I'm planning on eventually writing a blog post on this subject):

- You probably need to pay people differently depending on whether they're the maintainer or a minor contributor - There needs to be a balance of power between users and the maintainer. A simple balance could be, the maintainer is dictator for life (or until they lay down the mantle) but compensation is based on number of users. - Maybe compensation is done on a per-feature basis, e.g., users put a bounty on a feature and the interest money doubles that bounty.

But they can afford large families, and good marriages for their children. Monks they are not.

I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

That is thinking in the future, I'm sure of it

The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many.

This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs

This might be stretching the definition of greed as it's commonly understood.

Edit: for clarity I not implying negative connotations to either side. I think corporations are doing exactly what they should do. But I also think people need to be more responsible for their choices and the consequences thereof.

Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.

The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high.

Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your best interest at heart than a corporation, there both made up people it would be moronic to think they'd act any differently.

Educational policy is not exclusively for the benefit of the recipient either intentionally when pandering to teacher unions or unintentionally when said policies set targets that drive the system in the wrong direction per Goodhart's law.

Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.

Not exactly. A feature gets developed if it brings in more money from customers, but not always because the customers are happy to pay.

Consider putting ads to the software.

Consider turning software to a subscription service.

Consider preventing other software from interoperating with yours without a license, or at all, and locking users down on your platform.

I agree that when a user votes with their money, it is a great incentive. But the way it currently works with commercial software is a bit far from a meritocratic ideal. Other mechanisms are possible (see sponsorship, Kickstarter, bounties), and I hope they will grow in popularity.

It was not until much later, due leaving good environments for bad reasons, that external financial motivations became a driver, providing a temporary bad self justification for not leaving sooner. Even then, solving the puzzle, exceeding the clients expectation. We're still the most rewarding parts of the job.

If you love what you do, money just becomes an issue in just 2 cases.

(1) When your needs for living in comfort (and with that I mean the luxury of not having to worry about money) are not met.

(2) When you feel others are exploiting you financially (you see disproportionate gains by others based of your work)

Now. Against this background, let us return to the question of 'will software still get written if we allow the free distribution of it'?

My believe is yes. While it is most certainly not for everyone, a certain type of people just love to create digital platforms and solutions. In fact their passion is now more often than not exploited, see for example the practices in the major gaming industry. There are more than enough specific needs that people will want to prioritise to offer financial incentives for their prioterization even if that means the result will become part of the commons. Current exclusive IP exploitation rights very seldom reward the creators, most often just those who have constructed layers on layers of financial instruments confining and leeching of the creative.

Finally IP protection most certainly stifles innovation. It restricts forms of further creation. The question is Wether this reduction is compensated by a boon in extrinsic driven creation that would be missing in the absense of guaranteed monopolies on exploitation. My guess once again is no. Science, innovation in knowledge, has progressed for centuries through the free sharing of ideas. The Eastern electronics industry has thrived in a climate of fluid copying and absense of IP enforcement. Most of the 'major' industry investments carry disproportionate public investments through grants and incentives while still locking up all rights on the publicly funded results.

We might see a different software world if copying and extending of all software was free, but not one whete creators go hungry, or innovation ceased to exist.

Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.

The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'.

MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'.

In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'make' your pair of Nike shoes - it's definitely not the 'cost of parts and labour' (though that's obviously an input).

Making anything working, of material value is usually an excessive grind involving a lot of people. 'Software' is not 'the implementation of some algorithm' it's all of the ugly complexities around that and the sausage-making realities of getting things to work well and play nicely with other platforms. And then of course it requires ongoing support, maintenance, docs, training, security updates etc.. That's real work.

In then 1990's when we 'controlled' the software that went onto our Mac/PCs ... that we didn't have access to Windows or Adobe Photoshop source code wasn't really an excessive problem.

Especially the fact that there was a clean delineation between 'OS and Software' (other than for say MS Office Products) - then it 'mostly worked'.

IP protections are absolutely not going away, for good reason, the challenge is to make those work as the situation evolves, moreover, they are not the 'real problem' frankly, as excessive platform control (i.e. Apple, now Google) represent a more fundamental issue, and consider that happens while technically most of Android is open source anyhow.

Even Linux is open and popular, and to this day it's still a mostly 'dev/interest' OS that most people don't use in their homes, partly due to distribution power controls by MS/Apple, but also because frankly managing massive real world deployments of 'Moms, Dads and frankly most people' who 'just want it to work' is an operational challenge as much as it is an R&D/Creative effort.

Consider the basic economics involved: Even reasonably smart corporations with 'good IT' still don't generally deploy Linux to regular userbase. Why not? Because $50 a year to MS is very cheap, and frankly worth every penny in terms of value created. Any 'supported' Linux variation is going to cost 'something' anyhow, so what's the difference between '$20 a year' for some 'supported Linux variation' and '$50 a year' for MW Windows? Basically nothing. In a per capita basis, the true cost of a lot of software is marginal.

> Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.

It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over a sufficiently long term ALL costs eventually become marginal costs[1].

[0] Suffice it to say that most businesses try to leverage or introduce imperfections in the market (aka "sustainable competitive advantage").

[1] Instead of thinking about the "sunk cost" of building a factory, consider the (eventual) marginal cost of building the next one.

Good software requires incredibly investment, even if the 'unit cost' is nothing.

Books aren't sold for $25 because of the cost of paper.

I think we are wired to think in such material terms, which is why maybe why we have an instinct towards the notion of 'free' software as being somehow special, when really it's not that much different than many other things.

True. But with open source that investment is of labor (sometimes it is volunteer labor, in part), and is usually incremental, there is often little in the way of large up front capital outlays.

Most of the exceptions would be a commercial company making a "Big Bang" initial release.

This is just to say that the concept of "marginal cost of producing another copy" needs some contextual adjustments.

For F/OSS, it might be better to think instead of "the marginal cost of making a new release", since at the point of making the release the marginal cost of all subsequent copies becomes zero.

There are a number of free and commercial substitutes for Linux that could be used at that embedded level and of course, they are perfectly encapsulated and monolithic: your 'fridge' is not a platform wherein there needs to be some degree of OS-level integration with other bits of software. From a systems perspective 'it doesn't matter' what OS is running on your refrigerator.

But it's moot: there is no inherent morality in 'free software'. Software is just another good, with different means to distribute, one of which is FOSS, which is really great, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.

For someone who was such a large philosophical influence on our industry he had some basic sociological lessons to learn, which in the past ten years have been a more dominant topic in the industry than software freedom. Both are important topics, and it's unfortunate that software freedom has taken a backseat recently.

Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often.

Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a lot more exploitation of software projects and open source software developers and it's almost embarrassing how often open source projects and commercial open source entities are surprised when it happens.

I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other, but we don't. If we did, I think we wouldn't even need share-alike licenses. But we don't, so we do.

But we can. One Thing that is absolutely evident from the fantastically vibrant open source communities forming around every conceivable niche, it is exactly how much energy and enthusiasm to do just that is out there.

We “just“ need to scale it up.

What we are talking about here is carving out a complementary arrangement scaling up _intrinsicly_ motivated production.

One interesting thing that happens when trying to use extrinsic rewards to encourage some behavior is that it tends to suppress any intrinsic motivation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory

Also for more on the intersection of open source development culture and economic systems I warmly recommend to checkout “The Wealth of Networks” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

A market economy is not based on greed, it's based on the willingness of people to provide services for one another whereupon actor's first motivation may be individual wealth creation, but the side effects of trade, division of labour and especially competition create massive surpluses, usually for the buyers, i.e. consumers.

Most importantly, companies are only successful if they focus really hard on doing things that others (i.e. 'the market') believe is valuable.

Paradoxically - it is 'intrinsically motivated' behaviour that is 'greedy' or purely self-oriented. To think that someone - anyone - deserves some kind of high standard of material living because 'they want to do whatever they want all day' - irrespective of the net utility they create for the community ... is selfish.

'Intrinsically motivated work' already has a name, it's called 'art'. And in that I would lump the vast majority of OSS which was designed to meet the makers view of what is useful, not 'the market's view', which is why most of it is not used.

Nothing could be less healthy on the whole than letting Engineers build 'whatever they want' because most of it will be completely useless, and projects will generally not produce enough material input to be able to do anything at scale.

Another bit of paradox is that if there were more efficient means to fairly license and maintain software - 90% of OSS makers would happily do that. I don't believe they are ideologically tied to OSS - if they could tool away on their favorite bit of software and earn what they though was a 'fair living' by selling it - they would do it in a heartbeat.

Intrinsically motivated initiatives are important, and frankly, nobody would do Engineering if they didn't like it on some level, but it's only one ingredient, and not the primary driver.

And of course, most labour has zero possibility for intrinsic motivation: 40-80% of jobs would instantly be vacated if that were the only motivator as they're just too grinding, boring, difficult for someone to do mostly on that basis.

The market forces people to 'serve others' and that's ironically want people don't want to do ... because it's a grind. What people really 'want to do' is 'whatever they want' which probably won't bode well on the whole for having a broadly high standard of living.

I do think we have some problems in the current incarnation though. Way to much resources are spent on, frankly, destructive behavior. Which I think the word greed perhaps could be used to describe. But I think it’s anthropomorphizing things that are actually structural and institutional deficiencies, not necessarily moral failures of individuals.

I do not agree that intrinsically motivated work is just art though. The public sector can be described as being the kind of scaled up intrinsically motivated production I was thinking of. But thoughts of what is and should belong to the public sector vs the market differ wildly.

On a personal note I might add that I am actually primarily motivated intrinsically. A sufficient income is necessary, but not sufficient.

Now I’m not actually arguing for giving everyone a heap of money and just see what’s built. I do think it would be interesting to study the result though.

What I do argue is that there probably are some interesting, and worthwhile, ways to put more capital in the hands of more organizations that produce things of value for its own sake.

How have they put pressure?

I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back.

If you're talking larger projects, a lot of the big, recent ones have come out of companies--projects like MongoDB, Cassandra, React, Kubernetes. Some like Hadoop were inspired by work at big companies.

It's not about getting contributions back, but ensuring that everyone who needs it can use it includes end users.

As an advocate of the AGPL, and someone who releases software under it, I think Google's argument is pushing FUD.

So the user must trust someone. Typically this is going to be at a minimum his OS vendor. He might also have to trust other software vendors, and maybe hardware vendors and network operators. That the vendor provides Free Software makes no difference. I have a machine running Debian. I still have to trust Debian.

What TPM does is give the OS vendor another tool so I can be assured that I’m running what the vendor provided. Of course the vendor can abuse this. But if he does, I have bigger problems. I want the vendor to be able to provide me with what I asked for and therefore I welcome technologies like TPM.

I don’t disagree with RMS because he’s paranoid. I disagree with him because he thinks Freedom is an elixir.

Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software.

Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free.

I'm no ideologue, just sayin'.

It's the same idea as with Right to Repair - the movement isn't expecting everyone to learn how to use a soldering iron and a chip programmer; is to allow local communities to have their own specialists capable of repairing hardware. Similarly, with free software, my mother isn't going to look or modify the code herself, but she may ask me to help with it. Or a different neighbourhood tech whiz, who may even take payment for the service.

Software freedom is in part enabling local markets to work.

And TPM does not allow other people to maintain that software.

We're obsessed with celebrity trivia and judge the person rather than the message being delivered. I see that a lot in other areas these days as well.

This is a broken society in my mind.

It's interesting because it's unique. The only other person I can think of that would do something similar is Danny DeVito.

Or at least I think it's interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so.

I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar.

I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong.

And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that.

It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism.

I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.

He won the MacArthur award in 1990.

It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.

You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do.

It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push them to do and the world becomes a very simple and predictable place. The time to panic isn't when someone threatens you, it is when they have the means & incentive to threaten you. Run or fight then, not later on.

If the FSF gains power, it will abuse that power. Sooner or later. They will react to money just as much as the rest of us. Look at what happened to Mozilla.

Organizations are just groups of people. People have varied motivations, and their motivations don't have to change just because they join forces with others.

If what you're saying is correct, then either people's own varied motivations are all evil, or instantly become evil the moment they join a group (whatever that means).

This isn't bad. But it is resonant with what Stallman talks about.

Regardless of the initiative (could have been rural broadband) by expanding into these areas Mozilla's parent company said..

We have enough money for operations. This extra money will go to this good cause.

As someone who might donate I would hold off because they have more than enough. I could use my money directly to support a cause.

Not sure how a charity starts giving to another charity (unless that is what they specialize in). That strikes me as greedy. If you have enough don't ask for more. There are local charities who could use the money.

Which is why I'm a huge fan of sortition as a way to run groups of people larger than a dozen.

That doesn't mean he's wrong. Just...a loon.

I think it's actually quite impressive that he saw something incoming which only now (20 years later) is becoming feasable.

then again, a lot of people think I am also crazy, so there's that

One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more."

If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human species. People with life experience so deep as to have limited exposure to some of the more mundane ones we all take for granted. I'd recommend offering a bit more benefit of a doubt, and a wee bit more effort in terms of investigating context before writing someone off.

After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.

Yes, I pointed out his backtracking on that.

> After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.

I don't think of Stallman as an enemy, just a very creepy guy who happened to make some important contributions. Regardless of his backpedaling, I would have extreme reservations about leaving him unsupervised around children. That doesn't mean his ideas were all bad, just that he shouldn't be put on a pedestal. Lots of great ideas came from very flawed people.

- Fritz Haber is responsible for the Haber process that unlocked atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer, and saved multitudes from starvation. He was also responsible for horrific suffering thanks to his other project, chemical weapons.

- Hans Reiser was a brilliant engineer who created a widely used linux filesystem. He's also a convicted murderer.

- Wernher von Braun was a brilliant rocket maker who was responsible in large part for putting Americans on the moon. He was also a Nazi who made weapons that killed many innocent civilians.

I even feel the need to add that I don't share his skepticism, lest I raise suspicion about my own position by posting this.

So I emailed Cory and asked if I could interview him for a podcast. He responded almost immediately and said yes. At the time he was doing interviews on major network programs about a new book, and I figured he would never respond.

He was basically like you would expect Cory Doctorow to be in person, smart and well spoken, friendly and fired up about computing freedom type issues. We need more public intellectuals like him.

    https://starlabs.systems/
    https://system76.com/
    https://www.pine64.org/

https://minifree.org/

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en

But the first company (Purism) specifically attempts to change the industry, they state it as one of their goals: https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-p....

And for completeness:

Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission

https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-c...

Do you happen to know if any of these companies monitor their supply chains to avoid China? I recognize that that's not the fight that many of these companies are fighting, but it seems like a worthwhile one that would probably tip at least me over from one option to another.

I've done a little poking around myself, but haven't seen anything.

On the hardware side, they are trying to produce their phones outside China, but it’s expensive: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ ($750 for phones produced in China vs $2000 for those produced in the USA).

We are so far away from companies creating and embedding computers everywhere for this to be an issue. Let alone for sophisticated means of interaction.

And lets say we somehow exceed all expectations and companies start creating marvelous products that are all on par with the iphone. It's still going to be difficult for them. There are people out there that are afraid of 5g because they think it causes coronavirus. We've avoided capitalizing on nuclear energy because of NIMBY. These nutjobs combined with perpetually on the fence observers will be a big enough stumbling block for a lot of this overreaching behavior. Remember how places banned google glasses?

Have faith in human stupidity and disorder - it's a tried and true system.

Apart from those in TV:s, loudspeakers, phones, light bulbs, doorbells, cars, airplanes, watches, trains, billboards, medical equipment, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, thermostats, elevators, vending machines, kitchen appliances, lawnmowers, musical instruments, cameras, bathroom scales, thermometers and a few more things there's almost no computers at all in most everyday objects.

This is true, without your qualifier. Go into a random house in America and you won’t find many smart appliances. Internet of things devices are more of a hobby for those with disposable income, than some thing greatly taking over. There’s not a real problem that smart lightbulbs are solving to be worth the time and hassle for most people. There are a couple of exceptions, like internet connected TVs that can play Netflix for you, make a lot of sense. But go look at Home Depot, not many fridges, ovens and microwaves are being advertised and sold as smart.

The examples you provided with general human stupidity and disorder is a good one.

Another one, besides The Singularity fluff, which is very much related to your own two and which we see often today, is with AI. You can also find other examples littered in the history of sci-fi literature, especially towards real life projections, not just fantasy.

My big less was that humans are naturally inclined to massive overestimated our ability to master these systems and are terrible at projecting how these systems will also be adopted and run (typically always assuming some masterfully run corporation or government full of geniuses).

The reality is almost always extremely more underwhelming.

Not to downplay the need for things like controls on privacy or surveillance.

But even something like the NSA is probably a good example. They are capable of so much with today’s technology and do in fact work very hard to have said genius’s work there. But I’m sure general bureaucracy and institutional incompetence has stopped many of our worst imagined fears from being realized on a wide (and therefore meaningful) scale.

This sort of thinking helps us become more practical in our projections and our handling or what is possible (and a counter to knee jerk reactions for hyper control through hyperbolic and extensive law - which we’ve seen frequently elsewhere in history places such as drug prohibition and race controls, where the controls cause far worse harm than any betterment).

I also think this is why older people tend to be more conservative in their expectations. Personal failures and learned education of those in history help push us in this direction. Unbridled optimism is for the youth. And I still think an important thing for society to move forward. As long as it’s not the only voice in the room, as it seems to always want to be.

This is bullshit. It's for profit and control.

The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created.

It's one of the few things that gives the average person the same abilities as the wealthy or elite. Whoever you are, where ever you are, if you have a general purpose computer and some knowledge, you can do just about anything.

Rather than teach people about this amazing, near magical piece of technology enabling anyone to do amazing things, the whole attitude, at least since i've been around using computers going back fairly far is, 'users can't be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity'.

Instead of being taught as something that's now just a part of life, the way something like driving is, despite being nearly as, if not more important than, driving is in society these days, general computing is still pushed as this mysterious arcane art the average person needs to be protected from through the use of everything mentioned in my first paragraph by someone who can lock everything up and provide security for them.

How else could they convince people to own three, four, five a dozen of what is essentially the same thing? Just locked down in functionality in different ways.

I lay responsibility on the early generation of tech people that got rich quick in the late 90's early 2000's. They seen the potential computers had to bring, they took advantage early and made money, they got greedy and have done nothing since but try and keep the average person out through whatever means necessary.

Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing.

ETA: I changed my original wording from blame to lay responsibility on. My intention wasn't to blame anyone in particular but to bring awareness to the let down by those original people that benefited from the openness of general computing only to be at the forefront of trying to lock it down now.

Yet, it's disheartening that even in many online forums of so-called hackers, one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. Or who argue against the FSF and the right to tinker.

If I had to choose one quote from your post is this one:

> The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created.

Well said.

What these people don't know is that we already had all of these arguments, 20+ years ago, on Usenet and Slashdot and a ton of mailing lists and it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll. The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago. The problem, of course, is actually getting the average Joe to understand what it means and what it implies; they have enough difficulty understanding what Free Speech really meant for them, and even now are willing participants in its dismantling.

That said, the library of existing Free Software is phenomenal. For most people, almost anything you could possibly need has some incarnation in the vast libraries of GPL and copylefted software out there. It's not going away, and so far there's no sign of general purpose-ish computing going away; $50 Raspberry Pis have more compute than most machines from a decade ago and so it's a really good, really equalizing era in computing, for anyone willing to take the plunge.

We need schools to start teaching kids Linux from a young age, I think.

This is what depresses me. It was won, like you said -- yet there's a new generation of tech-minded people, even here (or on stackoverflow, reddit and many other places), who are not Joe Averages and who don't acknowledge the matter is settled, who disregard the old arguments, and who will argue walled gardens and locked down hardware are good things. Surely you've seen this too. It's really disheartening, and probably part of the wider phenomenon of younger generations unwilling to learn and understand old battles and hard-won rights and lessons.

To be clear: I don't mind people not knowing about the history of computing. Nobody is born knowing. But actively arguing for less freedom, freedom that was once part of hacker culture -- that hurts.

Is it? Logging into my old Slashdot account after several years of not bisiting /., early 6 digits, I found old posts removed.

Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production.

No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

No, they aren't: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

We should strive to get back to having engineering level access to the general purpose computers we buy. And then continue on to give tinkerers the same engineering access for tools for making things: CNC lathes and mills, etc. Then your "whoever you are ... you can do just about anything" part becomes even more powerful. My 2c.

We're close. Between home CNCing and 3D printing, both subtractive and additive machining processes are available and becoming more readily accessible for home production.

I've been excited about home manufacturing for a long time. It really has the potential revolutionize so many things in the world. The advancements in material research related to this has been pretty awesome over the last decade.

A world where any individual can produce most of anything they may need, using what will hopefully be more and more biodegradable and reusable materials.

Between that and small scale agriculture and power generation, this is where I really hope the direction the future goes.

A society built on small scale local first production that branches out further and further to a connected global grid. It gives power back to local communities, allows a trade network based on actual necessary commodities starting at a more local scale and scaling to a global scale seamlessly.

Something that puts the least pressure on the world while still allowing the benefits of a globally connected world.

So much amazing technology is available today to allow a smaller and smaller level of independence that can contribute back a lot to local society. Things that were out of reach 30 years ago or so are now within the reach of nearly anyone with small amount of resources and the willingness to learn and try.

To address some of the other comments here too. Educating enthusiasm to the general public is the best way to start. Whatever someone's interests are, there's a chance computers can be included in some way. Teaching people about how computers can help them with things they already enjoy will help them along the way to becoming enthusiastic about computers in general.

Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & centralized options. Most people just want to use tech like an appliance that benefits their lives, not teach themselves to manage or understand it.

Driving is an apt analogy because the overwhelming majority of people have no idea how to maintain or extend or tinker with their vehicle, nor do they want to learn. They just want to steer their car towards a location much like computer users want to steer their phones to a video or article or profile. Some minimal skill is currently necessary for driving, but even that's going away. Soon, cars will drive themselves and the automobile will finally be as convenient as a phone.

Kill everyone in tech right now then reset the clock, and in 30 years you'll have exactly the same industry. There's no tech Illuminati trying to crush general computing, general computing just stopped being necessary.

Software that doesn’t infringe on your freedoms is great, but functionality and user experience is important. A big reason why proprietary and increasingly user-hostile software won is because it works well enough (despite the hostility) for the majority of people.

To expand on my earlier comment, my point was that free software will not succeed until it competes with proprietary software on user experience and functionality, and the only way to compete is to focus their (limited resources) where it matters instead of making yet another distro, desktop environment or init system.

In any case, not being able to install whatever he wants, or being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM is a very immediate limitation even Joe Average will notice and complain about -- unless we, the people who know better, "train" him to accept this is the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it. And we really, really shouldn't do this.

As for your second point, two thoughts:

- Free software has already succeeded. The tech world we live in couldn't exist without it. If you work with computers, your job likely wouldn't exist without free software -- or if it existed, you wouldn't recognize it or want to work in it.

- There's a lot already said, by better thinkers than you and me, about quality vs freedom. Because free/libre software is a philosophical point of view, quality comes after, not before freedom. This is precisely the kind of thing people like RMS pointed out about the differences between libre and merely "open source" software. Please consider what better thinkers have already said in battles already waged decades ago before rehashing the same arguments.

Is it? When it comes to media, it used to be that you would have a collection of music/movies ripped from physical formats or pirated, both of which are time-consuming.

It is indeed a problem that media nowadays can't be easily shared, but is it a complete loss? You could argue that the widespread availability of near "all" media (at least when it comes to music, such as Spotify) for an affordable price makes up for it. Not disagreeing with your point, but the current model also has its upsides, at least for the time being (it is indeed a possibility that once piracy has been extinguished by the low demand thanks to legal offerings being available and affordable, nothing prevents them from raising the prices or altering the terms of the deal to be unacceptable, such as with ads/etc).

> Free software has already succeeded

Free software has succeeded, in the form of libraries and developer tools. The ideology of free software and freedom (not as in beer but the other one)? Far from it, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with.

Free software has succeeded in areas where it benefits the gatekeepers and the purveyors of proprietary and freedom-limiting software or services. It has definitely not succeeded in areas which are against that.

> quality comes after, not before freedom

The problem is that there are a lot of people out there, rightly or wrongly (we don't know their individual circumstances and the reasons behind their choice), do not know nor care about freedom as an ideology. The only way to win them over is not by pushing the ideology, but by delivering results, in the form of free software being better, or at least on par with proprietary offerings. This is where the free software "industry" has failed us and keeps failing us.

> Please consider what better thinkers have already said [...] before rehashing the same arguments.

I am not fully aware of those arguments, I am just talking from my own perspective. I try to do my bit as much as possible, but there are cases where free software just doesn't cut it at the moment, thus I have to fall back on the "lesser evil" proprietary services (as in those whose business model doesn't rely on ads, even if more expensive, for example) and recommend those to people in the same boat. For a lot of software/services, the alternative isn't a slightly worse free software experience, it's outright no experience at all.

- Free software is better in many areas. The internet as we know it wouldn't exist without it. If you feel passionately about a piece of free (or open, whatever) software that in your opinion is lacking in some regard, why not contribute to it?

- If people aren't aware or "don't care" it's our job as tech-minded people who read HN and other technology related sites to make them care. Yes, it's our job, as important -- or more important -- as creating the next fancy startup to disrupt this or that. It's our job to push back whenever someone here or anywhere argues that walled gardens are convenient and we can't have users actually owning the computers they paid for because of malware yadda yadda.

- If you are not personally aware of the battle-tested arguments for users' rights, the right to tinker, and for general purpose computing, it's your job to educate yourself. Yes, it matters that much.

Although computers are a great innovation and the human mind is powerful I think that the abstract thinking required to use computers to their full potential isn’t distributed across the human population evenly. There are so many problems that can’t be solved with computers either.

Before you used to have a separate device for every activity in your life. Phone, video camera, scrap book, magazine etc. Now all those functions those items did can be rolled into one device. My mom can’t handle that her iPad is something more than a camera/Facebook machine. She asked me to delete Pages, the word processor that came with it, because she never uses it.

I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with.

TO expand on my other comment on this thread, I think what we need to do is train the next generation to handle and demand more, rather than lock them into appliances based on what the older generations supposedly can't handle. Maybe we need to look to historic systems like Lisp machines, NLS (the subject of Engelbart's "mother of all demos"), or the original PARC Smalltalk system to recapture a more ambitious vision for personal computers, from before Apple decided that they should be appliances.

> Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing.

To blame individuals will solve nothing. This is a systemic problem. There is a strong incentive to gate-keep computers for maximum profitability, put anyone in charge of a tech company and they will feel the market pressure to extract as much value as possible from each user and close doors to competition.

Only regulations that change the industry environment will make it work for consumers. And, that regulations are clearly needed. Or locked down hardware is the only hardware that will exist in the future controlled by a few corporations that have locked in everybody else.

I'll admit my choice of words was poor.

The question I have is how can we reverse this trend? I've thought about this a few weeks ago and shared my thoughts at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso.... I am trying in my small way to reverse this trend by building a new FOSS desktop environment that focuses on user empowerment through programmable, component-based software that is inspired by Smalltalk, the Lisp machines of the 1980s, and Apple's OpenDoc. However, user empowerment is more than just having access to software that empowers the user; the hardware must be open enough to allow users to run a wide variety of software without special permission.

My dream is to start a company that is dedicated to preserving and improving general-purpose personal computing, as an alternative to commercial platforms. I'd like to pick up from where Apple left off in the 1990s, back when Apple had a lot of ideas about how to push the state of the art of personal computing through projects such as HyperCard, Dylan, Copland, and OpenDoc, yet sadly Apple at this time had a difficult time with project management, which led to the purchase of NeXT and Steve Jobs' retaking of the company. I also find the work of companies like System76 and Purism inspiring.

Hypercard, on the other hand came with some example stacks (its name for a self-contained application), and it was just a couple clicks to see how anything worked. It was, of course too limited to be used for serious work without external tools, but the potential, had it remained bundled with every Mac and given a few more iterations was huge. It was a big step toward making the personal computer a bicycle for the user's mind as Steve Jobs once described it.

Nothing has really replaced it, and Apples most popular current platform now would forbid anything with equivalent functionality.

I think a lot of us will agree that it's a shame Apple allowed Hypercard to wither and die. What you might not know -- and what I only learned about a year ago -- is that there was an effort within Apple's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to make more of the whole system (and programming generally) "Hypercard-like" called SK8 [1]. It seems like it was received with confused stares from the more traditional developers in the company. And, as with much of the really interesting ATG work, it was tossed out eventually.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8

I fear the opportunity to popularize such a thing has passed, though I suspect the discoverability not quite as valuable in an era where information is orders of magnitudes more available.

It does seem like a battle, for every open project you hear about, there's 10 more proprietary giants pushing some new all inclusive platform, but I don't think the war is lost or even close to being over.

Any time I try to tell someone how to tell a computer what to do, I can guarantee someone will tell me how unreadable it is. Or how important it is to use java or python because there are lots of java or python programmers (what a sucker move!). Or maybe someone will tell me I can’t manage memory so I need rust to tell me how. Or I need libraries because I can’t (or shouldn’t) be “trusted” to write certain kinds of code. And so on.

Most programmers (people really) are downright toxic to anyone not like them, and maybe it’s really the fault of the bullies who came before you, but it is you, the reader who can help stop it.

It’s like in 1984 how they reduce language so it is harder to express yourself, so it is with software. But we are truly free so thoughtcrime is only a crime if you let it be one. Of course there will be people (programmers) looking down on the others and will use their doublespeak to lock people down and prevent anyone from getting the idea they can do something else with their stuff.

What if we simply stop telling people how not to code — and call those that do out for their bad behaviour — then maybe more people will start coding. And maybe just maybe our “government” will demand an end to the other walls and ceilings in software.

Take the term user-friendly; which is insidious term in that it labels everything which isn't in that bucket as user hostile. That we now co-opt the term to mean any software which is easy to use for certain users, means that we, as developers steer away from creating software not in that particular bucket.

We do a disservice to people to hide these tools away; software should enable users, not dictate what they do. I love this particular example of a Professor in French studies extending Emacs to do medieval transcription [1].

[1] https://josephrjohnson.georgetown.domains/posts/emacs-transc...

Some people see something hard and give up until someone else makes it easier.

Others make themselves better, and it will pay dividends.

"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

Android probably comes the closest to a free market for software that gives normal users some measure of control over their own devices. It requires TPM and secure boot so that there's a viable option for normal people who accidentally install a bad APK. Normal people can't flash EEPROMS by hand to remove rootkits.

I'd love if general computing was pushed as one of the most important things for people to know. I still think that the level of expertise necessary to maintain a malware-free computing experience is beyond the reach of most people. Computer and network security are hard.

These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much. I think the real reason is DRM and control over the platform; malware gets used as the stick in this argument, and is mostly a red herring.

There used to be a time tech-minded people widely considered this kind of control evil. I wonder when the cultural switch happened that people in a site called hackernews started considering it acceptable.

Of course, that kind of power corrupts regardless of its wielder's benevolence, with there being recent examples of Apple imposing, or being forced to impose censorship on services provided through third-party apps (e.g. Telegram being forced to censor doxxing of Belarusian police), and smartphones play a much more important role in society than game consoles do.

With respect, the threats are real. I spend plenty of time removing unwanted software from my relatives' PCs. Antivirus/antimalware software is not much better; it slows the systems down significantly and doesn't protect against adware.

Let me ask you this: of the many times your relatives had spyware, viruses or malware... do you remember a time when they caused real damage? I don't mean slowing down the computer or making it malfunction, but actually stealing something irreplaceable, identity theft or causing a real money loss? In other words, when were these instances more than annoyances?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335261 (2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364 (2019)

An analogy that will probably define the 21st century...

Might be a little long, but I liked it in the end (and my fiancé drew pictures for it which I think turned out great).

https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

I like this part:

> Jonathan looked upset. “Why do the knights support this work? They are skilled farmers, couldn’t they tend their own land?”

“The earls offer the knights a comfortable life, high salary, and pleasant work (though curiously poor housing). Life outside the earldom is uncertain and difficult.”

“Do no knights strike out on their own?”

Philip was quiet for a moment. He pointed across a vast vista to a large castle in the distance adjacent to that of their own Earl Zuckerberg’s. “That is the castle of Sir Brian Acton of the former Earldom of WhatsApp. Sir Acton was an idealistic farmer who rejected the ways of our earl. He promised the serfs he would take no part of their data harvest they produced from the land he provided them, and instead the serfs even paid him a small cash fee for his protection. He had no knights to watch and report on his people and no heralds spreading pronouncements.”

“What happened?”

“He was too successful. Earl Zuckerberg saw many of his serfs begin to leave his lands to work the lands of Sir Acton (at the time he was known as Farmer Acton). This was a risk to the power of Zuckerberg’s earldom, since an earl without serfs to tend to the data fields has no harvest to interest others. In the end he offered Sir Acton a knightship and such enormous wealth that he could not refuse. It’s said he now lives in that vast castle alone, is rarely seen, and rarely speaks. The serfs that were in agreement with him now belong to Earl Zuckerberg as they had before, their deal was broken, and once again they tend to our earl’s data harvest.”

i do think it's worth asking what the alternatives are, and what we have to do to chase them.

i was very salty above, but i feel like i have embodied the zeitgeist, captured the popular attitude, fairly accurately, to get an escape from capture into techno-feudalism.

i for one also have spent a lot of my life with endless zero pay toil, chasing the better alternatives, basically sure that my life will never reach any kind of techno-culmination, never achieve any kind of useful escaped coherency, but engaged in the struggle none the less. for zero pay, expectations of reward, other than personal satisfaction at having made a go at homesteading myself on the digital.

i'd also say that i don't find open source uneasy to work with, & in fact it feels more comfortable to me, lets me go down rabbit holes but rabbit holes that ultimately, usually, culminate in some kind of ground truth & insight, some understanding gained. my macbook on the other hand started refusing to connect to my wifi 3 weeks ago & there's next to no hope for understanding why the macbook has had this change of heart, for finding out what went wrong. the macbook will remain unknowable, a thing that is unexaminable, outside the scientific process & unadaptable; in some ways it's comforting, getting to a hard wall & having no place further to look, but i for one will take & hope humanity continues to have rabbit holes to dive into & chase down, towards reason, towards understanding, towards betterment.

and it's just so much easier & more interesting to situate myself in such a powerful land, as OSS brings.

i think we should take Cory's techno-feudalism concerns very seriously, and very much consider what we ourselves can do, and assess more honestly the behaviors & perceptions of the options about us.

There are many cheap computers like rpi, but regulations could demand certain security controls that might eliminate those devices.

So I could imagine (a terrible) future where innovation slows, our devices are like ipads, and you need to go to uni to use a real computer. It would take some time... but I think theres a chance it could happen.

There should accordingly be a neutral authority for signing apps, and requiring that companies build on neutral connectivity standards like PCIE. The ecosystem can stay open as it matures, but you're right, if the internet remains 4 giant companies, then yeah, even general purpose computing devices can be reduced to iOS, Windows 10 S, and Android with locked bootloaders and no alternative app stores.

The civil war problem though, user rights vs owner rights, I think can be helped along though maybe not solved completely with basic income and mandatory information disclosure. Lots of the problems he talks about involve people very underlevereged in the market and incapable of making decisions both because of an unequal distribution of information and/or capability.

So maybe we can solve the capability problem by giving everyone enough cash to allow them to make market decisions not solely based on survival, but also based on things like moral value. For example, people could more sustainably make purchases based on things like logging, spying, data protection or even allow someone to move from one rental property with an overzealous landlord to another without being captive to the whims of the owner out of circumstance. The monetary threshold is arguable and having the capacity to make non-binary market decisions when capable doesn't mean that people will -- most that are capable of voting with their wallet today still often don't. This wouldn't solve those human problems, but in many markets I feel we're reaching a point where many people are not just unwilling to make pro-consumer decisions, they're incapable.

My second point, mandatory information disclosure, is kind of a necessary component to a functioning capitalist market. Consumers can't make informed market decisions without information from the market. Forcing correct information disclosure of one kind or another allows consumers to compare services. Sure this doesn't solve problems with what should be mandated or "natural flavors", etc, but the more correct information consumers have, the more likely they will be able to make the best market decision, be that ingredients, certifications or schematics.

Not really. Capitalist opponents of DRM like that. Many of us are against ownership and property as such - but do support autonomy, privacy, decentralization of power and the breaking of the dichotomy between user and designer/programmer, between producer and consumer.

Barons also provided for the common defense. An unlocked software architecture and untrusted code leaves people at the mercy of hackers, it doesn't empower the average user.

We can do that defense of users better than we're doing right now, by divorcing the trust model from the paid vendor model, but it's worth noting how we got here in the first place and why where we are now is better for a lot of people than where we were. If we can't recognize that, it's hard to make a value proposition that people will actually sign on to.

There are other solutions to this problem that do not involve surrendering control over everything that matters to corporate interests that may coincidentally align with your own sometimes.

For example, do we really think a corporation primarily motivated by making its profits is going to be habitually careful about software security? We know this is not often the case, because the quality of so much software produced by big businesses today is terrible in terms of security. What is more telling is that it continues to be terrible even though we are well aware of methods to mitigate many of those vulnerabilities. But those methods usually require more skill and/or more time to get right, and typically that means greater up-front costs, and since it turns out that Joe User will often put up with junk security and pay good money for the software anyway, the profit incentive does not have the outcome we would like.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean Joe likes the poor security. He might be willing to use the tech anyway because he values what he gets from it more than he believes the dangers are costing him, or because he believes the dangers are inherent in the tech and unavoidable, or because he just doesn't realise the dangers are there in the first place.

This can be solved in a number of ways, but most of them come down to showing people that it's possible to do better by writing software that actually does better, and given the lack of commercial incentives coming from above, the most likely place we'll see that is in community efforts. Those efforts don't even have to result in some sort of openly developed software that dominates its market to succeed here, just to make it obvious to enough normal people that they don't need to accept substandard junk and they should demand better in return for their money.

Much the same argument can be applied to issues like privacy, repairable and upgradeable hardware, open standards for data portability, freely programmable devices, and no doubt many more. If competition in the commercial markets isn't getting the job done, yet we know doing the job is possible, it's up to those of us with the knowledge and skills to push things forward for now. That could mean directly creating better hardware and software, educating our less skilled and experienced peers to improve standards in the industry and make hiring better people less expensive, or simply educating users and pushing for higher standards from the customer's side.

Yes. It's the monarchy argument - Apple focuses on security because they own the ecosystem, so they're hurting themselves and there's no-one else left for Apple to blame if they screw it up.

Maybe those priorities are well-intentioned, helping to make sure their customers don't lose access to precious photos because they lost some important key. Maybe they are driven by more nefarious motives, such as the endless rumours of government interventions. It doesn't really matter, because the gaping security vulnerability is there all the same, and much of what Apple does actively pushes users into it, and at the same time Apple makes a big deal about the security and privacy of its devices.

At least if you are technically inclined you can read their more technical documentation to understand what is really happening, which is to their credit. But it seems likely that most people potentially affected by that vulnerability won't have done so.

This may be surprising, but a lot of users don't accept that as an answer and find this to be a less valuable business model than one where the trusted vendor has skeleton keys.

In any case, iCloud still isn't fully secure, and Apple isn't very honest about that in its marketing. It also doesn't give those users who do value security and privacy more highly the opportunity to use iCloud with real security, while simultaneously making it unnecessarily difficult to transfer data using other, more secure methods.

As one potential alternative for discussion, you could instead construct a system where users had the option of keeping keys entirely under their control, with suitable backup options, or of creating an online emergency recovery system where partial key data was given to Y trusted friends and recovering that data from any X out of those Y would be sufficient to reconstruct the key. Each friend need only know that they are agreeing to be an emergency keyholder for someone, and no-one else other than the original user and the keyholder need know that the relationship even exists.

The UI for a system like that could be extremely simple. Turn on the emergency recovery system. Identify a list of friends you want to trust. They each get asked if they're willing to help, and you either get a list of people who all said yes or prompted to choose more people if anyone declined or couldn't be reached. Once you've got enough, everyone who is a trustee carries around a suitable fragment of the other keys on their own secure device(s) in exactly the same way that their own key is held.

Only if you're trying to say that the war is mostly over, and general purpose computing lost.

The article is not biased or out of date at all. Most people can't figure out how to get around "secure boot" technology, which has the effect of locking people out. Big companies, both those that make hardware and software, work together to lock ordinary people out of creating alternatives. If an independent creator were to make something good, the big companies would just make their own version, that would be just as good for most users.

Yeah, this article seems like it accurately predicted the future when it was written.

>Secure Boot/Trusted Computing

This is an effort born out of seemingly benevolent intentions. Rootkits, a form of malware known for implanting themselves into a computer system before an Operating System even loads and persisting in various exotic ways were quite difficult to detect or do anything about. By applying various cryptographic verification techniques though, one can be sure that software being loaded or delegated to is actually the "original legit stuff".

The issue comes back to trust though. The community fought hard against a move that had been shaping up in the standardization of UEFI and secure boot to fight against entrenched industry actors being able to gatekeep or be the only holders of keys. The fear was that someone like Microsoft would utilize their position to remove a User's ability to load a cryptographically "unblessed" OS. Happily, User's can swap out that cryptographic material now, but many of the more arcane aspects to doing so on a system to system basis are poorly documented and difficult to discover. At least the desktop world seems to be pretty accesible, but the mobile world is a nightmare in regards to getting it up and running from the get go with minimal support and a modest home lab.

>Monolith's

The monoliths I speak of are tech giants. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. The different flavors of evil wrought vary by the particular actor. Apple and Google have used their role as gatekeepers to their App store as a means to tap into novel business verticals, or to be able to ensure that other app developers can be frustrated or otherwise managed by applications of arbitrary structure and standards. Things such as code signing requirements baked into the OS have created situations where now there is a barrier to entry of at least understanding cryptography and the tools around it (once considered a niche and unnecessary computer programming skill, now core). It also dissuaded and complicates the keyboard to pixel prochain even more intimidating. I expected that I could hand my child a smartphone sized computer to program and crash to get familiar with computing fundamentals, but the world has gone hard the other way. Frankly any place with an App store has. Most mobile system foundries or OEM's are notorious for locking down access to the implementation details of their silicon.

Nvidia, Microsoft, and even AMD's graphics divisions have earned a access to a special place of hatred in my mind over the two pronged efforts of collusion with the media industry through software driver and hardware implementations that make it absurdly difficult to drive one's own purchased graphics and coprocessor equipment as well as supporting abandoned hardware configurations. (I'm looking at you Sony, and your abandonment of the Nvidia GeForce 630M.)

All of this user hostility was absent when I was growing up. You had this machine where the only limit was what you had the documentation to read to know how to drive it. Nowadays, it seems everyone is more interested in shoving a microprocessor in things, but threatening with lawyer, anti-tamper, or absolution of themselves from having to provide any documentation to a buyer at all, of the responsibility to deliver to the user any constructive value, while at the same time, maximizing lock-in and recurring revenue streams. Look at HP printers nowadays for how microprocessors being inserted into the meta-logistical function of ink management makes user's life actively worse, where previously one was free to source one's ink from anywhere with nary a concern.

It's got to stop.

Joking, of course. Half-joking.