Comment by wolvesechoes
11 hours ago
I am baffled that people in this thread write something along "well, depends what you call win" - the goal of Free Software is quite clear. The goal is freedom, computing freedom, freedom of the software user. It is very easy to notice that in 2025 users have less freedom even if they run some Libre Linux distro on their Thinkpads than they had running Win98, because of everything that happens OUTSIDE PC software ecosystem (phones, SaaS etc), and even inside PC world things sometimes are not obvious.
Free Software is losing, simple as that. Even with Kubernetes, as the goal was never to provide free labor and free software infra to companies.
Free Software isn'r just losing, it's being co-opted, hollowed out and sold back to us without the freedom it was meant to protect
Yes, basically rent extraction over various forms of cloud capital. The widening societal wealth gap means owners can simply charge workers for access to what they own, without having to produce very much. Perfect in the short term if you are rich. Cash thus flows from the working class to the ownership class in a feedback loop that intensifies the problem.
I shall quote:
“ The right of workers to manage the state, the military, various enterprises, and cultural and educational affairs is, in fact, the greatest and most fundamental right of workers under the socialist system. Without this right, other rights of workers—such as the right to work, the right to rest, and the right to education—cannot be guaranteed. … We must not understand the issue of the people's rights as meaning that the state is managed only by a small group of people, while the rest of the people merely enjoy rights such as labor, education, and social security under their management.”
Meaningless. You can replace socialist by capitalist and it would be equally meaningless.
The correct word is democracy. The people (or "workers") having a say or not has nothing to do with socialism or capitalism IMO.
I don't understand the downvotes - parent's right. All regimes today like to trumpet themselves as (exceedingly!!) democratic, the question is: are they? In my estimation, overall, communist countries have done significantly worse in this department. And yes, rule by the many people is the definition of democracy.
The vast majority of software now runs on personal devices and the average user has no knowledge nor interest in it, as long as they press the button and the action is done.
The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
> The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
People that fought for common hygiene standards, or labor rights, or human rights etc in the past were a minority too, because most people didn't care. But this minority was able to organize, push forward and gain support. And the fight was worth it, and improved lives of us all.
Good point. Wasn't going to say the fight is useless, just that those who know are the minority.
Ya think? I mean, I agree 100% that was the good fight. But to take a tangent here? That's falling apart, world wide.
It's falling apart because the average person wants to be "smart". I applaud this, the fact that people want to learn, want to know, want to understand.
Yet now, when they try to learn? To understand? They end up with youtube. Tiktok. Pages of AI slop. They're told what is "astonishing" or "proves that scientists don't have a clue!". They're told that gibberish is real, that those lab-coats are all evil, or trying to poison people, and so on. Or even better to their egos, that the lab-coats aren't so smart, and with this "one simple trick", you can be smarter than them!
This is coupled with outrage!!, when this rarely tends to be the case. Yes, there is corporate greed and it gets caught, recalls happen, mistakes happen, yet 99.99999% of the products and services just work. No one notices that aspect, only the "big news" of the tiny, rare, unusual failures of our system.
And then on top of that, politics enters the scene. Now, it's "us vs them" on matters like medicine?! Or health? Or school? What?! And no it's not just "one side", it's both sides, just in different ways.
People used to say things like "I don't know". Now people who can barely write, and read, have opinions on everything. They have no idea of the science behind things, but they'll just say "Oh! I saw this on youtube by a random person I've never heard of before! That's true, not what I learned in school!"
And the worst part is, we want people to think "being smart" is important. We want intellectual betterment. Yet now this is twisted and warped against the light of knowledge, for now everyone craves it, but are given the ashes of burned truths. All provided by false profits, so they can pocket some coin.
As far as I'm concerned, youtube and tiktok need to die. Social media needs to die. There are other solutions, but Google, Meta, the rest only care about cash, profit, and not one iota about fixing this.
So if they won't fix it? Then we must destroy it.
And can we? Nope! Because the public LOVES it. Loves loves loves it.
So back to FOSS. I've dedicated my entire life to FOSS. But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on.
I'm not happy about it, but if you can't get people to even be interested about privacy violations by Google on their Android device? How will you get them to even remotely care about FOSS?
Parent is right. Only geeks care.
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Even those, who should know better, choose to not think about the consequences and in masses opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness. I mean, look at all the computing professionals (?), who use Google Chrome instead of Chromium or Ungoogled Chromium, or another browser entirely. Look at all the web developers, who only test on Chromium-derived browsers, maybe even only Google Chrome. Look at all the IT departments, who mandate use of Windows in companies. Instead of being part of the change, they are part of the dystopia.
I think we have a severe problem, due to influx of too many people, who don't actually care, even though they should be knowledgeable enough to see the consequences. Maybe the paycheck is the only thing that counts for them, but they are actively contributing to the process of us all losing our freedom. If we lose our freedom (more than we have already) in the digital realm, we will lose it outside of the digital realm as well. For example imagine there are no longer any auditable open source/free software messengers you can use and all you can do it trusting proprietary vendors, who can introduce any backdoor they like. What tool will you use to organize protests? What if messenger makers agree to introduce state determined blackouts? Or secretly report your activity to the state and police, so that they appear at your door, before your protest even started? How will you organize any critical number of people, without digital freedom to do so in this day and age?
Our freedom is at stake, but most people don't care, even if you tell them. We are too damn comfortable for our own sake.
Open source produces good infrastructure, but does not build good products. Asking people to use a worse alternative for some ideological reason that they don't feel strongly about is silly. Companies use Windows because it's easy to hire or train professionals capable of managing Windows deployments and there is a good system of getting support externally when needed. Control over source is very costly and companies and individuals rightly want to externalize the cost. Companies that make their product open source have trouble monetizing what they build. Offering paid support isn't always a viable business and other companies can simply repackage your product and sell it. There are a lot more things people prioritize above software freedom.
> opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness
Surely you can think of more reasons than that.
When I choose to play Mario Kart with my kids, it's not because I'm too lazy to download and install Tux Racer.
This is not unique to software. There's no "free&open ball bearing" design out there, let alone for a machine capable of making them, even though the modern world couldn't work without them. The only people caring about ball bearing design are technical minded people already working in the field.
Same as for a thousand other fields essential to operating the modern world. Nobody has time to learn them all, so we specialize.
There are some attempts at things like this: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs
They're usually very hard to get share because machine manufacturers can smash out cheaper things via processes like castings, mouldings and stampings, then eventually lock down spares (or just don't bother).
The open source option basically only be worse (but maybe more repairable) and/or more expensive than the alternatives, except when there is no alternative in the market. And China is providing so much mid-grade affordable and fairly functional stuff there often is an alternative even in the most isolated places. In 1980, getting a decent lathe in some town in, say, Angola might have been basically impossible. Now, it's still not cheap, but it's not completely impractical. If you can get bearings and induction-hardened shafts you'd need to DIY, you can get the whole thing, and maybe even cheaper.
It's a bit depressing, because of course I want to see the world flooded with high-quality, modular, very standardised, re-usable, repairable, hackable items, but that approach has a limited market in reality.
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Even their own manufacturers don’t know what’s in a bearing assembly they manufactured ten years ago, all they can do is sell you a new one with the same spec. Rolling element bearings are specified by application; shaft diameter, load direction, and so on. Manufacturers change important things about bearings, like how many rolling elements they have, without necessarily changing the part number. It’s worse than closed: after some time has passed, nobody anywhere knows how it was made.
Software is unique in a few ways. It has the ability to spy on us, to be insecure and against our best interests if an attacker gains control. It can also lock us in in ways that are harder with just physical objects. Infact printer ink lockin happens using software not e.g. the shape of the cartridge.
Inversely, the only end-users FOSS cares about are those that can compile and build from source themselves. More so if they can also submit good bug reports and patches.
The demographics of the majority of end-users shifted a long time ago but FOSS is stuck with a mindset that treats everyone like their own sovereign sysadmin.
It'll take a big shift in the Free Software movement to make it something that represents regular end-user enough for regular end-users to care about the Free Software movement.
> The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.
It was this way when I was loading Linux from floppies and compiling 3c509 drivers. Same as it ever was.