Comment by thefz
7 hours ago
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.
I agree with this sentiment 100%.
Probably the speculative FOSS project I'm most excited to think about is an open alternative to YouTube – a universal video hosting platform or network, free from commercial incentives baked into the platform.
I've only started to think about this recently so haven't explored whether it's viable to e.g. run all video hosting in a torrent-like, distributed way, or perhaps a Mastodon-like model, but the goal seems like one of the best things free software could aim to achieve right now. YouTube needs to die, and it needs an alternative that could conceivably kill it.
"But the time of "making people care" about things is gone. They don't care. They never will with all this noise going on."
Tragically, that's very true. But society and societal issues being what they are nowadays we should not expect anything else.
Most of the world's addicted users would be bereft and suffer severe withdrawal without their regular dose of Social Media. Same would apply if those 'amazing' apps provided 'freely' by that wonderful magnanimous benefactor Google were to disappear or ever be under threat.
Any notion that their treasured online ecosystem could be disrupted or their 'free' apps might be replaced with FOSS equivalents would cause outrage. With their attention spans already severely reduced, uses would never stop to consider the true benefits of FOSS, instead they'd actively fight against it.
Like a parasitoid wasp taking control of a catapillar's mind/body to benefit its offspring, Big Tech has parasitized the minds of much of the world's population before anyone realized the fact.
That this outrage has actually happened without any effective opposition is a true tragedy, to expect FOSS to reverse the situation without some cataclysmic event intervening is just a fanciful pipedream.
> They're told that gibberish is real,
Literally. In pentecostal churches people (even children) are taught to babble out loud as if it's divine revelation. And another to 'interpret' the gibberish in the 'human' language for everyone else to understand.
Many of these people are college educated. Yet they learn to compartmentalize to the extreme.
I always wondered where this belief that progress is given comes from.
Nothing is given in this world. Every real fruit of progress (freedom, democracy, public health etc, not iPhone) was fought for and paid with effort, sweat and blood. People were often put in jail, tortured and murdered. I am not sure what exact price you have in mind when you state you've dedicated your life to FOSS, but I somehow doubt it is comparable. It is naive to think that once we achieved something, we don't need to keep fighting in purpose to keep it. This is equally true about democracy, eradication of diseases through vaccination, and free computing.
Of course only geeks care. My point was that it was always like that. Every big societal and political change was enacted by a relatively small, but coordinated and motivated minority. Majority always is passive, and even if it comes in, it comes in at the very end of the process. The problem is not a small number of geeks that care, but rather geeks' reluctance to organize and act politically. Hell, in this demographics political is always suspicious and unworthy. There won't be any success until this changes.
1 reply →
> Only geeks care.
This is false, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20207348
3 replies →
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.
The GVCS is a totally different beast than open source software. It's been around for at least two decades now, and has been making very little progress in the last ~15 years. It's trying to reproduce the most visible products of mechanical engineering without having a firm grasp of what is needed to get the supply chain working.
Notably lacking from their toolkit is anything large (no refineries, no blast furnaces, no glassworks for making window panes, etc) or anything needing high precision or high purity (medicine, ball bearings, optics, high quality metals, etc). It still assumes the rest of society will be around to source those materials from.
The GVCS is like if FOSS only ever produced leftpad libraries and never a linux or a postgres.
2 replies →
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.
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.
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.