I feel similarly. While I absolutely can't and won't operate under the severe restrictions that an ideologically pure stance on software freedom ala Stallman would impose, I'm glad that there are some people, like Stallman himself, who take it to those extremes, tirelessly advocate for improvement and thus move the needle towards a better middle ground for everyone.
> I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
I wish I can be one of those young people who can be a worthy successor to Richard Stallman. I already am to a great extent, preferring FLOSS whenever possible (with an unfortunate exemption for video games, especially many PC and all console games).
My primary issue is now trying to find like people who are also into FLOSS as much as I am, and they're not as common as tech illiterate people are. Maybe someone can advise me on how I can get started (online or local around the Houston, TX area).
I'm also a big FLOSS advocate to the point where I'll use GIMP and kdenlive (which I feel are great software) even though it would be far, far easier for me to use something non-free.
An important thing RMS did was producing good software along with his advocacy. For example, even though it's inferior to vim (joking), it was and is a killer app. What RMS didn't write himself, he helped to drive and organize, and ended up as a force behind some of the most important tools we still use today, like gcc.
For RMS it was pretty obvious where the needs were. Today it's much less so, but if you want to make a big difference and start a name for yourself, I would probably look for areas where there aren't great FLOSS options and try to take on one of those. It will be challenging no doubt.
My best advice (take with a grain of salt as I'm not the next RMS which is where you want to be), keep preaching the gospel of FLOSS! Help people find and use software (and hardware) that respects their freedom! Pay attention to users that you teach, and identify usability issues that hurt adoption and work to fix them. Be "that guy" that people call when they have a problem and need a solution.
Yes, every institution is default dead without constant recruitment of young people to the cause. Most things won’t make it past a generation because everyone fails to focus on how to pass it on.
It’s not too late by any means, but it’s looking very bleak for Free software with most kids’ computing being smartphones and cloud services via chromebooks.
Indeed. The FSF is a very worthy cause. If it is true there is a lack of young people involved I'd look for reasons why amongst things like "is it a pleasant space to cooperate in", "are people accepting of new people"? I never had anything to do with FSF directly, but whenever I dealt with people involved with heavily "politically charged" projects like guix, guile, linux-libre and few others in addition to very nice people I always encountered complete idiots that would try to chastise me for example for having the audacity to report problems running a nVidia gpu. Or one person told me flat out he will not answer any of my questions regarding a programming language syntax because I admitted to be making a non-Libre package for my own use. It is 100% bonkers. You may say so what, it's just one person. Every community has idiots, right? Yes, correct, but in case of these projects I had dealings with the toxicity is rather bad to the point that only very dedicated people stay. This also means the communities are tiny and it's much more difficult to get help when you're just starting out.
I think that's why we don't see many new people flocking to FSF projects.
Honestly this is a sign that times are relatively good. Most people of any stripe have little desire to engage in politics for its own sake, and FSF is fundamentally a political entity. When the only people participating are the radicals and crazies who make it their whole identity/want to play revolutionary, that means all the normal/reasonable people have better things to do. It's when things are so bad that the normal/reasonable people are forced to participate that you get effective political organizations.
Perhaps FSF has solved all the problems the community at large deems as worth solving.
wow, that's wild. I get the appeal of living in the world you want instead of the world that exists, but at the end of the day that approach is self-defeating.
It makes me wonder if a new org isn't what we need. I love the FSF and feel they did a tremendous service to the world, but the religious extremism limits their appeal only to true die-hard believers.
I would not say it's all doom and gloom. I just founded a FOSS/Linux club at my university. There are going to be some kids who are so interested in technology that they go down a rabbit hole of different communities, open source included.
I definitely agree that the general trend towards less advanced technology will harm that though (some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder), but some cohort of the generation will _always_ be interested in digging deeper.
It perhaps doesn't help that the general attitude of someone in FOSS/tech in general could be perceived by the average person as elitist or exclusionary - I try my hardest to challenge these notions.
(Let's see if one of the other founding members of the new club will read this comment)
> some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder
Huh? Finder is the macos equivalent of explorer.exe and it's the GUI for the file system. I assume you're taking about Spotlight which searches the entire file system and the internet much like the Windows start menu.
Anyway people have been making claims like this for as long as computers have been around. Smart people use Spotlight and the start menu because it requires fewer keystrokes than typing full paths or clicking 10 times to navigate a directory tree with Finder. It would be stupid to avoid using the fastest tools available
I mean people who are literally unable to navigate directories because they drop all their folders on the desktop, and use exclusively Spotlight to find these files. Of course it makes sense to use Spotlight - I use the equivalent on Linux - but I still know how to navigate a directory, unzip a zip file, etc when many people simply never learn that.
I refuse to believe that a smaller proportion of people know how to navigate a directory and unzip a zip file today compared to any prior year. A lot of people didn't know how to use computers at all a decade ago because they didn't have any kind of computer at home, not even a smart phone
When I TAed a CS1 course for a handful of years, I'd definitely say easily like 1/4 of the class would also end up needing a general primer of basic computer usage.
Ultimately, some people are just not interested in technology or using it efficiently.
It peaked and is in the decline. The number of households with desktops/laptops is in the decline. Fully native tablet+phone is the way a bunch of kids are growing up. Only computer usage in our local public schools is chromebooks.
The whole "charging for distribution is fine but charging for development is wrong" thing is what keeps me well away from any kind of involvement with FOSS groups.
I don't believe anyone ever said that you can't charge for development. The only issue is that you're not allow allowed to limit people's right to distribute it. Once you already developed it and have given access to one person, it's up to them whether to pass it forward.
It's just like if you tell someone a joke. You can still claim credit for coming up with it, but not to stop its propagation.
In particular, you can still make money as a developer by asking for it upfront, whether from an employer, or patrons, or early access, or whatever model. Similar to how Netflix might pay someone upfront to develop a stand-up comedy special
Exactly. It isn't really possible to discuss this without "copyright" and that is why RMS focused on that topic. Conventional commercial copyright in practice is making a monopoly of redistribution and then burdening the distribution cost with additional cost-recovery and/or profit-taking.
I charge for development of (F)OSS. It's my salary. My employer likewise charges the patrons/funding agencies. But we get paid once for the effort, like any usual labor contract. We don't try to get paid again when our past work products are copied.
In the old days, paying a distribution cost was more common for free software, when it actually took effort such as writing and shipping media. This handled the case where someone asked for a distribution, so that sharing did not become a financial burden. It's a mostly obsolete concept now with pervasive internet and many low cost or free hosting options to put content out there at essentially zero marginal cost to deliver copies.
> I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
yes there are; but also not really.
due to my age cohort I'm see my self as this "next generation" software scientist/engineer who is aware and believes in FOSS and "liberty minded software";
I suppose most of use are millennials but the whole generation-label stuff is not accurate so maybe in the USA this next gen of people are a bit older but in other poorer countries they're younger???
in any case I think a lot of younger engineers got swayed away from the FSF/GNU ideological stuff by means of 'being pragmatic' which is just a consequence of when the open source movement distinguished itself as different from the free software.
I think the impact of this may have something to do with leidenfrost's appraisal that there's no next-gen to pass the torch to.
it seems like us millennials do not rally, we don't come together into any kind of social movement or dunno.
Ironically Drew DeVault shared this thought about Stallman on his blog earlier this year:
> Fuck Richard Stallman and his enablers, his supporters, and the Free Software Foundation’s leadership as a whole. Shame on you. Shame on you.
(He uses the word fuck in that post five times.)
Drew has done some great work in OSS but he has a history of going after people he doesn't like in a very vicious way. You can't really behave like this and be a leader. A leader needs to unite not divide. For all the criticisms leveled against Stallman he saved most of his vitriol for the enemies of OSS. If everything he wrote had been as personal and expletive-laden as what Drew writes the FSF would not have gotten very far.
IMO, a good leader is someone who can set his ego aside and turn the other cheek against such vitriol thrown at them. It seems like Stallman does a good job at this.
It’s commonly said that his inspiration was from wanting to improve a printer driver but couldn’t because it was proprietary.
I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability.
These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.
Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
I think you might not be considering personal bugfixes (X interaction is great for the common denominator, annoying to me), long-term support (I want to use my device securely in 2045), or custom features (I want to be able to do X, but only 0.001% of people care so Apple doesn't). I use Android, so I can't be more specific. I have heard the unverified complaint that Apple sometimes slows down old devices as new ones are released, which would be impossible in FOSS.
Apple is ultimately going to work in their own best interest. Their particular brand aligns that with the consumer fairly well, but there will be disconnects.
I don't really understand this. You plan to single handedly replace the entire OS and security teams to maintain the OS on your phone for a decade? How will you update the kernel when the proprietary driver blobs stop being maintained?
I expect more people than just me are interested in reducing tech turnover or using old tech in the hobbyist space, ie. not single handedly. And yeah, as the sibling says, if we're relying on proprietary drivers, we're not really FOSS- my fantasy world doesn't just apply to Apple.
Yes, it would be very hard. But today it is impossible, so very hard is hardly a complaint you can make in comparison.
No. They want iOS to be open source, because they want to be able to modify a few bits of source code and use their modified OS for their personal use, and then keep pulling updates from upstream forever after that. Like a small fork.
Perhaps the more generous take is that, with FLOSS software, you don't have to go it alone. My Pinephone Pro will not be running security fixes I write myself. But entirely because of its open nature, it doesn't need to - it will continue to recieve updates for years and years. For once, the hardware of a cell phone is likely to die before the software.
If it gets the support of the right people who know how to write such security software and have an interest in maintaining it, sure. But that's the reason many open source initiatives fall short of proprietary. It's either based on the altruistic whims of a few particular talents, or some company is paying to have them maintain it. And we know the latter is fleeting.
The caveat is that sometimes an initiative can be funded by charity or bounty to keep interest, but relying on generosity for 99.99% of projects is a fool's errand.
There are several OS level things I wish I could change/override on iPhone: ability to share screen during a video call, ability to control how certain Bluetooth devices pair automatically, ability to throttle apps that I know are abusing the CPU and costing me battery.
> These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.
> Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
If you look at major MacOS or iOS releases, you will often see new features being advertised that were copied from FOSS systems that experimented with them and proved them out often many years beforehand.
That is to say: iOS might have the edge on QA, but if you want to have impact and shape the future of how people use computers, contributing in the community is still a good way to do this. And in fact, commercial development tends to rely on this talent pool for survival, as companies do a comparatively poor job in educating new talent. It's where you get people with "job experience" in doing certain things.
When it comes to large sophisticated software the goal is not so much to improve it one self. Rather it is the knowledge that any anti-patterns will be removed by the community if it ever get added. Most of the time the community will not even need to remove anti-pattern from open source projects, since companies know that adding anti-pattern is just wasted developer time.
All this terminology is muddied and often misused. The whole term is supposed to refer to getting access to the root user, which is definitely an OS-level thing. One thing people often don't remember also is that gaining root on your phone and unlocking the bootloader are not only different things, but entirely separate things. You can gain root in your vendor ROM without being able to unlock the bootloader (common case on Amazon tablets), and you can install LineageOS in your phone after unlocking the bootloader but you still won't have root access in the OS unless you do an extra step, setting up Magisk or similar. You also have to re-set-up Magisk after every LineageOS update, which often means once a week if you do all the OTA updates in a timely manner. Gaining root is usually the easier thing and the less useful thing. It doesn't help much with getting a nearer-to-AOSP experience. You can remove some apps but there are still limits to what can be done without just flashing a different ROM with less crap in it.
When picking a phone I like to see if it's on the LineageOS devices page (you bring up a good point that different variations of the same model aren't equal, definitely watch out for that), as that means both that the bootloader is unlockable and that someone else is already maintaining a ROM for it, and hopefully will for years to come. If I just go after the shiny new hardware, chances are the bootloader is locked and it will never be unlocked, generating e-waste.
You linked to AOSP, not Android. AOSP doesn't have things like the Google Play Store; the shipped image is substantially different and isn't necessarily open-source just because it contains open-source components - Windows contains BSD networking code but that doesn't make Windows open-source.
You know what the "A" in AOSP stands for, right? :-)
All I'm saying is that there's a big difference in jailbreaking an OS when most of the source code of that OS is publicly available for study and experiment. Surely that is not a controversial statement?
Our young people only seem to care about witch hunting for perceived slights without proper evidence. We basically have a mob frothing at the mouth for its next potential target
Human history seems to show that all humans love forming into a single mob to attack some perceived "other." This is a habit which has existed since long before the current "mob" of young people, or the internet, or the Boomers...
The internet makes it really easy to purity test a community into an echo chamber. Many people willingly subject themselves to these purity tests to fit in and be part of the community, which is also why we see negative communities tending toward a downward spiral (like any of the 4chan communities) as people walk step by step to more extremism in their views.
What can we expect when most of the internet is paid for by abusing people's vices. The "whales" of the mobile gaming industry exist in other industries too. The majority of alcohol is purchased by a relatively small percentage of consumers - meaning the alcohol industry's main source of income is people so addicted they drink as much as they can, regardless of consequences.
When your money is made because people can't help themselves, that's blood money. It's not surprising that a society which tolerates (and encourages!) companies to pursue blood money would likewise have other moral failings, including a tendency to separate into tribes and attack different tribes.
Well, RMS tirelessly advocates for his beliefs, but sometimes his beliefs are regressive and outdated. In particular I remember a debate perhaps 8-10 years ago when the gcc team wanted to expose more info from the compiler back end to enable better support for editor integrations and similar tools, because gcc simply couldn't compete with LLVM in that department. IIRC RMS stepped in with a unilateral decision blocking the effort, saying that it wasn't a big deal anyway because editor integration wasn't an important feature. RMS, a guy who (AFAIK) hasn't done any serious coding in 30 years.
Decisions like this have definitely ended up harming the movement more than helped ultimately. Him refusing to have gcc support that ended up pushing a lot of people to other compilers (llvm) and have sidelined gcc in many spaces.
Speaking of stallman, the doom community is still alive and going strong all these years later. Dooms source was released under gpl a long time ago and the modding scene is incredible.
Check out doomworld some time to see what’s been going on. Unbelievably good level design and mods all over the place, custom source ports everywhere, thousands of maps, etc
I just don't understand the severe misunderstanding that results in one thinking that what Stallman advocates would impose severe restrictions. I'd love you to think about what you mean so I can see where you're going wrong. It's honestly that far out from my understanding of reality I can't begin to comprehend what you're thinking.
If you actually tried and really can't see how living by the gospel of Stallman would impose severe restrictions on how you use your computer then I'm afraid I can't help you.
Still, a few examples to illustrate
These are just all-in-all minor examples I could find in a couple of minutes on gnu.org. I remember reading much more radical takes by Stallman and his companions, but would have to spend more time searching for them.
Do you understand there's a difference between advocacy and imposition? Stallman recommends you don't do those things because they all surreptitiously undermine your freedom to use your computer.
During the civil rights movement black people were encouraged to not use the buses while segregation was in place. You'd be the guy complaining about how difficult it would be to get around without the bus.
Sometimes the way forward involves going back to fix the wrongs of the past. People like Stallman see the world from a higher dimension. He isn't living on flatland like you and me. There is no world where proprietary software and computing freedom can coexist. If there was you can bet Stallman would be advocating the shortest path to such a world.
I don't think we are necessarily in disagreement here, so I'm not sure how to respond. I never said that Stallman was exerting power over me to get me to live by his standards, just that I would have to change and restrict the way I use software and which software I use if I (voluntarily) followed all his recommendations. As I've said in my original post I even respect his commitment and perseverance in this regard and think they lead to a better outcome for everyone, but I'm unwilling to follow his example out of laziness and convenience.
