How did the ideology of libre/free software get so politicized?
I’ve noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.
I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy. How network software is configured in systems that other people don’t control, it doesn’t matter if it’s open source when people have no knowledge of other networks configuration.
On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.
It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way. Unless someone is both a network engineer and does infosec or something similiar, they’re not in a position to understand fully appreciate how network protocols matter more than a license and code availability.
I personally haven’t run into this, though I have seen people immediately hop into a conversation to say, “You shouldn’t use X! It’s proprietary!” Worst-case scenario, I’ve seen social shaming for using proprietary software. Which I think is to some degree OK? Encouraging and advertising proprietary software is unethical, and I think it’s fine to annoy people into not advertising things like Discord. That’s not censorship, it’s just how relationships work, it’s how people associate.
Again, I haven’t run into this. I have seen people defend even garbage libre software on the basis that half-broken free code is better (ethically) than wonderful non-free code — which is true!
It only hurts the people that use the proprietary software that was made; now they don’t have control over their PC, and are at the mercy of the developer. Really, all they can do is cross their fingers and hope the dev is friendly and not up to anything unscrupulous. Speaking of which…
Not inherently, obviously! No one actually thinks that free software is a magical silver bullet that vanquishes any possibility of malware, spyware, or anything of the sort. The argument is that these sorts of things are, compared to proprietary software, significantly easier to identify and remedy.
For instance, let’s say you find through some network analysis that a program phones home with suspiciously large payloads. You can’t actually see the contents of the packets as they’re encrypted in some weird format you can’t make heads or tails of. With a proprietary program, you’ve hit a brick wall that’s very hard to climb — you can’t find out what the program is sending, not easily. Your only hope is some back-breaking reverse-engineering work, which probably isn’t feasible unless you’re a professional security researcher. With a libre program, though, you could snoop through the code for anything net-related, and discover much more easily that it’s sending your private keys to the project’s server. Heck, with the libre program you could even remove the malware code and use the program again!
One is leaps and bounds more amicable to privacy and security.
Thank you for countering me point by point, I fully respect. Even if you say that I’m wrong, I must always respect someone who argues point by point, and doesn’t do the usual internet trash of “You sound stupid, you don’t know anything”.
I have seen in Trisquel Linux forums, they get irritated or offended for mentioning something that is not 100% open source. For example, if someone obviously new posts “I want to stop using Windows, will Trisquel help me to only use free software from now on?”, to which the replies will be “Yes, but please don’t mention that software in the forum here, we don’t like that kind of promotion”. I read that and my thought is “Dumbass, they were explaining their current situation and what background they are coming from in pursuit of trying to find guidance, they were not promoting anything.”
At a certain point, people have to address the way the world is, not the way they want everything to be running. I would love to live in an exclusively BSD world with a heavy majority towards OpenBSD, along side FreeBSD to to run on all other systems. But in the mean time, since people who do all production work with various proprietary program, we have to live along side them.
My view is until free software can match the quality of a $100 million movie project as proprietary software vendors, libre software does not exist any any conversation with those people. A movie editor that makes a million dollars doing all of the editing work production does not care about software.
I think that’s what I find puzzling, is how to libre/free software advocates not see that for people who get paid for their production work on computer all day, open source software is not an option. I am not going to criticize someone who uses various Adobe programs or Pro Tools for being able to produce better quality work in less time, and there is no libre software alternative for what those programs do.
Regarding Trisquel Linux. These guys are trying to make a totally Free (Free as in Freedom) Linux distribution. That is still very hard even to this day. I think you have no idea how hard it is to have say a totally Free laptop. This is for many reasons. So you do kind of insult them by pushing Windows on them. If you do not care about this then use Debian or Ubuntu. I have used Linux for over 25, but I do not use totally Free software because it is not very easy and the trade-offs are difficult. On the other hand I totally support the FSF and their mission. We need people doing the really hard things too.
BSD. Apple OSX is based on one of the BSDs, maybe FreeBSD. They basically took it made proprietary software out of it and gave very little back. These sorts of licenses encourage that behavior which is basically free loading. If you think that is OK in terms of software you write then your fine. I am not sure I do. Thankfully Linux is protected from that or it would have already happened.
A worse situation is GitHub. Lot of projects on there do not even state a license which means they are proprietary. So not FOSS. So though people worship GitHub it is not exactly Free Software friendly.
Trisquel is sadly the kind of software that would attract those kinds of users. It’s all about being completely free and open source. No driver blobs or anything even slightly proprietary. I appreciate the stance and how they’re doing it but people who go that far in their software choices tend to be quite serious and almost radical when it comes to their choices. Some of them also feel superior to people who haven’t been able to make the switch to free software. It’s also sad that the way they react will probably chase away more potential converts than it actually helps.
The people who heavily push the libre/free software exclusionary attitude have very much turned people off with the attitude. I suspect that there have been a few that went back to Windows dueto the fanaticism.
I come from BSD, and outside of maybe Slackware and Gentoo, Linux people are not the technical people they think they are. As a collective whole, I find Linux users in general who are not paid Linux servers admins have more opinion than knowledge.
I deal with it in person and online, when Linux users hype the benefits of Linux over Mac and Windows, if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.
I do wonder what is the real world, face to face, social skills of people who only use Linux-libre exclusively and won’t touch anything it. Given the posts on Trisquel forums, I get the impression that a few of them are not functioning in a healthy and socially observant manner.
Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?
I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?