Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

And how it could leapfrog Apple as the dev platform of choice.

Read the whole story

 

[icejam_]

BarkingGhostAR[/url]":3cr7ujn3]
If the Linux arena had half the development money that Windows had for one year it would probably crush the market from corporate to gamers alike. But criticizing Linux for not having drivers because they ignore the fact that development is mostly free is just silly.

Linux development is driven and sponsored by huge corporate players, and paid developers do 80% of the work.Some major developers of the Linux kernel run their own 'consultancies' that perform contract work for Intel or Red Hat.

It isn't that there are no resources to develop Linux for desktop. People who decide on its development just don't need it as much as they need networking protocols or OpenStack.

jcupitt[/url]":3cr7ujn3]

idleberg_[/url]":3cr7ujn3]
Don't get me wrong, I'll choose bash over cmd.exe any day, but why would any Web developer require make or gcc? Node is available for Windows, Ruby is available for Windows, Python is available for Windows…

I do wonder a bit how useful it'll be. You can't run notepad.exe from inside bash, for example, or run a linux binary from powershell. It's much more like a VM with a shared filesystem.

Same thing here. Would that work from within an IDE? For example, can I run code that I wrote in Pycharms inside the Linux subsystem, or do I need to do through bash every time I write some new code?

 

[icejam_]

Adriano Petrosillo[/url]":1va9f4tz]

Chip O.[/url]":1va9f4tz]

zogus[/url]":1va9f4tz]

tjukken[/url]":1va9f4tz]"Indeed, for a number of years, it wasn't a huge exaggeration to say that Apple made the only x86 laptops that were both reasonably affordable and pleasant to use."

THAT really was a huge exaggeration. Windows laptops were no harder to use than Apple's. And they were more affordable, as they didn't command the huge premium Apple took for essentially the same hardware.

No they weren't, and aren't.

In Christmas 2011 I was looking for a light laptop to take on a trip. Although I have been a Mac user, I wanted a cheap Windows machine because all I was planning to use on the road were web, mail and a couple of small Windows-only apps, and we all know Apple overcharges, right?

Well, Windows laptops turned out to be either too big (15", 2.5kg and a 1366x768 display?), ran on glacial Atoms, or too expensive (comparable to Macs), and all were hobbled with terrible trackpads. In the end, I was surprised to find that an 11" MacBook Air was the only machine that was neither ridiculously expensive, ridiculously slow, nor absurdly large, all at the same time. So I got one of those, with the Windows apps running in a VM. It's still my road machine today.

Fast forward to February 2016. Now my wife wants a laptop of her own, so we go look for a Windows machine because that is what she uses at work. We started by looking at a MacBook Pro 13", which she liked a lot, and decided to find a Windows machine that is approximately equivalent but is cheaper--because we all know Apple overcharges, right?

Well, again, I was surprised that the situation is still the same--the cheap Windows laptops are hobbled with huge 15" chassis coupled with crappy displays, and the nice ones with SSDs and retina-grade displays are as expensive as equivalent Macs. At least the trackpads are much better today. My wife takes one last look at Surface Book, shrugs at the sticker price, and says "At this kind of a price, I'd rather get the Mac."

So once again I find myself enriching Tim Cook by process of elimination, and I can't help asking myself where this urban legend of Apple's "huge premium" comes from.

The end of summer, 2007. I'm in the market to get a new machine for school and for Photoshop. My previous system was a Mac G5 (dual CPU) workstation. At the time, it was pretty awesome for Photoshop. But it was dying. So new laptop time.
I initially went toward Apple since I'd been already using the G5. But the price was way higher than expected. Power to dollar ratio was not good. So I decided to check HP, Dell, etc...
Dell didn't have much in the way of customization and their offerings were lackluster, so I checked with HP.
Turns out, you could pretty much throw anything into them. And their 17" laptop had a base price of $999.99, compared to the MacBook's base price of somewhere around $1700.
Not only was the HP's base price cheaper, it was spec'd higher as well. Twice the RAM at 2gb, Core 2 duo at 2.6ghz Vs. Core 2 at 2.2ghz, 256mb VRAM/ NVidia GPU Vs. no real GPU on the Mac.
The list goes on. Even after I configured the system, doubling the RAM, taking the CPU to 2.8ghz, adding a better screen, Bluetooth, webcam and microphone, doubling the storage, I still hadn't reached the base price of the Mac.

Fast forward to 2010. I was ready for an upgrade. Again, I checked the MacBook Pros out because they're just damn good looking.
Same story, only now HP was offering an 18.3" screen and the system had a small, but fairly powerful subwoofer, all for a base price of $1200. I configured it up to $1650 and used a "back to school" coupon code to shave off $400 from the price. That included 8gb of RAM, 1gb Nvidia GPU, quad core i7 @3ghz, BR drive/ DVD burner. 256gb SSD with a 7200RPM 500GB secondary storage, amongst a host of other features not found on the MacBook Pro. All for much less than the starting price/ base configuration.
One thing to note was a pretty bad issue that line of HP's had with a row of touch-based buttons above the keyboard. After a year or so, they get wonky and activate themselves. So I disconnected them. Crisis averted, performance not affected. But still, it was an annoyance enough to sway me from HP (unless they resolved the issue, which they didn't).

Four years later, I'm looking for an upgrade. Same store as before, but this time, HP was out. Mostly because, like Apple, they seem to like the 2core i7 CPUs instead of the quad core version. So I looked at Dell. Their Precision m6800, to be exact. Base price was $999.00 for the 17". Apple's 15" base price was $1999.99. At base, the specs are very similar. Only, the Dell is obviously larger and much heavier. I'm not looking for portability, I'm looking for power to price.
Core i7@4ghz, 16gb RAM, 4gb Radeon GPU, DVD burner, 5 USB 3.0 ports and the ability to power two external screens, a hot-swappable HDD bay (which is pretty amazing, really) and a host of other features. And it was still $50 less than the base 15" MacBook pro. The one and only knock I could give it is that it "only" has a 1920x1080 screen. I could have upgraded to that, but that would have been an additional $200. And I'd rather stick the extra dollars into a better CPU/ GPU.

And if you read all of that, you'll know why people get pissy about the price of Apple computers V. everything else.
You might find a better low-end laptop from Apple, but there's always going to be a Windows version that is more powerful. It might not be as lightweight and good looking, but they're there.

*shrugs* get what you like, who cares the brand. But to be so blinded by one's choice as to not see the obvious...

[edit: the base price of the 17" MacBook 2007 might have been a lot higher, somewhere around $2700 if anybody knows, please correct me on that]

What Macbooks do well is "general-purpose computer with good form factors, long battery life and stylish looks". If you want a non-Apple laptop which replicate what Apple do you'll spend something similar. Thing is, Macbooks (Airs and Pros) are a well-thought out compromise but they're still a compromise, which you may be happy with or not. Portable workstations they aren't. Flexible they aren't (as much as other laptops). They offer good craftsmanship, 10-hour battery life and good enough performance for most tasks and for this reason they're very popular with a certain crowd (for example, tech writers who will then favourably review them). I'm personally very happy with, say, 60-70% of the battery life (which, I'd like to stress, means still 6+ hours) and have a somewhat heavier and larger computer with a better screen, sometimes better performance (Macbooks have/used to have better storage speed, IIRC) and expandability.

In January, I needed exactly that: A well performing all-rounder for ~2500 euros, one that I can keep for another 3-5 years. I set my eyes or either Dell XPS 15 or MBP. After serious internal debate, I went with Dell because:
- Apple doesn't care enough to update processors on their 15-inchers. Because of that, not only 15" comes with Haswell, but also lacks TB3.
- Dell has better GPU and screen (4K vs 'only' Retina). It also had bigger SSD than the Macbook
- Despite the 'packed' form-factor, I can still open it and replace RAM, SSD and wireless module if needed.
- 3y warranty was included in the price, which was 2460 euros.
- On top of everything, the Dell sales rep was actually talking to me about specs, ports and warranty terms. At the famous Apple Store, I talked with a sad aging hipster who was really trying to discourage me from taking the 15" and settle for the flimsy 12" instead. I'm afraid he totally misread the customer, but that's not my fault.

If I wanted to get similar specs with the MBP, I'd need to go with the top-spec model for 2849 and Apple Care for another 349 euros.That's a total of 738 euros more than I paid, and it still will be a computer with 2-year old chip. If that isn't AppleTax, I don't know what is.

 

[icejam_]

vartec[/url]":11zi1w6d]

foljs[/url]":11zi1w6d]
They have great slimness, weight, durability (due to the unibody construction), and battery life. Plus, they tend to offer the best screens on the market (hi-dpi "retina" came on Mac laptops first, and besides that reviews have consistently pinned them to the top or near for color accuracy etc, including in Ars),

That used to be the case in 2009. In 2016 any $800 hi-def 13" ultrabook has 40-50% more pixels than 13" retina. And touchscreen. And Gorilla Glass.

And let's not forget MacBook Air, with 1440x900 on 13". For 2016 that is abysmally low.

Competing PC laptops sometimes beat them in one or the other category, but rarely in most such areas -- and when they do, they tend to be the high end models (Dell, Sony Vaio, etc) with same pricing as the Mac equivalents.

MacBook Pro 15" - here is where Apple shines, best quad-core laptop on the market, alternatives are bulky "workstation laptops", which are way more powerful, but are big, heavy and expensive.

Only if you omit the following:
XPS 15, Precision 5000, Asus Zenbook 501 or even things like EVO15-S. All come with a 4K display.

2 and more years ago Apple was a de-facto monopoly in that segment, not anymore.

 

[icejam_]

agrouf[/url]":2s16y8fk]

KnightRAF[/url]":2s16y8fk]

agrouf[/url]":2s16y8fk]

KnightRAF[/url]":2s16y8fk]

enduzzer[/url]":2s16y8fk]

agrouf[/url]":2s16y8fk]In a way that's a failing of the GPL. Maybe it's time for GPL v4. GNU is technically a good system but many people forget or don't care it's about freedom first and foremost. Running GNU on Windows defeats the purpose of GNU.
I know the Ars community doesn't care about freedom and I fully expect a rain of downvotes but I hope the few with an open mind can still read it before it disappears from view.

There's a thread on Trisquel forums about this.

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/ubun...roject-canonical-and-microsoft-what-your-idea

Wow...

Virtually everyone in that discussion comes across as a religious zealot with only tenuous connections to reality. That was actually painful to read.

There is no religion involved in this discussion, you are too close minded. Not everyone has the same opinions as you. They are discussing from the perspective of the people who brought bash and GNU to the world. People want to use GNU for cheap. They think GNU is a public service that is owed to them. They can't understand the restrictions on it but they are OK with Windows EULA. They think it's fair that Microsoft just take GNU but the wine team has to reverse engineer their code and they call name on anyone who doesn't agree, even the ones who created GNU. The irony is when they call them religious zealots or go as far as calling them 'entitled' and whiny.

Yeah, they're discussing from the perspective of people who think anyone who disagrees with their philosophy is immoral, abusive, and dangerous. You know, like a a religion. And there are a couple of people in that discussion who appear to have elevated RMS to the level of infallible demigod/prophet. I'd say that the group involved in that discussion meets at least two and arguably three of the definitions for religion given here.

The idea that Microsoft including these tools in Windows is some kind of giant secret plan to destroy free software makes zero sense, yet nearly everyone in that discussion believes that it is such a secret plan, and the few who disagree plainly still think that is a reasonable suspicion to have. I do not recall a single person in that discussion providing any evidence of such a plan or explanation on how such a plan would work, beyond "It's Microsoft so it must be evil". They have bought into their religious dogma that Microsoft is evil so heavily that they are no longer capable of rationally evaluating anything that involves Microsoft. That's why I called them zealots.

And yet they made some good points but you dismissed them as zealots, the same way you accuse them of dismissing Microsoft as evil. Instead you should join the discussion and expose your opinion in a civil way. Name calling doesn't make you right.

My favorite 'good' point, creme de la creme of conspiracy reasoning:

"It is possible that there is an evil hidden plan behind all that. But I do not see it. It may simply be that MS makes a strategical mistake that benefits the free software movement."

People have been using GNUsoftware on Windows for ages i.e. GIMP or R. No people were harmed during that process. Except for those poor souls that were told that GIMP is just like Adobe Photoshop, but for free.

 

[icejam_]

agrouf[/url]":6853krut]

DKlimax[/url]":6853krut]

agrouf[/url]":6853krut]

KnightRAF[/url]":6853krut]

onpon4[/url]":6853krut]

KnightRAF[/url]":6853krut]Have you ever read the philosophy pages on gnu.org? I pulled that basically straight from there. They consider all proprietary software to be abusive to its users and unjust and the purveyors of such software to be unethical. They consider everything from iOS to Chrome to Windows to any SaaS to be malware. They consider software piracy to be less evil than abiding by the license agreement not to redistribute proprietary software, though at least they consider both more evil than just not using such software. They consider it immoral to teach someone how to use proprietary software. In short, they're nuts. Which isn't really surprising since RMS is, in addition to being a genius, more than a little crazy and he's had a large roll in shaping the philosophy.

Most of what you say here are positions. Having a position does not make you religious. Regular, secular political movements have positions, too. You call the positions of RMS and the FSF "nuts", but even if this unsubstantiated claim is true, it's insubstantial to the claim that the libre software movement is religious.

It would be a religion if everyone in the libre software movement considered the writings of RMS to be holy scripture that was infallable. I do not, and many others do not. Disagreements abound in the libre software movement. I can't speak for others, but these are some of my disagreements with RMS and the FSF:

* I do not agree with much of anything on the "words to avoid" page.
* I do not think outreach programs (e.g. for women) are a worthwhile effort.
* I do not agree that Debian is unfit for recommendation for ethical reasons.
* I do not agree that "works of opinion" should have copyright licenses applied to them that prohibit modifications. In fact, I think this is unethical.
* I do not agree that textbooks should be classified in the same way as software (though I do agree that they should be libre, simply because I think every work should be libre).
* I do not agree that copyright should be preserved for the sake of copyleft.
* I do not agree that Mozilla's software must be rejected because of Mozilla's trademark policy (though I do agree that the trademark policy is bad).
* In a private email, RMS suggested to me that playing proprietary video games on a friend's computer because that's what your friend wants to play is tantamount to pointing and laughing at a friend who is getting drunk. I do not consider this to be a reasonable comparison.
* I do not agree that LibreJS does any good whatsoever.
* I do not agree that the GNU Free Documentation License is a good license for manuals, or even that it is a libre license.

I could go on and on.

I never said the entire libre software movement was a religion. However, I do believe that some people (like the zealots in that discussion) have turned the libre software movement's positions into their religion. Hence their behaving like zealots toward everyone who disagrees with the positions that they have turned into their personal dogma. The entire free software community does not have to have turned their positions into a religion for some subset of the community to have done so.

As for me calling the FSF nuts, that's based totally on the contents of the philosophy pages at gnu.org. I had never seen them before today (someone linked into them earlier in the discussion). Personally, between the name calling (Amazon Swindle", "game cr...aaps", and "music screaming"), scare quotes in every third sentence, and the newspeak-esque replacing of commonly understood terms because they don't like how those commonly understood terms make people think, I find them almost as crazy as the zealots in that discussion.

With all respect, they look nuts to you because they go against your own personal dogmas. You don't seem to have any reason to have that opinion, just that it's "nuts". It's your dogma actually. Proprietary software is ok and anybody who think it's not is 'nuts'. But you have no reason to think that, just that it's the way it is. You are actually as religious about that as you accuse them to be.

Either you don't know meaning of word "dogma" or you are grossly abusing it in illogical, irrational wrong way in an attempt to degrade and drag down other's position to same level as yours.

Pretty sure it is logical fallacy (False equivalence IIRC). Not bright idea. It's not working...

What I'm trying to say is that calling other people religious zealots or nuts does not constitute an argument, it's just mean. Btw you can stop downvoting anything you don't agree with already, it dorsn't matter at this page and it's just mean anyway.

Meanwhile, among the GNU people "Anything designed to make life easier for Windows developers should be opposed" constitutes a perfectly sound argument. /s

 

[icejam_]

agrouf[/url]":rqywfhxi]
You really don't get it. It's not an argument since they have no opposing view point. It's their opinion. For a discussion you need opposing arguments and the only thing opposing them is insults. If you don't agree with them, tell us what you think, by all means. Insults and name calling is not an argument nor an opposing view on the matter. /s is not an argument either. What you are doing is just trying to make their position sound absurd by putting /s at the end of your post. This is a good way to have up votes in an echo chamber like Ars technica but it's a populist post with no substance.
There can be no reasonable discussion because your positions is void while their position is clear. They don't want their software to be used in that way.

Did I insult them? Did I call them names? I quoted their opinions, word for word. Those opinions are a very clear explanation of why FSF continues to be marginalized while pragmatic open source is having a great time.

Yes, they might not like that MicroSatan is using their* tools to attract developers. But they released those tools on a license that allows that, and it is not the first time that HugeEvilCorporation uses GPL. Google does that, Apple does that, Amazon does that, so what? If they don't like the fact that people and corporations use free software in a way that they think is wrong or unethical, they probably should go back to their own agenda and look at Freedom 0.

If you deny Freedom 0 on the basis of who the user is, you're being hypocritical. It's like saying "hey, let's create an inclusive, free-for-all marriage institution. Except for hetero people. We don't like them to use our marriage for their disgusting hetero normative goals." And if you think that you're defending Freedom 0 by doing that, you're being absurd.

If there's one single point in that discussion that is against Bash on Windows and is not an example of aforementioned hypocrisy, I'd go and discuss that. But there is none.

---
* FSF is not the owner nor maintainer of all the tools inside Linux User Mode. Heck, even the Linux name does not belong to the FSF.

---
edit: changed the example a bit to reflect preference distribution better.

 

[icejam_]

onpon4[/url]":31s32mwh]

icejam_[/url]":31s32mwh]FSF continues to be marginalized while pragmatic open source is having a great time.

I don't know about that. The idea of open source claims that open source software is better in practical terms. It's hard to quanify this, but when you look at the numbers, most libre/open source programs are not collaboratively developed, and recently it was discovered that a few very important libre/open source programs had massive security vulnerabilities for years.

While being licensed on GPL, OpenStack has nothing to do with FSF. Nor does Blender. A lot of things are happening around Apache (Docker, Spark), Google uses MIT license to release Angular, Go is BSD, Rust uses MIT-BSD-Apache. But I still fail to see a single project under FSF that is anywhere close to the level of complexity of Docker and was developed in the last 10-5 years. The world moved on, but FSF still lists Gnash and Google Earth's replacement as high-priority projects. This is what I mean by marginalized.

Yes, this is my selection of things that make our lives as both users and developers easier or more interesting. You're more than welcome to say that I cherry-picked those and prove me wrong.

 

[icejam_]

onpon4[/url]":10hm1pm6]

icejam_[/url]":10hm1pm6]While being licensed on GPL, OpenStack has nothing to do with FSF. Nor does Blender.

What does this have to do with my post which you quoted? I never mentioned OpenStack or Blender. I don't even know what OpenStack is. Unless you're talking about the bugs I vaguely mentioned; I was in particular thinking about Heartbleed and Shellshock, but if that's what you were talking about, it makes no difference whether the FSF has anything to do with the program. I was only pointing out that these are open source programs, and the promise of open source failed in the case of these bugs. It's a blow to the whole idea of open source software being more secure; you could say it's not a fatal blow, but it's still a blow. Yet it has no effect on what the FSF says.

icejam_[/url]":10hm1pm6]A lot of things are happening around Apache (Docker, Spark), Google uses MIT license to release Angular, Go is BSD, Rust uses MIT-BSD-Apache. But I still fail to see a single project under FSF that is anywhere close to the level of complexity of Docker and was developed in the last 10-5 years. The world moved on, but FSF still lists Gnash and Google Earth's replacement as high-priority projects. This is what I mean by marginalized.

Your logic doesn't make sense. So, the libre software movement is "marginalized" because the FSF isn't responsible for the software you think is significant? This doesn't follow. The FSF is a political group, and the GNU operating system (which, by the way, you are using substantial components of if you're using a GNU/Linux system) was developed to achieve a particular goal (to make it possible to use a computer without proprietary software). The FSF does not develop software these days. That does not invalidate its positions, nor does it necessarily mean that the libre software movement is irrelevant.

I also don't understand what point you're trying to make by mentioning that people are using permissive licenses. You do realize that permissive licenses are libre licenses, approved by the FSF, right? The FSF even directly advocates the use of the Apache License for certain kinds of programs. Are you under the impression that Docker is a problem for the libre software movement? It is not. Docker is under a libre license. What we have a problem with are proprietary programs; for example, LLVM is libre, so we don't have a problem with LLVM itself, but we do have a problem with proprietary LLVM extensions. Copyleft is a strategy we use to suppress proprietary software, not an ideal or something we insist on out of principle. This strategy is why we wish for GCC to do better than LLVM, for example.

On a side note, the FSF is in a process of reforming the high-priority projects list, and Gnash and Google Earth are slated for removal.

I am afraid you misunderstand the idea of marginalized. It does not mean that you stop doing things. It means that people don't care what you do.

None of it had to do with bugs. The whole point, in bullets:
- FSF is a political group that aims to promote free software because it in their eyes it is ethical. Agreed.
- FSF as such has a political position which I didn't say is invalid. I said it is marginalized.
- Marginalized means that the people who are the face of open source these days (I made multiple examples) do not care what is the official opinion of FSF and RMS. They just make it work and those are the people that made FOSS popular, not FSF.
- Nor does the public opinion or researchers who study FOSS care for the FSF. Research papers quote Eric Raymond more often than they do quote Stallman.
- There is no GNU operating system. There never was. The pinnacle of the GNU software movement materialized only because Linux came along, and from there they went separate ways. Now you have to fork it because it does not adhere to your high ethical standards.
- No, neither BSD nor MIT (the most popular license on Github at the moment) are not libre licenses. They're permissive, but not libre.
- Apache is, but it's only recommended for small projects. Spark is not small. Docker is not.
- Do not think that "if people do what we support, they most likely support us".

tl;dr: Linux and open source software are not popular because FSF did something. They're popular despite FSF's misguided crusades against ECMAScript or rather disgusting name-calling (Amazon Swindle).

 

[icejam_]

vartec[/url]":15rg4lv4]

icejam_[/url]":15rg4lv4]
- There is no GNU operating system. There never was. The pinnacle of the GNU software movement materialized only because Linux came along, and from there they went separate ways. Now you have to fork it because it does not adhere to your high ethical standards.

There is. GNU/Hurd, a Frankenstein's monster made from pieces of FreeBSD, Linux & Stallman's microkernel.

I know about Hurd. It is in the same sorry state since I started shaving 16 years ago, unfit for any deployment, server or desktop. If it would be promising in any aspect, they wouldn't fork to linux-libre.

- No, neither BSD nor MIT (the most popular license on Github at the moment) are not libre licenses. They're permissive, but not libre.
- Apache is, but it's only recommended for small projects. Spark is not small. Docker is not.

BSD, MIT, and Apache License are all "libre" licenses, as they all guarantee the 4 freedoms. They're even all FSF approved as such. None of them is copyleft.

I stand corrected in this aspect. Which brings me to a point: why on Earth do the FSF members have to come up with all of those newspeak terms?

 

[icejam_]

onpon4[/url]":37j1fv70]When you say the libre software movement is "marginalized", what I imagine is shrinkage of the libre software movement, not growth of open source support. Growth of open source support does not hurt the libre software movement.

If the general size of FOSS expands, but none of it with relation to FSF, then it is getting marginalized, isn't it?

I am afraid that you expanding from my words about Free Software Foundation, registered in Boston, with RMS as president, to a general opinion about amorphous 'libre software movement'. I never said such a thing. I have no idea what that movement might be and how to define it's boundaries. All my comments were and are related to FSF and its self-inflicted inability to be an influential organization.

And this is where we can probably stop, thank you for the discussion.

 

[icejam_]

onpon4[/url]":3ns6kr8n]
Like I said, the FSF's mission is not software development, but political activism.

At which IMHO they're failing because in the eye of the public opinion:
- GNU/Linux became just Linux.
- Free Software became Open Source Software, and only few understand what does "libre software" mean.
- Linux Foundation outgrew FSF at least in the money at their disposal. If you don't have funds, you cannot do politics (and Linux does politics quite nicely, i.e through End User Council or LinuxDefenders)
- There is no free hardware. There is Open-source hardware movement.
- Eric Raymond is being quoted more by peer-review publications than RMS. (almost 4000 to almost a 1000 according to Google Scholar, with similar results given by Scopus).

In the end politics is a popularity contest. Free and Open Source is popular (at least in the developer-programmer-server space), but FSF is not, not even among the FOSS crowd or the researchers that study the movement. I'd even say that if FSF closes shop today, FOSS will not suffer. Awareness about privacy and security of your information will not suffer either.

many of these people who are advancing the goal of the FSF are open source boosters and may even hate the FSF with a passion, but if they are helping the FSF achieve its goal by making libre software better, it doesn't matter.

If my goal is to promote marriage equality, but even other promoters of marriage equality do not like me and just ignore me, I am not doing a fine job just because marriage equality law is widely supported and even legally binding. It does not follow.

The Hurd is under the GNU GPL, which gives you the freedom to...

It does not give you the most important freedom, Freedom to Get the Job Done. At this point, discussing the freedoms that you are granted with Hurd is like discussing all the freedoms that come with a car that has the engine bay filled with concrete and broken axles. You might as well just start from scratch, with whatever license you like.

This is most likely the biggest problem with FSF: they completely ignore that most people run computer programs to do something, not to realize ethics or freedom. According to FSF, a program that is a piece of garbage with infinite loop that bricks your hardware, as long as it has the four freedoms, it is better than a proprietary text editor that people use to write novels, compile shopping lists and write love letters. Most people appear to think otherwise.

Even if you hate this copyleft provision, you must be jumping through massive hoops to compare this to Cuba when it's a lot more freedom than any proprietary program gives its users.

Cuba libre is a name of a coctail, so it most probably is not comparing to the state, but the drink.

 

[icejam_]

onpon4[/url]":3eo3ot0o]
The FSF doesn't say much about technical things, so I don't think that measures like the number of times RMS gets referenced in research or the number of programmers who care are the relevant statistics.

Those are not technical papers, but philosophical ones. Those are: The cathedral and the bazaar and Free software and free society.

What's relevant is the number of people overall who agree with the libre software movement.

Again, you jump from FSF to an undefined libre software movement, which has god knows how many supporters. This is a non-sequitur that you do over and over again and that's probably why you don't understand the notion of being marginalized. You cannot jump from "Yankees supporters" to "baseball fans" like that.

That's why I said it would be interesting to know how many people attended LibrePlanet this year compared to previous years.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/lib ... comes-next

350 in both 2014 and 2015. In 2013, at a different venue, that was 150. Meanwhile at OSCon, attendance goes into thousands (somewhere between 2 and 3) and is generally growing. Then there's LinuxCon, with a 1000 or so.

I didn't say the FSF was doing a fine job. Quite the opposite: they aren't doing the job of software development at all because they see no need for it currently.

Which is what we already established, my point is about the "political activism". Hence the analogy to gay marriage.

Talking about marriage equality, it would be like campaigning against death sentences for gay people in the U.S. If an action is unnecessary, then taking that action anyway is just a waste of resources.

Another try: Currently, socialist ideas are getting popular in US, mostly because of Sanders, a self-described socialist who works for the Democratic party. Does it mean that Socialist Party USA is doing fine political activism?

That is not a freedom, it is a technical capability. By that reasoning, a rock is disrespecting your freedom by existing. Not everything in life has to be useful.

Wait, what? In what way does an existing rock disrespect any of my freedoms?

"Works to do practical job" (how FSF defines software, i.e here) are first and foremost to be judged by their ability to do a job. If they don't, as in Hurd, any "freedoms" that you get are as theoretical as all the freedoms that you get from being immortal.

You can't judge everything based on how effective it is at performing its task. It could be, for example, that a totalitarian dictatorship would create a more efficient country than a democratic government. Even if this is the case, the totalitarian dictatorship is still unethical, and must be opposed.

I can and will judge "works designed to do practical job" on how effective they are at performing their tasks. Give me a most ethical car on Earth that doesn't drive, I'll abandon it and walk or take a tram because I don't need its ethics for the ethics sake. Give me a choice between comparable cars (let's say, BMW 3er and Mercedes C-Class) and I'll choose the one that doesn't gather telemetry and allows me to change light bulbs by myself.

You can disagree with our position, of course. But if you agree with our position, then all proprietary software is unethical, regardless of how useful it is.

I find your position highly theoretical, unfit for real-life applications and communicated in a cryptic, newspeak language. I might agree with you on freedom 0 and privacy concerns, but that's about it.

Thankfully, all of my concerns can be resolved through civil and trade laws. i.e. in Germany you cannot give up certain rights and any EULA that asks you to give up personal data after software purchase can be easily deemed void. Similarly, it would not be a problem to enforce software standards (i.e. make sure that every commercial OS needs to be SUS-compliant) similarly to how we enforce electric appliances to use 110/240V power supply.

 

[icejam_]

Adriano Petrosillo[/url]":2j1nhmvw]Some of the commenters should relax. What's your issue with someone being an activist? If anything, they're doing the job that you aren't. Without the free software movement, the more pragmatic open source movement (which takes the idea of free software and repurposes it to a less ideological approach) might have never become a thing. We're all here to reap the rewards, and we have to thank guys walking barefooted and navigating the Internet pre-downloading select pages and immediately turning off their connection if other people have been inspired by them and decided to put forward a more "mainstream" version of those ideas. How does even the most ideological activist who voluntarily puts himself through much more trouble than it's usually bearable harm your freedom, by the way? It's a free world (in the West).

Or open source would be a full-blown thing instead of something constrained to fairly technical part of the general software world. Or we would have BSD all over the place and Linux would have never happened. You'll never know.

Any discussion about "What if there would be no FSF" depend on your world view. Marxists would argue that there would be "open programs coalition" or "source code sharing club" with Eric D. Pallman that would do the same job because the history needed such an organization back then. Libertarians would say that it is only thanks to RMS and his charisma because he's such an extraordinary person. Anyway, no point arguing.

The GPL must be doing something right, after all. And a work such as the Linux kernel would cost years of R&D and most of all several billion dollars.

Linux costs years of RnD and several milion dollars yearly, it doesn't matter what license it is released on.

Linux development is driven and sponsored by huge corporate players, and paid developers do 80% of the work.

 

[icejam_]

By the way, at the end of the day, why should someone hate copyleft licences with a passion? What's the lone developer's interest in having their own code potentially lifted by a company and repackaged in a proprietary solution?

I don't know why should someone hate GPL with a passion, I don't, but I never used one for any of my projects.

I find FSF tiresome because of their fanatical, yet hypocrite leader ("I advise you to not have a cell phone" but "when I need to call someone, I ask someone nearby to let me make a call.") who's been the face of that organization for far too long. And then, I also happen to dislike internet vegans, gluten-free and any other evangelists who try to convince random people on the internet that their lifestyle of choice is the best.

To illustrate my point, I replaced the word proprietary with "not vegan", original belongs to onpon4. I hope that does not violate any libre licenses:

Thinking that something is unethical doesn't directly obstruct "real-life applications". I think you might have missed the part where I said I gave up some of my freedom to apply for the job I currently do, because I had to (job applications are all online at this point, and usually require not vegan JavaScript code). I also used my phone - which is one of those basic phones with a not vegan OS - at that time, though I don't these days. My OpenPandora has the not vegan OpenGL ES blob installed, because Tiled (a program I need to use) cannot run without it, due to the way software is built for the OpenPandora. I ran not vegan JavaScript code to create an Ars Technica account (it was needed for the CAPTCHA, IIRC). The difference between me and you is I recognize these as things that diminish my liberty, and I avoid them when feasible.