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.
Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?
This is an deeply uninformed rant about how their exact politics are what is “apolitical.” I’ve seen this exact nonsense on literally every FOSS related forum I’ve been on in the last 20 years.
But isn’t it such a weird coincidence that “apolitical” always happens to be the same as “whatever is best for moneyed interests?” Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?
want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned
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.
don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.
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!
My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
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…
I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy
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.
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 position that others should have the freedom to read, use, and adapt source code is inherently a political one. It was never not political.
It shouldn’t be surprising that people within the FOSS movement have political disagreements about precisely what that freedom should entail.
In the end it is all about user freedom. So you can do what you want. But if you develop closed software I do not want to have to use it. This consideration is less importent when the FOSS options are considerable. On the otherhand I have lived in times where it was not like that. This is always the fear.
What people do as a group matters… and people are always doing stupid things in terms of user freedom. Great example is Firefox and Chrome. People are idiots for using Chrome based browsers from an ad company. This affects me becase now websites prioritize Chrome compatibility. Essentially this makes the web an arm of Google.
Everything is political, all is opinion.
deleted by creator
if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
In my opinion, the point of many open source licensing models is not to protect the author, it’s to ensure that useful modifications to the code are able to be incorporated back into the original software. The licenses accomplish this by requiring those who fork/modify the original code to make their code/modifications public.
This improves the source code and makes it better for everyone.
You can’t take an open source project protected by a GPL license, make improvements, pretend that you did all the work yourself (i.e. not acknowledge the source project on which yours is based), and then attempt to monetize the original code + your improvement.
For example, take Truth Social. Not understand (and/or caring) about the license attached to the Mastodon project, they forked the code, made changes, and then did not acknowledge that they did so. Mastodon had to threaten to sue before they acknowledged that they’d built their platform on open source software.
It’s not about protection of a single developer or even a group. It’s about cooperation to build on the work of others in a fair way.
Open source licensing is responsible for a lot of really useful things that are integral to the daily lives of billions of people. The Linux kernel alone is a massive example. Without that license, there would be no Android, or SteamDeck. Without the BSD license, they would be no OSX/macOS. Without GPL, there would be no AdBlock, no uBlock Origin, no Git, no MySQL, no Ansible, no ProtonMail, and millions of other projects. Most internet servers would probably still be running Windows.
Most of these licenses explicitly say that you can even sell products based on the code - all you have to do is acknowledge the source project, and make your own source code public and available under the same license.
Here’s what Linus Torvalds said about people making money from Linux back in 1993:
The fact that others make money by selling Linux is something that I find mostly amusing, and something which does my ego no end of good. Frankly, I wouldnt want to bother personally, so if somebody else does it, it doesnt hurt me. Its also quite legal by the copyright, and so far I havent seen any major developer stand up and say he doesnt like his code being sold, so I dont see the problem.
I will gladly admit that I don’t use BSD nearly as much as Linux and know far less about it but I think Apple forking and close-sourcing a version of BSD is a pretty good example of what you said doesn’t happen in BSD.
With all that being said, that’s what the BSD license allows for and so there’s no issue with anyone doing so.
Interestingly, Apple as well as the 2 others I mentioned that ship BSD based operating systems sell hardware meant to cooperate nicely with the software that they “give away”. Red Hat and other commercial Linucies? Linuxes? Linnii? often have a support or software license agreement that makes them money.
If you want to talk about anything to do with BSD, you can’t do it with a Linux mindset using Linux terminology if you don’t want to lead with your prejudices and ignorance as soon as you start talking.
As a first step starting point, there is no such think as a BSD distribution or “distro”. TrueNAS and pfSense are not and have never been a distribution.
I’m not going to give you all of the info or explain what they are, I’ll leave it at that for you to choose to dismiss it and stay ignorant or read and learn, expand your thinking, and stop crossing one operating system with a different operating system.
