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Written by Reid :ablobcatattention: on 2024-12-15 at 08:52

I keep seeing this enlihhtened centrism take of "FOSS is too much about purity!!!" which first, you're throwing together two funndamentally different ideologies there, Free Software and Open Source Software are analogous to communism and neoliberalism, but second, and in theme with the politics theme, it's really just tue tollerance paradox which we've seen play out in software a bajillion times.

People use open standards and free/open/public domain software, then a corrpo joins in with their proprietary thing acting all innocent and in love of the open standard, they start getting influence and become one of the biggest entities in the spave, then boom they stop supporting the open standard, getting a lot of people to join their proprietary thing until they eventually either make it so shit nobody uses it anymore, or outright axe it for the lolz. Sound familiar? It's what did with XMPP and Hangouts, as well as what Threads is trying to do on Fedi. Take away the initian open standard compatibility, and you have the story of Skype, Discord, Facebook, and so so many others. Proprietary software is fundamentally not designed to respect your freedom, it's just a product putting you at the whims of the developer. And the solution when the debepoper runs it into the ground? You can just switch to something else! Or can, you, really? If it's a local music player, sire, but if you're using a dogshit proprietary chat thing like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Discord etc. getting everyone to move is a lot of work, especially all moving to the same thing, because even if your friends are all willing to put in the effort to get away from hell, their friends might be too tired of the constant switching already. If the proprietary thing is your OS, then you'll have to make sure all the other softwate you're using is compatible with whatever you're switching to. Once you're caught in the spider web of a corporate proprietary anything, it's hell to get out, so how about not getting caught in the first place? THIS is why so maany peopls refuse to use corporate and proprietary anything, this isn't new, people have been burned befote by this shit.

To summarise the whole thing with a philosophical quote:

"Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it." - Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldy Wisdom

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Descendants

Written by asie on 2024-12-15 at 10:54

@Reiddragon@fedi.reimu.info

maybe I live in a bubble, but most criticism i see about the "purity" of free software is about the FSF's specific interpretations and where exactly in the sand they draw the lines of freedom, and how over time - at least to me, it feels like - they sacrificed pragmatism (pursuing the goal of maximizing the amount of free software in the world) for dogmatism (pursuing the goal of adhering to a specific set of ideals, even if doing so hurts the amount of free software in the world). the "microcode issue" and the whole "respect your freedom" certification project is an iconic example of this (contrasting with the rationale behind introducing the LGPL as a GPL alternative initially) - but none of this has anything to do with standards.

i see criticisms of free/open source software akin to what you have mentioned, but they don't tend to use the veil of "purity"; rather, it's more of "convenience": people use proprietary services because they solve their short-term needs better. it's really hard to convince people who don't strongly value freedom that "fairly decent platform which will get worse over time and you'll have to move in five years" is worse than "terrible platform which won't ever get worse". people are already used to the former happening, after all, and many treat it as an inevitability and not a nonsensical ritual. unfortunately, a lot of people act like the goal of freedom not just explains, but excuses those sacrifices; it leads to a situation where people complaining that an open platform is not convenient enough and people complaining that a closed platform is not free enough essentially shout past each other, instead of trying to inquire "how can the open platform be improved for users? how can the closed platform be coerced into giving up more of their castle?". there's also the problem of most users not seeing the benefit of having code accessible to them - they do not possess the skill of programming, so to them it doesn't matter if it's a collective or a corporation harnessing that skill for their purposes, especially if the collective is further away from these purposes.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that we cannot keep improving free software by asserting ideological superiority over those who don't share the same priorities, but also that we cannot just enhance free software to the extent people expect (closed) software to be, not in this economic system and with this many hands at least (and a lot of people who try feel burned - see Aseprite).

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