>And I would even say: despite having 0 budget, they were immensely successful over time.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because from where I sit, Free Software had a bright spark at the beginning and slowly faded away into a miserable failure.
Apple sells a lot of laptops because they're really easy to use. The wifi "just works" and the battery life is excellent.
To a first approximation, zero people run fully-free stacks on their daily-driver laptops because they're not easy to use unless you're the kind of person who uses their 2005-vintage Thinkpad on Ethernet and AC power only.
>I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like?
Well mostly it would look like an FSF that doesn't eat toejam on camera, and instead of giving the same tired lecture about the 4 freedoms, they actually go out and do productive things like put on workshops for college students to install trisquel or whatever.
Instead of wasting countless hours sponsoring dumb stuff like the GNU Name System they could be writing open wifi/bluetooth stacks that support more than 802.11g, since connectivity is usually the #1 reason people won't run fully-free stacks on their laptops (or at least it's a big reason I won't), or if not that then how about getting governments to run Linux and helping them do so? They could operate a consultancy to bring in some operating income.
>Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?"
Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost? People think it's a technical thing but technical excellence has always been secondary to political/ethical purity for GNU/FSF as evidenced by things like HURD and gnutls.
>There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person,"
Look, if you're not going to argue in good faith then don't bother replying further. Those movements all have have multiple organizations working towards somewhat-common goals. Those individual orgs do indeed have leaders and by and large they're not toejam eaters.
I think in this new era of endless security breaches at cloud firms and M1-style processing innovation we'll see a slow but steady migration away from the cloud.
>It is certainly fascinating to see people start running away from "information wants to be free" and other Free Software principles full tilt when, all of a sudden, it's their livelihoods that are suddenly on the line.
Indeed. Everybody is a leet haxors when they're 14, it's 1998, and we're vying for +o in #warez on DALnet. We believed information really did "want to be free".
Unfortunately some of those same kids grew up to create today's data barons and that old saying about getting someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding comes into play.
I have ubiquiti gear for my home network. It's pretty good for what it is, which is basically "consumer networking gear for power users" but I'm not sure I'd use ubiquiti to do serious networking for an enterprise environment. Maybe a small business/doctor's office type of environment.
I mean that women still routinely experience sexual harassment in the workplace.
>Can you expand on what you mean by “casual racism is institutionalized but perhaps less overt”?
I mean that while you might not have a bunch of people throwing the word nigger around the boardroom as one might have in yesteryear, racism is still alive and well in many policies today
>Interesting, somehow I don’t think how companies where run in the 1950-1960 translates to today
In some ways maybe.
In the 50s your wife stayed home to work while you worked a blue-collar job, probably having only a high school diploma (if that), and your blue-collar job supported a family of 2.1 kids, your wife, Rex the dog, a car, and a mortgage in the suburbs. Oh and it probably came with a pension. Everyone smoked indoors. Companies felt obliged to look after their (male) workers and sexual harassment of female employees was routine and casual racism was baked-in to the culture.
Over the years CEO pay has risen something like 1000% and worker pay less than 20%.
Now companies spy on their workers and engage in union-busting while paying their workers a pittance such that even a person working two minimum wage full-time jobs is barely able to sustain a family in the USA and Canada. We don't smoke indoors any more. Sexual harassment of female employees is still routine and casual racism is institutionalized but perhaps less overt today.
I guess society can pride itself of the smoking thing but we've either made no progress or regressed in a lot of ways.
It's not even "faster software" so much as eliminating the culture of Developer Convenience at the expense of User Experience. That's what got us Electron. I've actually seen comments on HN unironically describing the web as "the perfect app platform".
Unfortunately, the majority of users seem conditioned to accept software with awful performance, so there's no impetus for developers to upgrade their skills.
I find systemd to be an over engineered pile of trash that keeps infecting more and more of the Linux ecosystem because nobody wants to stand up to redhat and their push for more poetteringware
Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008.
I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc.
I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use my lap top, not just configure it every time systemd breaks something and I have to switch distros or window managers to get away from it.
I still like Linux on the server but in my opinion quality ux requires someone to get paid to do the un glamorous work like fixing compatibility issues and corner cases.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because from where I sit, Free Software had a bright spark at the beginning and slowly faded away into a miserable failure.
Apple sells a lot of laptops because they're really easy to use. The wifi "just works" and the battery life is excellent.
To a first approximation, zero people run fully-free stacks on their daily-driver laptops because they're not easy to use unless you're the kind of person who uses their 2005-vintage Thinkpad on Ethernet and AC power only.