Free OS' for the L5

Your (sounding to me like it is kind of strategic way of handling that you are offering here) approach might be related to 2020 Asparagus Season in Germany (mid-April to the end of June) only, from my point of view. And trying hard not to give further lessons about other deficit jobs (please read: skilled professionals), here another one farmers related; I don’t think that highly qualified (skilled) butchers are getting better wage there from they are coming from (sometimes +/− thousand kilometers away). So, my opinion is that bad payment offerings (per hour of work) might not be of an issue in Germany as you are trying to present this, as this would be against related German law(s), for sure or as well (choose which one you like), at minimum (leaving ethics aside).

Anyway, you expressed your opinion and this is fine with me, as by rethinking over and over again, talking to each other, people will find best solution, agree upon it. Worst case scenario make those that continue their lives by saying: “This or that interests myself nothing at all, is not of my concern at all,” just not to elaborate further about harvesting:

You see, I stumble from time to time to such people, or perhaps asked them wrong question, that they as experts (in their selfish lives) in some other area, didn’t find necessary to bother with (sort of). Yet, very next second I’m gone, left such hole without getting any answer, but still moved on as I worked hard to get to the point where I can say I’m free to choose from who I’m getting necessary day to day food (and water) and make my soul full of and free of, whatever subject, and at the same time.

P.S. I don’t know much about developers job, but this one, made for ‘myself’ as user: https://vimeo.com/336052823, I’m not ‘buying’, for sure, and such usage of this kind offering, up to their point of view, is voluntary anyway.

@amosbatto you’ve touched on these points time and time again here on this forum not just in this thread. we get that companies can choose to free code if they feel so inclined but the fact remains that if end-users want the same or state-of-the-art-code with open-hw and code that doesn’t phone ‘home’ then they have to pay a premium that most of them don’t have.

this brings us back to the original ‘sin’. the divide between people ‘with’ and people ‘with-less’. unless you provide a program and a system for this injustice we’re always going to remain stuck in the same place for as long as the matrix has us. again we aren’t arguing how things ARE we are discussing how to make things better without repeating the mistakes of our past …

you might have heard about Chernobyl and the ‘incident’ that took place in the spring of 86’ in the Soviet-Space. now imagine if this kind of nuclear-power-plants were to fail at the same time in the same manner everywhere in the world by cyber-warfare instead of human-error (but not lack of courage) where would we be ? it’s just one example out of many that push us to remain skeptical about closed-source-software ?

i’ve noticed that our benevolent dictator has posted something quite interesting on the Purism-blog yet again > https://puri.sm/posts/foreshadowing-why-the-purism-logo-is-a-rectangle/

The logo, a simple rectangle, was to showcase that all these devices are just computers with screens, and to showcase the fact that computing can be more liberating than the indoctrination of proprietary rights-stripping big-tech products. Free your mind and the rest will follow.

to me it seems that how liberating a rectangle is depends on where you’re standing … inside it looking out or out looking in ? :wink:

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For browsing the web and watching videos we already well equipped. I don’t see much need for new coding work and therefore not much opportunities for developers to get paid. I might overlook something. Anyways there are plenty of demands for new software in other areas.

Users should have never accepted proprietary software. Then there would be no developers and no companies creating and selling proprietary software.

With new inventions and changing habits existing business models stop to work. The car killed all the jobs in the horse industry for example. So the internet is here and won’t go away soon. Stallman doesn’t whine about not having that business anymore.

I care a bit about the developers, too. But their wellbeing should not be the focus of the public discourse. Because most of the people aren’t developers. And we don’t need to care about them. When there is a demand for software development there will be developers and they will get paid well. But we as customers and users should demand to get the software under a free license.

I’m willing to help. I plan to found a consulting firm that advises its customers to only use free software. I have the feeling we have to spread the knowledge and understanding about free software to a much larger extend than what we did until now.

It all depends on what the customer it willing to accept. If the enterprise customers demand free software you can only fulfill their wish or do business with someone else. I suggest to charge more for free software because it respects the users and doesn’t exploit them.

Open Source failed. See for example:

This campaign was started for Free Software companies, but in this special case we decided to make an exception to the rule:

Bruce Perens, co-founder of the Open Source movement and author of the “Debian Free Software Guidelines” and the “Open Source Definition” asked us to add his name to the list and make it known that he also speaks about Free Software and supports the “We speak about Free Software” campaign.

https://fsfe.org/activities/whyfs/

With the concept of free software there is a learning curve but I don’t see any way around that effort. Either you get why proprietary software is bad for you or you don’t!

It’s hard to charge for standard apps which are years and even decades old. Especially from private persons. I used to be excited about new KDE releases. I was on several devel mailing lists in the times of KDE 1.x and to a lesser degree 2.x. But since then I don’t care. I don’t even use KDE as default anymore since it doesn’t matter. There are dozens ways of browsing the web…

GNU (meaning free software) doesn’t fail to succeed on the mobile and desktop market because the apps aren’t good enough. It’s because it doesn’t come pre-installed. So I’m very grateful to Purism for that they do just that. Normal people never install an operating system in their lives.

Mozilla is an evil company. Service as a Software Substitute is not beneficial for the user. Why not run a free programme locally?

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You’re only referring to web browsers it seems, since you ignored all my examples and instead focused on “browsing the web and watching videos.” So yes, with that excessive limitation, I can agree with everything you say.

Most people don’t do much more on their personal computers (including smartphones and tablets) than browsing the web and watching videos/movies. Older adults also may use a MUA for email. Very good free apps for this are decades old.

The influencer type also creates videos and edits images. Free software for this purpose is more scarce and immature than for email but since a few years good enough. In this field someone might request a feature and wait eagerly for its implementation — or pay for its development.

And there is the office suite that some people use also not for business. Since around the time of KDE 1 and 2 that problem was solved in free software (with AbiWord for example). For more professional usage there is LaTeX and Org-mode for Emacs.

I can’t think of any proprietary software that comes close to those powerful tools. With MS Word you cannot use footnotes and indices and when you click “print” the content gets wildly distributed on other pages. Not usable!

Developers are needed for businesses to make use of Org-mode and they should charge more than ever before for this work. Because it’s worth the price.

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Bruce Perens started a campaign to get himself on the OSI’s board a couple years ago (he failed), so it isn’t like he totally converted to the FSF camp. He has always been in the middle between the two ideological camps in my opinion. He wants to talk about user rights, but he also wants FOSS to be an attractive option for businesses, because it needs industry support in order to succeed. Most people who use FOSS are in this middle ground as well.

The reality is that very few companies that contribute actual code or create new hardware are willing to publicly align with the FSF. I can only name a handful of companies (Purism, Aleph Objects, Raptor CS and Libiquity), and of those, only Purism does much to promote the ideas of the free software movement on its web site.

Our side is failing precisely because we refused to engage the business community. I can give you many examples. Canonical wanted to create a version of Ubuntu that used 100% free software called “Gnubuntu”, but the FSF refused to allow Canonical to use the word “GNU”, because Canonical also produces versions of Ubuntu with non-free code and the FSF didn’t want people to confuse the GNU project with Canonical. When Canonical saw the FSF’s refusal, it abandoned the project altogether and we lost the chance to have a leading distro with 100% free software.

Another example is when the FSF refused to clarify whether proprietary firmware updates are allowed or not for RYF devices, and I have tried repeatedly to get an answer from the FSF. Anyone who spends two seconds thinking about it understands why that this does nothing to encourage the creation of free firmware, but it makes it impossible for any company to market RYF devices.

That isn’t what is being debated. The issue is how do we win in the real world, and the point I’m making is that there is no strategic advantage for our side to demonize companies like Intel and IBM that contribute a ton of FOSS code, but also produce proprietary code. We have to think strategically about how to get these companies to embrace FOSS and move to a business model based on more FOSS. Refusing to work with these companies is cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

Failure to think strategically about how to engage the business community is one of the reasons why the free software movement has done so poorly in advancing its agenda in the real world.

This is a perfect example of the failure to think strategically about the problem. We have over 25 million lines of FOSS code to maintain in Firefox, Thunderbird, Gecko, SpiderMonkey, WebAssembly, Rust, etc. If Mozilla goes under, I doubt that unpaid volunteers will be able to maintain all that code, although some pieces like Rust will probably be maintained by the community. We will be stuck with an internet controlled by Google and the only alternative is WebKit, maintained by Apple. Both of these companies are openly hostile to copyleft licenses and actively working to undermine their use.

In contrast, Mozilla is a non-profit whose manifesto states that one of its principles is: " Free and open source software promotes the development of the internet as a public resource." Mozilla used to tri-license its code under the GPL 2.0 and Mozilla designed its MPL 2.0 license so that it can be used with (L)GPL code and can later be converted to (L)GPL code if needed.

The fundamental problem is that 89% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from search royalties (from Google, Baidu and Yandex), but instead of demonizing the company for participating in surveillance capitalism, you should be encouraging people to subscribe to Mozilla VPN and Pocket, so that the company no longer depends on surveillance capitalism to survive.

Think about what happens when Google and Apple are the only two companies left which can implement the web standards and over 90% of all web browsers are running on Google’s web engine (Blink + V8). At this point, Mozilla is the only organization left in the room that cares about user rights when defining how HTML, EcmaScript, CSS, WebAssembly, REST and all the other web standards will get implemented.

I agree that is part of the problem, but your rhetoric is not going to convince many companies to preinstall free software in the hardware they sell. Your rhetoric tells device makers to avoid free software altogether, because they will be publicly vilified by people like you for not being perfect.

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(TL;DR marked below)

well, this will be 100% off topic, and feel free to skip it if u (or anyone) have better things to do - warning has been given, and sorry for spamming, however see the rationale of my final decision below, i hope i will be understood! :slight_smile:


so, i was very much puzzled, cuz there is no good reaction for that message…

writing in private - why? u didnt even read my previous message, and from the public perspective, it is like not responding at all (more on that option below).

writing in public - not good, it is spamming, it doesnt really much serve the common good, maybe a bit, therefore, i chose this, and cuz otherwise i just silently accept ur judgement (publicly), that i also dont want. maybe it would even look like a rant, while it isnt! :slight_smile: (<- thats a friendly smiley, just to express myself better.)

not writing at all (or just writing “sure! :)”) - this could be the right, and the only good answer, that u have left for me to pick any from (other than the bad answers, at least if i could change myself just that easily. otherwise being ignorant and keep being myself would be the worst path, while maybe this is the 2nd worst thing i could choose… :smiley:

[TL;DR]
so i dont collect enemies, i dont want to be rude or ignorant, and i dont want to get a bad reputation either. what i can actually offer to u, or anybody, is to refine what i write (to a certain level) in case if it is valuable enough to do so, and if i wrote something that is too much messy, or when there is a language barrier.
[/TL;DR]

why not as default? - cuz habits, it works like in 98% of the time. cuz i always write very much, it takes much time, and refining it takes even more time, and it also renders my texts even longer (with kinda much), and sometimes when i do, then i just write things twice, when i miss something from the beginning, that i already wrote at a later point, and i can even mess up things when extending the middle of something… also, it is an extreme effort to me to try to break up my very lengthy and complex thought into sentences consisting of 3-8 words each. using an ellipsis is a bad habit of mine, and actually i try to rehab myself about that! :smiley: smiles, well, im a happy and friendly guy, they stand for either of those, and i can express myself better. in general, im even aware of how would it sound when others will read what i write, and right, my too much smiles may render me like crazy, but on the contrary, in other cases it can show a friendly tone when things could be read like a rant or something offensive… also, those are subjects to my habits as well. just tell a smoker that they could go for a holiday by their new lamborgini from that money they spend on their poison, and then the earth will keep rotate the way it did yesterday… :smiley: (but still, note my offer, that was the most important part of my message, as i even marked it as such! :slight_smile: )

this applies too:
(Some people assert that many hackers have a mild form of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, and are actually missing some of the brain circuitry that lubricates “normal” human social interaction. This may or may not be true. If you are not a hacker yourself, it may help you cope with our eccentricities if you think of us as being brain-damaged. Go right ahead. We won’t care; we like being whatever it is we are, and generally have a healthy skepticism about clinical labels.)

about this text that u gave me - im well aware of it, ive reread it probably not for the 1st time. (i even figured this out on my own: Revision 3.10 21 May 2014 New section on Stack Overflow.) giving me that newbie stuff (basically about asking things) renders me much below my position in general and to urs as well, even if the style part was the main point of it, and even if i can understand it, and even if i can take it as a good advice, just its not that simple… btw the worst reaction from me would have been to try to say anything that can show my level. :smiley: also, i saw 2 mistakes of mine according to that text other than the style part … and who is Alan Cox!!! i mean rhetorically, not that i cant ddg://alan+cox. one happened elsewhere recently, the other is that i actually had minor questions between the lines of my previous message, one even had the answer directly in mms’s initial message… (shame on me. :confused: ) i spent much time reading about guix, but i missed a link at the beginning when i reached the end and came here to answer. in this spirit, i should not ask anything about technical stuffs, cuz i can read more programming languages than not, at least from those that make sense and matter, i even coded weird things in bf! :smiley:

playing kind with others from my behalf looks like this:
“tldr: feel free to move on, i was thinking out loud about void and guix, and im sure it became more messy than i could be actually proud about, sorry! :smiley: (actually i had hard times with this topic! :slight_smile: )”
such things are there to not waste precious time of the ppl who would have more important duties, so i actually make my steps for making others’ life easier, just it differs from ur expectations, while i actually care! :slight_smile: it was meant for u, my dear friend (nope, not cynically, but future-wisely :slight_smile: ), when i point it out myself, that i only needed to react to a message sent to me while i had hard times and that rendered it much worse than what i could write with better background knowledge, and that therefore it didnt become much of a valuable writing, then u shouldnt do the same too, especially referring to my smiles :smiley: (no offense… :confused: still, just being myself, trying to write sane sentences in a better shape, that actually matters, and that i do for u!)

the 2nd most important thing of my current writing is that u could have done better too! maybe u made a false assumption about my level based on the cover instead of the content, wrote something in public that was off topic and that really calls for an answer with even more off topic, without leaving my freedom to have a good answer…

and still, no offense, its not a rant, i can take that as a good advice in the wrong form, and i appreciate the good intention in that bit of ur message; and as it is just the 2nd thing after the initial redirection, i dont collect enemies, im a hippie, i wrote this for peace, i want every1 around to be able to use this very playground without watching their back, or feel bad, or anything like…

in case of responding, please do it in private, for the common good, that i already harmed partially.

i wish u, privacy238437, all the bests! :slight_smile:

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I will reiterate, only once more: social media and games.

Just to share, in accordance with this German article there is new kid in town (sort of saying). And, as I see this as here related update, please read (at least) answer given under: “How is OpenSSF different from CII? What happens to CII?” question.