@ehashmanAnyone comparing the philosophy of "open source" to "free software" without acknowledging the harmful stagnation and single-mindedness in the latter community is not making a thoughtful critique in the year 2022.
@zkat@toot.cat@ehashman what does "stagnation" mean for a community whose goal wasn't corporate uptake to begin with?
@zkat @ehashman the goal was user empowerment, but user empowerment accomplished by software running on your own computer
it's been obvious for a long time how companies can do an end run around that by making you use their computers instead of yours, but the free software movement just ... hasn't noticed at all? or at least hasn't adapted
@ehashman@technomancy @zkat and also, using their computer instead of yours is a significantly better experience in a majority of use cases? For the average user, not having to manage their own backups or data durability alone makes this worth it.
It's just a complete failure to understand the needs or challenges of the average person. The closest I have seen things get here is "use the free software hosted service we run instead which is significantly more expensive and worse than the proprietary counterpart!"
@ehashman @technomancy @zkat and stuck on a specific solution to the problem of user empowerment that worked for a specific set of people and insisting that is the universal solution :(
@ehashman @technomancy @zkat I think another aspect I struggle with is the judgment from some free software folks when I say I use some proprietary software or pay for hosting open source software.
It's like, look, I don't have time to manage a bjillion servers and all their dependancies for all the personal online services I use.
It's the lack of acknowledgment that users have personal time constraints that really gets to me.
@ehashman@sphakos @technomancy @zkat 100%. That's sort of what I was getting at in https://toot.cat/@ehashman/108872987397058231 which is a thread I wrote in response to my frustration of not being able to host my own email. I had a couple others on Twitter in the same vein. I feel so disempowered by self-hosting, and I am capable of actually doing it!
@ehashman @technomancy @zkat When I do bring up the fact that personally running free software is time-intensive, some free software folks judge me for not pouring all my spare time into only using free software.
I would like to have a life, to be able to rest my brain, to play non-free software games, and to cook my own food to avoid food allergies.
I can't do that if I'm spending all my time maintaining a self-hosted version of all my online tools.
So I compromise. I run free software on my personal computer. My work websites use free software tools, and have open source code. I buy proprietary game consoles and closed source games. I use Google for email, calendaring, and file storage.
I do my best, and I'm really tired of being judged for not pouring ever single hour of my days into the free software cause.
There has to be a balance. An acknowledgement that people will do their best to run as much free software as they can, but we all need to treat each other as human beings with a limited amount of time and resources.
@0xkruzr@unrelentingly.online@sphakos this is really frustrating. I am super enthusiastic about running my own infrastructure and get a lot of satisfaction out of it, but FFS, part of the whole POINT is helping other people who don't have the time or inclination to do so. recriminations about it are useless at best and incredibly counterproductive at worst.
@ehashman @technomancy @zkat What is your solution? The FSF website is actually explaining that issue to users and @lxo even discussed the issue of self hosting and what an alternative strategy to this could be. Did any of the "open source" organisations do that? Nevertheless, there are plenty of shared hosting collectives like https://www.chatons.org/ and projects like #freedombox that provide reliable self hosting.
@ehashman@zkat It means they have failed to engage anyone outside of their core circle in 20+ years, failed to grow the movement outside of those demographics, failed to learn from their past mistakes, failed to achieve any of their goals.
To this day, as someone who doesn't want to spend hours of installation and babysitting, I cannot install a fully free operating system and userspace. Debian just had a GR over needing to include non-free firmware in the install media.
To this day, I can't find a job where all I do is work on free software that meets not just the letter but the spirit of the ideal.
To this day, it is higher impact for humanity for me to work on proprietary software at a megacorp in an effort to reduce climate impact than it is for me to work on any free software project.
That's a trash movement right there.