Alright, so
15
Replies
40
Boosts
@ajroach42 thanks for all the thoughts in this thread.
If you all are wondering why so many of us in the “tech” world are feeling such existential dread and exhaustion about our profession, passion, and livelihoods, this thread does a good job of touching on most of the topics.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
This comment is unavailable — it may have been deleted or is not visible to you.
But hardware support among these alternative operating systems is inconsistent (with NetBSD sitting at the top of the pile, but well under Linux and Windows.)
And, as with all things, there are degrees to all this. I recognize that I will probably end up having to make compromises in some of the things that I use in order to continue to do much of the work that I want to do.
In much the same way that I begrudgingly keep a windows 10 box around so that I can interface with some windows only hardware, I will allow Linux on devices that support Linux, or for activities that I can't perform in other environments unless/until I can afford to replace them.
But, if I'm going to be exploring alternative OSs and reexamining the foundational layer of how I approach computing, I might as well question it all.
I am looking at new ways of doing things, and new software, and new ideas about how software should work, and new ideas about what is *good* about the software community, up and down the stack.
I'm not just questioning my OS, I'm questioning everything about modern computers (and not for the first time! I was already banging this drum nearly a decade ago https://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/ )
So yes, I'm going to set up a NetBSD laptop and a NetBSD server and start figuring out how much of my core life I can move onto them.
I'm going to migrate things off of my yunohost server and into the NetBSD server. I'm going to try to use Linux only when I don't have another choice.
I think these things are pretty obviously values aligned with the position that I've taken.
But I'm also going to start doing some other things.
This bit might get a little controversial, and I want to make sure that I say what I mean to say, and that means I'm going to take my time to write it.
I haven't stopped, I'm just being careful.
Alright, I also made a sandwich and grabbed some chips. I should be slightly more able to speak correctly.
Everything that's happening in computers today is evidence to me that the free software movement failed.
Or, at least, depending on which vision you have in your head of Free Software, it has either entirely failed as a movement, or it has ended up where it was always headed.
It’s amazing to me how we’re watching the tech world fall apart at the feet of monetization, enshitifiction, AI, and whatever other Bullshit trend they’re chasing this week.
The world we're living in, where privacy disappears more each day and everything gets worse, is basically the consequences that the Free Software folks have been warning about and talking about for decades!
But, by and large, the tools that are being used to implement these consequences *are* so called "Free" software.
Even before we let AI eat everything, our so called alternatives were compromised.
Canonical partnered with Amazon to send them your keystrokes, Firefox was almost entirely funded by Google, Duck Duck Go has always been Bing in a trench coat.
And, even outside of AI, one of the most widely used Free image editing programs is named after an ableist slur, and is actively hostile to anyone who suggests the name should change.
Free Software alone was never going to save us.
The free software movement did some good! I don't want to dismiss it. I am deeply grateful for the existence of the free software movement, and computers would be worse and less safe without it.
But it was insufficient.
From the very beginning, it was also about power, about wielding power, about being protected.
Many of the people associated with the free software movement got a free pass to be horrible, bigoted, or abusive, because they also wrote good code. (or, even sometimes because they wrote code at all, regardless of quality.)
This is playing out now with DHH, but it's been there from the very beginning, with far too many people to list.
For years, I was of the opinion that it didn't matter who wrote the code as long as the code accomplished my goals.
I no longer believe that.
Ideology influences decisions, controls the possibility space.
This isn't an absolute, and it doesn't wholly dictate what software I will use (I am, after all, still an internet user in spite of it's DARPA origins), but peoples values influence their choices and you gotta remember that when you're looking at any given piece of software.
But that's neither here nor there because the worst damage the free software movement did was in expectations.
The Free (libre) software movement seeded the idea that software would also be Free (gratis) and that anyone charging for a piece of software must be punished.
And, in the process, broke the only mechanism for funding software development that ever really worked, and replaced it with telemetry and advertising and surveillance and subscriptions.
@ajroach42 "that anyone charging for a piece of software must be punished", I've seen people accuse the free software movement of this, but I never saw that idea being promoted by the free software movement. On the contrary the idea is that one gets paid for writing code (instead of receiving money over and over for the same code).
The majority (95%) of the software written has only a single purpose and user why such model works for most programmers.
