Post by @ajroach42@retro.social

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 7 hr. ago

Alright, so

15 Replies

42 Boosts

Steve Kohls

@stevekohls@mastodon.social 3 hr. ago

@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.

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Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

Here: https://retro.social/@ajroach42/113481632282311122

That was two years ago. I haven't re-read it. I wonder how much I agree with.

Two years ago was around the time I noped out of computers more or less completely to start making toys.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

To be clear, I don't think the fault for the "I'm not paying for that" mentality lies solely with the Free Software movement.

I think it mostly belongs to The Internet in general, and as much as major corporations pretended to hate it, I think it largely served their interests.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

( I should unpack that)

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

Modern computers are very fast.
Modern network connections are very fast.

Sometime in the early 00s, the scales tipped, and suddenly it was easier and faster to download a song off the internet than to go to the store and buy a CD and rip the CD.

Network connections weren't gigabit, and hard drive space was limited, but it's easy to understand why piracy was so commonplace, even without the cost aspect. Even on a naked DSL line, I could download an album (or a podcast, or a mixtape) faster than I could go to the store.

Corporations took a while to catch up, and when they did, they mostly embraced the convenience, which is what most people wanted anyway (hence Netflix and Spotify) and when that convenience starts to disappear (Netflix today) piracy takes an upswing.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

Now, the beauty of the Free Software movement is that, if your primary developers decide to do something stupid, you can pack your things and go.

We saw this recently with Audacity and Tenacity.

That gets a lot harder in the Shareware model (but this is not an impossible hurdle to navigate! The important parts of free software can live alongside the important parts of the shareware model.)

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

Oof, I'm getting a bunch of replies taking issue with the way I phrased some of the above.

1) I don't care.

2) If you come at me with a nitpick, and don't add anything else to the conversation, you will get blocked.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 5 hr. ago

Large parts of the libre software movement have been very clear that libre and gratis are different, and many pieces of libre software cost a few bucks, or operate on a donation model.

This is good!

GB Studio is one of my favorite modern programs, and it operates on a pay what you want model, while also being fully open source.

I love that.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 4 hr. ago

But, today, this is very much the exception rather than the rule.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 4 hr. ago

The thing that made free software attractive to me was the idea that no one could take it from me.

It wasn't going to disappear. It wasn't going to stop working. If it didn't run on new hardware, I (or someone else!) could fix that. If it didn't do what I wanted it to do, I (or someone else) could fix that.

But the free software movement, or at least the FSF, bailed on open firmware pretty early and I think that was one of their biggest mistakes.

(I am editing this post to clarify that what I'm talking about here is the way the FSF and the freesoftware movement in general fumbled the locked bootloader conversation. It doesn't matter that Android is "open source" if the keys for flashing that device aren't.)

Zack Weinberg

@zwol@masto.hackers.town 4 hr. ago

@ajroach42 It's surprising to me that you say that about the FSF because what _I_ thought happened was that after about 2003 the FSF laser-focused on open firmware at the expense of basically everything else they could have been doing and _that_ was one of their biggest mistakes.

(it's entirely possible that we're both right! maybe their _approach_ to that laser focus was so hopelessly misguided that it amounted to capitulating. i never dug into it in detail.)

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 4 hr. ago

@zwol Yeah... I'm massively oversimplifying, and leaving out a lot of nuance.

It probably wasn't ever the FSF's intent to cede ground to the land of locked bootloaders, they probably didn't see it coming.

But it turns out it absolutely does matter what firmware is running on your lightbulbs and your toaster and your washing machine, and just being able to see and modify that code, without *also* being able to load new code onto the device is insufficient.

They got fucked by TiVo and then disappeared down the wrong rabbithole.

Zack Weinberg

@zwol@masto.hackers.town 4 hr. ago

@ajroach42 Ah, yeah, I see what you mean now. Fully agreed.

In a similar vein, not being able to patch network services to your needs is a genuine problem, but the AGPL does not effectively address it, because if you can't get your patches deployed, there's hardly any use to being able to *write* them... but you *shouldn't* be able to force the service admin to take your patches just because you use the service...

Zack Weinberg

@zwol@masto.hackers.town 4 hr. ago

@ajroach42 ... and so here we are on this very fediverse with lots of people having legitimate beef with Rochko's project management decisions and no recourse short of "spin up your own server" (which might not even be good enough, if the issue is with the protocol)

This is just not a problem that can be solved with either code or licensing.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 4 hr. ago

@zwol indeed.

Although solving the code and licensing problems certainly help along the way to solving the social problems.

But there are social problems at the heart of it all.

As for Mastodon... I guess it depends on the particular beef.

I'm planning, eventually, to migrate this server to hometown so that I can get away from the future of the mastodon project.

I've played with other softwares (I like GTS well enough) and I know my way around the data structures well enough that I could probably write a (one time only) migration if I really felt the urge.

But I'm not happy enough with the state of any of the other fedi projects to make it worth the effort yet.