Free software hasn't won

by LorenDB • 9 months ago

384 447 9 months ago

palata• 9 months ago

I read through half the article, and I don't understand what it's trying to say. Has free software won? Or not? And what does it mean? No clue.

__del__• 9 months ago

they're suggesting that "open source" has won (attention, mind share, funding, whatever) while "free software" as defined by richard stallman has not

schoen3• 9 months ago

I may have glossed over this detail, but I didn't think the article was saying that "open source" had actually won either (perhaps that people who preferred the term "open source" have tended to accept much narrower wins as "victory" in practice?).

billy99k2• 9 months ago

It didn't succeed because he was always against making money from software. He also has pushed for governments to be forced to use FOSS.

I remember him doing some interviews in the 90s, and he would put his coat over the camera, if it wasn't using FOSS. This sort of zealot mindset will always be on the fringes of society and eventually abandoned for something more liberal (which is what we've seen in the last decade or so).

schoen3• 9 months ago

It's quoting people who say that it has won because of extensive adoption. However, that adoption doesn't mean that most people are allowed even in principle to change most of the software in embedded devices they own, or even on most of the computing devices they own.

I've also found this really weird. Like, we have Linux kernels on most cloud instances, and most data center servers, and most academic and research computing systems, and probably lately on most embedded microprocessors that are big enough to run it. (And various ecosystems for computing infrastructure and software development are mainly using free software userspace and tools.) Meanwhile, almost all user-facing software that almost all people interact with almost all of the time is proprietary. Why would someone say it's "won"? Thinking really small?

okanat• 9 months ago

Even Linux hasn't "won" in those areas. It has just replaced what we would call a common API layer or a communication standard. The virtualization products are still proprietary. Servers and their firmware are too. People needed a Unix-like OS that hasn't been riddled with patent issues and wasn't outrageously expensive. They needed it because they were also price-sensitive or outright cheap. They didn't want to change APIs or modularize their software. Linux was there. Startup culture happened which demanded cutting all the costs you can. Linux was free of charge. Linux wasn't the best OS for the job sometimes. But it was there and it was gratis. So it became the middleware for Unix-compatible software.

We have open standards and even open/free software for anything that companies aren't making money out of. FOSS by itself cannot make money. In places where software matters the most or, if the software hides the trade secrets the most or, if it is the main money maker, creating FOSS is economically infeasible.

For FOSS to win, we need to change the economic and legal system. Current capitalist system in many West-aligned countries is actively hostile against sharing in any kind, except the ones that profit the biggest players in their non-critical areas. In a market where the first one to market gets to buy all competitors, in a market the one that has the biggest secrecy wins and gets all the money from investors like Y-Combinator, there cannot be any truly FOSS software-only products. They need to do rug pulls to support the exponential growth. Startup culture is fundamentally anti-FOSS. It is pro-FOSS in only consuming. Even a startup releasing some middleware can be interpreted as mishandling investment.

We need to make sure our governments support FOSS infrastructure and FOSS user-facing software. They need to be equal employers and competitors to Big Tech or they need to directly support smaller competitors for decades. Otherwise, I am afraid, FOSS cannot win.

stingraycharles• 9 months ago

What picture does this paint? Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version.

I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc).

When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.

xwowsersx3• 9 months ago

I think this post overstates the "loss" of free software. Yes, closed firmware and locked hardware are real gaps...but that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack. From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet. "Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.

I tend to see this kind of absolutist, binary tone a lot from people deeply involved in FOSS... and sometimes I think maybe that mindset is necessary to push the movement forward, but it also feels detached from how much open software has already changed reality.

api2• 9 months ago

The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.

Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.

I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

xwowsersx3• 9 months ago

The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.

That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open.

You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.

fluoridation• 9 months ago

he infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software.

Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to.

Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.
I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.

skissane2• 9 months ago

I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.

It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers.

It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)

getpokedagain3• 9 months ago

As someone not deeply involved in FOSS I am starting to get the absolutist mindset.

I run graphene on my phone and this new restricted security patch limit by google is nothing short of a shit show.

abnercoimbre• 9 months ago

Can you shed light on this new patch? Does it hinder your freedoms as a user of graphene OS?

I wonder if switching to a Jolla C2 [0] is a reasonable alternative.

[0] https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

I think the article properly addresses that:

Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version

What devs can build without much oversight or business pressure usually works well open sourced.

Almost everything else (hardware, non technical "productivity" software, services) doesn't, and that's most of our life. We live in a world that's still massively closed source.

I wouldn't call someone absolutist for wanting printers, coffee machines, laptops, TVs, cars, "smart" lights to be more open than closed.

xwowsersx3• 9 months ago

That's true. Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier.

Of course we'd all prefer open printers and cars, but those domains aren't mainly limited by software ideology; they're limited by regulation, liability, and econ. The fact that programmers can build entire OSs, compilers, and global infra as open projects is already astonishing.

So yes, the world is still full of closed systems... but that doesn't mean FOSS lost. It means it's reached the layer where the obstacles are social, legal, and physical, not technical. IMO that's a harder, slower battle, not evidence that the earlier ones were meaningless.

jowea• 9 months ago

Yeah. I'd say open source won in the basic infrastructure of the tech world, but actual political free software is just barely holding on. I want users to be free not some base shared code you can't actually modify running somewhere in the stack of a closed source SASS.

the_gipsy2• 9 months ago

I don't think the article was absolutist, binary, at all.

The issue is that for a lot of things, there is exactly zero foss options. The problem is not, and the article doesn't imply, that there should be a 100% foss, so that foss finally "wins".

squigz4• 9 months ago

Can you provide some examples of things for which there are zero FOSS options?

matheusmoreira21• 9 months ago

"Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor

It absolutely does.

Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now. They discriminate against us for it. Installed your own open source software? All services denied. Can't even log into your own bank account.

We're marginalized. Second class citizens. There is no choice, it's either corporate owned computers or nothing. What good is free software if we can't run it?

nebula8804• 9 months ago

Its a lost battle not a lost war. You have to adapt for the circumstances of the time. Today that seems to be using a device that is closed but gapped only to get the essentials done(government services, banking etc.)

For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings.

In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow).

I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.

andrepd• 9 months ago

Yes. This is not even an exaggeration as it is, and they've barely even started.

shadowgovt9• 9 months ago

You can run it, I'm just under no obligation to let your machine send signals to my machine that my machine will respond to if you are running software I do not trust.

And that's the complexity of this era of computing. We just got finished convincing people that it made sense that they should have the right to run whatever software they wanted on hardware they owned... And then immediately the technology shifted so that most things no longer get done using exclusively hardware that you own. The RMS four freedoms approach is only chipping away at the larger problem: capitalism (I mean that literally in that the problem is that the machines that do the work, the capital, are owned by a tiny ownership class).

avalys• 9 months ago

What are you talking about?

codedokode3• 9 months ago

This looks like a loser's move, but if your bank has no other options except for mobile app, you can buy a cheap phone for that app only, and connect it over WiFi (without SIM card) so the bank would only get your IP address from this and nothing more.

nzeid• 9 months ago

Come on, this kind of defeatism only emboldens entrenched players.

Yes, we're awkwardly cornered - hardware used to be open or easily reverse-engineered. Now it isn't. The solution is to demonstrate the demand for open hardware. No one is going to walk away from money that can be made even if the market is smaller.

This movement was strong enough that the incumbents themselves offered Linux-friendly hardware. We continue to see momentum in the mobile space as well with /e/OS, Fairphone, etc. GrapheneOS is pursuing alternatives to Pixel.

Be brave!

glitchc3• 9 months ago

It absolutely does.

I'm not sure I follow. Corporations are free to impose requirements for access to their platforms. FOSS didn't start by demanding that MS release the source code for Windows and Office. It started with developers writing their own alternatives. What helped was the open and standardized nature of the IBM/PC stack that made it all possible. Without it, FOSS would have died before birth.

827a4• 9 months ago

Here's a take on this which might be unpopular:

Open source software lost in this domain fair and absolutely square. Desktop linux has been an extremely accessible and decent option desktops and laptops for, what, three decades; it lost in the open market. I'm typing this comment on arch linux, but even so: It failed to become a force sizable enough to fight back against the tide of corporate-owned attested consumer hardware. Android has been an option for nearly two decades. Its reasonably successful, globally. Google is now toggling the doomsday switch everyone knew they had, to force all applications to go through the Google Mothership. Samsung could fight back; they won't. Motorola could fight back; they won't. The market could revolt; it won't.

Software being open source is not enough to change the tide on what the market wants. Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to? By what mechanism do you propose we stop a bank from saying "we'll only support connections from iOS devices", if not the democratic market force of ensuring enough of their customers demand access from devices running free and open source software? You get there by building products people want. Anything else is succumbing to the same authoritarian forces that you're hoping free software will stop, by forcing service providers to behave against their own interests.

If that was unpopular, here's where it gets really unpopular: I don't see a doomsday-level problem with a world where, in addition to whatever awesome FOSS hardware I might have, I also have an iPhone 12 ($130 on swappa) as my "attested device" to do "attested stuff" with, like store my drivers license, banking, whatever. To me, this is... fine. Not ideal; but fine. We should fight like hell to score wins where we can, like in right to repair, parts availability, ensuring old devices are kept up to date for as long as possible (Apple is pretty good at this); but if I have to carry an old iPhone in my backpack to access my bank because they refuse to support my hypothetical GnuPhone 5, the world isn't going to end.

We need nerds who care about this to stop typing on hackernews and go start a phone hardware company. That's it.

denote-demote• 9 months ago

Absolutely.

The takeover of "free software" by the enemies of freedom is not the "winning" of free software.

bhawks• 9 months ago

This is one of the reasons to embrace crypto - having an intermediary with direct control over your finances is absurd.

wizardforhire• 9 months ago

(This is not directed to you but the wider community writ large, you just happened to be the one to kick the hornets nest)

You know… there was time before this latest generation started calling everyone that complained to a manager a karen… that complaining to manager would resolve issues… and if that failed, publishing your story and refusing to do business with someone was seen as proper conduct.

Banks!!! Lol! Are the most fragile institutions ever! Fdic, exists for a reason… get enough people to withdraw their money all at once and see what happens.

Open source people that want to stick to your grit… don’t work with banks that won’t let you use open source software. Oh is that too hard for ya? If you’re not compiling your own slackware distro than you have no leg to stand on (/s)

But seriously, use a local bank and try solving human problems by dealing with human’s. Quit trying to tech everything… if the open source community would get unified and actualize… thats a fuck ton of people!

Here’s another crazy concept that the oss community could do… they could literally just open their own bank… voila (its not as hard as it seems and takes way less money than you think)

marcodiego• 9 months ago

As I said other times: we need a Free Hardware Foundation now like we needed the Free Software Foundation for many years. The GSD (GNU software distribution) is basically a standard GNU-Linux distro using GUIX as the package manager seems very interesting, but if you want to run 100% free software on a RYF-certified device you'll have to pay a lot of extra money for 15 years old class hardware.

We need the equivalent of a Linus Torvalds + Richard Stallman but hardware. We were lucky to have had both for software at the same time. We need the same luck again now.

userbinator• 9 months ago

Y'all should've pushed back far more strongly against their "security" long ago... but now the only way forward is to keep fighting.

mariusor2• 9 months ago

Where does this resigned opinion that open source can not do attestation come from? Do you really think it's impossible to build the attestation mechanisms inside open source OSs?

willtemperley• 9 months ago

I think free software has to adapt. I find it very difficult to run QGIS on a modern Mac with an up-to-date OS. It won't run for genuine security reasons, not because some corporation doesn't want me to run free software.

eleveriven5• 9 months ago

I think it's worth distinguishing between what "winning" should mean and what's still possible in the world we're in. We may not win by owning every transistor, but we sure as hell lose if we stop demanding the right to.

Hnrobert42• 9 months ago

If you're definition of winning is owning every transistor, then it is an unproductive definition.

Under that definition, we have and will always lose.

indymike• 9 months ago

Corporations are pushing remote attestation now. They can detect if we "tampered" with our devices now.

This is not new, and has been the case since the mid 1990s.

Installed your own open source software? All services denied.

I access five different banks with linux every day. I've never had this problem.

We're marginalized.

I've made a great life for my family largely using free software to do so. I don't feel marginalized.

goalieca• 9 months ago

"Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.

I remember when winning meant you can modify your computer as you please because you have all the sources. We’re locked down in a world of apps, saas, and whatnot.

belorn• 9 months ago

Winning does has many different outcomes, only some which is similar enough that the historical records will see it as such. A comparison I would make is the war on encryption that was won. It is no longer illegal to sell encryption. The question becomes how much of a victory that is if then government impose laws that dictate backdoor, like say chat control.

What did that NSA official said. They lost the battle over control of encryption, but won the war against privacy?

epolanski5• 9 months ago

I think you completely miss the point.

You're focusing on the benefits of open source in booming the technological sector, but his emphasis is that openness ends at the developer's, not consumer's stage and this is particularly bad when more and more of your life is technology dependant and de facto you cannot control nor modify it.

Forgeties793• 9 months ago

Speaking as one of the less-technically inclined HN users all I know is Linux has never been easier to install for even the slightly motivated and while there are lots of gaps, you really can run a lot of key tasks on FOSS without much fuss.

If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.

devjab• 9 months ago

I work in solar, so we have quite a lot of hardware which doesn't run on free software. We couldn't patch part of our inverter pipeline because the hardware was proprietary and had no open alternatives. We had to pay quite a lot of money to find one of the original engineers and have them flown in to help us unlock it, so that we could replace the firmware with some we had a security clearance holding contractor write for us.

To be fair this is a story about not doing your due diligence and buying the wrong hardware, but I think it can give you some insight into what the article talks about. Because yes, you can install Linux, but can you install something on your blender when "BRAND" decides you need to pay a subscription to run the self-cleaning program?

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

On installing Linux, I think it always has been relatively easy to do on previous generation hardware.

20 years ago if you didn't care about decent laptops, you'd easily find a mid-level desktop tower and it would mostly work. You'd be in pain if you wanted the best GPU or best hardware, but mid-tier stuff would work fine.

Nowadays you can get Linux very easily on ThinkPads or a mid-tier business laptop for instance. Or Framework. But it will be PITA on a Surface Pro, or the best Asus laptop.

I'm with you in that the market has matured so much mid-tier is now viable enough for most office or everyday life, trying to get top hardware isn't really needed. But there's still definitely a gap if your use case spills out in a more demanding area (games, VR, CAD etc.)

xg15• 9 months ago

You're not wrong, but "reshaped" can mean all kinds of things. If the goal was user freedom for the broad public, than it clearly hasn't won.

Getting put to good use by your opponent isn't winning.

eduction3• 9 months ago

that doesn't erase the fact that open software has completely reshaped the modern stack

What stack?

You give a bunch of web stack examples, great. The vast majority of people will never run a server nor benefit from the licenses of the code running on the server. They overwhelming give their money to the companies benefiting from those licenses and get typical crummy consumer EULAs in return.

Meanwhile phones tablets iot tvs appliances cars tractors pacemakers videogame consoles security cameras coffee makers printers juicers friggin Christmas lights routers, all that stuff, is overwhelmingly closed source.

JuniperMesos2• 9 months ago

"Winning" doesn't have to mean owning every transistor; it means setting the norms and powering most of what's built.

It doesn't matter if software published under free licenses sets the norms and powers most of what is built if critical transistors that are necessary to use important hardware at all are powered by unfree software. That is precisely what this article is decrying. If you don't own every transistor, whoever does own those transistors can use their control over them to prevent you from using your hardware as you wish, or attempting to get money out of you for the privilege; and preventing this state of affairs is actually more important in many ways than being able to use free software to create novel internet applications.

drnick14• 9 months ago

Free software may have won on the infrastructure side, but it is people's computing that deserves freedom first and foremost. The good news is that Linux is gaining ground on the desktop, and we may eventually see the "year of the Linux desktop."

The issue is that most people's computing has now shifted to mobile devices, and these are quickly becoming fully locked down. Apple has been a lost cause for a long time, but Google is now aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. Projects like Lineage and Graphene are more important than ever for this reason.

surajrmal4• 9 months ago

Google is not aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. It has always been 99% developed by Google and a handful of close partners like Samsung. It is simply aligning workflows to make this arrangement less costly to maintain. The fact that Graphene is hurt by the change was simply not part of the consideration. I'm sure they can alter their arrangement to get similar access to other partners and continue on as before.

pjmlp2• 9 months ago

In most places that I have been, free software is basically the way to not pay for software, for most companies free === gratis.

In the 1980's and 1990's, the same kind of places would be pirating software.

In Portugal, we used to have shops with catalogs during those days, hardly anyone at goverment level cared about software sales, nowadays it is controlled by an economic agency and those kind of shops aren't as easy to find as they were up to early 2000's.

Free software allows them to now be in a legal state, yet the authors get the same as before most of the time, nothing.

Which is why in the end many FOSS projects end up pivoting for something commercial, preferbly in ways where even piracy isn't possible, like SaaS.

pwdisswordfishy• 9 months ago

From Linux and K8s to Postgres and Python, it is the infra of the internet.

I may be unable to control the software in the device I am holding in my hands right now, but the important thing is that a few corporations can externalize the costs of maintaining their infrastructure to "the open-source community". And even get free publicity from doing so!

eleveriven5• 9 months ago

Maybe it's not "overstating the loss"... it's just focusing on a different kind of loss

tempodox• 9 months ago

setting the norms

But it doesn’t set the norms. Enshittification is setting the norms. The positive effects of free software being tangible for the users is very much the exception.

Sytten• 9 months ago

Complex puzzle, I feel a key part is that the financing / financial sustainability of free software has not been solved. The author touches on it a bit by saying "when you sell hardware..." which kinda means no hardware == no revenue since you can't sell the software. I don't discount that Redhat is a thing, but it is the exception not the norm.

Geof25• 9 months ago

I do see it on exactly same way. A lot of people are conflating opensource with free. That model is not really sustainable if you want to do it for living.

epolanski5• 9 months ago

Free Software doesn't imply someone has to write what I need for me for free.

It means that if the end user wants to control his devices he/she should be able to.

guyzero• 9 months ago

Sybase and Ingres disagree.

pooyan2• 9 months ago

I hate to complain about styling, but when I can’t read it, I have to say something about it.

This has a strange CSS styling problem on my phone. There’s no left margin in portrait, so it’s basically unreadable, but if I go landscape it’s fine.

abdullahkhalids• 9 months ago

Use firefox. Click "reader view" on any page and read it according to your own theme. Maybe help free software win.

hnthrowaway738• 9 months ago

Flipping into reader mode constantly is clunky and jarring. People shouldn’t use that as an excuse for poor styling.

sdotdev• 9 months ago

Blog styling is a bit weird and for the actual copy I kind of don't get its direction

piersolenski• 9 months ago

Yet ;-)

Animats• 9 months ago

It's about to get much worse.

You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.

nixpulvis• 9 months ago

This is one of my biggest problems with AI coding assistance. And how they will shape the development of less human friendly APIs and libraries over time.

protocolture4• 9 months ago

You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

In abstract, probably true, but so vague to be useless.

I can probably vibe code with qwen on debian. But are you then going to pivot from your microsoft example to like, my ISP? And if I point out I can move to an ISP with less than 5 staff, you will probably just move the goalposts further right?

Might be better to let you establish your goalposts first hey.

kragen5• 9 months ago

What has your experience vibecoding with Qwen on Debian been like so far? What tooling and approaches have you found to work best?

unleaded• 9 months ago

i'm guessing you've never seen r/LocalLLaMA?

It's a miracle that open-weight LLMs are even a thing at all, let alone as good as they are (very).

janice1999• 9 months ago

You need thousands of dollars of hardware to run a decent coding model with bearable tokens/s.

827a4• 9 months ago

Eh, this I cannot abide with. There are dozens of hosted model providers, from the foundational providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) to cloud re-hosting (Azure, GCP, AWS) to routing proxies (OpenRouter, Vercel, etc). There are huge open source models that are quite competitive (Qwen3-Coder). There are smaller open source models that can run on your laptop and easily help with function writing. There are walled garden, highly integrated tools (Claude Code, Codex) and there are plug-and-play bring your own API key or model tools (Charm Crush, etc). The ecosystem is vast, and every facet of it appears to be getting better.

toast0• 9 months ago

If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.

Why wouldn't you just get another account?

themacguffinman• 9 months ago

All major platforms have mechanisms to identify ban evasion. It's not so easy to create another account when, for example, they ask for a phone number.

EvanAnderson• 9 months ago

Age verification laws in the US are chipping away at Internet anonymity. You might not be able to get another account because your legal identity might be required (and can be banned).

sherburt3• 9 months ago

What if you just like do normal programming instead?

echelon3• 9 months ago

What if vibe coding becomes 20x faster than normal coding? Are you going to stay old school and write artisanal code?

bigstrat20033• 9 months ago

You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

True, but that's also not exactly a good thing to be doing to begin with.

jamesnorden• 9 months ago

Can't tell if this is a joke or not...

ofalkaed3• 9 months ago

Haiku will win in the end, at least win what many in the free software world are trying to win. Or at least what I think this blog is trying to get at, but it is a weird post I am not completely sure what it is trying to get at. But I do appreciate its methods even if I am somewhat confused by them.

The year of the linux desktop is not going to happen, far too much baggage. The year of the Haiku deaktop will happen; they are doing everything right and staying under the radar until they are ready.

christophilus• 9 months ago

That is a hot take. I’d take the other side of that bet.

ofalkaed3• 9 months ago

What do you want to bet and which assertion are we betting on?

Haiku has stayed out of the open source drama and focused on its goals; slowly and steadily working towards them even when the goalposts move. The big thing is their determination and staying focused on the user experience in a way Linux has not and can not without a single distro wining which is not going to happen. When it comes to the desktop, Haiku is offering everything Linux doesn't.

nathan_compton2• 9 months ago

I've been using desktop linux for 15 years, at least. I play Steam Games on my Linux Desktop. I work on one. It's not prefect, but neither are the other OSes.

ofalkaed3• 9 months ago

I have been using desktop linux for more than a decade longer than you and have config files older than 15 years. No idea what our individual experiences have to do with this but I win, I guess?

beeflet2• 9 months ago

Like all permissively licensed software, it certainly will win what many in the free software world are trying to win: a bunch of nerds will do a ton of free work for corporations in exchange for absolutely nothing. Not even the drivers they need to run their own software on their own hardware. See: BSD, Minix, etc.

Permissively licensed software is everywhere. It's winning. What exactly it's winning, I'm not sure. Permissively licensed software is in my hypervisor. It's in my ankle monitor. Permissively licensed software will power the terminator drone that kills me in WW3. But it isn't in my laptop because the drivers don't work.

zzo38computer• 9 months ago

In many cases you shouldn't need a computer, and for many where a computer is helpful, a very simple one should be possible which can use less power and with small enough ROM and RAM, and not needing any Wi-Fi and stuff like that. You also should not rely on computers too much even in the circumstances where they are helpful.

I do think that different computers (and other stuff) can be made which do not use proprietary software (and which do not use excessive software; I think it is also important, for a different reason). Free open specifications can also be made, too. Many people don't, but it can be done (although in some cases it is difficult, for various reasons).

movedx• 9 months ago

Well said.

“When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.” — Star Trek: Insurrection.

A month ago I watched animatronic dogs herd sheep around a paddock just minutes after some Border Collie did the same thing. What came to mind straight away was: that’s not a problem that needs solving. Yet here we are, injecting technology into every nook and cranny we can and ultimately all it’ll do is free us from our own freedom as people and enslave us to the rich, who will own all the tech and knowledge to support those animatronic dogs.

tolerance2• 9 months ago

As a quasi-tech person I can’t imagine what more can be (or what isn’t being) achieved within reason by FOSS. And when it comes to Life’s Big Problems™ showing me someone playing Snake on an ULTRAK 435 Digital Pitch Counter doesn’t instill me with confidence that free software is as big a solution as its proponents would like to think.

squigz4• 9 months ago

"Within reason" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence, isn't it? What I define as reasonable FOSS solutions, many executives would not agree with, but that doesn't mean they're not practical or acheivable.

Your Snake example also doesn't seem very fair - there are many large, concentrated FOSS movements and organizations that are doing good. More and more - albeit very slowly and sporadically - there are governments and organizations choosing to invest in self-hosted FOSS solutions. And you focus on hackers expressing curiosity doing silly but interesting things on various types of systems. Come on.

tolerance2• 9 months ago

Well, you seem capable enough at shouldering the load that the phrase imposed.

daemin2• 9 months ago

The main benefit that I see it of having the source code to the software running on the devices you own is that you can always fix or modify it if and when you want to. Lots of things can happen such as the law changing, the company going out of business, the company stopping support for your device, or you just wanting to make some changes to how it works to better suit your lifestyle.

This doesn't mean that everyone will dive right in and make the code changes by themselves, but it does allow for paying someone knowledgeable to come in and make the changes for you. The same kind of way that you can (or used to be able to) get someone knowledgeable in cars to come in to fix or change things for you.

Think of it as having access to the device's schematics so that you (or someone knowledgable) can make repairs to the device when you need to.

This brings me to another point, that in addition to having the source code for the device available, there way to build and deploy the code to the device also has to be made available, otherwise it's only a shadow of a solution.

AtlasBarfed• 9 months ago

If AI is actually a software revolution, OS/Freeware will close the gap with non-gaming proprietary software.

pheggs• 9 months ago

I am quite convinced a lot of open source is not open for ideology reasons but rather are a result of competition and the market itself.

When the competition publishes its software for no price, the next way to make it even better is by improving the license. And if thats not enough you can even pay users to use your software, just like brave does (or did) through ads.

Now theres software which has less competition. Usually this is software that requires large amounts of investments, often coupled with hardware. Smartphones are the perfect example for this.

Also, software which is tied to hardware that you have to buy has less pressure, because there's a price anyway for the hardware. So you wont suddenly have some competition offering the same thing for free.

ezoe• 9 months ago

I don't think things can be explained by competition alone.

People don't use free software Compiler and Web browser and OS just because it's free software, but there is no better alternative.

neilv• 9 months ago

With branding like "free software", it could have have lost the battle for hearts and minds for that reason alone, if not for all the other reasons.

Of course the public thinks "free software" is software for which you do not pay money.

And everyone immediately goes on their way with their downloads, without you getting the chance to give your hour-long spiel on "I'm glad you asked what I mean by 'free software'."

Because no one would ever ask what "free software" means, because they already know what it means.

It is the advocates who are terrible at advocacy who keep trying to give a term new meaning, and failing for a few decades to get the public to understand or pay attention.

You could even say that's the philosophical/awareness barrier, right there: people thinking in terms of free software, rather than in terms of Free Software(tm)(R).

(If you liked this comment, please subscribe to my newsletter about renewable clean energy, called Burn Fossil Fuels. My team has been working to get the message out, with a clever bit of wordplay there, in which we actually mean more the opposite of what we're saying. This is all explained in our hundred-page manifesto whitepaper, and we are also available for speaking engagements, at select events where we can preach to the choir.)

squigz4• 9 months ago

This touches on something I've noticed the past few years - it seems to me many advocates of most topics often do more harm than good for their cause - taking hardline positions normal people simply can't relate to, even if they do agree in theory.

Anyway, on the topic of "free" software - how might you recommend we try to frame this to be more clear to the public? I think people tried to make "libre software" a thing, but doesn't that have the exact same issue - that is, that people will misunderstand what it is?

luxpir2• 9 months ago

Freedom Software?

Beats Open Software because open is still ambiguous to non-technical people.

"Freedom Apps" if you truly want to talk to the masses.

pacifika• 9 months ago

That’s what open is meant to stand for, but Google et al have successfully caged that.

mixmastamyk2• 9 months ago

I really don’t like this comment but have to admit it’s pretty damn true.

hshdhdhehd4• 9 months ago

Thats why I like enshittification as a phrase as it attacks the bad side of things.

If you want to propagandise against the cloud the thing most average (and indeed smart and dumb also) people hate about the cloud is: the software keeps morphing. the buttons keep moving. the menu disappeared.

Lets call it shapeshifting software. Different from this morning-ware!

Confusionware!

codedokode3• 9 months ago

Note that non-free firmware in a network card, for example, doesn't affect anything, if the traffic is encrypted (and ideally routed through VPN so that the card has no direct Internet connection). So in some cases we can isolate non-free components so that they cannot do any harm. Modem in a phone, probably can be isolated also.

fsflover12• 9 months ago

A non-free firmware in a network card can

1) deny you service at the will of its true owner,

2) stop receiving updates rendering this piece of hardware dangerous to use with no recourse.

codedokode3• 9 months ago

It cannot deny you service if it is routed through a router that allows only communication with a VPN server, for which the malicious firmware has no access credentials.

billy99k2• 9 months ago

What's not mentioned here is that every single successful OSS project is funded by multi-million dollar corporations and the reason it's so prevalent today.

The rest usually become abandonware because maintainers don't have the time or energy to continue with it for years at a time, especially if they can't make money from it.

glitchc3• 9 months ago

Isn't the author confusing closed platforms for closed software? There are open platforms out there (Mastodon, Bluesky), but they lack traction. For any closed platform, the owner of the platform gets to decide what the stack looks like.

GMoromisato4• 9 months ago

The fundamental conflict here is that software developers want/need to get paid. We have mortgages/rent/medical bills/groceries and none of those are free.

The root problem, in my opinion, is combining "free as in beer" with "free as in speech". The latter cannot be achieved if you insist on the former. I.e., if your solution to privacy is only use free-as-in-beer software then you will fail because developers want/need to get paid.

What we need is a business model in which people are willing to pay for privacy-respecting software. That's the only sustainable path. And it's frustrating to me that the people who are most vocal about software freedom are actively working against that with this kind of article.

[p.s.: I realize I'm ranting and not offering enough detail to change minds, much less offer a solution. Sorry about that.]

squigz4• 9 months ago

Blender seems like a good example of how this can actually happen.

GMoromisato4• 9 months ago

Sure--but the article is saying that there are many cases where it doesn't work--where no good free software exists.

Could the Blender model replace YouTube, for example? I don't think it can, until hosting costs drop significantly. Maybe that's part of the answer.

porcoda• 9 months ago

I think people are willing to pay for privacy protecting software. The problem is I don’t think people trust companies who claim that because there are too many instances of that “privacy” coming with a subtle asterisk. Businesses can’t seem to resist eroding trust in the interest of $ (growth! Shareholder value!) or caving to authorities. Plus, it’s rare that companies are transparent enough to earn the trust they claim we should give them.

I do agree with the sentiment: people need to get paid to write software, and people want freedoms to be respected by that software. It seems to be challenging to rectify the two in most cases (yes, there are cases where it works - those are the exception not the norm).

GMoromisato4• 9 months ago

100% agree. Regulation is part of the answer. For instance, we trust that a gas pump is accurate because we know the government inspects it.

But I think we need more companies where trust/privacy is a brand promise. Apple, I think, is trying because they can. As long as they make money selling hardware, they don't have to rely on ad revenue.

In my opinion, the reason there aren't more companies that brand themselves as privacy-protecting is because people aren't willing to pay that much for it--at least not as much as the companies can make by selling data.

Part of my reaction to the article, however, is that the people who most value privacy are the least willing to pay for software--their solution is always about free-as-in-beer software. That obviously shrinks the market for privacy-respecting software.

eduction3• 9 months ago

John Deere bricking someone’s tractor because they put in an unrecognized spare part has nothing to do with supporting some poor hard working software developer who would otherwise starve.

It’s using software for evil. (And if I had to bet I would bet a software engineer was nowhere near that decision. They just implemented it!)

cozzyd• 9 months ago

It is possible if the software is a byproduct of something else that pays the bills (e.g. scientific research).

GMoromisato4• 9 months ago

Except the "something else that pays the bills" is usually ads. And I think we all see why that's a bad idea.

oneshtein3• 9 months ago

Yep, open source developers don't want/need to get paid, so give them f*ck and use their code for free.

redwood• 9 months ago

Microsoft, Google, Amazon. They will all open source wash themselves and have a cadre of former red hat and other equivalent employees speaking about how they are the center of open source.

Meanwhile there's an entire parallel universe where people view things using different terms than these tired 1990s battles.

The next generation of software cannot be controlled by a small number of hyperscalers.. that is the new center of freedom focus. Times change

ninetyninenine• 9 months ago

Nothing is truly free. All developer time is bought and paid for. Even leisure time. What pays for the software developer to be able to not starve and be able to spend leisure time on free software? Paid software. Obviously. Somewhere in the equation someone needs to be paid.

Usually if software is open source, it won't be paid for. So whatever is funding it... well if it's a software company funding open source software where does the money come from? Obviously paid software. And people won't pay for open source software because it's basically free.

Follow the money trail it ends at roughly three places: 1. donations, 2. tech support 3. ads 4. closed source software.

1 and 2 are too miniscule to be effective.

b_e_n_t_o_n6• 9 months ago

And 3 is worse than 4.

28304283409234• 9 months ago

All this time and people still do not understand the difference between Freedom and Gratis.

jrapdx33• 9 months ago

This topic provokes a question, what exactly is "winning" anyway? As others point out, how could there be absolute winning, or complete dominance of the whole gamut of software used for every purpose. Of course, no one ever proposed such a definition of open-source success.

Since the 1990s I've been thoroughly committed to using and developing open-source programs. I strongly prefer using open-source products even when they've been less robust than proprietary options. In recent years, that's changed in favor of open-source, a number of open-source programs have become best-in-class. To name a few Blender, postgresql, Firefox, most developer tools. Still, proprietary products dominate areas like OSs, enterprise programs, etc., and will probably continue to do so.

But even if not as widely used, the fact that quality alternatives exist to a significant share of proprietary offerings speaks to open-source success. It's noteworthy that giants like Microsoft have open-sourced some of their products, a practice unheard of a couple of decades ago that shows influence of the open-source movement.

A winner-take-all philosophy is bound to be as deleterious to open-source advocacy as in any other endeavor. Realistically, producing excellent, bug-free, well-documented open-source software is what it takes to find an appreciative user-base. Perhaps not the majority of users of that category of software, but is that necessary to call a project successful? To say it is seems a prelude to enduring a constant sense of failure and missing out on authentic victories.

bjourne• 9 months ago

The goal of the Free Software movement is to build a usable computing environment for which all software (i.e., "code") is free. If you include things like cell phones, tablets, web services, firmware, or basically anything other than core os components in the computing environment, that goal is very far off.

jrapdx33• 9 months ago

Sure, the FSF is as idealistic as it has been influential. Can't fault FSF for unrelenting commitment to stated purposes. While the totally free OS was a goal that never quite materialized, a large proportion of modern open-source systems is composed of free (in the FSF sense) software. What FSF advocates has indeed mattered.

I think the question is this: is having totally free cell phones, etc., the essential criterion of success? Or is something less than embodying FSF-style ideology acceptable? To be sure, there's no definitive answer to such a question. But ideological purity is a luxury in the real world that even FSF acknowledges, compromises sometimes have to be made, pragmatic considerations have to be taken into account.

Nothing wrong with keeping lofty goals, but as practical necessity frequently dictates, graciously accepting less than total victory more often than not best serves our interests.

(Edited re: grammar.)

einpoklum3• 9 months ago

The victory situation for free software is that it becomes socially unacceptable, and rare, for individuals and for organizations to claim IP rights over software, to restrict its dissemination, to hide its source code, etc. When it is clear that software is shared commons, and nothing else.

FormerBandmate• 9 months ago

Why would that ever happen? Software is too important for people to not sell outside of communism and free software people aren’t as good as making consumer products as capitalists

Der_Einzige• 9 months ago

I love firefox, but it is NOT best in class. What kind of copium are you huffing? I want some!

jrapdx33• 9 months ago

Couldn't disagree that FF has its deficits, IME it's not the best browser for videoconferencing. OTOH FF provides top-quality developer tools. And AFAIK preserves user privacy better than certain other browsers, Chrome being the poster child for the issue. FWIW FF remains unique and influential.

Ultimately judging what's "best in class" depends on exactly what criteria are applied. How old is the saying "one man's meat is another's poison"?

Anyway, the class of browsers is perhaps the most volatile in the software world, top of the heap changes constantly. But within it there are good examples of quality open-source programs and some that are not free at all. We decide on our own terms which among them is the "best".

signa11• 9 months ago

how does Linux's world domination feel ?

bad_haircut72• 9 months ago

People seem to think Free Software ought to have won purely as being free, as if that was somehow going to overcome the heinous acts f profit motivated groups to try and take away your end user freedom for their own gain. Its an idealogical battle not an economic one, though sadly we havent won its true

sarchertech• 9 months ago

So much software is “open source”, but it’s either de jure or de facto controlled by a single company.

Sure you could fork it, but for complex projects you’re not gonna. 99.99% of users of open source software will never meaningfully contribute. So the only option most people have is to hope someone else forks the project if something goes wrong, and for complex projects maintaining a fork requires serious resources.

We really need to distinguish between generic “open source” and actual community built and controlled projects.

The term open source itself was popularized by the open source initiative. A group funded by Tim O’Reilly and big tech to co-opt the free software movement and make it more business friendly.

They’ve spent so much time and money promoting the term, that there’s an enormous amount of good will around it. To the point that any project that doesn’t use an OSI approved license is widely considered dirty.

You could have a project controlled by the community with a nearly completely free license with the caveat that companies making more than $100 million in annual revenue can’t resell it, and the majority of devs would trust it less than an “open source” project completely controlled by a trillion dollar company.

sexyman48• 9 months ago

It's 2025. Code is worthless and becoming more so. The distinction of free versus open-source is moot.

zoobab2• 9 months ago

"The distinction of free versus open-source is moot."

Access to source code and subsequent modifications are still a concern by end users.

Sorry to say the experience of 'open source' was not very successful in that regard, because it was designed to not force vendors to publish their changes.

zelcon• 9 months ago

Why would anyone want free software to win? Dont most of us here draw an income from software that’s explicitly not free?

b_e_n_t_o_n6• 9 months ago

Yeah I'm not exactly sure what the appeal is of a world in which none of us are rewarded for our time and labor...

phito4• 9 months ago

Free as in Freedom not as in free beer.

tmtvl• 9 months ago

To me, having different ideals, that sounds as strange as saying 'why would anyone help an old lady cross the street without getting paid for it?'. Sometimes one may want to do something without needing to get money for it.

wilg• 9 months ago

Fundamentally, the issue is that only a small number of people know what free/"libre" software is, and only a small subset of those people think it is a good tradeoff.

For that reason alone, there's just not going to be a lot of people working on building something the vast majority of people very clearly do not want.

vednig2• 9 months ago

I think being a programmer we must understand that there's never a one size fits all needs.

Each project has different needs having an option never hurts, as long as there is competition, there will exist a chance of open sourcing the source.

Because, closed source softwares die faster in their lifetimes, while open source remain remembered even after being unmaintained.

Had it not been for GitHub(a closed source software) we'd had never reached this stage of open source expansion and understanding, because hosting a git to open source a project was and still isn't cost effective solution. Meanwhile torrents are mildly successful with this, yet faced by the lawful resistance in many regions.

Basic goals, should be to always have a choice, if there isn't much then create one if you can. Rest is just fog in hindsight, I'd say.

vednig2• 9 months ago

Gaming is one such usecase that requires and works well, currently, with proprietary software.

As such, gaming is a sport and as long as a game is competitive, there's always a chance to bypass a n obstacle with a hack, just as there was misconceptions with OSes.

But unlike OSes, games don't have a commercial application yet, we still have a long time before the realisation of freeware gaming.

akst2• 9 months ago

I think the free software model underestimates how much people dislike being compelled to operate on other peoples terms when it comes to exercising discrete with their intellectual property. Even if they get "free" software.

The suggestion free software is free is intellectually dishonest, I don't think free software is really free, the nature of it is very controlling towards those who decide to depend it. I publish most of the code I do for small side projects publicly, but I would never use free software if I arbitrary forgo to my ability to make the decision for myself. It deprives contributions of dignity, any suggestion a contribution comes from a willingness to share is undermined by the fact they are compelled to do so.

There's a reason why their interpretation of free is prefaced by a bunch of precondition, because it's a force framing that is odds with what people actually understand to be free.

thedevilslawyer2• 9 months ago

It's free as in freedom/libre - liberty.

Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be. Same is true in software.

akst2• 9 months ago

But it literally isn't that, as an author in depending on it you reduce your liberty. The software is free, those dependent on are not free.

You could argue well it's free to users, but there's a level of survivorship bias due to the fact this is confined to the software people will publish under this license.

Edit: Back to "free software losing" is unsurprising given the above. All the benefit to the user are ultimately irrelevant to the growth of software when doesn't come from users, it comes from people weighing up if they want to forgo this ability to exercise control over software they made. And the portion of users who actually care are negligible to the point it has zero incentive to the software provider. The one exception I would say is, the "Free" softwares model works well for public goods like shared infrastructure like database software and such, but for end user software it is insane licensing model.

Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be

Do you even hear yourself. This is the rhetoric why no one takes this seriously. Your suggesting my desire not to be deprived of my own personal liberty and act on my own terms (without causing harm to anyone else) is somehow authoritarian? It's such a narcissistic / manipulative entitled framing, to suggest this embodies anything resembling liberty.

drnick14• 9 months ago

Free software has won on servers. It is making inroads into desktop/gaming PCs (above 5% market share now), and the exodus from Windows 10 could well push it over 10% soon.

But the computing landscape has shifted towards mobile devices and this is where our freedoms are now the most at risk. It is time that we turn our back on Apple and Google and exclusively buy devices that can run operating systems that are community-controlled such as Linux phones, and devices that can be flashed to Lineage and Graphene.

indigoabstract• 9 months ago

I guess there will always be people who think in black and white. I'm pretty sure that if Stallman had been born in the 19th century, he would have been the first to write "The Communist Manifesto" before the other two guys had a chance.

rahen2• 9 months ago

I highly doubt that, considering Stallman's stance on freedom and personal sovereignty. Free software often operates like market anarchy (pure meritocracy), similar to the Internet. Coercive structures of centralized power that dictate what the 'common good' is do not align with the principles of the GPL. Also the GPL is focused on enforcing property rights ("this is yours unconditionally"), while communism emphasizes transferring property to the government ("this is ours but you might have some if you behave").

Imustaskforhelp7• 9 months ago

As someone who recently made a post on how to change it just recently and has been thinking about why[1] Here are some of my thoughts.

Your article is great and that is a reality I also want to live in where everyone completely "owns" their device and lives free from proprietory stuff and you are approaching things from a hardware perspective because you maybe more familiar with that and I am more familiar with software (as compared to hardware) but here's the shocking part that I want to share

People don't even use open source software. Something which just works as compared to hardware. There are sooo many low hanging fruits for privacy in this world that we haven't picked.

Even if I have a completely open source laptop, if the only way to message my school's teacher some message that he will look or send me is whatsapp, all of that falls apart.

We need to advocate on both sides & I 100% agree that we should want the same thing for hardware as well (proprietory blobs Intel ME are scary with proprietory blobs) but we need to definitely prioritize in the process as well.

What are some low hanging fruits of privacy/open source we can share that people aren't using because they are unaware.

Also, as someone deeply interested in advocating for open source and to those comments on that ask HN I made, I am deeply saddened to see the state.

Since I feel from those comments on my post that there is no hope. Everyone expects a better UI/UX but nobody said anything about donating to the contributors.

We expect so much from open source and we give so little back as a society.

And its just funny that on my post which is about how to give back to open source contributors so that they might work full time on it so that they can make a better UI/UX, people expect the better UI/UX first. I can understand them but...

It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Open source is itself a chicken and egg problem. Why do we want unpaid labour abused by big tech which is then used for surveillance/ad-tech and then if we can't create a better UI/UX then stop trying to expect any payment. Why do we want perfection before giving open source guys some donations. They are competing with a company which might have full time guys working on a project funded by a VC fund only to enshitten stuff later.

Please, I genuinely want to change it. Give me any ideas on how we, the people interested in open source, can change/fix this chicken and egg problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that)

(also I should've probably changed it to say how can we change that but the HN limits the text of a title and I had to modify some of it, and now after writing it, I am genuinely not sure if we even a "how can we change" or if my title was correct and its now "can we even change")

wiz21c• 9 months ago

Free software will win in the long run. But it depends on what you call "win". For me it means that, provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others. They will write free software and each year, that free software, although years behind commercial offerings, will be better than the software of ten years ago. With the GPL, that software will stick and won't be appropriated. So in the long run, free software will produce value.

See KiCad, Inkscape, emacs, etc. Are those better than commercial offering ? Sure not. But compare that with 10 years ago: it's much better.

And in the long run (say, 50-100 years), it will come out positively.

Just keep the spirit alive.

hobofan• 9 months ago

Just keep the spirit alive.

And to do that, blog posts like this one are necessary.

provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others

They don't spawn in a vacuum and rarely arrive at a significant formed idea of Free Software from first principles, so providing education and awareness into that direction is important. In the last decade free software discourse (at least in my perception) has significantly quieted down, to a point where I'm not sure that newcomers to the topic satisfy a replacement rate.

If one wants to keep the spirit alive, now would definitely be a time to push!

pabs33• 9 months ago

We need a right to repair for software, perhaps embedded in copyright law. No right to repair software by replacing it, no copyright.

andersmurphy• 9 months ago

I mean the reactions to posts on HN when a developer dares to make their OSS/MIT project sustainable by adding paid extensions is part of the problem. Almost to the point where I believe most developers are acting in the interest of the large corperations by bullying OSS developers into keeping their work free as in gratis.

The same people lose their minds if a project is GPL or copyleft.

donatj• 9 months ago

I would kill for decent NURBS oriented 3D CAD software. I feel like the 3D printing community would absolutely thrive if they stopped dealing with polygons for things meant to exist in the real world.

Rhino is really the only fully featured tool in town, at least available to the general public at a somewhat "affordable" price (~$700 from the right reseller). I end up paying to upgrade every few years when compatibility with my existing OS finally breaks. Apple announced the removal of Rosetta in 2027 (dear god why?! I use so many apps that'll likely never be made native) so I'm gonna have to pay again then.

At least, so far, it's software I'm allowed to *own* rather than rent. I can run my old versions in perpetuity, particularly on an emulator. As someone who has 3D models going back to around the year 2000 in his collection, the idea of using any of these hosted solutions just sends absolute shivers down my spine.

OpenSCAD is really the best we have in open source non-polygonal modeling tools, and it honestly wouldn't be too bad if someone could slap a decent WYSIWYG GUI on it.

IshKebab• 9 months ago

FreeCAD is actually pretty good since the 1.0 release. Far better than OpenSCAD for anything but highly regular and parametric objects (basically fasteners and art).

exasperaited• 9 months ago

And better still in the upcoming 1.1 release. Lots of improvements.

starky2• 9 months ago

This and a good RAW image processor are the two reasons I ever boot up the Windows VM these days. None of the options available on Linux come close to the software I use on Windows for those tasks.

You can get Fusion360 to work on Linux through some scripts someone created, but I don't like how Fusion works at all after using SolidWorks (and Pro/E) professionally.

zipy124• 9 months ago

Are raw therapee or dark table not enough?

NoiseBert69• 9 months ago

Darktable gets quite good results - even compared to Photoshop and DXO.

not--felix• 9 months ago

But I would say Free software also has not lost. It also has the advantage that it will get better with time and a lot of commercial software gets worse throug enshittification. We also saw this with blender, I think free software will win eventually

sbuk• 9 months ago

Blender is an interesting case. It's seeing wider adoption in studios generally - an Oscar win has helped and the recent Blender Conference had talks from Framestores vizdev[1] and Paramounts in-house teams[2]. Blender 5.0 is around the corner, which is adding more and more industry standard features[3][4], though recently there was a discussion about pulling away from the VFX Reference Platform[5][6], which they have walked back from[7]. It's not there yet, but it's gaining mindshare rapidly. Enshittification in DCCs is interesting. Arguably the two dominant companies, Autodesk (Maya, 3ds Max) and Maxon (Cinema 4D) are on that path, whereas SideFX (Houdini) is kicking ass!

[1] https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk

[2] https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o

[3] https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc

[4] https://landscape.aswf.io

[5] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-plat...

[6] https://vfxplatform.com

[7] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-stateme...

wolvesechoes6• 9 months ago

I am baffled that people in this thread write something along "well, depends what you call win" - the goal of Free Software is quite clear. The goal is freedom, computing freedom, freedom of the software user. It is very easy to notice that in 2025 users have less freedom even if they run some Libre Linux distro on their Thinkpads than they had running Win98, because of everything that happens OUTSIDE PC software ecosystem (phones, SaaS etc), and even inside PC world things sometimes are not obvious.

Free Software is losing, simple as that. Even with Kubernetes, as the goal was never to provide free labor and free software infra to companies.

thefz2• 9 months ago

The vast majority of software now runs on personal devices and the average user has no knowledge nor interest in it, as long as they press the button and the action is done.

The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.

WJW3• 9 months ago

This is not unique to software. There's no "free&open ball bearing" design out there, let alone for a machine capable of making them, even though the modern world couldn't work without them. The only people caring about ball bearing design are technical minded people already working in the field.

Same as for a thousand other fields essential to operating the modern world. Nobody has time to learn them all, so we specialize.

wolvesechoes6• 9 months ago

The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.

People that fought for common hygiene standards, or labor rights, or human rights etc in the past were a minority too, because most people didn't care. But this minority was able to organize, push forward and gain support. And the fight was worth it, and improved lives of us all.

notarobot123• 9 months ago

Inversely, the only end-users FOSS cares about are those that can compile and build from source themselves. More so if they can also submit good bug reports and patches.

The demographics of the majority of end-users shifted a long time ago but FOSS is stuck with a mindset that treats everyone like their own sovereign sysadmin.

It'll take a big shift in the Free Software movement to make it something that represents regular end-user enough for regular end-users to care about the Free Software movement.

zelphirkalt2• 9 months ago

Even those, who should know better, choose to not think about the consequences and in masses opt for spyware and non-free software, out of convenience, or laziness. I mean, look at all the computing professionals (?), who use Google Chrome instead of Chromium or Ungoogled Chromium, or another browser entirely. Look at all the web developers, who only test on Chromium-derived browsers, maybe even only Google Chrome. Look at all the IT departments, who mandate use of Windows in companies. Instead of being part of the change, they are part of the dystopia.

I think we have a severe problem, due to influx of too many people, who don't actually care, even though they should be knowledgeable enough to see the consequences. Maybe the paycheck is the only thing that counts for them, but they are actively contributing to the process of us all losing our freedom. If we lose our freedom (more than we have already) in the digital realm, we will lose it outside of the digital realm as well. For example imagine there are no longer any auditable open source/free software messengers you can use and all you can do it trusting proprietary vendors, who can introduce any backdoor they like. What tool will you use to organize protests? What if messenger makers agree to introduce state determined blackouts? Or secretly report your activity to the state and police, so that they appear at your door, before your protest even started? How will you organize any critical number of people, without digital freedom to do so in this day and age?

Our freedom is at stake, but most people don't care, even if you tell them. We are too damn comfortable for our own sake.

chasd00• 9 months ago

The only ones caring about FOSS are technical minded people already working in the field.

It was this way when I was loading Linux from floppies and compiling 3c509 drivers. Same as it ever was.

eleveriven5• 9 months ago

Free Software isn'r just losing, it's being co-opted, hollowed out and sold back to us without the freedom it was meant to protect

grafmax5• 9 months ago

Yes, basically rent extraction over various forms of cloud capital. The widening societal wealth gap means owners can simply charge workers for access to what they own, without having to produce very much. Perfect in the short term if you are rich. Cash thus flows from the working class to the ownership class in a feedback loop that intensifies the problem.

markus_zhang2• 9 months ago

I shall quote:

“ The right of workers to manage the state, the military, various enterprises, and cultural and educational affairs is, in fact, the greatest and most fundamental right of workers under the socialist system. Without this right, other rights of workers—such as the right to work, the right to rest, and the right to education—cannot be guaranteed. … We must not understand the issue of the people's rights as meaning that the state is managed only by a small group of people, while the rest of the people merely enjoy rights such as labor, education, and social security under their management.”

bboygravity• 9 months ago

Meaningless. You can replace socialist by capitalist and it would be equally meaningless.

The correct word is democracy. The people (or "workers") having a say or not has nothing to do with socialism or capitalism IMO.

ChaoPrayaWave• 9 months ago

FOSS used to win by being able to run on anything. Now hardware chooses you. If you’re not running the sanctioned OS, even the browser might be crippled. I’m not sure if that’s progress, but it’s definitely not freedom.

eleveriven5• 9 months ago

Soo open source "won" commercially, but Free Software hasn't won philosophically

werdl• 9 months ago

Free software has been killed by all the companies offering 'open source' solutions...

agoodusername633• 9 months ago

It sounds to me like the biggest problem are the users.

There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.

I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. I don’t think anybody can at this point now that Google and Microsoft are having extremely successful trial runs with fully managed systems.

phito4• 9 months ago

I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.

Better education, which is definitely not the current trend.

agoodusername633• 9 months ago

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink

Yeah we can Properly Educate non techies all day, but when they sit down to watch Netflix and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors, I’ve yet to get a single person to care after that.

eleveriven5• 9 months ago

Freedom lost not because it was taken, but because most people didn't care to keep it.

tim333• 9 months ago

I'm not sure users such as myself using non free stuff, Apple in my case, are a problem. We do our thing, people wanting to use Linux do theirs, no real problem.

mft_• 9 months ago

There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.

It's often beyond just sacrificing "any sort of convenience" - but rather "it's effectively impossible for someone who's not at least a compentent IT hobbyist to install this software".

I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.

You need to change the culture in free/open software. The current goal seems to be something like "as long as it works, and I can install it --no matter how convoluted or unreliable that process is-- then that's good enough". Mainstream users don't want to use the shell, or have to search internet forums for solutions, or use Docker, or whatever.

If you genuinely want FOSS to win, the goal should be to be better than the commercial alternatives: easier to install, more reliable, better more intuitive UIs, smaller, faster, more features, whatever.

hshdhdhehd4• 9 months ago

It should be easy to make FOSS Web apps especially ones that favour front end (and hence web standards) for most of what they do. Someone does need to be the server though so you end up with a bit of cloud.

I think another problem is marketing. The SaaS can afford to advertise. The free libre app has to be discovered.

starky2• 9 months ago

It isn't like it shouldn't be easier on Linux either as it already is much of the time. I can open up my command line and type "yay ProgramName" and hit enter a couple times to install most things. Its even easier on a distro that uses a store for distributing applications. But as soon as you get away from that curated selection the process becomes so much more difficult very quickly. Users will give up if it is more complicated than downloading an executable and clicking on it.

elric• 9 months ago

The pacemaker example is an interesting one. Medical devices are shrouded in secrecy, ostensibly for "good reasons", but in reality they're often insecure garbage. I'm not sure if an open source pacemaker would be safer than a proprietary one. It would be nice to be able to audit the source code, but I'm not sure whether contributions from random committers would have a net positive impact in this space?

kovac• 9 months ago

If winning means mass adoption, I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free.

If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it. The de facto strategy in our era for commercializing any tech is surveilling its users.

If a technology can't be harnessed, corporations will contain if not outright kill it.

We've seen this time and time again. So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Remain in the hands of individuals who care and build it for themselves. In that sense, there are many free software that have already won.

My question is, why on earth are people obsessed with things like the year of the Linux desktop, and more people adopting their software.

Fragmentation is probably the only way free software will remain free.

einpoklum3• 9 months ago

I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free.

The Linux kernel is widely adopted and remains kind-of-free.

LibreOffice is widely adopted and remains quite free.

If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it

Not necessarily. That is, they may engage in commercial activity surrounding it, but that's not the same thing.

So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar.

Your "winning" requires not-winning, i.e. most people not using the relevant software.

karel-3d• 9 months ago

Prusa has already said they will start closing their devices to fight against Chinese clones.

jezek23• 9 months ago

That's unfortunate, mainly because they will find out that they can clone closed devices as well, in fact it's their default mode (not much of HW is open).

They even clone stuff that you send them to manufacture but forgot to include the sources (or have them outdated) as part of providing a good service :)

puterbonga• 9 months ago

The title undersells it, it retreated. We open sourced the visible parts and then built a surveillance and firmware monoculture underneath. Every “smart” thing is a dumb terminal for code we can’t audit. The GPL didn’t fail, we just stopped applying it where it mattered most.

Paianni• 9 months ago

The reality is that since the invention of ICs, electronic devices have become 'black-boxes' that the vast majority of people can't hope to understand the entire workings of. Free software licenses were never going to change that.

aeon_ai• 9 months ago

I think we vastly underestimate the impact that AI will have on open-source capabilities and technology.

tsoukase• 9 months ago

I have no problem with closed source firmware as long as I can install Linux, with proprietary junk apps as long as I can side load open source ones, with ads as long as I have Ublock. Currently, especial Google is passing over my red lines and I am preparing for retaliation (ungoogle).

realaaa• 9 months ago

what are the good modern examples of true FOSS projects which are still managing to make OK money?

even services like MSP are all relying on M$FT and similar vendors

there are some attempts at building open-source stack, but that ends up not viable in the end :(

Free software hasn't won

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