On FOSS software, mass adoption, normies, and customization

This is something I've been struggling with my whole life. This is probably going to sound stupid, and maybe I'm just incredibly ADHD and autistic as fuck and nobody actually cares about this shit except me, but idk, it bothers me constantly.

I used to love Android for the simple fact that it was the only good alternative to applefags' locked-down, special needs classroom walled garden that was the Iphone and its ecosystem. Don't get me wrong though - I got a 1st gen iPod touch for Christmas when I was like 13, and since this was before I cared about brand loyalty or harbored any kind of formal software "philosophy" (which let's not kid ourselves, sounds retarded saying that out loud) I was obsessed with it not only because of how cool & new it was, but moreso because you could jailbreak it and from there, it seemed, the possibilities were endless. Heh, iSteamy, the post-your-own-porn app was probably my favorite while it lasted.

Anyway, when I got old enough to buy my first smartphone, I went with the HTC Incredible due to all the things that iphone at the time infamously could NOT do - I'm looking at you, copy & paste. Plus, around that period I think Fapple started cracking down on jailbreaking and restricting its utility heavily. Honest to god even in my naivety at a young age, it offended me so deeply that Apple would disallow even the *potential* for fixing LITERALLY _broken_ shit like that yourself, except at the hands of (((their))) developers themselves, that I learned early on that 'Droids (lol) were the only option for me.

Now, in the present day, shit's different. Jewgle has taken over the world and rules with an iron fist, and that fist is getting heavier. Seems like every new release of Android, although making it easier for developers to stick to an increasingly standardized & streamlined framework of permissions and design decisions, which in theory is a good thing; also corrals everybody into a decidedly less choice-rich user experience.

cont.

I used to root the SHIT out of my old android devices. The Incredible was a great start, and every new device I got after that, the first thing I did when I got home was crawl XDA and 1-click root that fucker right from the get-go. Stuff like Xposed enabled amazing functionality that was otherwise nowhere to be found in the OS. And some of those features were so good I wondered why google didn't include them standard in AOSP to begin with - but I didn't have to, because Xposed bro!!! And all I needed was a $3 Titanium Backup Pro license to quickly & (mostly) seamlessly take all my customizations across roms and try out even more sweet mods. I couldn't get enough of it.

Then Samsung started locking down their bootloaders starting with the S6. That has made galaxy devices a no-go for me to this day, along with all the other manufacturers (and Verizon, fuck you so much) that locked up their BL's tight. Sucks too because they all have some of the best hardware. However, on the flipside, it really doesn't matter so much anymore, as Android has admittedly become a much more fluid, consolidated platform, and handily eliminated a lot of reasons to root at all. But even in the custom ROMs I use today, the trend almost seems to have turned from wanting ricing and customization, to just a """pure""" AOSP experience, literally just debloated stock android. But I feel in pivoting our preference to that kind of experience, we lost the spirit of what rooting & tweaking was all about, and why we did it in the first place.

Ok. So Android is just one example, one that I feel on a visceral level since it's probably the technology I use most every day.

How about GNU/Linux? So I tried Ubuntu a few times before, but never stuck with it because muh gaymes, and ...why.... when windows ""just works"". Well, beginning of this summer I think Windows 10 finally got to me, to the point where I was willing to put in whatever effort it took to switch, if Lincucks was indeed fundamentally better (as /fglt/ would have me think). There was probably some choice-supportive bias going on, as I never quite gave a shit about the FOSS movement and Richard Stallman or any of that. But windoze 10 made me realize how much of an identity crisis M$ has gone through, with just one example being the way the control panel is STILL sticking around, but a lot of its functions been relegated into the cool boxy MeTrO AppS LoL "Settings" menu. It's such a clusterfuck, with duplicate settings and way too much confusion about what setting is located where. I see why my dad would always download a "classic start menu" app with each successive Windows release after XP; the whole OS's organization got more schizophrenic & disjointed with every iteration. But we all know this.

For the most part, I had a kind of spiritual awakening with linux. On paper it sings hallelujah to me with its squeaky-clean FOSS foundation, and once I tried Manjaro and got the benefits of the almighty AUR along with an easy graphical installer and relative stability, I was and am convinced. Everything should be on *nix, or at least some kind of similar software architecture whose footsteps follow in the linux discipline - unified, platform-agnostic, yet completely and utterly as open and free as possible. Upon this, you and anyone can build anything. That's how it's designed.

stop blog posting holy shit

What bothers me now is this. A lot of shit in linux is plain broken. I tried to sign a PDF the other day and found that there is literally no free linux app that can correctly cryptographically sign PDFs, because it's a proprietary Adobe thing. I guess there's no way around that because FOSS larpers will refuse little BS compromises like that to their fucking grave, even though if you work somewhere like the government where the real world REQUIRES that stuff, you are shit out of luck. Simple as that. There's a very real case for utility and pragmatism, which explains Apple's market share.

And yet.....if you close your source, or otherwise bar others from vetting and ultimately improving on your work, which THEY use, there's just something that seems fundamentally wrong to me there. The money aspect fits in here somehow, but only to the extent to which you obviously don't want people just compiling the code you put on github to the $100+ masterpiece of an application that you made and essentially pirating it. Other than that, I really think it's sort of my unalienable right that I should be able to tweak the way that someone else's code runs on MY machine or phone. Because when you have an otherwise perfect and open-source platform but that has certain pesky applications that are just so autistically developed they basically pay no respect to the rest of the components of that system, it's a crime of engineering. And in that case, anyone who has the time & interest to repair it should be able to.

tl;dr

if you want to use proprietary shit you can always use a virtual machine and emulate windows.

this even lets you bypass typical windows DRM like not being able to screenshot protected content

Learn linux and programming, faggot. Make a website so you can stick your several page long threads there for posterity.

Learn to read, faggot.

I'm done. I'm not sure what I'm asking, just want opinions. This board has become pretty cancerous over the years but it's funny to see that the core philosophy is the same. Simple, strong, practicable, and fundamentally "right" hardware and software in all technology.

Still though it looks to me like the rest of the world has changed quite a bit with everyone's attitude towards FOSS or frankly, even having an unironic "philosophy" about openness and design principles in technology at all, waxing and waning with the influence of people like Gates, Jobs, Stallman, Torvalds, shit even as far back as Turing etc.

Thankfully we don't sign papers that way here.
We use a government login service which is basically an old 2 factor login system (paper instead of SMS) and then we sign stuff that way.
The login is we based so obviously not free software but you can use free software tools to access it.
Other places, they want you to print, sign then scan.

I'd like to interject for a moment.

The two political camps in the free software community are the free software movement and open source. The free software movement is a campaign for computer users' freedom; we say that a nonfree program is an injustice to its users. The open source camp declines to see the issue as a matter of justice to the users, and bases its arguments on practical benefits only.
To emphasize that “free software” refers to freedom and not to price, we sometimes write or say “free (libre) software,” adding the French or Spanish word that means free in the sense of freedom. In some contexts, it works to use just “libre software.”
A researcher studying practices and methods used by developers in the free software community decided that these questions were independent of the developers' political views, so he used the term “FLOSS,” meaning “Free/Libre and Open Source Software,” to explicitly avoid a preference between the two political camps. If you wish to be neutral, this is a good way to do it, since this makes the names of the two camps equally prominent.
Others use the term “FOSS,” which stands for “Free and Open Source Software.” This is meant to mean the same thing as “FLOSS,” but it is less clear, since it fails to explain that “free” refers to freedom. It also makes “free software” less visible than “open source,” since it presents “open source” prominently but splits “free software” apart.
“Free and Open Source Software” is misleading in another way: it suggests that “free and open source” names a single point of view, rather than mentioning two different ones. This conceptualization of the field is an obstacle to understanding the fact that free software and open source are different political positions that disagree fundamentally.
(cont.)

(cont.d)
Thus, if you want to be neutral between free software and open source, and clear about them, the way to achieve that is to say “FLOSS,” not “FOSS.”
We in the free software movement don't use either of these terms, because we don't want to be neutral on the political question. We stand for freedom, and we show it every time—by saying “free” and “libre”— or “free (libre)”.

See this is sort of an example of exactly what I'm talking about. When 99% of people talk about free/libre/open-source SW (that percentage in itself being yet 0.0001% of the population at large) I think they're all generally referring to the same sort of thing. Sure there's a distinction, but honestly, it doesn't FUCKING MATTER when a massive chunk, if not the vast majority, of popular software and platforms in use by humanity currently are not even close to free or libre or whateverthefuck anyway. They're all closed source and happy as a clam raking in royalties and subscription fees and licenses, while lincucks yell from their dirty basements about the injustice.

Funnily enough, reading that post seemed identical to my eyes to reading the endless arguments over whether to include GNU in the /flt/ and /fglt/ threads. Bickering over something that sure, *technically* isn't required to the grand linux dogma but that 90% of linux users depend on.

It's a failing of the community, not being able to recognize what good (or precisely, lack thereof) it does them when you do run up against an Adobe PDF proprietary signing API that a nontrivial amount of people, like it or not, use daily.
is great, that's the route I usually take lately, just give up on the whole scheme involving the proprietary software entirely and go about it another way. But it's still not an excuse. Sometimes you can't beat bureaucracy by throwing your hands up and refusing to participate period. That's the way of the liberals :^)

Just watch some anime, buy cute programming socks, learn C and Haskell, rice your distro and shitpost eternally here.

tl;dr?

Just dropping in to say I'm enjoying this thread.

I use Linux primarily for development at work but I can't use it at home just yet.

One of my most comfortable experiences was a legacy Solaris deployment as my main machine at a defense contractor behind security clearance doors with no internet access.

Got so used to Unix and learning without internet access that I miss it. Became a master of Vim and could do anything without a mouse.

I don't know, it's like being cleared of all distractions. I yearn for it again but at the same time, I don't.

>This is probably going to sound stupid, and maybe I'm just incredibly ADHD and autistic as fuck and nobody actually cares about this shit except me, but idk, it bothers me constantly.

This is Sup Forums, no matter how seemingly insignificant your gripe may be there is someone here who agrees with you violently.

Thanks for actually reading it, I'm impressed lul.

My thing about this is I just don't understand why (just one example) linux is still so far behind technically and usability-wise and doesn't seem to be making the same kind of progress in a lot of areas as the non-free popular default options. You'd think open-source would only make sense in the tech world, fostering innovation and enabling improvement by the people who actually have skin in the game and a reason to make it better, the end users.

At the same time Google is crippling Android by slowly doing the same thing to its development as Apple has always done, but still not quite as good, lolol faggots. But even fucking Apple is losing its way and everyone can tell. Without Jobs they're literally just a slightly above average tech company with a significantly unified and, dare I say addictive ecosystem, which IMO is the single and only reason they're still the king (but probably not for much longer).

Basically if you don't use exclusively Apple products, the oligarchical wardens of the ultimate modern maximum security prison of software design, you're dealing with a fractured and confused mess that is wind0ze, android, linux. And the latter two should at this point be unified in a holy grail of unified-yet-open-source technology platforms, being as they both use the ages-old linux kernel, but faaaaar from it. Idk mang. Really rustles my jimjoms.

good thread, can’t post because of
> t. On phone

Lol, thx anons, it warms my heart to know that someone gets it. I expected a lot more shitposting.

And I agree the simplicity aspect of a platform like *nix is everything. Not only just in terms of the lack of bloat or """"""features"""""" compared to some cloying playskool excuse for an OS preloaded with a bunch of unnecessary shit, but in the sense that the core of the OS itself is sufficiently, fundamentally, *simple* enough to LEAVE ROOM for the absolute richest amount of avenues of development POTENTIAL to change it to your liking - and requiring the closest to absolute zero, so to speak, amount of effort necessary to do it.

'free software' is a stupid, impractical idea
we live in the real world. owning land seems stupid too, I mean it's just ground, why can't I walk on it? But these artifical systems exist so we can live together productively.

This is a short essay, only the retarded cannot read an essay in one sitting.

The plan since day 1 was to get you into a friendly prison. The technology didn't exist back then to create a walled garden, also due to competitive reasons they kept it "more free" but that time has come and now it's prison devices.

All you need to know is the essay by RMS called 'The Right to Read' written in the early 90s. It's exactly what these companies want for our future: a device where it's impossible to tamper with, illegal to tamper with, and you are force to use it. Now they can control what you read and see.

The whole point of FOSS, is that the work you do on software will never end up helping to build a future prison society. People get lost in the present, and don't think 5-20yrs ahead. Imagine an AI produced DSL, that is formally verified by another AI to never be exploitable, that boots from a signed crypto chip that can't be tampered with using post-quantum lattice crypto. These companies will start to lease devices instead of selling them, offering you $20/month and just handing you the latest Iphone or Jewggle phone. Everything you do is scanned in real time for thought crime. You won't be able to browse sites like these because they'll be dead simple to ban now that everybody has a leased devices except for the millionaire class. You can't open any PDFs or stolen research papers from sci-hub. You can't even type in and Russian domain without being put on a list somewhere. That's the future that guy's like RMS saw when they came up with the whole idea of FOSS

>wasting this amount of time writing an useless piece of """essay""" blabbering about """FOSS""" instead of watching anime

Welp. lol

I think what partially inspired this post was the season 3 premiere of Mr. Robot last wednesday. The scene in the middle where he's breaking the 4th wall and talking about how it all ended up that way was powerful af senpai.

>watching jewish media instead of anime

I think this is something that a lot of Linux developers these days miss. In their hunt to emulate Windows and major platforms (see Red Hat and SystemD, and GNOME 3's ongoing fuckery) they're making it harder to philosophically point to the reason that the foundation (as in the base-level idea, not the FSF) is so important at all. Not to say you can't have totally open software that is also ignorance-friendly, but you have to keep it at a level where it can be controlled by the community.

Look at the bloating size of FOSS and imagine trying to audit it for backdoors. It would be nearly impossible.

what about open source hardware like raspis running open source/FOSS/FLOSS/free/libre software?

Read the whole thing.
Agree completely.
I think that if you want tools based on nonfree shit such as adobe's crap for signing you'll have to bite the bullet and just code it yourself usng their (((sdk))).
I had the same experence with you and jailbreaking btw.
Right now my gripe is fighting Gapps and the fact that they make my phone light like a goddamn beacon with 20 services draining all time

welcome to the magical real world, where the patents are a thing. And, as long as they exist there'll be no legal way to implement a FOSS alternative to some bullshit functionality that $megacorp decided to patent.