I hope that ad blocking features are eventually seen as a killer feature, driving Firefox market shares up at the expense of “you can’t even block a fucking ad!” Chrome-based browsers.
If that’s gonna happen or not, I have no idea. It depends on how well each side plays its cards. The worst case scenario is Google boiling frogs (i.e. removing capabilities little by little) while Mozilla fails to advertise Firefox in this regard.
Then my bad on claiming that those were “your” claims, what I said should apply to the original author.
My point still stands though. Those questions are still better addressed individually; for example, gathering some data on software quality and contrasting open and closed source, including the reference that you linked in #2. Then I bet that you’ll get better arguments, as the matter is more approachable for discussion.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, for anyone in c/leftistinfighting, that social circumstances shape the behaviour of the individuals. And that’s what happens in r/communism101, the typical users there will full engage on typical Reddit behaviour - such as a taste for red herrings and inability to get the point and to the point. Always assuming some reason for the question, but never addressing it.
As other people here said, your post is great and well put.
It does add meaningful info to the discussion: it shows why people would be less-than-eager to reply to a post to contradict it. It also shows that good faith discussion, trying to achieve a consensus (or at the very least better understanding) should start with simple and basal claims, otherwise the other side will not answer.
Now analyse your own post, and notice how many claims you did to chain your argumentation:
- That the meaning of “open source” has changed over time; did it?
- That “most free software is poor or unusable”; is it?
- That “protagonists like to use isolated points fallacy to sell the idea that FOSS is great”; do they?
- Who are even the “protagonists” in #3?
- Taking #2 as true (something that plenty people here won’t), the alleged poor quality is due to lack of capital. Is it?
- Are the examples mentioned (OO, Emacs, Linux) representative?
- Is free open source “not often innovative”?
- How those attributes compare with commercial software?
You’re also making a definition mess, for example at the end you’re contrasting “open source” with “commercial”, even if both attributes are orthogonal to each other. (i.e. you can have non-commercial closed source, and commercial open source). There’s also the issue with “free-as-free-speech software” and “open source” being conflated together.
I won’t bother defending free and open source here because, frankly, I’m more of a lurker than a debater, but this is not the way to introduce a discussion.
I do. Mostly /a/, /ck/, /g/ and /vg/.
Yes, the place has been infested by Stormfront refugees, /pol/ is cancer central undergoing metastasis and spreading cancer everywhere, and /b/ managed to go from “this shithole was never good, but it’s funny” to “this unfunny shit needs to improve to become a shithole”. And the whole site has been redditised, so users there spend more time assuming words on the others’ mouths than actually discussing the topic.
However, it’s still a decent place to discuss random stuff. Your typical Anon is dumb as a brick, but at least not dumb as a snoo. Entitled whining leads you nowhere there so most entitled users either leave or stop whining. And there’s still some sense of humour left, not touched by the alt right.
I hate when people conflate:
- Western, Eastern - Western and Eastern Europe, backtracking to the Roman vs. Orthodox schism, and then back to the WRE / ERE split. Not really meaningful outside Europe, except maybe in the Americas; but then it applies equally to former British, French, and Iberian colonies.
- First world, second world, third world - Cold War blocs: USA-aligned, Soviet-aligned, unaligned.
- Developed, in development, undeveloped - that shows where the capital is going to.
So for example. Switzerland is third world (unaligned); Latin America is western (former Iberian colonies); Japan is developed.
On the point. I can certainly relate to socialists in developed countries, complaining about how the bourgeoisie exploits them. It hurts, like being punched on the arm. However this should by no means on the same level as being exploited in developing and undeveloped countries, where the shit is better comparable to being kicked on the stomach.
Yes it absolutely is, because “woke culture” is nothing but a strawman to justify LGBTQIA±phobia and racism. Let’s not forget that “traditional values” are forged in a lot of those things.
It’s 90% strawman, 10% hypocrite finger-pointing at things that the alt right also does - such as the thing that they call “virtue signalling”. The later is yet another of those “even a broken clock is right twice a day, but if you’re assuming that a broken clock is reliable then you’re braindead” cases.
I wish that people stopped using the word “toxic” to refer to behaviour, and actually described what they’re complaining about. “Toxic” is simply non-descriptive, it can mean a thousand things depending on whom you ask, and at the end of the day it’s the same as “I think that this is bad but calling it ‘bad’ would make you notice that it’s my subjective opinion”.
NB: Bailey might be the one to blame here, not Miele. Miele actually describes, later on, what she’s talking about: sex-based harassment and marginalisation.
It is said that this document work will fundamentally change the way everyone works at Canonical and require documents to a higher standard.
That’s great, but I hope they don’t get rid of chunks of documentation just because “it’s of lower quality”. Low quality doc is still better than no doc at all.
This sort of anti-customer pattern is arguably as old as advertisement, and it usually exploits some sort of asymmetry between business and customer, either in information or necessity.
For example: businesses are not prone to decision fatigue, emotional manipulation, or imperfect attention. They’re also better informed to understand the value of the things being exchanged (e.g. “your privacy” vs. “access to my site”) than the users.
I think the article handles well the message that version numbers are meaningful for users, and that developers should be a bit more careful with them.
Thankfully in Linux’ case this is simple to solve, given the developers aren’t prone to make backwards incompatible changes. Just keep the 5.x series indefinitely. (Sorry Torvalds, I know you only got 20 fingers/toes, but…)
This link is relevant for context. It’s a small blog post from Steve McIntyre identifying the problems he sees with firmware in Debian and proposing solutions. Eventually McIntyre’s views led to this general resolution.
Quoting from that link:
With his proposed solution being to
So basically the same that was voted now, “Change SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer”.
In my humble opinion, as a literal nobody on the internet: sometimes you need to take a step back to take two forward. This inclusion looks undesirable but necessary, and I feel like giving differential treatment to non-free firmware vs. non-free software was the right move here, to minimise the ideological damage caused by promotion of non-free code.