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Comment by astazangasta | Hacker News Reader

>What I am saying is that refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop because there aren’t free drivers helps basically nobody, and only harms yourself.

This is wrong. Doing this forces you to confront the deficiencies of free software, the lack of available free software, and strongly encourages you to support development of alternatives. Just like being vegan encourages the growth of a market for vegan products.

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I also was strictly vegan for a while, and lost that religion too. For sort of similar reasons! I think it's too focused on the ethics of one part of the situation, and misses the whole.

The value in strictly adhering to religions like software freedom or veganism isn't so much to cause any meaningful change yourself - you are actively harming your own experiences and potential in restricting yourself in most any way dogma would limit you - but it projects to those around you an adherence to that belief that can inspire and promote the change in those you directly interact with.

This happens in all manner of things - politics, old school regular religions, intellectualism, scientific literacy, rationalism - for the ideas to spread you need prophets and priests to spread the word and adherents to project legitimacy to attract converts. But pretty much any belief system, followed dogmatically, is not for your own personal empowerment - its self sacrifice for the cause.

I agree with this, and I think that what I'm getting at here is more of "I don't believe that these actions are inspiring nor promoting that change, and so it is not effective as a tactic."

The point is that the presumed benefits of said dogma just don't seem to be there. Mostly these things concentrate around people for whom the sacrifice is relatively small and scare off everyone else with the holier than thou attitude.

The entire technology stack the modern Internet is built on exists because Stallman clung to his dogma, how's that for "presumed benefit"? Stallman isn't the world's smartest person or best programmer or even a particularly gifted organizer. His superpower is his fanaticism. And it worked.

I think his technical contributions are much more relevant here than the dogma, which, as I said, seems to be scaring people away to this day.

There is ample evidence that in the absence of substantial GPL contributions (Linux kernel, KHTML, GCC, etc) there would be a much reduced substantive body of influential free code available.

Apple in 1998 definitely weighed their options between writing their own proprietary browser engine vs forking a GPL one. To this day almost all free software hardware device support is exclusively due to how second class proprietary drivers play in the Linux driver ecosystem. Before the prevalence of GCC compilers were one of the deepest and most tightly protected proprietary secrets of corporations.

And none of that would have happened with permissive licenses because it required compulsory source disclosure to force businesses to contribute back. The alternative is what we see Sony do with their Playstation OSes - they built the PS3 and PS4 OS off FreeBSD, but neither contribute code back to said projects, provide any sponsorship or support (dozens of companies do, but the one making grotesque profits by exploiting user freedom isn't), and use an open source product to cripple fully functional computers with unmodifiable proprietary operating systems.

We would absolutely be in the PS4 world in regards to almost all software if the free software movement didn't push its dogma in the 90s.

Veganism might have been a fad for you, but for others it is a necessary undertaking to remain healthy. I can't blame you for finding some choices difficult to make, but at the same time it's disheartening to see these "anti-religion" arguments brought out to dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices, for their own purposes which are not explicitly approved by the vendor.

It wasn't a fad; it was a moral commitment. I certainly agree that some people are vegan for health reasons, but health was part of why I stopped being vegan: it was harming my health. Not for any of the reasons that anti-vegans trot out, mind you, it was that I was mostly consuming vegan junk food.

My comment was focused on this moral aspect because that's the part of veganism that I was a part of and are familiar with, but I don't think that all vegans are vegans for moral reasons, nor do I think that nobody should be vegan.

> dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices

I'm not dismissing that at all, in fact, I am arguing that it doesn't actually enable you to retain control. The AGPL is an acknowledgement that the GPL does not go far enough in doing that today, and its failure to gain traction demonstrates that it's not a tactic that works for this purpose. We need new strategies and tactics.

If the moral aspect of it is really important to you then I hope you can find the path to trying again in a different capacity that doesn't compromise on your health. If not then forget I said anything.

The AGPL does have traction, just not in the places you might expect to look. I think that's a red herring anyway because it is indeed a niche license, useful specifically for free software communities where growth and development focused around a network API is happening actively and rapidly, and there is active worry that a bad actor could move in and try to take over the network. This is absolutely not the only issue threatening free software communities currently because not all of them fit that description, so I see why it is quite common for people to dismiss the AGPL. But know that it may just not be what is correct for your use case, and that for many communities a lot of other licenses are still adequate, including the non-copyleft licenses that you have mentioned are gaining a lot of traction due to their popularity within proprietary, closed-source companies.

I have heard a lot of rambling recently about "post-open source" and "post-free software" movements lately but I still think it's jumping the gun. The fact that it's still so difficult to find working libre drivers for wifi chips (and a lot of other pieces of hardware) is proof to me that we still have a lot of work to do, not a convenient excuse to dismiss things entirely and stop caring.

Seeking perfect wholes is more religious than identifying specific areas where practical interventions can be made.

Free Software works to protect the freedom of individuals to use software that they own. It doesn't work as a magic way of making VCs money by companies giving server-side code away for free. The former is a politics, the latter is not even a religion. But sift through all the anecdotes and repeating of old Microsoft slurs against Free Software and it is clear that it is losing that religion that is behind the current debates.

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