We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!
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@anonymous234 said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@xaade said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
It's immoral to ask for money for your work?
How do these guys buy food?
No, you see, you can still sell GPL software so it's OK! I mean people will download it for free from someone else so you'll probably only sell one copy. But you can make money selling support!
Seriously though. That's the main problem with free software. Yes, freedom is nice and all, but what about getting paid to do stuff? Do we just give up on the idea that works everywhere else? They always deflect by pointing out you can still sell support contracts or whatever alternate business model you can come up with, but those are just bad workarounds.
If I cared enough about freedom, I'd start a "free as in freedom but not as in beer" movement where you pay for a license but still get the source code and permission to modify it for your own uses.
The GPL has absolutely nothing to do with freedom. If the GPL and "free software" were really about freedom then the GPL would contain exactly one sentence:
"You are free to do whatever you want with this software."
The truth is, the GPL is about forcing a particular set of beliefs on people. Stallman, and his ilk, only care about freedom in the Orwellian Doublespeak sense: In order to be free you must do exactly as I say, and only as I say.
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@El_Heffe Not necessarily, in the same way that anti-regulationists generally support antitrust regulations. It's just a different brand of freedom. If you had popular software labeled with the WTFPL, at some point Microsoft would fork it and add proprietary extensions to it, and then everyone would use Microsoft's because it's better and Microsoft would accidentally make their fork incompatible with the original and nobody would use the original and the freedom would be gone. The GPL is specifically designed to keep the freedom going. It does so in a rather hamfisted way, and you'd probably be better off with CC-BY-SA, but it's still freedom.
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@Zerosquare said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
On one hand, yes, this kinda sucks. On the other, you have patents.
Patents aren't such a good solution for this:
- If most key patents for a kind of technology are owned by a single company, then you get a monopoly. That's not good for the consumers, and not good for competition either.
Compare to keeping things secret, in which case... there's still a monopoly because the technology is only known by a single company.
- If they're held by different companies, each company has to reinvent the wheel not to infringe the patents they don't have.
Compare to keeping things secret, in which case... the competitors still have to reinvent those wheels.
Don't get me wrong. You do have some good counterarguments. But you also made some very bad ones.
Everyone loses.
No, not everyone. The winners are those who come after the patents expire, because everyone can replicate it then freely. I agree it's way too late by then for cutting-edge IT solutions because of how long those patents are compared to how fast the technology evolves - but not everything is cutting-edge, right? And it's not like a small company can afford making cutting-edge chips even if they do have access to the designs, right? (I allow the possibility I might be wrong on both counts.)
Even if you have a patent, patents disputes are long, expensive and the result depends a lot on how good your lawyers are. Not to mention certain countries don't care that much about patents anyways. So not revealing all of your "secrets" makes sense.
Yes, it does. But it comes at the cost of keeping the inventions inaccessible to the rest of society for indefinite amount of time. It's not the cost to the inventor, though - it's the cost to the society. Remember that patents were invented so that the inventors would be more willing to share their inventions with the world. If having the patent is not worth sharing your invention... we as a society, are doing something terribly wrong with patents.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I realize it's complicated subject. Nearly everything is a complicated subject. Double so in technology. But I still believe the potential benefits to the society would outweigh the costs.
Remember that if such a law was passed, it would not only affect big companies, but every single one of them.
That's why I'm glad I'm talking to someone who has vast knowledge of the field that I don't know myself very well. I can get answers to questions I could never figure out myself. Like for example - how much effort would it be to prepare public-ready documentation on interfaces, given you already have internal documentation on it? A man-week per page? More? Less? A very rough estimate - I'd much rather an answer that's wrong by several orders of magnitude in common case than "it depends".
Except prices to increase, and products being cancelled because it would be considered "not worth it".
I don't believe prices would be affected much (by which I mean, less than 5% - also remember that many devices, especially cheap ones, use generic drivers so they don't have to document anything because the documentation is already out there), and I really doubt we'd completely miss a groundbreaking new product type just because the paperwork became slightly more demanding.
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@El_Heffe said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@anonymous234 said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@xaade said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
It's immoral to ask for money for your work?
How do these guys buy food?
No, you see, you can still sell GPL software so it's OK! I mean people will download it for free from someone else so you'll probably only sell one copy. But you can make money selling support!
Seriously though. That's the main problem with free software. Yes, freedom is nice and all, but what about getting paid to do stuff? Do we just give up on the idea that works everywhere else? They always deflect by pointing out you can still sell support contracts or whatever alternate business model you can come up with, but those are just bad workarounds.
If I cared enough about freedom, I'd start a "free as in freedom but not as in beer" movement where you pay for a license but still get the source code and permission to modify it for your own uses.
The GPL has absolutely nothing to do with freedom. If the GPL and "free software" were really about freedom then the GPL would contain exactly one sentence:
"You are free to do whatever you want with this software."
As a counterpoint, look how many lines of the Constitution were devoted to encoding the simple fact that people are free to do whatever they want.
The truth is, the GPL is about forcing a particular set of beliefs on people. Stallman, and his ilk, only care about freedom in the Orwellian Doublespeak sense: In order to be free you must do exactly as I say, and only as I say.
That's just ignorance. They do care about freedom. The real freedom. The usual freedom that common people have in mind when they talk about freedom. But they focus on the freedom of the end user. The freedom of the end user to do whatever they want with their software, no matter how many middlemen were there between them and the original author. And to coerce as many other developers as possible to offer the same kind of freedom to their end users. You won't get that with MIT.
Whether their goal is realistic is another discussion entirely. But please don't mischaracterize their point - it makes you look like an edgy teenager who just learned about the phrase "viral license".
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
The winners are those who come after the patents expire, because everyone can replicate it then freely. I agree it's way too late by then for cutting-edge IT solutions because of how long those patents are compared to how fast the technology evolves - but not everything is cutting-edge, right?
That's the precise bargain with patents. You get enhanced protection (over just privately keeping everything secret, with little recourse to the law if that fails) while the patent is active, but afterwards it becomes free for anyone to use.
And it's not like a small company can afford making cutting-edge chips even if they do have access to the designs, right?
It depends on the details. Some patented technologies are very expensive to deploy (masks for current-generation chips aren't cheap!) but others are much cheaper to implement.
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@dkf said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
The winners are those who come after the patents expire, because everyone can replicate it then freely. I agree it's way too late by then for cutting-edge IT solutions because of how long those patents are compared to how fast the technology evolves - but not everything is cutting-edge, right?
That's the precise bargain with patents. You get enhanced protection (over just privately keeping everything secret, with little recourse to the law if that fails) while the patent is active, but afterwards it becomes free for anyone to use.
Yes, exactly. But how much does it match the reality of electronic hardware industry? Especialy the smaller companies?
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Especialy the smaller companies?
The smaller companies usually produce ASICs using libraries of relatively large “parts”, and getting them manufactured using shared wafers (where there are several different sets of IP on the same wafer; the foundry operator makes the lot and then cuts out your bits and sends them to you). That's the cheapest option until you get a large enough order to cover the cost of a full mask. Once a mask is made, getting another wafer done with it is pretty cheap, enough so that chips are not expensive parts (or wouldn't be except for the cost of the IP licenses for use, which can be 90-95% of the end-user cost). I don't have the precise figures as I'm on the software side of things, but that's how it works out with small chip firms (which only employ a few people, so definitely small).
The first of any chip is expensive. The ones after are cheap by comparison. Software has evolved an even more extreme cost differential than that (where virtually all the cost is in producing the first copy of a version of the software and the copies afterwards are so cheap they might as well be free, at least in terms of duplication costs) but the effect is still there with chip manufacturing. Computers are really quite different to standard product engineering, where the main effort is put into cutting the cost of duplication; I suspect that's part of why manufacturers like to put computers inside nearly everything…
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I just don't believe the entire functionality (at the hardware level - logic gates and internal subcomponents) can be extracted from interfaces alone. No matter how coupled the interface is with the implementation.
My first job out of uni was to reverse engineer some hardware from a 3-letter company that was still relevant in small computers at the time. I had their public data sheet, knowledge of the industry standard computer bus and peripheral interfaces and protocols, and our implementation of our hardware that did a similar function. I was able to reverse engineer and clone exactly not only the documented behavior, but also some undocumented stuff that I stumbled across.
This was over 30 years ago, and the hardware (including the public protocols — AT bus vs. PCIe) were a lot simpler than anything somebody would care enough about to RE today. It's probably a few orders of magnitude harder for today's complex systems, but it's not impossible if you're willing to put enough effort into it. You can, for example, buy your competitor's hardware, open up the chip packages, and take photos of the chips under a microscope, which can give you a good idea of not only the documented interfaces, but the internal structure. If the photos are sufficiently detailed and you're willing to put in a lot of effort, you can even reconstruct a transistor-level schematic of the chip; you may not fully understand what it's doing, but you can reproduce its behavior exactly, and if you're a 3rd-world counterfeiter, that's good enough. If you're really lucky, you might not have irreparably damaged the chip in the process, and you can use something like a laser voltage probe to watch the internal logic in action.
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@Zerosquare said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
For users? None.
For companies:
- Requires additional work (writing public specifications takes time)
- Removes flexibility (if you have a public spec, it's harder to change things later, or fix hardware bugs with software patches)
- Encourages users to use non-official software, which makes support more painful
- Makes reverse-engineering/cloning easier for competitors
- In some cases, exposes ways of breaking the hardware permanently (by accident, or as part of an attack)
Not really worth the trouble when it's only wanted by a few percents (at most) of your consumer base, and they won't pay extra for it.
Also, for cost reason some hardware manufacturers offloads some functionality to the driver (say those WinModems and low-end RAID cards) which would bring disadvantage to the company if found out. (Since they uses more CPU resources than they should be, how dare them!)
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And it's not like a small company can afford making cutting-edge chips even if they do have access to the designs, right? (I allow the possibility I might be wrong on both counts.)
There are three costs to consider. There is the engineering cost of designing a chip to make. Depending on what you're trying to do, you're looking at something on the order of a year with a team of between 10 and 100 engineers at, say, $100k each, so maybe $1M — $10M. Second is the one-time expense of getting manufacturing tooling made. As I understand it, for cutting edge technology, this is around $1M, and chances are you'll have to do it twice because there will be some bugs in your first design. Third is the cost of actual manufacturing; this depends on a lot of things — size of the chip, technology, quantity — and I don't have any real knowledge of this area; figure maybe another $1M.
So rough estimate of as much as $15M to design and manufacture enough chips to start using them in your product (or selling them, if the chips are your product).
A big company may have an advantage in the first cost. They can probably afford a bigger team of engineers working on the project, possibly finishing it sooner, which may save money overall — or not. But a big company probably has revenue that can fund the ongoing development team more reliably than a small company.
A big company might have a small advantage in the second expense, if they have a steady enough stream of new chips to get a volume discount from the supplier, but I'm not sure any but the biggest can maybe do that.
The place where the small company is probably at a disadvantage is in the manufacturing cost. A big company is likely to have larger volume and thus better able to negotiate pricing with the manufacturer.
However, $15M is not necessarily out of reach for a small company. Even a startup has a good chance of extracting that from a VC if they have a well thought-out and marketable product (or sometimes even if they don't).
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And to coerce as many other developers as possible to offer the same kind of freedom to their end users.
Coerce others to offer freedom. Do you not see the inherent contradiction in that?
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@HardwareGeek said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Third is the cost of actual manufacturing; this depends on a lot of things — size of the chip, technology, quantity — and I don't have any real knowledge of this area; figure maybe another $1M.
One of the biggest variables there is the yield, what proportion of the chips made are actually usable. The more faults you can tolerate, the cheaper the result (since the actual foundry charges are typically per wafer, not per chip).
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Compare to keeping things secret, in which case... there's still a monopoly because the technology is only known by a single company.
Compare to keeping things secret, in which case... the competitors still have to reinvent those wheels.
Competitors are free to reverse-engineer other companies' products. And as long as they're not creating a direct copy, they can use what they learn to improve their own products, since something secret can't be patented.
It's not as good as public knowledge, but it can be better than patents, which create situations where you know something good exists, but you can't use it (even if you invented/discovered it independently).
not everything is cutting-edge, right? And it's not like a small company can afford making cutting-edge chips even if they do have access to the designs, right? (I allow the possibility I might be wrong on both counts.)
Yes ; even if a small company could somehow got hold of Intel or nVidia's designs, they couldn't do much with it, because the costs to make the chips would be prohibitive.
But smaller companies can also have valuable secrets. If you look at niche markets, it's not unusual for moderately-sized companies to hold a big marketshare, because they figured out something their competitors didn't (yet).Yes, it does. But it comes at the cost of keeping the inventions inaccessible to the rest of society for indefinite amount of time. It's not the cost to the inventor, though - it's the cost to the society. Remember that patents were invented so that the inventors would be more willing to share their inventions with the world. If having the patent is not worth sharing your invention... we as a society, are doing something terribly wrong with patents.
I'm certainly not defending patents ; I agree the current patents system is very broken, and no longer does what it was created to do.
That's why I'm glad I'm talking to someone who has vast knowledge of the field that I don't know myself very well. I can get answers to questions I could never figure out myself. Like for example - how much effort would it be to prepare public-ready documentation on interfaces, given you already have internal documentation on it? A man-week per page? More? Less? A very rough estimate - I'd much rather an answer that's wrong by several orders of magnitude in common case than "it depends".
Unfortunately... it depends. (Sorry).
Some products are nothing more than the reference implementation provided by the manufacturer of whatever chip is inside, just with a brand name slapped on it, and maybe one or two custom features. Releasing the interfaces for these is pretty easy: you can copy-paste the documentation for the chip with a few alterations, and you're done. But for the same reason, you usually can figure it out without the manufacturer's cooperation anyways.
(An annoying case is when the chip manufacturer only gives info to companies who sign a restrictive NDA: even if the manufacturer of the product would be OK with making docs public, they legally can't give away what isn't theirs.)At the other end of the spectrum, you've got products with a lot of custom design. If every interesting part is in the hardware, you could have "clean" interfaces, but it's rarely the case ; usually there's a pretty tight coupling between all parts. So you have the choice between releasing interfaces with a lot of undocumented stuff (which defeats the purpose and makes the whole thing pretty useless), or having to reveal more than you would like about your product.
Let's take an example: you have a product that's significantly faster than the competition. The secret is that you designed a customized compression algorithm that's very efficient for the kind of data you're using, and implemented real-time compression in hardware, which saves a lot of bandwidth. For your interface document to make sense, you have to disclose how to decompress the data ; but at that point, it's pretty obvious what the trick is, even with half of the puzzle.
In the middle, there are products that were simply never designed to be open. Making interfaces public can range from a bit of cleanup, to documenting every variation and special cases in your product line in a way someone who doesn't have access to the internal knowledge could understand, to redesigning the whole interface.
I don't believe prices would be affected much (by which I mean, less than 5% - also remember that many devices, especially cheap ones, use generic drivers so they don't have to document anything because the documentation is already out there), and I really doubt we'd completely miss a groundbreaking new product type just because the paperwork became slightly more demanding.
Big companies would probably pay the cost and increase their prices as a consequence, yeah. You'd probably not miss a whole product type, but it may discourage small disrupting companies that would otherwise try to compete.
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@cheong said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Also, for cost reason some hardware manufacturers offloads some functionality to the driver (say those WinModems and low-end RAID cards) which would bring disadvantage to the company if found out. (Since they uses more CPU resources than they should be, how dare them!)
I thought about using WinModems as an example, as it's a pretty interesting case, but they were so horrible that it would hurt the point.
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@cheong said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Zerosquare said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
For users? None.
For companies:
- Requires additional work (writing public specifications takes time)
- Removes flexibility (if you have a public spec, it's harder to change things later, or fix hardware bugs with software patches)
- Encourages users to use non-official software, which makes support more painful
- Makes reverse-engineering/cloning easier for competitors
- In some cases, exposes ways of breaking the hardware permanently (by accident, or as part of an attack)
Not really worth the trouble when it's only wanted by a few percents (at most) of your consumer base, and they won't pay extra for it.
Also, for cost reason some hardware manufacturers offloads some functionality to the driver (say those WinModems and low-end RAID cards) which would bring disadvantage to the company if found out. (Since they uses more CPU resources than they should be, how dare them!)
Realtek? Or so I've heard.
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
But they focus on the freedom of the end user.. The freedom of the end user to do whatever they want with their software
No.
The GPL is about what Stallman et al. think is important and what THEY think the user should want to do with their software. In their world there is no room for differing opinion. You must like what they like, you must believe what they believe.
Richard Stallman's 4 Freedoms:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
98% of the software I use is proprietary, closed source, "non-free", and yet I have never been prevented from doing exactly what I want to do. Never. Ever.
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish
Don't care. I have no interest in studying how the program works. I have no interest in changing it, and neither do 99% of the people in the world. Another example of Stallman believing that everyone should be interested in something, and like it, and agree with it, simply because he does.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others
Helping others is nice, but, again, irrelevant. You want to give away software? Go ahead. I don't care. But 99% of the world has no interest in that (except for the cheapskates who always want something for free). I'm not running a welfare agency. You want software? Go buy it. That's what I did.
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
Since 99% of the world is not interested in the previous "freedoms" this one is equally irrelevant.
Nothing you have said refutes any of my original statement. There is nothing "free" about free software unless you are willing to accept a very bizarre definition of free.
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@El_Heffe said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
98% of the software I use is proprietary, closed source, "non-free", and yet I have never been prevented from doing exactly what I want to do. Never. Ever.
Because you haven't wanted to use this program for commercial purposes, and that program with third-party addons, and this other video game without Internet availability. Do not mistake lack of want with lack of reason.
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Whenever FOSS is mentioned I always refer people to this article:
http://marktarver.com/problems.html
When you poke at a group of
retardedpeople straight at exactly what their beliefs are absurd instead of the apparent actions, they begin to react really hard. That's when you know you hit the mother lode. It works every time.
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@HardwareGeek said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And to coerce as many other developers as possible to offer the same kind of freedom to their end users.
Coerce others to offer freedom. Do you not see the inherent contradiction in that?
We coerce companies to offer customers various freedoms all the time - and it's considered a good thing.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
not everyone on here is a self-righteous arsehole
You take that back!
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@El_Heffe FWIW, as an author of software libraries that sit inside quite a few applications, I happily grant those freedoms to all who use those libraries. But unlike with the FSF, I prefer to not insist that everyone else follow those rules for the things they build on top. I care about my intellectual property being open, not others'. This perspective hugely annoys the likes of Stallman, because it really doesn't sit well with his political perspective; that pleases me. If it wasn't for the fact that I don't want to listen to a thing he says any more, I'd be happy to spend the rest of my life trolling him as hard as possible, as he's really quite a nasty fanatic.
OK, he's actually right about some things (as there's multiple types of jerkwad in the world). Doesn't change that I haven't actually respected him for decades…
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@El_Heffe said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
But they focus on the freedom of the end user.. The freedom of the end user to do whatever they want with their software
No.
The GPL is about what Stallman et al. think is important and what THEY think the user should want to do with their software.
Isn't that, like, the definition of an opinion?
In their world there is no room for differing opinion.
Sure there is. They just disagree with them. Just like literally everyone else who has an opinion of any kind that's not universally accepted. #FightFor15, small government proponents, Rust programmers, MacBook owners, dietetists - they all have strong opinions of some sort, and they all respect your right to have a different one, but they all think your opinion is bad and theirs is much better (otherwise it wouldn't be an opinion).
Richard Stallman's 4 Freedoms:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
98% of the software I use is proprietary, closed source, "non-free", and yet I have never been prevented from doing exactly what I want to do. Never. Ever.
Visual Paradigm, a professional tool for software modeling, requires internet access to launch. Connection down? No modeling for you.
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish
Don't care. I have no interest in studying how the program works. I have no interest in changing it, and neither do 99% of the people in the world.
I'm 99% sure you have no interest in knowing the exact reason behind "check engine" light in your car either, same as most drivers. Is this enough reason to deny this information to those who do want to know (e.g. people servicing their cars at 3rd party repair shops)?
Another example of Stallman believing that everyone should be interested in something, and like it, and agree with it, simply because he does.
Or maybe he's just campaigning for minority's rights. You think minorities shouldn't campaign for their rights?
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others
Helping others is nice, but, again, irrelevant. You want to give away software? Go ahead. I don't care. But 99% of the world has no interest in that (except for the cheapskates who always want something for free). I'm not running a welfare agency. You want software? Go buy it. That's what I did.
That's the most disagreeable point, but you should at least acknowledge where he's coming from. Ability to just copy over binaries to another computer can be a real lifesaver sometimes.
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
Since 99% of the world is not interested in the previous "freedoms" this one is equally irrelevant.
Have you ever heard of game mods?
There is nothing "free" about free software unless you are willing to accept a very bizarre definition of free.
This is bullshit on your part. Yes, they're heavily redefining the word "free". But let's ignore that and use the regular, common, non-FSF definition of free. Under this regular, common definition of free, what exactly is non-free about FSF-approved software?
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
Since 99% of the world is not interested in the previous "freedoms" this one is equally irrelevant.
Have you ever heard of game mods?
Are you sure you really want to open this can of worms? Modding community is an even bigger shithole than FOSS community of all things, and the fact that they share lots of nastiness should tell you something.
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@HardwareGeek said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And to coerce as many other developers as possible to offer the same kind of freedom to their end users.
Coerce others to offer freedom. Do you not see the inherent contradiction in that?
I think it's a bit similar to "tollerant societies need to be intollerant about intollerance". Rights and freedom need to be defended, so that contradiction exists everywhere we talk about freedom, and no matter what kind of freedom.
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
Since 99% of the world is not interested in the previous "freedoms" this one is equally irrelevant.
Have you ever heard of game mods?
Are you sure you really want to open this can of worms?
Why not? We've already opened a much bigger one.
Modding community is an even bigger shithole than FOSS community of all things
Because they make bugfixes to games that the developers couldn't be arsed to fix? Or because of furry porn? Look - not all modders are into furry porn.
and the fact that they share lots of nastiness should tell you something.
They do?
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Because they make bugfixes to games that the developers couldn't be arsed to fix?
That's like 1% of what happened. 99% of what happened is they bitch at developers for not opening their game for modding, and then proceed to produce lots of hot garbage, and then bitch again when the game changed and their mods aren't compatible again. Oh, and they also cherry-pick the handful successful mods (that is a collaboration of many skillful individuals) to put into their "modders rise up" speak.
The majority of modding scene doesn't happen in your favourite niche game. It's mostly in Minecraft and Roblox.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Or because of furry porn? Look - not all modders are into furry porn.
Why are you immediately jumping conclusions to furry porn?
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
They do?
Have you read that post I linked above? The syndromes described there applies very well to modding community too.
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Are you sure you really want to open this can of worms?
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Why not? We've already opened a much bigger one.
Good thinking there.
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@JBert said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@HardwareGeek said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And to coerce as many other developers as possible to offer the same kind of freedom to their end users.
Coerce others to offer freedom. Do you not see the inherent contradiction in that?
I think it's a bit similar to "tollerant societies need to be intollerant about intollerance". Rights and freedom need to be defended so that contradiction exists everywhere we talk about freedom.
The gist of the issue among Stallman, GNU and the FOSS ecosystem is that
- Yes, everyone has their freedom of choice
- Yes, pursuing freedom is perfectly fine
- Yes, your freedom needs to be actively defended
- Yes, I can accept your choice to be free
But that doesn't mean you should shove your "I want to be free" into my face and force me to be "free" too. Why must I also be free? Why are you sure being "free" is automatically good to me? It's like assuming democracy is good for everyone "because it's true".
And they have many nasty ways to advocate their beliefs. They remind me of kink-shaming which is highly frowned upon. Lots of FOSS people does this passive-aggressively; Stallman does that right in the open and bluntly. That's why he's a snowflake among the snowflakes.
Oh also, the notion of GNU license being "free" is completely incorrect, because it is a license that frees the software, not the users/developers. A license that frees the users/developers would be MIT/BSD. So I wouldn't say adopting FOSS ecosystem's beliefs would make me any more free.
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
- In some cases, exposes ways of breaking the hardware permanently (by accident, or as part of an attack)
And there's about as much bad in it as there's good - being public means the good guys are much more likely to stumble upon these bugs, making the customers aware of them, and that can save them some serious money.
This is not an encouragement to manufacturers to publish specifications.
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@anonymous234 said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth Did you pay $139?
In 2003, I paid €54.95 for SuSE 8.1 (I went and found the box, and it had the receipt still in it).
That's how much people pay for Windows. Autocad costs $1,610/year. Think they'll make the same amount with any other of those business models?
Probably not, but that’s not relevant, IMHO. What’s relevant is whether you can make enough money to stay in business.
If restaurants didn't exist, people would probably still pay to have a place to sit in and eat their own lunch they brought from home, but you wouldn't go online and defend that "no one needs to sell food, people already pay for the table".
I wasn’t defending anything — I was just saying that what you suggested (“free as in freedom but not as in beer”) is pretty much the way Linux distros used to work before they all became download-based.
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@El_Heffe said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
You want software? Go buy it. That's what I did.
“I did it too” is not an argument for or against anything, except initiation rituals (which I find stupid, but that’s a different discussion).
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Because they make bugfixes to games that the developers couldn't be arsed to fix?
That's like 1% of what happened. 99% of what happened is they bitch at developers for not opening their game for modding
I regularly bitch about games not making use of more than 10 keys of my 112-key keyboard. Is this wrong too? If so, what topics are gamers even allowed to bitch about? Can we at least bitch about UI not working great with mouse and keyboard?
and then proceed to produce lots of hot garbage
Sturgeon's law. Of course most mods are going to be hot garbage. Just like most music is hot garbage. But imagine if amateurs weren't allowed to produce music without approval. You wouldn't get any good songs either!
Oh, and they also cherry-pick the handful successful mods (that is a collaboration of many skillful individuals) to put into their "modders rise up" speak.
Those handful successful mods per game add up to tens of thousands of quality works, often greatly increasing general enjoyment from original game. I wouldn't want to miss up on that!
Fun fact: many top AAA game developers started out with mods.
The majority of modding scene doesn't happen in your favourite niche game. It's mostly in Minecraft and Roblox.
Your point?
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
They do?
Have you read that post I linked above?
No. Only just now.
The syndromes described there applies very well to modding community too.
No, they really don't. Modders don't demand full source code - they're okay with just interfaces for mods. They're perfectly fine with everyone having to pay full price for the game to the original developer first before using their mod. They're not funded by businesses, except sometimes retroactively by developers themselves but that happens very rarely, and usually in form of hiring modders to develop regular game content. Crowdfunding absolutely makes sense for mods. Mods do contain bugs, but not at a higher rate than full games do. They're usually not very innovative, but they're not meant to - they're meant to be fun. And there's plenty of mods that actually are very innovative, especially with respect to how they twist the game mechanics to provide brand new experience.
And the "there are over 120,000 shitty OS projects on SourceForge" is just bad argument overall. And I don't like how he discourages aspiring developers from even trying to do anything. And how he grossly mischaracterizes (one might even say, lie about) FOSS movement and Stallman's point of view. The "theft is OK if you don't get caught" part is pure manipulation.
To sum up - it's good that mods exist, and while the modding scene might be a teeny tiny bit worse than your average online community, it's still very definitely worth it.
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
But that doesn't mean you should shove your "I want to be free" into my face and force me to be "free" too. Why must I also be free? Why are you sure being "free" is automatically good to me? It's like assuming democracy is good for everyone "because it's true".
I don't want this topic to be moved to garage, but your argument would sound extremely wrong if you were talking about personal freedom. Especially if you remember it's not users that make the choice to be free - it's the software developers that make the choice for them.
And they have many nasty ways to advocate their beliefs. They remind me of kink-shaming which is highly frowned upon.
Frowning upon kink-shaming is a very recent development, and only in a few countries. Also, why kink-shaming, and not, say, second wave feminists? They were using all the same tactics too. You think that was wrong too? Or is it suddenly okay to use those tactics because you agree with their opinions?
Oh also, the notion of GNU license being "free" is completely incorrect, because it is a license that frees the software, not the users/developers. A license that frees the users/developers would be MIT/BSD. So I wouldn't say adopting FOSS ecosystem's beliefs would make me any more free.
What exactly can the user who's not a developer do with their MIT software that they cannot do with GPL software? I agree that GPL doesn't free the developer, but it's only because it's required in order to give greater freedom to the user. It's you who's redefining freedom now.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
- In some cases, exposes ways of breaking the hardware permanently (by accident, or as part of an attack)
And there's about as much bad in it as there's good - being public means the good guys are much more likely to stumble upon these bugs, making the customers aware of them, and that can save them some serious money.
This is not an encouragement to manufacturers to publish specifications.
I'm not trying to encourage manufacturers to publish specifications. They win nothing with it - they'll never do it out of their own volition. I'm trying to encourage consumers to demand from manufacturers to publish specifications. This doesn't require benefit to manufacturers to work. It's only required to not make manufacturers break down.
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I think that if the movement focused specifically on drivers, they'd get much larger support and be more successful
Except it is the domain where it is least successful. The hardware companies like to carefully guard their drivers and firmware for variety of reasons.
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@Bulb said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I think that if the movement focused specifically on drivers, they'd get much larger support and be more successful
Except it is the domain where it is least successful.
And it's all because of their own marketing mistakes. Mistake #1: focus on the wrong thing.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
They always deflect by pointing out you can still sell support contracts or whatever alternate business model you can come up with, but those are just bad workarounds.
Did you know that MacOS is free as in beer even though it is not open-source?
Not really. It's free as in glass when you buy coke 10-pack.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
If every electronic device had a public specification of all its input and output interfaces
That will never happen because of intellectual property and you know it. It's a pipe dream.
"Something that's decided entirely by the law that can be changed by our legislature at any moment, will never ever change." My favorite argument.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Did you know that MacOS is free as in beer even though it is not open-source? I wonder how that works for Apple.
I know that $27.99 CAN in USD is even less, but that's still not free
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I regularly bitch about games not making use of more than 10 keys of my 112-key keyboard. Is this wrong too? If so, what topics are gamers even allowed to bitch about? Can we at least bitch about UI not working great with mouse and keyboard?
I was talking about modders bitching about developers not opening their game's interface so they can graffiti on said game with their mods. It has nothing to be with the game being broken/inconvenient. Minecraft is highly mod-able and yet still a broken piece of crap.@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Sturgeon's law. Of course most mods are going to be hot garbage. Just like most music is hot garbage.
So you're saying that right? Normal != Correct.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Those handful successful mods per game add up to tens of thousands of quality works, often greatly increasing general enjoyment from original game. I wouldn't want to miss up on that!
Often you get the elephant in the room instead: any sufficiently big and complete mods, just like the original game, enforces a particular way of playing by how it's designed. So bitching about things you don't agree with whoever designed the thing is inevitable. Period.
Or you can just blissfully ignore them, but then why can't you ignore the same thing in the original game as well? Double standard? Modding fanboy? I smell a load of
there.@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Fun fact: many top AAA game developers started out with mods.
[citation needed]
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Your point?
That your idea of modding ecosystem is probably very outdated.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Modders don't demand full source code - they're okay with just interfaces for mods.
How is "interfaces for mods" coherent with your previous post saying
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Because they make bugfixes to games that the developers couldn't be arsed to fix?
? I'm thinking you're thinking of Super Mario World romhacks, and that's a massive outlier because they had problems attracting new blood for like 20 years.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
They're usually not very innovative, but they're not meant to - they're meant to be fun.
You must be assuming everyone find mods to be fun. I felt being assumed by you.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And there's plenty of mods that actually are very innovative, especially with respect to how they twist the game mechanics to provide brand new experience.
Does that surpass above-mentioned Sturgeon's Law? If not, that's not plenty. You're still contradicting yourself, or you're assuming a handful of such mods are good enough, which I'd say, your expectation is so low even Candy Crush would look ok to you.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And the "there are over 120,000 shitty OS projects on SourceForge" is just bad argument overall. And I don't like how he discourages aspiring developers from even trying to do anything.
If what you take away from that article is "so we should not try anything" and not "so we should not inflate our desires with bullcrap like freedom and ideology to make ourselves look right", your reading comprehension skill is horrible. Or perhaps it's because your lens are jaded?
Also, if you see someone claim themselves as "an aspiring programmer", you know he's either an narcissist or an idiot. So a big red flag there. And you'd be surprised how much people in general don't realize how bad their work is. It's literally the entire culmination of TDWTF. The lack of "pointing at the reality" is dominant among them.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
The "theft is OK if you don't get caught" part is pure manipulation.
See: the entire mobile market?
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
while the modding scene might be a teeny tiny bit worse than your average online community, it's still very definitely worth it.
Look, we can all agree that modding scene is as useful as FOSS ecosystem does, but that's from a point of utility: they delivered some products that are actually usable by us. It does not say anything about the ecosystem. Node.js ecosystem being a massive
doesn't stop useful softwares from popping up from it.
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Node.js ecosystem being a massive
doesn't stop useful softwares from popping up from it.Which software?
FileUnder:
WebAppTryingToPassAsDesktopApp
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
But that doesn't mean you should shove your "I want to be free" into my face and force me to be "free" too. Why must I also be free? Why are you sure being "free" is automatically good to me? It's like assuming democracy is good for everyone "because it's true".
I don't want this topic to be moved to garage, but your argument would sound extremely wrong if you were talking about personal freedom. Especially if you remember it's not users that make the choice to be free - it's the software developers that make the choice for them.
In the context of FOSS, software developers = users. It relies on users contributing to keep it alive. What use are you if you're using open source software but can't be bothered to make PRs or fix the code yourself (like every linux person does all the time)? Sometimes when you raise an issue on their repo you get response basically in the form of "make a PR yourself or GTFO".
Yes, there are a handful of specific projects that is mostly contributed by a small group of fellows instead. They are also, not surprisingly, most of the actually good products coming from FOSS.
Also, since apparently you don't like how I phrased it, let's do it this way:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Frowning upon kink-shaming is a very recent development, and only in a few countries. Also, why kink-shaming, and not, say, second wave feminists? They were using all the same tactics too. You think that was wrong too? Or is it suddenly okay to use those tactics because you agree with their opinions?
...And we're suddenly approaching the P-word?
I referred to "democracy" because that's what an open source zealot would mostly likely believe in. And "kink-shaming" as in, shaming you for liking anything but open source. Any perception of the involvement of the P-word is entirely your own illusion.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I agree that GPL doesn't free the developer, but it's only because it's required in order to give greater freedom to the user.
A user is either also a developer (so they have the ability to fix shit and they want to fix bugs in whatever software they're using), or is not a developer. If they're a developer, then GPL doesn't free them because now they have to make their code GPL too; and if they're not, then what does the entire thing have to do with them anyway? They'll just complain and yell "damn you devs, what did I pay you for?!" anyway, so there are no "freedom" in which they'd be gaining. So I don't see how GPL gives "greater freedom to the user".
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
In the context of FOSS, software developers = users. It relies on users contributing to keep it alive. What use are you if you're using open source software but can't be bothered to make PRs or fix the code yourself (like every linux person does all the time)?
Millions of people use FOSS and never contribute any line of code.
Also, some people contribute by testing, translating, documentation, etc
Sometimes when you raise an issue on their repo you get response basically in the form of "make a PR yourself or GTFO".
IOW, some FOSS people are assholes. Welcome to the Real World™
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
software developers
=⊆ usersFTFY
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@dkf if a non-developer uses FOSS then how are they supposed to fix the bugs
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@bb36e They can pay a developer to fix it for them.
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@bb36e By communicating with someone who is technically able to fix the bug, pointing out that the bug exists (“this seems weird and I don't think it is right”) and helping them understand how to reproduce and test it?
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I regularly bitch about games not making use of more than 10 keys of my 112-key keyboard. Is this wrong too? If so, what topics are gamers even allowed to bitch about? Can we at least bitch about UI not working great with mouse and keyboard?
I was talking about modders bitching about developers not opening their game's interface so they can graffiti on said game with their mods.I noticed. What's wrong with that?
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Sturgeon's law. Of course most mods are going to be hot garbage. Just like most music is hot garbage.
So you're saying that right? Normal != Correct.
I'm saying it's not a problem and not an argument against modding.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Those handful successful mods per game add up to tens of thousands of quality works, often greatly increasing general enjoyment from original game. I wouldn't want to miss up on that!
Often you get the elephant in the room instead: any sufficiently big and complete mods, just like the original game, enforces a particular way of playing by how it's designed. So bitching about things you don't agree with whoever designed the thing is inevitable.
Of course it is. And that's fine. Just like it's fine in the original game too.
Period.
I'm sorry.
Or you can just blissfully ignore them, but then why can't you ignore the same thing in the original game as well?
Because it's good? Bad games usually don't have modding communities.
I don't want mods because I hate the game. I want mods because I like the game and want it even better than it already is. Or just crave for new content.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Fun fact: many top AAA game developers started out with mods.
[citation needed]
There are several guys at Valve who started as modders (and I'm not even talking about when they've bought entire groups and assimilated their mods as their own). I've seen interview with CDP Red lead dev or something who talked about hiring a couple modders as full time devs simply because their mods were so good. And many more success stories I've read around the internet. I could try finding some links, but
and .@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Your point?
That your idea of modding ecosystem is probably very outdated.
Alternative explanation: your idea of modding ecosystem is skewed by only looking at the 2 biggest communities and ignoring the other 800.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Modders don't demand full source code - they're okay with just interfaces for mods.
How is "interfaces for mods" coherent with your previous post saying
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Because they make bugfixes to games that the developers couldn't be arsed to fix?
?
Modders can work without any interfaces (look at Minecraft). It's just that the interfaces make their lives easier.
I'm thinking you're thinking of Super Mario World romhacks, and that's a massive outlier because they had problems attracting new blood for like 20 years.
Morrowind, Fallout: New Vegas, all other Bethesda games, Dark Souls, Max Payne, W40K, Enemy Territory, the many "widescreen fixes" for various games, and many other titles that I don't remember or know about - they've all received community patches right in the game binary itself. Courtesy of modders.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
They're usually not very innovative, but they're not meant to - they're meant to be fun.
You must be assuming everyone find mods to be fun. I felt being assumed by you.
I'm afraid of talking about smart pointers when you're around. You'll probably accuse me of assuming everyone codes in C++.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And there's plenty of mods that actually are very innovative, especially with respect to how they twist the game mechanics to provide brand new experience.
Does that surpass above-mentioned Sturgeon's Law?
In the sense that it's very easy to filter out all the crap so you're only looking at the good ones? Yes, very much so.
To give you a concrete example. Stellaris, a space strategy game by Paradox, has modding support on par with all other Paradox games - which is, very damn good. This allowed thousands of mods to spring up. As always, 90% is crap - but there are many mods that are very good. Various UI tweaks for those who don't like the defaults. Rebalance mods, or complete overhauls of how space battles work (several competing ones, each with its own ideas). New storylines, new races, new race traits to choose from, new buildings, new government types. And lots and lots and lots of avatars, of course. Yes, Touhou is there too. I'd much rather there wasn't, but it is what it is. So anyway, you have at least a hundred mods worth looking at. And that's great, because it keeps the game fresh.
You're still contradicting yourself, or you're assuming a handful of such mods are good enough
Good enough for what? What are the mods competing against? What happens if it's not good enough? I just don't see the problem here.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
And the "there are over 120,000 shitty OS projects on SourceForge" is just bad argument overall. And I don't like how he discourages aspiring developers from even trying to do anything.
If what you take away from that article is "so we should not try anything" and not "so we should not inflate our desires with bullcrap like freedom and ideology to make ourselves look right", your reading comprehension skill is horrible.
I was alluding to one specific paragraph. The one where he literally said that making open source software is a waste of time. The rest of the article I commented on in the rest of my post.
Also, if you see someone claim themselves as "an aspiring programmer", you know he's either an narcissist or an idiot. So a big red flag there.
It was my own words, describing no one in particular. Can you ignore that and pretend I said "beginner" instead? You're reading way too much into my choice of words.
And you'd be surprised how much people in general don't realize how bad their work is.
I wouldn't.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
The "theft is OK if you don't get caught" part is pure manipulation.
See: the entire mobile market?
U wot m8? The article doesn't say anything about mobile market. And neither does Stallman.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
while the modding scene might be a teeny tiny bit worse than your average online community, it's still very definitely worth it.
Look, we can all agree that modding scene is as useful as FOSS ecosystem does, but that's from a point of utility: they delivered some products that are actually usable by us. It does not say anything about the ecosystem. Node.js ecosystem being a massive
doesn't stop useful softwares from popping up from it.I thought you're criticizing the very idea of letting anyone just do whatever with games they like, not simply pointing out that the way the communities organize themselves is a bit suboptimal? If it's only that it's a bit suboptimal, then we're in full agreement. But then I don't understand why you were so triggered about shitty mods being shitty.
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@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@_P_ said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
But that doesn't mean you should shove your "I want to be free" into my face and force me to be "free" too. Why must I also be free? Why are you sure being "free" is automatically good to me? It's like assuming democracy is good for everyone "because it's true".
I don't want this topic to be moved to garage, but your argument would sound extremely wrong if you were talking about personal freedom. Especially if you remember it's not users that make the choice to be free - it's the software developers that make the choice for them.
In the context of FOSS, software developers = users.
And in context of non-FOSS software? Because it's non-FOSS that FOSS people have problem with, not FOSS.
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Frowning upon kink-shaming is a very recent development, and only in a few countries. Also, why kink-shaming, and not, say, second wave feminists? They were using all the same tactics too. You think that was wrong too? Or is it suddenly okay to use those tactics because you agree with their opinions?
...And we're suddenly approaching the P-word?
Performance? Paleontology? Picnic? I'm a bit lost here.
I referred to "democracy" because that's what an open source zealot would mostly likely believe in. And "kink-shaming" as in, shaming you for liking anything but open source. Any perception of the involvement of the P-word is entirely your own illusion.
You missed the point completely. You criticized their "way of doing this" (inb4
) and compared it to kink-shaming (inb4 more ). But you haven't given any arguments for why what FOSS people are doing is wrong. I pointed out that they're doing essentially the same thing that women have done to achieve equal rights (I mean the time between 70s and 90s). Either there is no problem with how FOSS people approach things and you just disagree with their ideology, there was a huge problem with how 2nd wave feminists approached things despite you agreeing with them (I assume you agree with 2nd wave feminism, because who doesn't), there is a significant difference between what FOSS people do and what 2nd wave feminists did, or you're a hypocrite. Which is it?@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I agree that GPL doesn't free the developer, but it's only because it's required in order to give greater freedom to the user.
A user is either also a developer (so they have the ability to fix shit and they want to fix bugs in whatever software they're using), or is not a developer. If they're a developer, then GPL doesn't free them because now they have to make their code GPL too
It does free them as users - just not as developers. Yes, the distinction matters. Just like it matters whether Trump meets someone as a friend or as the President of the United States, even though it's the same Trump. If the user-developer only acts as a user, they have all freedoms they could possibly think of. But if they start acting as developers, the actions they take as developer are restricted to ensure the end users of his new software also enjoy full freedom. It's really not that hard.
Freedom doesn't mean wild west. Anti-trust laws give people more freedom, not less. Even though the monopolistic companies themselves get less freedom in result.
and if they're not, then what does the entire thing have to do with them anyway? They'll just complain and yell "damn you devs, what did I pay you for?!" anyway, so there are no "freedom" in which they'd be gaining. So I don't see how GPL gives "greater freedom to the user".
Oh, I see. We're disagreeing on definitions. When you say developer, you mean everyone who has ability to code, and when you say user, you mean everyone who doesn't have any ability to code. Whereas when I say developer, I mean someone who's producing a new piece of software with the goal of having it used by other people, for money or for free, and by user, I mean everyone who ends up using a particular software to finish some tasks.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
"Something that's decided entirely by the law that can be changed by our legislature at any moment, will never ever change." My favorite argument.
Said legislature is in the pocket of said "intellectual property" industry so you know full well it can't change because that would be "biting a hand that feeds you". You can dream that you live in a real democracy where representatives you elect are entering the race because they want to change things for your benefit, not because of their personal interests, but I am too old to believe in fairytales.
The balance of powers changes every 30-40 years or so. Walt Disney's copyrights soon expire. Europeans are royally pissed at their governments for the new copyright directive. We might see something very interesting happening in relatively short time. 2050 might be a very different world from ours, more so than 1990.
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@izzion said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
He is the McAfee of free software.
Install Fests - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation