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Ask HN: Thinking of only using open-source in 2017. What would that mean to you?

9 points by esonderegger ↗ HN
Under the heading of "be the change you want to see in the world", I'm playing around with the idea of restricting myself to only using free and open-source software in 2017 and blogging about the experience (I know - it's already been done: http://yearofopensource.net/). As an audio/video engineer and more recently as a front-end developer, I've always been a three operating system guy (Linux for servers, Windows in the living room, and Macs for my daily driver/laptop) but recently have found myself using my Linux desktop more and the other platforms less and less.

From a practical perspective, going purely open-source would mean trading OSX for Linux, Sublime Text for Atom, Chrome for Firefox, Photoshop for Gimp, etc. All of that sounds totally doable, but the more I think about it, the trickier deciding what should count as "closed-source" gets. My iPhone is certainly closed-source, but I'm not sure it's even possible to run AOSP on any of the current batch of Android phones. Replacing my phone with a land line feels like taking too much of a step away from society. Facebook and Twitter are both closed-source platforms I could walk away from easily but again, deciding where to draw the line gets tricky. Avoiding Github and only sharing my code via a self-hosted Gitlab CE instance would seem like obeying the letter of the law but against the spirit of the experiment. Avoiding Google services would probably be the hardest but most interesting transition. (is there anyone offering a truly open-source email service? I know I could self-host, but I imagine I'd run into problems with messages being caught by spam filters.)

So I ask you all: what would going purely open-source mean to you? Where would you be willing to compromise and where would you draw the line? Do you think in 2017 it's even a reasonable thing to attempt?

Thanks! And I'm looking forward to reading your responses.

5 comments

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pimterry
The most critical problem: Hacker News is closed source, right? By any definition that includes Facebook and Twitter, certainly. That'll be a tricky one to let go of.

Personally, it's always drivers etc that I find it difficult to get good open-source options for. Even if you're running Linux the open-source graphics card drivers are pretty terrible, so you take quite a performance hit if you're not prepared to include any proprietary code at all.

esonderegger
That's a good point - I remembered when Reddit open-sourced a good chunk of their codebase and had figured Hacker News and Reddit shared some of their foundations, but looking into it I appear to have been mistaken.

I think restricting myself to only open-source hardware would make something like this impossible. I don't think I'm running any proprietary drivers on my Linux desktop now, though. It's stock Xubuntu using the hdmi and vga ports built into my motherboard and I haven't had any issues with it. I don't do any gaming though - the most GPU-intensive stuff I've done on Linux is running RViz and Gazebo when I was using ROS for robotics.

yuhong
I was realizing how horrible the ideology of "free software" is for a while now, especially when taken too far (for example microcode updates).
peller
I think the line should be practical. Personally, I switched to running Linux full-time about 15 years ago. Never looked back. But I still used nVidia drivers even though open source would have been preferable. Using anything else was hell, though, and investing the time I didn't think was worth it - there's a life to be lived outside of computers. These days, Intel GPUs and older Radeons have good open source support, so I use those.

I still use Skype, because that's what my (overseas) friends use. If you start going off on too much of a philosophical crusade trying to convince people to use open source tool X, more than likely I suspect most people will start thinking you've gone a little off the deep end.

For personal use, I try very hard to only use open source software, even if I know there are closed source alternatives that might be more polished / productive. (That trade-off is becoming less and less common; I find the quality of tools has improved drastically over the years.) Also, I try to contribute patches - or at least bug reports - whenever I can.

My point is, you gotta pick and choose your battles. Running an open source OS? Highly achievable. Changing the culture of the internet? Not likely.

--- I should add, wherever you end up drawing the line, good on you for taking the jump!