The page suggests that they are priorities, not that the FSF is supporting the development of these projects.
Given the diverse skill set and interests of free software developers, it's probably better to have a long list of priorities as long as there is little overlap. It would be difficult to attract individuals and businesses into supporting projects that they are not interested in or don't have the skills to contribute to.
Why would that be on the list? Isn't there already a solution? It doesn't need to be GPL licensed for getting FSF recognition - a non copyleft but Libre license is fine.
This is the right thing to do and I hope it is not too little too late. Free/libre OSS won the battle for the server, lost the battle for the desktop, but desktop is not (that) relevant anymore. FLOSS phone ecosystem will be hard to next to impossible, in my opinion, but worth going into. Self-hosted server side software has a very good chance of succeeding. For a long time I essentially wanted something like Synology and QNAP but completely open, with a single package installation interface and ecosystem of phone apps working with my self hosted software.
> Free/libre OSS won the battle for the server, lost the battle for the desktop
I don't think it lost the battle on desktop - if you don't rely on platform(or interest)-specific software like the adobe/microsoft suites and some 3A games then you'll be more than fine on the linux desktop.
Shame that the battle for the desktop is actually (mostly) being fought on the laptop - and Linux sucks there. The default settings are usually extremely poor for powersaving. Why doesn't powertop+TLP get installed, configured and activated by default when Ubuntu/Fedora detects its installed on a laptop? Also, sleeping still isn't reliable (if I close my Macbook with some work on I can be damn sure it'll be exactly as I left it when I open it. With Linux, its still not 100% reliable). Wifi still also isn't nearly as reliable (packet loss, connection drops etc.) as either Windows or macOS.
I use linux on laptop and I don't have problems(especially with xubuntu). I just install the base, run additional drivers, install the wifi/gpu drivers and done. It was always like this on my previous laptops and on others' laptops I've installed it.
Power saving on windows is an illusion, I don't remember getting more things done with the same laptop. Maybe it's the case if you use Unity/KDE/Gnome3 and similar heavy stuff...
If you want to spare more energy then use integrated graphics and amd|nvidia only if you want to play. Bumblebee can also help. Using XFCE, Firefox, playing videos with vlc(not with web players!), installing a blocking extension for your browser, avoiding electron/jvm/mono-based apps(ironic, I'm a Scala developer) can also reduce energy consumption. I use neovim for coding and it's a huge boost for me.
Suspending was always realiable on ubuntu for me. But with arch or arch-based distros it's a ~70% possibility for failure(according to my experience). On the other, hand putting windows to sleep is a serious hazard, it's not just hurts performance but it makes the os and its apps unstable(I use win7 at work).
I've heard that there are people with wifi problems but connection drops and packet losses are issues which are better to be reported. There is askubuntu.com, you can get help pretty fast by searching or asking.
The fact that TLP exists is a great step. It wasn't that long ago that I had a dozen different custom hacks in place to get better power usage while on battery, now TLP does all of them and more.
Still kind of disheartening that I get 10-14h battery life on my 13" 2015 Retina under macOS, but it drops to 4-5h on untweaked Ubuntu. I can push that to about 7-8h with the help of Powertop and TLP. That's still a vast, vast chasm to overcome for Linux. Yes, I know Macbooks do non-standard things with Wi-Fi and Thunderbolt controllers (special ACPI sleep modes etc.), that isn't a bad thing, Linux should attempt those as well. To end on a positive note: I do agree TLP (and other powersaving tools) are good progress.
It's not you personally, but I see this a lot in tech, in particular from the FOSS crowd 'Well, if you don't need x or y, then its fine!'
FOSS will always be second tier for most people until the plethora of software available is at some relative parity, similar to that of macOS at least. (I'm talking strict availability). The fact that there isn't more cohesive efforts to have big software vendors port their software to FOSS systems I feel like is part of the problem.
I personally feel the FOSS community doesn't have good evangelism to actual software developers that develop non-idealistic software. Adobe is a good example of this. So is Microsoft. So is Autodesk (With some exceptions, granted, but I think those come from the need to run in parallel processing environments that Linux supports quite well, and Maya). Heck, so is Wunderlist. Or 2do. 1password. They don't make native apps or even some semblance of apps for any FOSS platform, and I see no attempts to evangelize coming out of FOSS communities to get these places on their side. I'm sure there are exceptions I'm missing or perhaps some of these examples listed have progressed but my point still stands.
FOSS is great for users, and has really evangelized well to a certain subset of users in particular (mostly the tech literate enthusiasts and developer crowd, myself included). I however, will never accept this is a good answer. We should be demanding better evangelism to get big name products on the platforms. I do the best I can myself in this regard, but I feel that the entire idea that we should be more inclusive of these vendors/companies/developers is scoffed at in the FOSS/OSS communities and I do not inherently understand why. Yes, they create code that isn't meeting the guidelines of FOSS/OSS, but if you don't create the best toolsets independent of them or have some semblance of balance, then the platform will stagnant at x number of users.
I think idealism colors perspectives but reality is much more grey than either side is willing to cede, perhaps.
a fast OS with a diverse set of desktops for power users,
comfortable development environment with power tools,
security,
open standards,
sane package management(don't even mention Program Files and Control Panel...)
and a helpful and progressive community
then you'll be fine with windows. Yeah, you can run adobe and ms software natively, instead of using wine or crossover.
Seriously, you either avoid the ms bloat or find alternatives(ez). The FOSS community needs an industry but doesn't need the industrial abuse. By default, NOBODY should depend on a company or a "network" of companies and their software. That's the sin of public education - selling the youth to companies.
It's now like in Pascal Lainé's book - "L'Irrévolution(1971)" where the youth after finishing the school goes to the town's factory. There is no choice - you've been sold.
It's an interesting point of view, but I'm not sure I agree with the underlying argument. Specifically, I have not seen the free software environment stagnating at all. If anything I have seen it accelerating fairly consistently since I first became aware of it in 1985. There was a time when I was forbidden from using free software in my day job. Now I am encouraged to use it. How far we have come.
This point of idealism comes up a lot and I think it's something of a red herring. Keep in mind that the FSF's goal is singular - to promote software freedom. It is not idealism to hold to that mission. It is their only purpose for existence.
Let me give you a real world example of why a mixed scenario is not realistic. My wife has an Android phone that she bought from the phone company. It is on version 5.02. There is a bug in that version of Android where a log file fills up and the phone refuses to connect to WIFI connections that have had a lot of activity. This bug has been fixed for a long time in the Android code base. The code base is open source. I can inspect it, compile it, etc, etc. I can see the bug. I can see the fix. But I can't load the fix on the phone because the phone is locked. I can't even get root on the phone. I can't fix the problem. The vendor has told me that since the phone is 2 years old (2 years!) that no updates will be forthcoming and I should buy a new phone.
The problem is that no matter how free a piece of software is, it is really only as free as the environment in which it runs. We have seen over and over again, that companies will collude to ensure that their interests trump that of the user. A world in which free software exists only as an extension of non-free software is a world in which it is marginalised to the point where software freedom is lost entirely.
It is not idealism that prevents software freedom from working well in organisations that do not want software freedom.
Where I agree with you is that we have a long way to go to allow users to connect the dots between the problems they have as consumers and the protection that software freedom affords. My own wife thinks it is completely reasonable to spend $1000 replacing a perfectly good phone simply because the vendor wishes it. Somewhat unusually, this is a consumer movement held dear by developers, but virtually unknown to the consumers it seeks to protect. This is clearly a problem. However, we won't fix that problem by abandoning the purpose of the movement. Will my next phone be an open source phone that denies me software freedom, or a proprietary phone that denies me software freedom? Does it matter?
I don't know if my point came across well, so I will try and re-iterate what I mean here in some more detail.
To be perfectly clear: I share your motivations, and I cede that the FSF is a lobbying organization for promoting libre software. I want to note that I'm not specifically taking target at FSF here just generally the OSS/FOSS community in aggregate as I have interacted with them.
Now, to the argument! :)
My basic argument is as follows:
1. Its more important to have a libre/free OS than it is to have all Applications ever be libre/free. This is a matter of pragmatism. Your wifes phone for example, would be much better off if the phone OS itself was libre. This in my opinion is the best approach to take. It gives you the bulk of the freedom that one does seek, without completely alienating developers who, in some cases given the realities of today, rightly (or wrongly), don't want to or can't open source their software. I'd rather have their software on an FOSS platform than have to leave a FOSS platform to run their software. Thats just the economics of the world at work.
2. If one accepts #1 to be a justifiable position, which I think it is, the singular focus as far as the software part is concerned is to push that operating system forward with that set of ideals. Too often I find in the OSS/FOSS communities that they don't evangelize the platform, they evangelize the ideas, which again, i completely get, and I think for users, esp. of a technical bent, get it, and use it, and benefit from it. However, I don't think the average user, or even the majority of technical users, can get away with the switch. In part, its because the same logic that makes a FOSS/OSS operating system amazing doesn't particularly scale to Applications. Again, I will reference the missing software of Adobe, Microsoft, even task app like 2Do, Wunderlist, or the lovely Pixelmator, or even Zoho business apps are not available as native Applications on FOSS/OSS platforms, even Electron-type apps aren't scaling to Linux quickly. I think this is because the platforms aren't being evangelized. Everyone is concerned about the licensing, whether they can review an apps code, etc. or they get caught up in other mundane details, instead of unifying around a platform model that allows Apps of all types to exist (which i realize they do now, but I'm talking about community voices).
3. I would say to your point, an open source phone that runs 'nonfree' software is better than a nonfree phone OS running nonfree software. Why? Well, see above, but specifically because things like OS updates and OS changes would be viewable at a source code level, thereby if any apps are making modifications to it, you will see that.
4. The one thing, and this is my biggest thing, is that the lack of evangelizing as a platform for users is until recently, there is a huge lack of direction in the FOSS/OSS community. Elementary OS is the first time I've seen where a Linux distro is actually putting users first and adopting modern design and aesthetics. Another recent version of that is KDE's Neon built on ubuntu. Great desktop experiences. I feel the user experience suffers from a lack of focus on evangelizing and focus on a platform, instead of just ideals, that presents itself as a coherent whole that is accessible to develop for with some consistent standards. FOSS/OSS doesn't have to equal completely decentralized missions split between 2000 organizations. Where there has been unification lately, the better those products are becoming and actually entice users on a platform. High Idealism is well and good, but without focus on the platform, its hard to argue to switch. If you build a good platform, and get developers to make apps for it that people want to use, you are, in my opinion, gaining more than you're losing with this approach.
I have never seen this approach until very recently in the FOSS/OSS community. I'm...
Thanks for clarifying. It definitely makes more sense to me than what I understood from the previous message. Personally, I think there is room for a variety of approaches. It's one of the reasons I'm happy that the OSI is around to champion open source methodologies as distinct from software freedom. Likely, as you say, there would be some benefit from people concentrating on building user-focussed end-to-end experiences.
Having said that, I don't think the FSF needs to get involved with that as the role of prioritising software freedom in an ever changing world is probably more important and also more difficult than ever.
One thing I would caution is assuming that encouraging non-free applications on a free operating system is always going to be win-win. I worked at Corel when they were doing their Linux distro. They misunderstood free software badly. They saw it as an opportunity to lock people into their proprietary applications by changing the underlying OS (without having to pay for developing it). This led to some pretty strange business decisions and ultimately wasted a huge amount of money.
There were a couple of spinoffs from ex-Corel employees who tried to maintain this way of thinking and it was always an uphill struggle. Probably the only one to make any kind of profit was TransGaming and I'll maintain that was substantially because Gav State is both a talented and genuinely nice guy.
I think in order to to make this kind of thing work, you need to understand free software (and the goals of free software) at a very deep level. From my experience, it's just no compatible in a natural way.
Your story with Corel is my experience with the majority of companies I worked for, very few if any, did care for FOSS for anything else then cutting down costs without giving anything back.
This is why licenses like MIT are so loved by such companies, now with SaaS and Web UIs it is even better for them.
I agree they did misunderstand OSS/FOSS badly. The last thing a company like Corel needed (or needs) to do, and I know this i very opinionated; is to make their own Linux distro. This is kind of my entire point. A platform as such that is coherent and well evangelized (I know i keep coming back to this, but I was around for the 'we're going out of business in 90 days' Apple years. It took a huge level of evangelism to keep that ship moving) perhaps would have encouraged Corel to just make their software for Linux, which to me is the win. Yes, its a proprietary Word processor or Image manipulation tool, but the OS would still be free/libre, and Corel, at the time I'm assuming this happened, could have been a win with the platform.
I reject, as someone else mentioned, as an aside, that macOS is just free software with a non-free GUI on top. That is missing the boat completely.
> Free/libre OSS won the battle for the server, lost the battle for the desktop, but desktop is not (that) relevant anymore.
Desktop won't stop being relevant in the foreseeable future - there is nothing to replace it with for a whole variety of tasks. And usage of Linux on the desktop is gradually growing.
There are still obstacles that prevent someone from switching - lack of Free alternatives to software used in their working environments, lack of knowledge about the existing alternatives, even the lack of understanding of the difference between Free and non-Free software.
If GNU's idea of free software and open source are lumped together, I'm not convinced that the battle for the desktop and mobile are over due to the direction Microsoft is currently heading and the way in which Apple's closed source ambitions are increasingly subject to criticism on the basis of being closed source. Of course the caveat is I'm looking at it more as the 100 Years' War [1] than the 30 Years' War [2].
The reason I take the long term view is that it seems to me that open source development provides advantages that play out over the long term. At the very least, Google and Red Hat's hybrid models look more and more like the main stream default.
The interesting part of it is that those applications are mostly written by GNU/Linux developers, thus decreasing the likelihood of GNU/Linux ever becoming a relevant desktop in world wide market share.
> FLOSS phone ecosystem will be hard to next to impossible, in my opinion, but worth going into
You can run Android without gapps fairly well, I believe there's even a project that replaces gapps and uses xposed to fake signatures so that they look legitimate to replace Google Maps and other in-app widgets frequently used on Android. Or you can run with GApps if you're willing to tolerate some level of proprietary software.
FLOSS on phones is actually in a quite good state, F-Droid is pretty good, many well maintained open source roms. Better than most other platforms.
The FSF is a political organization; saying it has too much politics behind it is an oxymoron. And choosing to go after users over licenses is also a political decision.
Besides, we already have Open Source as a movement that makes the pragmatic argument for free software, there's no need to water down the FSF.
Exactly correct. There are basic philosophical underpinnings to the GNU/FSF approach to open source and as such the FSF's entire purpose is advancing those principles, not just some general sense of "open source".
I personally don't hold their vision and I find their philosophical position flawed. I see tactical use in their licenses when I want to limit certain developer freedoms without having a fully closed source license, but will generally license MIT if creating a genuinely open source piece work.
Then let's rephrase to meet that cavil - there's far too much irrelevant, futile and stupendously wasteful politics, then. The (yes, political) goal of free software is wonderful. Copyleft is a great invention. But the continued insistence on grabbing patents or even obviating patent law in its entire from within a software license - and also the mission to prevent tivoization (which I might want to protect my OS from an inside job or proximate attack, thank you) - has wasted billions of dollars (Google recreating GNU under a more liberal license), fragmented the movement, and tainted the brand, too.
Clearly you share the goal but not the politics in how to reach it. That happens in practically every political movement. Let imagine a similar comment for ecopolitics:
"The goal of ecopolitics is wonderful. Green energy is a great invention. But the continued insistence on reduced emissions or even a stop to burning fossil fuels in its entire - and also the mission to prevent non-ecological farming (which make food I might want to eat, thank you) - has wasted billions of dollars and fragmented the movement. To conclude, all discussions about climate change should stop and the movement should simply focus on building electric cars and wind farms."
So, here you are "strenuously agreeing" with me that the original statement was false. We both think that "saying it has too much politics behind it is an oxymoron" is false. You and I agree that one can think that the ice cream cone might have one too many toppings, and to utter such a statement ain't oxymoronic - debatable, but not in any way contradictory. In fact, you think "too much politics" is a common cry. Yes, it is a common kind of debate, but not therefore trivial - since one might end up with a lot of ice cream on one's shirt if the pile of toppings is too high. I think that's already happened.
The more people try to bundle what are in fact quite distinct aims into one movement, the greater chance of failure. Not to mention the greater chance of including an aim which is harmful, not helpful. So I'll stand by my thought that adding in the defeating-the-patent-system-or-bust goal was maybe a tad much.
Nobody doubts that politics are complex and divisions common therein; but surely it's also obvious that politic movements can vary in complexity (number of toppings,) too.
One can't always follow Lincoln's first law of strategy: "One war at a time", but it's an excellent rule of thumb, for politics as well as war, and I think it's pretty clear to most of us now that the EFF has wandered much too far from it, with (economically) catastrophic results - namely all those wasted billions, not to mention the limited supply of developer work-years thrown away on mere rewrites. Not every political movement overreaches anything like this badly.
That there are other arguments with a similar structure to mine does not distress me. That other, false axioms plugged into the same structure might produce a false result doesn't - and of course shouldn't - dismay me either. (Which is not to take one side in the example argument you cite. Not here, anyway.)
A license defines what a user is allowed to do with a software. Therefore battling for licenses can very well mean battling for users and seeing them as a contradiction doesn't make any sense.
I'm actually happy that the FSF has considered this one:
- Free phone operating system
They don't have the for-profit nature of both Mozilla and Canonical and perhaps supporting the FSF over either of those 2 (Mozillas failed FFOS and no availability of the UbuntuOS mobile devices) will ensure a stable OS that isn't Google-ware.
PS. I know Mozilla isn't for-profit, but they abandoned FFOS just like a for-profit would
The only organizations that don't abandon projects are the ones that never took them on to begin with (or the ones designed around a specific project). It's not a for-profit vs non-profit distinction.
In this case, unfortunately, being in the high priority list of the FSF doesn't mean much. It's a list of stuff they'd like to see being developed, not actually a list of projects being actively supported with funding or developers' time.
I am afraid I don't see how lack of minority representation is a factor in open source software. How does one's race or gender affect whether or not they submit code?
edit: Again, if you are downvoting me, please explain so I can understand. I'm not arguing for the sake of argument.
Humans are herd animals. They tend to look at what other people like them are doing, and do likewise.
It's unfortunate that people look at trivia like gender and ethnicity in such circumstances; but it's a fact of human behaviour. If potential contributors look at a project and don't see anyone who "looks like them", they're unlikely to contribute; so projects which want to maximize contributions are well advised to seek ways to "look inclusive".
(And this goes beyond open source software, of course. My university's computer science program has seen a significant uptick in applications from females after going out of their way to select photos of female students for recruiting material.)
In short, it's a matter of overcoming cognitive biases.
I view this issue differently, and I would love your opinion on my view.
First on sex/gender: I feel that hormonal differences create psychological differences in the norms between genders. This is why men are generally more aggressive and violent(see higher incarceration rates) and women are more nurturing. These differences lead to people in general choosing careers that reflect their psychology, and forced diversity hurts those that do best in their field.
Then on ethnicity, I feel many of the differences come from both differences in opportunity(which should be overcome) and differences in cultural and social norms, which lead to people choosing different careers.
In my opinion, forced diversity hurts those who would normally gravitate towards those fields because they are displaced by someone who doesn't necessarily want to be there, but just sees opportunity.
Again, I'm not looking to fight. I'd love you opinion on why I'm right or wrong.
In the context of open source contributions, no one is displaced.
In a wider context, yes, it's a bit more complicated, but Free Software? As a movement, there's power in numbers, and looking to increase that number via a focussed effort on minority groups is simply a smart move.
Open source software isn't a zero sum game. When one person joins, that does not displace someone else who would normally gravitate to that field because open source can scale efficiently to any number of contributors.
On the contrary, not having enough diversity can and does put off those who would otherwise make great contributors.
Are there differences between genders? Sure. It's an open question how much of the differences are due to direct biological causes and how much are due to societal norms (I find the parallel between open source software and indigenous gift cultures to be quite interesting, for example), but there are certainly differences.
As such, I would oppose any attempts to establish quotas or even aspirational targets for diversity; as you say, forced diversity has negative consequences -- not just for the organization, but also for the individuals involved.
But as much as we shouldn't be trying to bring in individuals who aren't really interested, we need to make sure we're not keeping out individuals who are interested... in a sense, it's more important to look diverse than it is to be diverse.
Hormonal effects has a long history of being overstated and overused when looking for cause in human behavior. It has been used to argue that women aren't fit to vote, then later that they are not fit to hold professions where a stable emotional state is required, to later conclude that estrogen effect on emotional states is complex and what people at the time attributed to estrogen was primarily cultural expectations rather than actually brain chemistry (concluded with some really interesting studies). One conclusion that a profession said that always made good sense to me is that sex hormones are intended to regulate effective reproductive success, not to regulate emotions in women or violence in men.
For example, there was a study done on violent men in prisons and testosterone. The theory that was tested was if testosterone levels were indicator of more violence, for which the data revealed was not the case. Further studies showed that so long testosterone is within natural occurring levels, aggression was not effect by testosterone.
> First on sex/gender: I feel that hormonal differences create psychological differences in the norms between genders. This is why men are generally more aggressive and violent(see higher incarceration rates) and women are more nurturing.
There's strong evidence that genetic differences account for some behavioural differences between men and women. The ones you suggest do make it clear why you'd expect a skewed distribution of genders in fields such as the army or midwifery. It's much less clear that genetic differences should lead to such an underrepresentation of women in tech fields; in this case I suspect that culture and social inertia are a large part of the explanation.
I have one big objection to this idea about potential contributors not seeing people who "look like them":
We're talking about open-source/Free software here, not working in a corporation. Volunteer FOSS work is all done remotely. If you asked me what the contributors to, say, The GIMP looked like, what sex they were, and what their ethnicities were, I could not tell you other than to merely make a wild guess. I suppose I could go look up their names and then make very good guesses based on those, but that's a lot of work; it's not like the contributor list pops up every time you start the application. FOSS volunteers frequently never see each other in person, and simply send in code contributions. They're not interviewed in-person, and they don't have to show up in-person to an office full of other people. If anything, it should be the most egalitarian form of work worldwide!
For most users, FOSS software is made by people who are utterly nameless and faceless. So I really don't see why this should be a factor to potential contributors. It should be the one place where they can feel safest about not being singled out and treated unfairly for their sex/age/ethnicity/other factor. There's not even a requirement that they use their real name! No one's stopping them from making a new email address at fake.name@gmail.com and contributing with that if they're really paranoid about being treated unfairly.
The user you're responding to was trying to articulate that whether or not people submit code is often silently affected by intangibles, like whether or not they think they'll be welcomed into the community and treated with respect and as an equal.
Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
If x% of the white male population is developing on open source, but only x% * y% of the non-white-male population is, and getting people interested in open source isn't a zero-sum game, then making y as close to 100 as possible can only be a good thing. Making a concerted effort to recruit diversely, it is hoped, will have accelerating returns as intentional involvement of diverse contributors will lead to more and more organic involvement of diverse contributors.
Differences in rates between <enter social class here> will always exist. Instead of trying to shoot for equality between every single social class(which will never exist anywhere), we should consider fostering an environment that accepts its inequity in a positive manner.
The goal isn't to make everything equal (at least not in the exact sense that cannot exist anywhere), but to change the widespread perception that treatment of different groups is not equitable.
The goal of getting more hands on deck by going after low hanging fruit (ie people who are capable of contributing to open source but currently aren't doing so because they feel uncomfortable or excluded) seems to be a worthier goal than "fostering an environment that accepts its inequity in a positive manner."
If you disagree, you are welcome to flesh out your proposal and submit it to the FSF as a candidate high priority project.
> ...whether or not people submit code is often silently affected by intangibles, like whether or not they think they'll be welcomed into the community and treated with respect and as an equal.
> Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
Do you know how you appreciate your opinions being evaluated on their merits rather than through a political lens? Social movements -- which is something that the free software movement explicitly considers itself to be -- cannot hold anyone to that expectation and expect to make inroads with them. Just as countless entrepreneurs have commented in various threads on HN observing that making your product is never as hard as marketing it, so too are the challenges of convincing people to change...well, damn near anything, inclusive of how they think about the ethical relationship between people who make software and people who use it.
This new high priority project is, in the most cynical and utilitarian interpretation, very good marketing. More likely, it was proposed and approved by people who see an inherent value in it that you might not. If you still don't understand that value, there probably aren't a whole lot of other ways to explain it than have already been offered to you in this thread.
Putting polical corectness aside, it's important to have as a varied crowd as possible using your software, to figure out what's still missing, where you still fall short.
I saw that happening time and time again - something I didn't consider important at all, was essential for other folks.
One example - if no blind people use your software, you'll never know how hard or easy it is for them - hence you'll never get a blind person to be your contributor, since it's unusable to them.
Similarly, there's a strong need for more developers tools in varied languages. A lot of great minds are being wasted because they are not proficient in English, and don't have a programming language in a language they know, or have difficulty bridging the gap because of a lack of in-depth tutorials in their language.
At this point, any hand-wringing over political correctness feels like mass hysteria a la UFOs in the '50s or fairies in the Victorian era. I see a lot of complaining about it, but I can't even tell you the last time I witnessed any examples of political correctness having any impact on anything of any import whatsoever.
On the other hand, I've seen seemingly endless instances of people using political correctness as a strawman to blow off disagreements or criticism without having to address them. It's like a blank check for assholes: if they think that all the people who think they are assholes are a bunch of brainwashed PC zombies, that's a lot easier to deal with than looking in the mirror, thinking about it for like 2 seconds, and maybe growing up a little. Nowadays anti-political correctness seems like an infinitely more widespread and toxic influence on our culture than any supposed PC conspiracy, in the sense that it shuts down honest discussion and keeps people from talking about real issues or understanding each other's perspectives.
Ironically a lot anti-PC hysteria uses verbiage about how we should all be up front and direct and brutally honest, but in practice it ends up doing the exact opposite. Nowadays anti-PC hysteria isn't people saying "tell me how you REALLY feel, don't mince words, let's talk straight about real issues"; rather, it's a mostly homogenous group of people saying "shut up and go away, I don't care about seeing things from your point of view, how dare you act like you're special enough to have your own perspective".
> I see a lot of complaining about it, but I can't even tell you the last time I witnessed any examples of political correctness having any impact on anything of any import whatsoever.
You've never worked in an office? It has an impact all the time because there are many subjects not safe to discuss.
> It has an impact all the time because there are many subjects not safe to discuss.
I agree with you, in the sense that cultures heavier on PC typically have a bit more self-censorship than they might otherwise. However, my experience so far is basically that nothing of value was lost!
I can kinda sympathize with the first guy who gets in trouble for stepping over the (newly instated, sometimes implicit) line.
But as far as actual effects on the office? Mostly just a work place that feels more like a place where important work happens and less like a high school lunch table.
I'd be curious to know why you think the typically censored topics add anything of business value to a work place.
Depends on how much value you place on office socialising, which certainly has it's benefits. It can also have a big impact on hiring when it becomes heresy to question things like diversity quotas.
One I often see personally is not being able to discriminate based on communication ability out of fear of being labelled racist.
And there's a good reason to have a more open mind about communication: you miss out on some potentially great candidates that way. The first ops person I hired at blekko had kinda terrible spoken English. He was awesome and solved a lot of hard problems. I just learned to not try to communicate with him over the phone :-)
If I step back a step, the reality is that I am always more comfortable communicating with people like me, with an accent I'm comfortable with, who use my kind of vocabulary, who use similar grammar to mine. Guess what? I can effectively communicate with a lot more people than the ones who score highly on my personal communication scale.
Edit: I should add that this is something that should be discussed openly during the recruitment process.
Not necessarily minorities in the US(in fact a lot of US minorities are overrepresented in tech), but if you could make say, a few Spanish speaking people in poorer parts of Brazil contribute, they could spread whatever knowledge they gained with their broader community and encourage more people to participate who might have otherwise viewed these things as stuff "genius hackers with degrees" do.
That would be my reasoning. We need to get people who would never see themselves as being able to develop software because they never went to university or don't have the 'brains' to get into it. There's a lot of wasted brainpower because of the false impression that coding is something for an elite few.
I like this and agree with this argument. Most arguments for "diversity" are simply based on race and gender in the US, but your argument really was help me understand why true diversity on a global scale would help.
At work, we had a speaker who talked about his company's diversity hiring approach. I don't recall specifics, but I believe it was a bank that was pretty well-known for having good representation across race and gender -- which was the basis for the invitation to come speak.
The bit that stood out for me was the claim that they never hired merely to increase diversity. Instead, they hired only based on the merit of applicants.
To achieve diversity, however, they were very aggressive about inviting minority applicants to apply, for example, posting job notices in places where under-represented groups were likely to see the notices.
Applying that idea to OSS, one could imagine active outreach as a means of increasing diversity among contributors.
The larger question of why one should care about having diverse contributors has, I think, been largely addressed by other commenters already. In addition to the UI issues others have mentioned, I might also guess that, from the perspective of Free Software Foundation, they probably also want to understand and engage minorities' privacy concerns.
I am a strong critic of diversity hiring - that is, hiring because of diversity - but this approach is sound. Reaching out to underrepresented groups but hiring solely on the applicant's achievements/merit is the way to go, in my opinion. Having diverse contributors is important, but it isn't more important than having good contributors.
> There's no force keeping people from contributing, they are just choosing not to.
We all naturally have tunnel vision, and apply our experience to everyone else. I can't speak for you, but many people who don't face discrimination naturally don't encounter the obstacles and don't feel negatively toward minorities; they assume that therefore such things don't exist.
But something is missing from our perception, because the evidence is overwhelming. Just consider that a black-skinned person in the U.S., for example, would be insane to assume they face no racism and no risks from it. A woman in IT would be willfully ignorant to think there is no sexism and she faces no threat from it.
* The historical record is overwhelming, and does not need to be recounted.
* Consider that white-skinned males make up ~33% of the U.S. population, yet look at their overwhelming prevalence in tech, business leadership, government, entertainment, and elsewhere - far more than a 1/3 of the people you see are white guys. Probably not coincidentally, it's the group that benefited most from prior centuries of discrimination. If it was a meritocracy, what is the statistical chance that Silicon Valley or the U.S. Senate would turn out to be so overwhelmingly white male? I doubt you believe that their skin color and gender make them superior (and if someone does, then we don't have to argue about where the barriers are); so how else do we explain their overwhelming proportion of success, and the lack of success for so many minorities?
* Surveys show that large numbers have prejudicial views of people of other races, religions, nationalities, etc. Look at the widespread support in Western countries for openly discriminatory leaders, openly discriminatory policies, and similar behavior by many citizens. This includes discrimination by religion (e.g., Muslims), race (e.g., blacks), nationality (immigrants), etc. Many people, even some on HN, claim it's ok to discriminate (to be clear, I don't mean the parent comment), but in the next breath argue that discrimination doesn't exist.
There's a lot of literature that answers your question, explaining what those barriers are and what they look like from other people's perspectives.
What affect does culture and income have on the prevalence of people in tech? Do white people who come from a poor background get into IT more than black people with poor backgrounds?
What leads me to believe culture has more of an affect nowadays than race is the fact that Asians have higher average incomes than whites, even though they were also historically subjected to racism.
Are you asking about the effect of the culture of the underrepresented groups keeping them out of tech in general and free software in particular, or about the effect of the culture of overrepresented groups in keeping others out?
I'll take that as implying that the underrepresented groups are not victims of widespread discrimination. One really must struggle to believe - struggle to ignore what we all see in the world and struggle to disregard all the research.
The question I ask is: Why struggle? What is the motivation for denying these groups justice?
But to clarify one important point: Most discrimination is ignorance, IMHO, not intentional. People don't see their own cultural bias - e.g., instinctively trusting the person more like what they are already familiar with (which becomes self-fulfilling) - or overlook their advantages, such as the fact that the culture of their college and workplace are so natural to them that they don't even notice that there is a culture, but that it's alien and exclusive for others. They don't imagine what it's like to be the only woman or dark-skinned person in the room, all day every day, for the rest of their lives; never sure if it's going to cost you a promotion, a job, a client, etc.
> I'll take that as implying that the underrepresented groups are not victims of widespread discrimination.
That was not my intent, as I certainly don't beleive that. Rather, I wanted to disambiguate the GP question (which could be taken either way).
Perhaps I should have shortened my request for clarification to "which culture and what effect are you asking about?"
Anyway, over/under representation happens through many avenues, some through overt and intentional discrimination, and much more through secondary and tertiary effects, many of which reinforce each other through positive feedback loops (not to mention reinforcing the overt and intentional sort as well).
eg. once you control for sibling order, parents' educational background and income, etc., it is clear that on average girls get their first computer at a later age than boys by several years. If a computer is supposed to be shared between siblings and it isn't in a common area it will tend to go into the boy's room. and so on.
Parents aren't deliberately reinforcing gender stereotypes to reduce their daughters' opportunities to discourage them from using computers, but that's exactly what is happening, and this is entirely a cultural phenomenon.
You can in many other cases measure a discouraging effect from within the culture of an underrepresented group, but just because it is worth noting however and whenever a group is complicit in their underrepresentation, it does not magically shift responsibility away from members of an over-represented group to accept changes to their culture to stop discouraging and excluding others, most specifically in this case any beleifs that participation in Free Software is entirely based on merit.
I'm sure culture and income have an effect, but it doesn't seem remotely plausible that there is no discrimination against black-skinned people in the United States. It's a fantasy that people struggle to rationalize, but you have to close your eyes to so much that is obvious.
Just because culture and income have some effect doesn't mean that skin color doesn't have a large effect. We can ask 'what if' forever, bringing up endless objections, but it's just a form of propaganda (intentionally or not) and doesn't change the obvious facts.
I'm tired of the "check your privilege" crowd bringing their guilt mongering into everything.
You know what I love about free software? It's ultimately judged on merits.
I use software everyday written by all kinds of people, many of whom I would otherwise have little in common with. I don't care about their personal lives, political opinions, or baggage. I care about what they've produced and vice versa. It's the ultimate level playing field.
Please keep the social justice fighting out of free software or you'll kill the openness that has built a worldwide ecosystem.
I've seen a lot of hostility online against people with non-european names. The idea that open source contributors are measured solely on merit is something of a fantasy. The canonical example here is contributors with an Indian name - they face a lot of social flak regardless of merit. No, not every project does it, but the ecosystem itself is somewhat unfriendly to such people.
> Please keep the social justice fighting out of free software
What are you talking about? The FSF birthed this movement, and was functionally based on social justice issues. If you pay any heed at all to the 'four freedoms', that's definitively 'social justice fighting'.
> You know what I love about free software? It's ultimately judged on merits.
If you like things judged on their merits, no doubt you are a strong, vocal opponent of any discrimination based on race, nationality, gender, sexuality, or anything else not related to merit.
> There's no force keeping people from contributing, they are just choosing not to.
Are you saying that people who are underrepresented in the free software community have a natural aversion to contributing to free software? That there are no outside forces impacting their choices, but it's something inherent in their character or genetic makeup?
I don't believe this to be true. If it's not true, then there do exist external factors that impact people's ability or desire to contribute.
> Why is this necessary?
I wouldn't claim the statement "Underrepresented people should spend more time contributing to free software" is some universal truth. Far from it. But from the perspective of the FSF, they presumably believe in their mission, and believe that increased diversity and inclusion would improve the community and its ability to achieve its mission.
> There's no force keeping people from contributing, they are just choosing not to.
Ah, but there are forces that keep people from contributing, or at least increase the amount of effort required considerably. These forces are not evenly distributed, and there are several dynamics operating that actually increase the effect many of these forces have on members of underrepresented groups.
So, given that this is to some extent a self-reinforcing phenomenon, if we want the community to look like it welcomes all comers, we not only have to be welcoming (which we aren't doing that great on in the first place), but also do everything we can to counteract the force of those feedback loops that keep groups underrepresented.
It becomes an even stranger thing to focus on when you consider that the main avenue of contribution to open source projects is the Internet, a medium where identity is irrelevant. You can be an incredibly productive member of a community and never need to be known as anything but a name, and perhaps "human".
Other so-called "identities" are truly irrelevant in this context.
While doing all of this catch-up is important, I think it would help FOSS politically (as it were) if there were something new and exemplary to come out. Signal is a good example (once they fix the Google thing, and BTW someone finally took up Moxie on the offer and there's a PR in progress). Maybe Sandstorm too (Plug and play web apps that are secure? That's kind of novel and useful if you think about it. And IMO they're doing a bang-up job with UI) If FOSS can shine, maybe it'll attract more help with the catch-up.
FOSS often plays catch-up, because true innovation is really hard and takes a lot of time and resources. It's frequently too much to ask of an all-volunteer workforce. It's not that they can't do it (ultimately the people writing FOSS are the same people as those writing apps for companies) it's just that there isn't the same set of motives in place.
This is why in earlier days, GNOME's goal was to catch up to Windows, and why a phone operating system (a pretty standard thing that everyone has) is now a target.
> true innovation is really hard and takes a lot of time and resources
It's like Bell Labs, but instead of helping the phone system make money, we help free software take over the world. That's a really interesting idea. I wonder how the technical staff are going to avoid starvation?
I stopped being a regular member last year, but love their work. After reading the priority projects list, I just made a small one-time donation.
The first project seems most important, a free and open cellphone operating system. This seems like a huge challenge, given that phone hardware has proprietary firmware. I look forward to seeing what comes of this.
I think the FSF is spot on with most of these priorities. The free phone and decentralized web, in particular, are areas for massive improvement and will be necessary for a FOSSful world. Getting governments to adopt free software is also a great priority, as they write the laws that govern the software ecosystem and could be a huge source of revenue for free software projects.
if FSF wants a intelligent assistant it will have to collect usage data, no? a little against the whole principle... but if the data are open, that would be kind of cool ;)
> if FSF wants a intelligent assistant it will have to collect usage data
Well, not necessarily (although that is certainly the path of least resistance). However, even if data collection is necessary, there are ways of doing it in a privacy- and freedom-respecting manner.
At a process level look at how researchers share anonymized data about patients in clinical trials for one example.
Technical solutions (some of which use cryptographic techniques) exist as well, many of which are described in Peter Wayner's book Translucent Databases: http://www.wayner.org/node/39
An AI-driven assistant doesn't have to necessarily run on someone else's servers and be under their control to be useful. In fact, if I teach my assistant patterns like how when I say "David" I mean David O, then I don't see a) why this type of learning can't be fully localized, or b) how phoning home with this kind of data is going to be of any particular use to anybody else, anyway.
To put it another way, what's wrong with letting my Siri and your Siri just be two different "people" instead of feeding back into a single, networked hivemind?
I'm not involved in AI projects, but my understanding is that current state-of-the-art work, including in digital assistance components like speech recognition, the approach involves gathering large amounts of data and throwing it into deep learning algorithms. This is why Google had free services like Voice, which served as sources for their modelling data.
IMO this is a bunch of BS by companies that want to control and centralize computing.
Years ago we had products like Dragon naturally speaking that could do full voice dictation reasonably accurately. They had limited digital assistants too (which is a subset of full dictation, much less valid inputs), though not much more limited than today. These ran on Pentium 1's.
The downside to this was the training time, but in practice I found this to be a strength. It was trained to my voice, not whatever generic profile Google stocks me into. I got better results nearly two decades ago (got a Dragon demo in a carnival bag) than I get with Google voice today.
It's perfectly okay to say, if you want to get the most out of this program, you need a big GPU rig. The price of such should come down over time. That leaves the question of how to get the data. If you make it optional, will enough people opt in? Is it an acceptable compromise to make it opt-out?
127 comments
[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadGiven the diverse skill set and interests of free software developers, it's probably better to have a long list of priorities as long as there is little overlap. It would be difficult to attract individuals and businesses into supporting projects that they are not interested in or don't have the skills to contribute to.
(joking a bit, but there isn't a notable GPL licensed web server, is there?)
I don't think it lost the battle on desktop - if you don't rely on platform(or interest)-specific software like the adobe/microsoft suites and some 3A games then you'll be more than fine on the linux desktop.
Power saving on windows is an illusion, I don't remember getting more things done with the same laptop. Maybe it's the case if you use Unity/KDE/Gnome3 and similar heavy stuff... If you want to spare more energy then use integrated graphics and amd|nvidia only if you want to play. Bumblebee can also help. Using XFCE, Firefox, playing videos with vlc(not with web players!), installing a blocking extension for your browser, avoiding electron/jvm/mono-based apps(ironic, I'm a Scala developer) can also reduce energy consumption. I use neovim for coding and it's a huge boost for me.
Suspending was always realiable on ubuntu for me. But with arch or arch-based distros it's a ~70% possibility for failure(according to my experience). On the other, hand putting windows to sleep is a serious hazard, it's not just hurts performance but it makes the os and its apps unstable(I use win7 at work).
I've heard that there are people with wifi problems but connection drops and packet losses are issues which are better to be reported. There is askubuntu.com, you can get help pretty fast by searching or asking.
It's not you personally, but I see this a lot in tech, in particular from the FOSS crowd 'Well, if you don't need x or y, then its fine!'
FOSS will always be second tier for most people until the plethora of software available is at some relative parity, similar to that of macOS at least. (I'm talking strict availability). The fact that there isn't more cohesive efforts to have big software vendors port their software to FOSS systems I feel like is part of the problem.
I personally feel the FOSS community doesn't have good evangelism to actual software developers that develop non-idealistic software. Adobe is a good example of this. So is Microsoft. So is Autodesk (With some exceptions, granted, but I think those come from the need to run in parallel processing environments that Linux supports quite well, and Maya). Heck, so is Wunderlist. Or 2do. 1password. They don't make native apps or even some semblance of apps for any FOSS platform, and I see no attempts to evangelize coming out of FOSS communities to get these places on their side. I'm sure there are exceptions I'm missing or perhaps some of these examples listed have progressed but my point still stands.
FOSS is great for users, and has really evangelized well to a certain subset of users in particular (mostly the tech literate enthusiasts and developer crowd, myself included). I however, will never accept this is a good answer. We should be demanding better evangelism to get big name products on the platforms. I do the best I can myself in this regard, but I feel that the entire idea that we should be more inclusive of these vendors/companies/developers is scoffed at in the FOSS/OSS communities and I do not inherently understand why. Yes, they create code that isn't meeting the guidelines of FOSS/OSS, but if you don't create the best toolsets independent of them or have some semblance of balance, then the platform will stagnant at x number of users.
I think idealism colors perspectives but reality is much more grey than either side is willing to cede, perhaps.
privacy,
a fast OS with a diverse set of desktops for power users,
comfortable development environment with power tools,
security,
open standards,
sane package management(don't even mention Program Files and Control Panel...)
and a helpful and progressive community
then you'll be fine with windows. Yeah, you can run adobe and ms software natively, instead of using wine or crossover.
Seriously, you either avoid the ms bloat or find alternatives(ez). The FOSS community needs an industry but doesn't need the industrial abuse. By default, NOBODY should depend on a company or a "network" of companies and their software. That's the sin of public education - selling the youth to companies. It's now like in Pascal Lainé's book - "L'Irrévolution(1971)" where the youth after finishing the school goes to the town's factory. There is no choice - you've been sold.
This point of idealism comes up a lot and I think it's something of a red herring. Keep in mind that the FSF's goal is singular - to promote software freedom. It is not idealism to hold to that mission. It is their only purpose for existence.
Let me give you a real world example of why a mixed scenario is not realistic. My wife has an Android phone that she bought from the phone company. It is on version 5.02. There is a bug in that version of Android where a log file fills up and the phone refuses to connect to WIFI connections that have had a lot of activity. This bug has been fixed for a long time in the Android code base. The code base is open source. I can inspect it, compile it, etc, etc. I can see the bug. I can see the fix. But I can't load the fix on the phone because the phone is locked. I can't even get root on the phone. I can't fix the problem. The vendor has told me that since the phone is 2 years old (2 years!) that no updates will be forthcoming and I should buy a new phone.
The problem is that no matter how free a piece of software is, it is really only as free as the environment in which it runs. We have seen over and over again, that companies will collude to ensure that their interests trump that of the user. A world in which free software exists only as an extension of non-free software is a world in which it is marginalised to the point where software freedom is lost entirely.
It is not idealism that prevents software freedom from working well in organisations that do not want software freedom.
Where I agree with you is that we have a long way to go to allow users to connect the dots between the problems they have as consumers and the protection that software freedom affords. My own wife thinks it is completely reasonable to spend $1000 replacing a perfectly good phone simply because the vendor wishes it. Somewhat unusually, this is a consumer movement held dear by developers, but virtually unknown to the consumers it seeks to protect. This is clearly a problem. However, we won't fix that problem by abandoning the purpose of the movement. Will my next phone be an open source phone that denies me software freedom, or a proprietary phone that denies me software freedom? Does it matter?
I am yet to work with any employer, besides the time spent at CERN, that bothered to contribute anything back to the community.
Many times the idea of even suggesting it was frowned upon.
To be perfectly clear: I share your motivations, and I cede that the FSF is a lobbying organization for promoting libre software. I want to note that I'm not specifically taking target at FSF here just generally the OSS/FOSS community in aggregate as I have interacted with them.
Now, to the argument! :)
My basic argument is as follows:
1. Its more important to have a libre/free OS than it is to have all Applications ever be libre/free. This is a matter of pragmatism. Your wifes phone for example, would be much better off if the phone OS itself was libre. This in my opinion is the best approach to take. It gives you the bulk of the freedom that one does seek, without completely alienating developers who, in some cases given the realities of today, rightly (or wrongly), don't want to or can't open source their software. I'd rather have their software on an FOSS platform than have to leave a FOSS platform to run their software. Thats just the economics of the world at work.
2. If one accepts #1 to be a justifiable position, which I think it is, the singular focus as far as the software part is concerned is to push that operating system forward with that set of ideals. Too often I find in the OSS/FOSS communities that they don't evangelize the platform, they evangelize the ideas, which again, i completely get, and I think for users, esp. of a technical bent, get it, and use it, and benefit from it. However, I don't think the average user, or even the majority of technical users, can get away with the switch. In part, its because the same logic that makes a FOSS/OSS operating system amazing doesn't particularly scale to Applications. Again, I will reference the missing software of Adobe, Microsoft, even task app like 2Do, Wunderlist, or the lovely Pixelmator, or even Zoho business apps are not available as native Applications on FOSS/OSS platforms, even Electron-type apps aren't scaling to Linux quickly. I think this is because the platforms aren't being evangelized. Everyone is concerned about the licensing, whether they can review an apps code, etc. or they get caught up in other mundane details, instead of unifying around a platform model that allows Apps of all types to exist (which i realize they do now, but I'm talking about community voices).
3. I would say to your point, an open source phone that runs 'nonfree' software is better than a nonfree phone OS running nonfree software. Why? Well, see above, but specifically because things like OS updates and OS changes would be viewable at a source code level, thereby if any apps are making modifications to it, you will see that.
4. The one thing, and this is my biggest thing, is that the lack of evangelizing as a platform for users is until recently, there is a huge lack of direction in the FOSS/OSS community. Elementary OS is the first time I've seen where a Linux distro is actually putting users first and adopting modern design and aesthetics. Another recent version of that is KDE's Neon built on ubuntu. Great desktop experiences. I feel the user experience suffers from a lack of focus on evangelizing and focus on a platform, instead of just ideals, that presents itself as a coherent whole that is accessible to develop for with some consistent standards. FOSS/OSS doesn't have to equal completely decentralized missions split between 2000 organizations. Where there has been unification lately, the better those products are becoming and actually entice users on a platform. High Idealism is well and good, but without focus on the platform, its hard to argue to switch. If you build a good platform, and get developers to make apps for it that people want to use, you are, in my opinion, gaining more than you're losing with this approach.
I have never seen this approach until very recently in the FOSS/OSS community. I'm...
Having said that, I don't think the FSF needs to get involved with that as the role of prioritising software freedom in an ever changing world is probably more important and also more difficult than ever.
One thing I would caution is assuming that encouraging non-free applications on a free operating system is always going to be win-win. I worked at Corel when they were doing their Linux distro. They misunderstood free software badly. They saw it as an opportunity to lock people into their proprietary applications by changing the underlying OS (without having to pay for developing it). This led to some pretty strange business decisions and ultimately wasted a huge amount of money.
There were a couple of spinoffs from ex-Corel employees who tried to maintain this way of thinking and it was always an uphill struggle. Probably the only one to make any kind of profit was TransGaming and I'll maintain that was substantially because Gav State is both a talented and genuinely nice guy.
I think in order to to make this kind of thing work, you need to understand free software (and the goals of free software) at a very deep level. From my experience, it's just no compatible in a natural way.
This is why licenses like MIT are so loved by such companies, now with SaaS and Web UIs it is even better for them.
I reject, as someone else mentioned, as an aside, that macOS is just free software with a non-free GUI on top. That is missing the boat completely.
This used to be the argument against the Mac in the 90s.
> We should be demanding better evangelism to get big name products on the platforms.
We should be demanding that they make their software free. If people want a free software base layer with proprietary software on top, there's macOS.
Desktop won't stop being relevant in the foreseeable future - there is nothing to replace it with for a whole variety of tasks. And usage of Linux on the desktop is gradually growing.
And we nailed it. We have several desktops and they all have decent quality.
It seems that the problem on phones isnt that Android/iOS have all the market share.
Biggest problem seems to be closed hardware.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/a-preliminary-analysis-o... :
> projects of strategic importance to the goal of freedom for _all computer users_.
The reason I take the long term view is that it seems to me that open source development provides advantages that play out over the long term. At the very least, Google and Red Hat's hybrid models look more and more like the main stream default.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Years%27_War
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
Everything else is slow, memory hungry, and insanely bloated.
You can run Android without gapps fairly well, I believe there's even a project that replaces gapps and uses xposed to fake signatures so that they look legitimate to replace Google Maps and other in-app widgets frequently used on Android. Or you can run with GApps if you're willing to tolerate some level of proprietary software.
FLOSS on phones is actually in a quite good state, F-Droid is pretty good, many well maintained open source roms. Better than most other platforms.
I've stuck with my OpenMoko FreeRunner due to the lack of alternatives, and even that uses a proprietary driver for the GSM modem :(
Hopefully projects like GNUradio will lead to a solution for this.
Plasma Mobile is not in a bad state [1]
[1]: https://plasma-mobile.org/
Until that is resolved, I don't see the hardware support issue being resolved.
Besides, we already have Open Source as a movement that makes the pragmatic argument for free software, there's no need to water down the FSF.
I personally don't hold their vision and I find their philosophical position flawed. I see tactical use in their licenses when I want to limit certain developer freedoms without having a fully closed source license, but will generally license MIT if creating a genuinely open source piece work.
"The goal of ecopolitics is wonderful. Green energy is a great invention. But the continued insistence on reduced emissions or even a stop to burning fossil fuels in its entire - and also the mission to prevent non-ecological farming (which make food I might want to eat, thank you) - has wasted billions of dollars and fragmented the movement. To conclude, all discussions about climate change should stop and the movement should simply focus on building electric cars and wind farms."
The more people try to bundle what are in fact quite distinct aims into one movement, the greater chance of failure. Not to mention the greater chance of including an aim which is harmful, not helpful. So I'll stand by my thought that adding in the defeating-the-patent-system-or-bust goal was maybe a tad much.
Nobody doubts that politics are complex and divisions common therein; but surely it's also obvious that politic movements can vary in complexity (number of toppings,) too.
One can't always follow Lincoln's first law of strategy: "One war at a time", but it's an excellent rule of thumb, for politics as well as war, and I think it's pretty clear to most of us now that the EFF has wandered much too far from it, with (economically) catastrophic results - namely all those wasted billions, not to mention the limited supply of developer work-years thrown away on mere rewrites. Not every political movement overreaches anything like this badly.
That there are other arguments with a similar structure to mine does not distress me. That other, false axioms plugged into the same structure might produce a false result doesn't - and of course shouldn't - dismay me either. (Which is not to take one side in the example argument you cite. Not here, anyway.)
- Free phone operating system
They don't have the for-profit nature of both Mozilla and Canonical and perhaps supporting the FSF over either of those 2 (Mozillas failed FFOS and no availability of the UbuntuOS mobile devices) will ensure a stable OS that isn't Google-ware.
PS. I know Mozilla isn't for-profit, but they abandoned FFOS just like a for-profit would
In this case, unfortunately, being in the high priority list of the FSF doesn't mean much. It's a list of stuff they'd like to see being developed, not actually a list of projects being actively supported with funding or developers' time.
Why is this necessary? There's no force keeping people from contributing, they are just choosing not to.
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain to me what is wrong with what I said?
edit: Again, if you are downvoting me, please explain so I can understand. I'm not arguing for the sake of argument.
It's unfortunate that people look at trivia like gender and ethnicity in such circumstances; but it's a fact of human behaviour. If potential contributors look at a project and don't see anyone who "looks like them", they're unlikely to contribute; so projects which want to maximize contributions are well advised to seek ways to "look inclusive".
(And this goes beyond open source software, of course. My university's computer science program has seen a significant uptick in applications from females after going out of their way to select photos of female students for recruiting material.)
In short, it's a matter of overcoming cognitive biases.
First on sex/gender: I feel that hormonal differences create psychological differences in the norms between genders. This is why men are generally more aggressive and violent(see higher incarceration rates) and women are more nurturing. These differences lead to people in general choosing careers that reflect their psychology, and forced diversity hurts those that do best in their field.
Then on ethnicity, I feel many of the differences come from both differences in opportunity(which should be overcome) and differences in cultural and social norms, which lead to people choosing different careers.
In my opinion, forced diversity hurts those who would normally gravitate towards those fields because they are displaced by someone who doesn't necessarily want to be there, but just sees opportunity.
Again, I'm not looking to fight. I'd love you opinion on why I'm right or wrong.
In a wider context, yes, it's a bit more complicated, but Free Software? As a movement, there's power in numbers, and looking to increase that number via a focussed effort on minority groups is simply a smart move.
On the contrary, not having enough diversity can and does put off those who would otherwise make great contributors.
As such, I would oppose any attempts to establish quotas or even aspirational targets for diversity; as you say, forced diversity has negative consequences -- not just for the organization, but also for the individuals involved.
But as much as we shouldn't be trying to bring in individuals who aren't really interested, we need to make sure we're not keeping out individuals who are interested... in a sense, it's more important to look diverse than it is to be diverse.
For example, there was a study done on violent men in prisons and testosterone. The theory that was tested was if testosterone levels were indicator of more violence, for which the data revealed was not the case. Further studies showed that so long testosterone is within natural occurring levels, aggression was not effect by testosterone.
There's strong evidence that genetic differences account for some behavioural differences between men and women. The ones you suggest do make it clear why you'd expect a skewed distribution of genders in fields such as the army or midwifery. It's much less clear that genetic differences should lead to such an underrepresentation of women in tech fields; in this case I suspect that culture and social inertia are a large part of the explanation.
We're talking about open-source/Free software here, not working in a corporation. Volunteer FOSS work is all done remotely. If you asked me what the contributors to, say, The GIMP looked like, what sex they were, and what their ethnicities were, I could not tell you other than to merely make a wild guess. I suppose I could go look up their names and then make very good guesses based on those, but that's a lot of work; it's not like the contributor list pops up every time you start the application. FOSS volunteers frequently never see each other in person, and simply send in code contributions. They're not interviewed in-person, and they don't have to show up in-person to an office full of other people. If anything, it should be the most egalitarian form of work worldwide!
For most users, FOSS software is made by people who are utterly nameless and faceless. So I really don't see why this should be a factor to potential contributors. It should be the one place where they can feel safest about not being singled out and treated unfairly for their sex/age/ethnicity/other factor. There's not even a requirement that they use their real name! No one's stopping them from making a new email address at fake.name@gmail.com and contributing with that if they're really paranoid about being treated unfairly.
Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
If x% of the white male population is developing on open source, but only x% * y% of the non-white-male population is, and getting people interested in open source isn't a zero-sum game, then making y as close to 100 as possible can only be a good thing. Making a concerted effort to recruit diversely, it is hoped, will have accelerating returns as intentional involvement of diverse contributors will lead to more and more organic involvement of diverse contributors.
The goal of getting more hands on deck by going after low hanging fruit (ie people who are capable of contributing to open source but currently aren't doing so because they feel uncomfortable or excluded) seems to be a worthier goal than "fostering an environment that accepts its inequity in a positive manner."
If you disagree, you are welcome to flesh out your proposal and submit it to the FSF as a candidate high priority project.
> ...whether or not people submit code is often silently affected by intangibles, like whether or not they think they'll be welcomed into the community and treated with respect and as an equal.
> Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
Do you know how you appreciate your opinions being evaluated on their merits rather than through a political lens? Social movements -- which is something that the free software movement explicitly considers itself to be -- cannot hold anyone to that expectation and expect to make inroads with them. Just as countless entrepreneurs have commented in various threads on HN observing that making your product is never as hard as marketing it, so too are the challenges of convincing people to change...well, damn near anything, inclusive of how they think about the ethical relationship between people who make software and people who use it.
This new high priority project is, in the most cynical and utilitarian interpretation, very good marketing. More likely, it was proposed and approved by people who see an inherent value in it that you might not. If you still don't understand that value, there probably aren't a whole lot of other ways to explain it than have already been offered to you in this thread.
I saw that happening time and time again - something I didn't consider important at all, was essential for other folks. One example - if no blind people use your software, you'll never know how hard or easy it is for them - hence you'll never get a blind person to be your contributor, since it's unusable to them.
I'm not sure what that term means. If anything, the politically correct thing - the acceptable thing - is to take shots at "political correctness".
But let's have a clear definition and say how it applies to something in particular in this discussion.
On the other hand, I've seen seemingly endless instances of people using political correctness as a strawman to blow off disagreements or criticism without having to address them. It's like a blank check for assholes: if they think that all the people who think they are assholes are a bunch of brainwashed PC zombies, that's a lot easier to deal with than looking in the mirror, thinking about it for like 2 seconds, and maybe growing up a little. Nowadays anti-political correctness seems like an infinitely more widespread and toxic influence on our culture than any supposed PC conspiracy, in the sense that it shuts down honest discussion and keeps people from talking about real issues or understanding each other's perspectives.
Ironically a lot anti-PC hysteria uses verbiage about how we should all be up front and direct and brutally honest, but in practice it ends up doing the exact opposite. Nowadays anti-PC hysteria isn't people saying "tell me how you REALLY feel, don't mince words, let's talk straight about real issues"; rather, it's a mostly homogenous group of people saying "shut up and go away, I don't care about seeing things from your point of view, how dare you act like you're special enough to have your own perspective".
You've never worked in an office? It has an impact all the time because there are many subjects not safe to discuss.
I agree with you, in the sense that cultures heavier on PC typically have a bit more self-censorship than they might otherwise. However, my experience so far is basically that nothing of value was lost!
I can kinda sympathize with the first guy who gets in trouble for stepping over the (newly instated, sometimes implicit) line.
But as far as actual effects on the office? Mostly just a work place that feels more like a place where important work happens and less like a high school lunch table.
I'd be curious to know why you think the typically censored topics add anything of business value to a work place.
One I often see personally is not being able to discriminate based on communication ability out of fear of being labelled racist.
If I step back a step, the reality is that I am always more comfortable communicating with people like me, with an accent I'm comfortable with, who use my kind of vocabulary, who use similar grammar to mine. Guess what? I can effectively communicate with a lot more people than the ones who score highly on my personal communication scale.
Edit: I should add that this is something that should be discussed openly during the recruitment process.
That would be my reasoning. We need to get people who would never see themselves as being able to develop software because they never went to university or don't have the 'brains' to get into it. There's a lot of wasted brainpower because of the false impression that coding is something for an elite few.
Am I missing something here or you really think we speak spanish in Brazil????
At work, we had a speaker who talked about his company's diversity hiring approach. I don't recall specifics, but I believe it was a bank that was pretty well-known for having good representation across race and gender -- which was the basis for the invitation to come speak.
The bit that stood out for me was the claim that they never hired merely to increase diversity. Instead, they hired only based on the merit of applicants.
To achieve diversity, however, they were very aggressive about inviting minority applicants to apply, for example, posting job notices in places where under-represented groups were likely to see the notices.
Applying that idea to OSS, one could imagine active outreach as a means of increasing diversity among contributors.
The larger question of why one should care about having diverse contributors has, I think, been largely addressed by other commenters already. In addition to the UI issues others have mentioned, I might also guess that, from the perspective of Free Software Foundation, they probably also want to understand and engage minorities' privacy concerns.
We all naturally have tunnel vision, and apply our experience to everyone else. I can't speak for you, but many people who don't face discrimination naturally don't encounter the obstacles and don't feel negatively toward minorities; they assume that therefore such things don't exist.
But something is missing from our perception, because the evidence is overwhelming. Just consider that a black-skinned person in the U.S., for example, would be insane to assume they face no racism and no risks from it. A woman in IT would be willfully ignorant to think there is no sexism and she faces no threat from it.
* The historical record is overwhelming, and does not need to be recounted.
* Consider that white-skinned males make up ~33% of the U.S. population, yet look at their overwhelming prevalence in tech, business leadership, government, entertainment, and elsewhere - far more than a 1/3 of the people you see are white guys. Probably not coincidentally, it's the group that benefited most from prior centuries of discrimination. If it was a meritocracy, what is the statistical chance that Silicon Valley or the U.S. Senate would turn out to be so overwhelmingly white male? I doubt you believe that their skin color and gender make them superior (and if someone does, then we don't have to argue about where the barriers are); so how else do we explain their overwhelming proportion of success, and the lack of success for so many minorities?
* Surveys show that large numbers have prejudicial views of people of other races, religions, nationalities, etc. Look at the widespread support in Western countries for openly discriminatory leaders, openly discriminatory policies, and similar behavior by many citizens. This includes discrimination by religion (e.g., Muslims), race (e.g., blacks), nationality (immigrants), etc. Many people, even some on HN, claim it's ok to discriminate (to be clear, I don't mean the parent comment), but in the next breath argue that discrimination doesn't exist.
There's a lot of literature that answers your question, explaining what those barriers are and what they look like from other people's perspectives.
What leads me to believe culture has more of an affect nowadays than race is the fact that Asians have higher average incomes than whites, even though they were also historically subjected to racism.
The question I ask is: Why struggle? What is the motivation for denying these groups justice?
But to clarify one important point: Most discrimination is ignorance, IMHO, not intentional. People don't see their own cultural bias - e.g., instinctively trusting the person more like what they are already familiar with (which becomes self-fulfilling) - or overlook their advantages, such as the fact that the culture of their college and workplace are so natural to them that they don't even notice that there is a culture, but that it's alien and exclusive for others. They don't imagine what it's like to be the only woman or dark-skinned person in the room, all day every day, for the rest of their lives; never sure if it's going to cost you a promotion, a job, a client, etc.
That was not my intent, as I certainly don't beleive that. Rather, I wanted to disambiguate the GP question (which could be taken either way).
Perhaps I should have shortened my request for clarification to "which culture and what effect are you asking about?"
Anyway, over/under representation happens through many avenues, some through overt and intentional discrimination, and much more through secondary and tertiary effects, many of which reinforce each other through positive feedback loops (not to mention reinforcing the overt and intentional sort as well).
eg. once you control for sibling order, parents' educational background and income, etc., it is clear that on average girls get their first computer at a later age than boys by several years. If a computer is supposed to be shared between siblings and it isn't in a common area it will tend to go into the boy's room. and so on.
Parents aren't deliberately reinforcing gender stereotypes to reduce their daughters' opportunities to discourage them from using computers, but that's exactly what is happening, and this is entirely a cultural phenomenon.
You can in many other cases measure a discouraging effect from within the culture of an underrepresented group, but just because it is worth noting however and whenever a group is complicit in their underrepresentation, it does not magically shift responsibility away from members of an over-represented group to accept changes to their culture to stop discouraging and excluding others, most specifically in this case any beleifs that participation in Free Software is entirely based on merit.
Just because culture and income have some effect doesn't mean that skin color doesn't have a large effect. We can ask 'what if' forever, bringing up endless objections, but it's just a form of propaganda (intentionally or not) and doesn't change the obvious facts.
You are opposing "race" and "culture" when race is in large part a cultural construct.
You know what I love about free software? It's ultimately judged on merits.
I use software everyday written by all kinds of people, many of whom I would otherwise have little in common with. I don't care about their personal lives, political opinions, or baggage. I care about what they've produced and vice versa. It's the ultimate level playing field.
Please keep the social justice fighting out of free software or you'll kill the openness that has built a worldwide ecosystem.
> Please keep the social justice fighting out of free software
What are you talking about? The FSF birthed this movement, and was functionally based on social justice issues. If you pay any heed at all to the 'four freedoms', that's definitively 'social justice fighting'.
If you like things judged on their merits, no doubt you are a strong, vocal opponent of any discrimination based on race, nationality, gender, sexuality, or anything else not related to merit.
Are you saying that people who are underrepresented in the free software community have a natural aversion to contributing to free software? That there are no outside forces impacting their choices, but it's something inherent in their character or genetic makeup?
I don't believe this to be true. If it's not true, then there do exist external factors that impact people's ability or desire to contribute.
> Why is this necessary?
I wouldn't claim the statement "Underrepresented people should spend more time contributing to free software" is some universal truth. Far from it. But from the perspective of the FSF, they presumably believe in their mission, and believe that increased diversity and inclusion would improve the community and its ability to achieve its mission.
Ah, but there are forces that keep people from contributing, or at least increase the amount of effort required considerably. These forces are not evenly distributed, and there are several dynamics operating that actually increase the effect many of these forces have on members of underrepresented groups.
So, given that this is to some extent a self-reinforcing phenomenon, if we want the community to look like it welcomes all comers, we not only have to be welcoming (which we aren't doing that great on in the first place), but also do everything we can to counteract the force of those feedback loops that keep groups underrepresented.
I find it baffling that this sentence could have been written in earnest at the present historical moment.
This is why in earlier days, GNOME's goal was to catch up to Windows, and why a phone operating system (a pretty standard thing that everyone has) is now a target.
It's like Bell Labs, but instead of helping the phone system make money, we help free software take over the world. That's a really interesting idea. I wonder how the technical staff are going to avoid starvation?
The first project seems most important, a free and open cellphone operating system. This seems like a huge challenge, given that phone hardware has proprietary firmware. I look forward to seeing what comes of this.
Well, not necessarily (although that is certainly the path of least resistance). However, even if data collection is necessary, there are ways of doing it in a privacy- and freedom-respecting manner.
At a process level look at how researchers share anonymized data about patients in clinical trials for one example.
Technical solutions (some of which use cryptographic techniques) exist as well, many of which are described in Peter Wayner's book Translucent Databases: http://www.wayner.org/node/39
To put it another way, what's wrong with letting my Siri and your Siri just be two different "people" instead of feeding back into a single, networked hivemind?
Years ago we had products like Dragon naturally speaking that could do full voice dictation reasonably accurately. They had limited digital assistants too (which is a subset of full dictation, much less valid inputs), though not much more limited than today. These ran on Pentium 1's.
The downside to this was the training time, but in practice I found this to be a strength. It was trained to my voice, not whatever generic profile Google stocks me into. I got better results nearly two decades ago (got a Dragon demo in a carnival bag) than I get with Google voice today.
Absolutely nothing wrong.. that would be great, actually. Question is how to do that without data and GPUs.
"Open Data Foundation" + "World Wide Distributed Processing" would really make a revolution here. We need break urgently the monopoly over data.
https://fsfe.org/join
Or
https://my.fsf.org/join