Is that why there were so many darn anarchists there?
And yeah books to prisoners programs are both a means of direct action and of spreading anti carceral propaganda to those most effected. Not all programs are anarchist, but the one I helped with had a zine library that included a lot of stuff by former prisoners about the harm, ineffectiveness, and racist origins of the American prison system. Which was good because at least that was something they always had enough of unlike English-Spanish dictionaries. Seriously if you ever have any lying around donate it to a books for prisoners program. A lot of prisoners want to learn to communicate with those they’re locked in a cage with. And for anyone with more liberal sensibilities it’s also a form of self improvement that helps on the outside.
Idk, technically voluntary association is a key tenet of volunteerism/anarcho-capitalism, so if we’re just using volunteering as the basis we might as well say it’s volunteerism. I think anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism are a bit more nuanced than “sharing.”
Cory Doctorow has a book, “Walkaway” that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It’s pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn’t overly glamourize any political system the way you’d typically see in political fiction.
There’s a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it’s almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device’s OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It’s entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.
I haven’t heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that’s why I love this book.
I made a commentary about it here lemmy.ml/post/511377 in the FLOSS vs Closed Source Philosophy section:
The soul and spirit of FLOSS is socialist/communist, in a similar way to piracy. The purpose of it is to serve the greater good. In comparison, the soul and spirit of closed source software, outside rare cases of benevolence, is highly corporate and fascistic, similar to a leech, which in many cases these days may suck money out of your wallets for subscriptions. It may also serve as a leech to suck your data for telemetry and spying purposes.
So I did miss that Linus is in the article, but the reference to him says he was awarded the title, which makes it sound like an honour rather than a hierarchical system. I don’t believe that he’s ever been anything other than the projects owner/founder but I’m happy to learn if I’m wrong.
Yes, that’s just how open source works. Of course they always serve at the pleasure of the community, otherwise forks would happen. Nobody said otherwise. As the “Usage” section of that article implies, the “benevolent” bit comes from the feedback loop of a happy community supporting their dictator-for-life.
I mean how the community refers to him. I’ve never read a thread where someone called Linus a BDFL, I have with python. If they do, they do. Just haven’t seen it myself.
You can fork it, sure Linus is very respected and his decisions are considered very important but you can fork it and change however you want so it’s still compatible with Anarchism.
Linus’ power doesn’t come from Ownership, but respect. Anyone can fork it and do what they want, but because Linus is respected, everyone else follows suit.
Anarchism would function in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be a bunch of opinionated people doing whatever they want, but people generally listening to experts who don’t actually hold systemic power.
Many times what? Most forks die within a few months. Especially for big and well known projects. For example, io.js was a fork of NodeJs. Didn’t last long and was killed by NodeJs. All the Firefox forks are pretty much dead as well. Linux also had plenty of forks by people who disagreed with Linus and where are they now? I bet you don’t even remember their names.
Forks don’t work unless the original project is dead.
This is incorrect. It’s true that most (in fact, I would say almost all) forks go nowhere but that doesn’t mean forking isn’t incredibly valuable. Even the example you cite, “original project is dead” isn’t just incidentally useful, it’s critical to open source. Other examples include:
project’s core team is part of a for profit org that is moving the project in a bad, profit motivated direction:
project’s leader suddenly and dramatically loses respect (maybe he killed his wife or something);
project’s leader dies without leaving a digital will regarding who controls the core repo;
project continues to direct effort into features while falling to address major security concerns;
project is healthy and useful in every way but there is an important use case not being addressed, and the fork would address it.
Even if 99% of forks fail, that’s irrelevant because 99% of original projects fail in the same ways. Forks are critical to open source.
So mass adoption is your answer, and I’d say you’re misguided. The purpose of FOSS isn’t to make a profit, but to satisfy uses and needs. If a few people have a need for a fork and use it, then it’s a success.
You’re judging FOSS software by popularity, rather than use, as though it’s for profit.
Most new businesses fail as well. Maybe we shouldn’t be starting new businesses either? Or perhaps this more about people being unprepared and out of their depth whether it’s starting a new business or forking a code base. And not the individual actions themselves.
I would say we should just let unjust societies fail so just ones can take their place, but that seems to be the natural course. We’re seeing that right now.
I would disagree and say it’s more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It’s all good until the king dies and let’s see who succeeds them.
I meant that as a reply to the second paragraph which generalised anarchism; including the non-Linux world.
I also disagree that this isn’t an issue in the broader Linux community however. See for example the loud minority with an irrational hate against quite obviously good software projects like systemd who got those ideas from charlatans or “experts”.
I know, I used Linux as an example. Just like not everyone needs to be a weatherman to trust weatherman that can recognize experts among themselves, so too can engineers recognize experts among themselves, and so forth.
Skilled programmers can see that Linus is an expert. It works in tech. It probably works in any professional environment - anywhere where skilled people are picking someone highly skilled.
For the average person, we have clearly seen average people suck at picking expert leaders, though it works fine in small groups
There’s a word for this, the promotion of leaders based on merit instead of popularity - Technocracy. And it’s not a distinct ideology but a syncretic one that has been adopted by many groups with differing politics. The most prominent example would be the Technocratic faction of the People’s Republic of China, which was opposed to the Maoists back in the 50s and 60s; they argued for society to be led by experts instead of Democratically with a strong emphasis on Peasant participation (the standpoint of the Maoists). China today follows a moderate path taking from both factions.
In the West, however, Technocracy is mostly associated with Liberals; however, I would argue that the modern Liberal view of Technocracy is fundamentally flawed, since it relies on Capitalism distributing wealth meritocratically (which Socialists understand is not the case).
Amazing how every single part of your comment is so wrong.
It’s actually a really good analogy,
Not an analogy, an example. Those two are different things.
because it can only run on
No, it can run on many things, including open source collaborative hardware that exists.
fully-capitalist hardware.
What the hell even is that? Fun fact: until very recently most of the computer hardware was made in communist China. I know, scary. And now that a lot of effort is being made to get that production out of there, those efforts are being sponsored by public money to an incredible degree. Billions of dollars of taxes (you know, community resources) are being poured into that because big corporations are the biggest lovers of government handouts.
Case in point. You think quoting an argument and sneering is a counterargument. Obviously, because you don’t know the first thing about labor theory of value.
Someone asked if you think capitalists or engineers did the engineering, and you revealed you don’t understand the question.
You are once again building a flawed model of the dynamic at play here in an attempt to ease the discomfort you feel from encountering something that doesn’t make sense to you (why did I choose to join this community?). I’m not even attempting to build any counterarguments because the responses I’ve gotten don’t even attempt to understand what I’ve said in the beginning. To be utterly frank I just lack respect for people who think of themselves as any flavour of anarchist while still dreaming of a system as thoroughly rigid as the artificially created Internet. You pretend to hate the system while desperately trying to invent excuses for continuing to make yourself at home within it.
No dude, you demonstrably said ‘I’m going to repeat your argument so you can think about it.’ Projecting some emotional state onto me is not gonna change how you fucked this up.
This is mockery. I am calling you ignorant.
I am trying to highlight how you joined an explicitly leftist server, whilst remaining aggressively unaware of… genuinely the first things people learn about leftism. So when you try smugly posturing your way out of a pointed question, you’re just revealing you know less than nothing.
To be utterly frank I just lack respect for people who think of themselves as any flavour of anarchist while still dreaming of a system as thoroughly rigid as the artificially created Internet.
Anarchists being naked hippies, of course, not organized laborers. The internet was mostly designed and operated by academics. It runs on half a century of “does this sound right?” collaborative standards. Whatever browser you’re reading this in has its origins in anti-monopolist diehards building better software out of spite.
None of which is even addressing the initial failure. Capital didn’t design your computer. Intel’s founders definitely did, but only because they were workers dissatisfied under Fairchild, who were in turn workers dissatisfied under Shockley. The early history of silicon valley is halfway to semiconductor co-ops.
The expansion of the Internet has witnessed a resurgence of the gift economy, especially in the technology sector. Engineers, scientists, and software developers create open-source software projects. The Linux kernel and the GNU operating system are prototypical examples of the gift economy’s prominence in the technology sector and its active role in using permissive free software and copyleft licenses, which allow free reuse of software and knowledge.
Essentially the line of thought is that open source software is an example of mutual aid and the gift economy.
I just got rid of my last Windows installation, and I got rid of all my Apple devices a couple years ago. The Linux life is so nice!
On the other hand, I just setup a Windows gaming machine for a friend (I would have pushed Linux, but I live far away and can’t commit to being tech support). There were so many hoops to jump through to cut through all the crap:
I had to set the region to somewhere in the EU so that my friend can uninstall Edge sometime in March, 2024 without breaking other functionality
I had to run a hidden script at a specific point during the install to allow me to not have to use a Microsoft account
I had to disconnect the non-boot drive and reinstall because the Windows installer uses motherboard drive ordering instead of UUID to decide which drive to put the boot partition on.
I had to run Win Debloat Tools to get rid of all the crap Microsoft adds to their OS
I had to find a 3rd party driver update tool because the motherboard manufacturer’s software is terrible and installs a bunch of extra crap.
I had to install a 3rd party Nvidia driver update tool because their official one requires making an account and gives a bunch of unwanted ads as notifications.
It’s seriously bonkers. It makes you really appreciate Linux as a whole and package managers in particular.
Whenever people talk about how difficult Linux is to install i ask them if they’ve installed Windows lately. They all say “yes”. I do not believe a word of it, though. If they had done so–or more likely, tried to do so–there’s no way they’d have that opinion. I’m sure they’ve gone into their OEM’s recovery menu and hit “reinstall” or whatever, but that’s a very different process.
It’s “hard” to us because we actually uncheck the telemetry settings and care about not having a Microsoft account on, including the additional debloating afterwards. For the average user, clicking next every step, ignoring the data harvesting effort and creating / using a Microsoft account is part of the experience and “normal” to them.
It’s funny because I’ve built like six Windows machines and the install process is always a snap. You just select what drive to install to, what telemetry options you want on/off, and then press start.
You don’t even have to have an Internet connection/Microsoft account if you don’t want to, you can just create a local one.
I don’t understand how you guys have such a hard time with it. Certain distros of Linux are pretty easy to get going, but Windows is only hard if you refuse to leave your Linux knowledge bubble, ever.
Sure we can talk about how you have to go in and do X and Y in order to get it configured how YOU want, but that shit applies in Linux too.
I don’t know when the last time you tried to install Windows was, but when I installed Windows 11 Pro yesterday, there was no obvious option to install without an internet connection and a Microsoft account. To make that option appear, I had to hit shift+f10 at the country selection screen to open a command prompt and run the script located at “oobe\bypassrno.cmd” to have the option “I don’t have an internet connection” to pop up and allow me to bypass needing a Microsoft account.
That’s fine, and people said the same thing about Windows 10, and Windows 7, and Windows XP, and…
If you control for bloat, tracking, and ads, the install process for Windows versions has gotten steadily more difficult as time goes on. Installing Windows 11 is a snap, too, … if you don’t care about all the crap they added.
The thing us Linux users are complaining about is not how easy it is to install if you accept the enshittification that Microsoft forces, but how difficult it is to install without it.
Hey, why get rid of valueable computing devices 😃 there is nothing more fun than a rolling distro like arch pr openSuse tumbleweed on old apple hardware
😁 i live a free computing live where I collect trash (mostly from my father and thus apple devices) and install Linux on them to make them treasures
I’ve tried switching to Linux exclusively multiple times, and I always end up falling back to Windows on my desktop. I have multiple Linux servers and VMs, but there are two main barriers. First is gaming. Last time I tried, I couldn’t get RTX working in some titles, EA launcher was broken, and it was generally just buggy. The second reason is for coding. I’ve been coding for Windows for almost 20 years, and I am hugely reliant on Visual Studio. I just can’t find a comparable alternative for Linux.
I’d ditch Windows in a second if I could make Linux work for me, but so far I haven’t had much luck.
I had similar issues. My Nvidia GPU was the main thing hold me back for so long. I finally upgraded to an AMD RX 7900 XTX and cycled my Nvidia GPU to my home server for transcoding, gpu compute, and KasmVNC GPU acceleration.
I also decided that ray tracing, HDR, and games that don’t support Linux just aren’t important to me, but it took me a long time to become okay with that.
For development, I guess I’ve been lucky in the type of work that I do in that Linux is a perfect fit. I find Windows to be far more of a hassle than it’s worth, but if you do game development or Windows-specific development, I can see that being a barrier.
RTX is one of those things that just isn’t optional for me. I may be in the minority, but I am far more concerned with how games look than how they run. As long as my FPS is above 30 or so, I’m generally okay with performance. I feel like Windows will always support those “extra features” like RTX before Linux, unfortunately. I really comes down to market share, I think; the developers at Nvidia and AMD are going to target Windows first, and the people who maintain Proton are stuck in second place. You’ll have to pry Windows 10 out of my cold dead hands, though; I liked Vista better than Windows 11.
For development, I’m locked into Windows at work, but my job isn’t specifically software development; it just happens to be a useful skill to have in my career. I do far more coding at home, and I certainly have the option of switching to Linux. I think I’ve just been spoiled by Visual Studio’s all-in-one approach for so long. My #1 concern is debugging. I haven’t seen an Linux IDE that allows for stepping back through the call stack and checking variable states inside the IDE quite like VS does it.
To be clear, I’m not bashing Linux at all. I’ve been a homelabber for longer than I can remember, and I have a total of 3 physical machines and VMs that run Windows compared to a total of probably 20 that run Linux, FreeBSD, or some other POSIX variant. I have so few Windows machines that I actually own legal licenses for all of them. I do feel like the people who say “Just run Linux on your desktop PC; it can do everything Windows can” are looking at the operating system through rose-colored glasses. Linux will always be the best choice for anything that doesn’t require having a monitor attached, but otherwise, it feels like it’s playing catch-up to Windows.
For sure, there are compromises no matter what you pick. I just hit the point where Linux checked enough boxes for me to ditch Windows. I hope that it gets to that point for you eventually!
I have a friend that does .NET development on Linux. So I guess that’s possible. I know he uses JetBrains Rider as an IDE instead of visual studio. I’m sure there are some other hoops he jumps through, as well, but I never really dove into it with him. I always used Visual Studio in Uni, myself. I also have a Windows partition for gaming and music production.
.NET is infuriating enough on Windows. Any time I have to work with a .NET library, I always write a wrapper with a C or C++ interface first. Your friend who does .NET development on Linux has far more patience than I can ever hope to have.
Linux desktop users might be the most delusional bunch in all of tech. Statements like this are why Linux is never going to be as easy to use as osx/Windows.
Bro it’s cool if your needs are best served by Windows or OS X but please don’t lump me along with childish ideologues like OP. I’ve switched to Linux on my work Desktop about seven years ago, yet that didn’t make me feel the need to go full-communist about it, nor do I hold it up as some kind of free market success story.
Damn, still hovering around negative two thousand? You can do it! Don’t let people get you down by ignoring your trolls. You are a troll, you are beautiful, and your contrarianism is annoying af! Don’t ever let anyone tell you different. I’m sorry people aren’t downvoting you at a rate high enough to smash that goal. You will get there.
Omg you did it! Bi-millenial troll-fuckery award goes to LemmyIsFantasticForBeingAnnoying!!! -2000 karma and counting! Imagine all the people having a good day when they scrolled down and saw some stupid shit take you wrote! So much fun!!!
And before you say anything, the tag only exists to identify a commenter who shouldn’t be taken seriously, which is absolutely well earned on your part. Side benefit is mild return trolling. You gotta admit -2000 karma is a ridiculous milestone, intentional or otherwise
Windows 11 Pro is $200. There are ways to get it cheaper, but that is what Microsoft charges for it…and they still collect a bunch of data and serve you a bunch of ads.
Even if you pirate it, you still pay with the immense amount of data they take, even if you opt out of a bunch of it (which you can only do temporarily anyway).
Its perfectly okay to have both Linux and Windows, and keep Windows for 5-10% use cases, excluding work/school needs. Always remember Pareto’s principle, and never try to force through things where unnecessary friction hinders you for benefits that are nothing more than ideological masturbation.
I have some newfound respect for the man, it seems. Not that I didn’t respect him earlier, just thought that his toxicity was the defining trait of his temper. I find these takes somehow mellow the image in my mind.
The man is a swedish speaking Finn originally, it kinda comes with the territory. We might technically be a minority but we’re still as Finnish as the rest of them (to a certain degree at least).
Linus isn’t a tankie, and Socialism/Communism isn’t giving away money. It’s a dramatic restructuring of the economy into a Worker owned and operated one.
That’s fair, but the result seems to be the same; he’s nowhere near as caustic when interacting with people as he used to be. I had quite a lot of sympathy with the message in most of his technical rants, but the delivery was counterproductive. If he’s changed that I think he’s done well.
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