I think it’s important to have boundaries. If we keep our operating systems fully free, it will be harder for anyone to pressure us to add proprietary components to them. But if our OSes already contain non-free components, it’s not that hard to add more. We not only want freedom, we also want to keep it.

It also needs to be clear for the people in our community that our main goal is freedom and getting rid of proprietary software. Convenience is less important.

I didn’t say that I’m never going to install any firmware updates. I just don’t want to put it in my system if it’s proprietary.

The world won’t change itself. If people did nothing 40 years ago, there wouldn’t be a Free Software movement.

It sounds like you are not using a fully free distro anyway. Most of the popular distros contain proprietary firmware, so what’s the problem?

I am forced to keep proprietary firmware in my OS to use the hardware and that’s what you are advocating for. You want everyone to be forced to do that. But I don’t want anything proprietary in my system. I see no reason why I should have a proprietary firmware package installed for my GPU to work. The firmware could be just on the device itself and if someone wants to change it, then they can install the package in their OS. But maybe there could also be some other way.

You don’t know what the proprietary update contains. It can be a security fix, but also a backdoor. People can decide on their own if they want to update, but I see no reason why I must be forced to have proprietary stuff in my system. I want a fully libre distro. I can’t switch to one, because I would have to give up on using AMD GPUs, because people like you say that this is fine.

But nobody is saying that there shouldn’t be a way to update firmware. Firmware just shouldn’t a be part of the OS, unless it’s free. Adding proprietary components to our systems will only make it harder for us to keep our freedom.

The FSF’s stance is just based on our current capabilities. Most people still use proprietary operating systems. We are capable of developing free alternatives of non-free programs, even very complicated ones. But it’s not realistic to think that we can currently replace all firmware for any device if we don’t know how it works. The amount of products that have the RYF certificate is already very small. Even Librem 5 didn’t manage to get it. When it becomes easier, I’m sure they will change the requirements or add more levels.

I’m pretty sure Libreboot contains proprietary firmware now and GNU is planning to develop an actually libre fork. So it’s silly for the developer to criticize the FSF for not being radical enough. It makes me think that the person doesn’t really believe in what they are saying.

But then the author says they want us to have proprietary firmware packages in our systems. So they want our OSes to be less libre… They even compare not including proprietary firmware to burning books… I stopped reading after that.

I’ve read it, but I don’t really understand the legal issue. I’m also not sure what could be illegal about VSCodium. It uses the Open VSX store for downloading extensions (but not every extension is on there).

It would certainly be better if VSCode was under a Copyleft license, so that it couldn’t be turned into proprietary software and maybe that way addons would also have to be Free Software, like in Blender. But Microsoft clearly doesn’t want that.

I’m not much against having repositories with plugins, extensions or whatever BUT they should be like Debian, you can just pack everything into images / a folder and use offline for ever when required.

Yeah, that’s a good idea. They could also just be added to Debian, which would solve this problem, but there also would be another benefit for me. Most people don’t care about that, but I want to only use Free Software. When I install something from Debian’s free repository, I don’t have to worry that it might be proprietary, because they only allow Free Software there. I don’t have this certainty when installing software from most other places.

Same goes for modern Docker powered solutions and JavaScript frameworks.

Some JavaScript frameworks and libraries seem to be packaged in Debian. But most people use NPM, of course.

Free Software gives you the 4 essential freedoms. One of them is the freedom to distribute the program. So anyone could legally give you a copy for free. Sounds like what you want, no?

Even if the authors implement some kind of DRM, any programmer can modify the program to remove that feature and share the modified version with everyone. Technically that is also possible with non-free software, but it’s illegal, pretty difficult and requires special skills.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

We’ve had a way forward for 40 years and it’s called Free Software: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

It’s super weird to me that pirates aren’t advocating for the Free Software movement. Being able to control their own devices should be like one of their main goals.

Speaking about VSCode it is also open-source until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).

I’m opposed to having repositories for plugins. I don’t want my code editor to connect to the internet at all. If I need some popular plugin, it should already be available in the repository of the distro that I’m using. Some distributions of VIM and Emacs download a bunch of plugins on launch from who knows where. I don’t get why people are fine with that.

It’s similar with Flatpak and Snap. Oh and each programming language has its own package manager too, of course (NPM belongs to Microsoft too, btw). Everyone and everything wants its own package manager or a separate distribution system.

For now I use VSCodium in firejail to prevent it from accessing the network and I don’t install new plugins. I haven’t heard of any better editor, unfortunately.

It is possible to be entertaining and ethical at the same time. Someone else will take their place.

I would venture that the majority of people see it as an investment of one sort or another. I think the insane market cap, and the devestating effect the recent crash had on its reputation and use, are evidence of that.

You are right, but it doesn’t matter what most people think. I mean we should educate them about it, but their opinion is irrelevant.

Most cryptos have fundamental problems that I don’t see being fixed, eg it’s deflationary properties, BTC’s wasteful PoW, ETH skirting/crossing the boundary of being a security, etc.

Etherum has already switched from proof of work algorithm to less wasteful proof of stake. So it seems that at least that problem can be solved.

This is like the one thing they are good for, and Monero is the best at it. This is an arguable point though, others may say that this is a negative due to the implications and governments have cracked down on privacy enhancing tools like Tornado Cash for this reason. I personally value privacy to an extent, but do not see the need in my life to use Monero. I certainly wouldn’t fault you for using it, though.

You should be able to buy any of the popular cryptocurrencies anonymously. They won’t make your payment history private like Monero does, but you will still be anonymous when paying.

I think adoption has stagnated. And look at El Salvador, they basically had to force crypto on the populace and they use their own proprietary wallet, nullifying privacy benefits. And again, it is treated as an investment by the government there who are buying BTC to speculate.

I don’t know exact stats, but it’s bigger than I expected before I started looking into it. There are a lot of crypto ATMs now in cities, which you can see at https://coinatmradar.com. There are also some stores and restaurants that accept crypto, especially in the US (https://coinmap.org/view). You can also find some online services on https://cryptwerk.com. El Salvador is certainly messed up. Bitcoin probably isn’t even a good choice, because of its big transaction fees. Other cryptocurrencies are faster, can handle more transactions and have smaller fees.

Yeh this is dependant on your country. Here in Australia every crypto transaction is a capital gains event 🙄

Damn, that’s crazy. So you can’t even buy something without paying an extra tax?

No problem, take your time :).

They were fine with Linus investing in companies and then reviewing their products or competing products and I don’t see that as a result of sloppiness. They haven’t even addressed it in their apology video.

Also moving too fast is not a valid excuse for misleading millions of people for years.

Linus is not the only one to blame. The people who work there could have done something to stop the unethical behavior or quit. But some of them stayed there for years and enabled Linus. I can’t look at those people and not think that they aren’t incompetent or corrupt.

What they did should be the standard. Serious reviewers should check on each others work and point out errors on regular basis. It’s the only way to stop corrupt/incompetent reviewers from misleading people.

But Steve didn’t contact Linus to give him time to prepare an explanation in which he would blame everyone else and say how sad he is! It’s just a poor $100M company, they are just humans and they make mistakes. :D