[benjaminjosephw]

This is exactly why I think FOSS has become irrelevant for end-users. An open source client for a proprietary API only gives superficial freedoms and doesn't guarantee those freedoms will not be taken away.

The software landscape has changed so much since the conception of GPL and all it stood for. Back then, freedom was about expert users having autonomy over their own systems. These days, I think the real fight for freedom is about user communities and general end-users.

I think there is potential in the emerging field of community authored software. Community's coming together to build their own platforms is an ethos that I think has gained some traction and, if it builds more momentum, could become the next free software movement.

[api]

The fundamental error is confusing free "as in beer" with free "as in freedom." The two are unrelated or in some cases even at odds with one another, such as when "free" stuff is used as a barbed hook to bait people into closed SaaS or surveillance based ecosystems.

The reality is that software is extremely expensive, especially polished software with a good user experience that's usable by non-experts. Good UX can take many times more effort than just getting something working. Without an economic model, FOSS will always lose in the general market.

I've been ranting about this for years on this site and elsewhere. Doctrinaire FOSS people seem to largely not get it or not care.

If you try to introduce any alternative license or distribution model it'll be rejected by the OSI, which is largely captured by the big surveillance capitalist companies like Facebook and Google. These have no incentive to change anything about the landscape. They're perfectly happy with open source as free labor for them and with competitors being unable to grow revenue.

[benjaminjosephw]

> The reality is that software is extremely expensive, especially polished software with a good user experience that's usable by non-experts.

I get your point here and I think this has been the case for so long that it seems like an immutable law by now. But, is it inevitable that software should be so expensive to produce?

How we write software today is largely based on ways of working and technical limitations that are not much different to what Fred Brooks wrote about in the Mythical Man Month. Brooks had some hope that programming languages would raise the level of abstraction we work at and that software design would shed much of its "accidental complexity".

Better programming languages could enable authors to work on problem solving rather than generating artefacts for machine computation.

The promise of better languages has been with us for a while but I'm not convinced that this avenue is as well explored as some believe it to be. The scope for these kinds of new abstractions isn't just drop in replacements for the programs you might write in C - it extends to other flavours of programming.

An example of progress here is how component libraries are used in web UI development. Mature component libraries require very little work to use and massively speed up development of "polished software".

Declarative end-user programming isn't a lucrative problem domain, but innovation in this space is still possible and could change the face of free software (both definitions) for everyone.

Progress like this could enable user communities to build, maintain and run their own platforms without the level of expense that currently prevents these kind digital commons from forming.

[api]

There was a push in that direction in the 1980s and 1990s in the form of Smalltalk, JITed super-portable and somewhat Smalltalk-inspired languages like Java and C#, WYSIWYG GUI design tools like old school Visual Basic (terrible language, but UI the designer is still unequaled), highly productive low-code systems like Hypercard, and so on.

Then we threw all that in the trash and went back to bespoke architectures, brittle un-portable OS-specific (and even OS-version-specific) compiled binaries, and of course the gigantic pyramid of hacks that is the web.

It's a classic case of "worse is better."

My own view on "worse is better" is that it's a result of the same phenomenon I'm alluding to in my parent posts: people want free-as-in-beer stuff. When people invest tons of time and deep thought into a platform they generally want (or need) to get compensated for that. The vast majority of the stuff I listed above was commercial or closely linked to commercial efforts and had commercial, "source available," or at least less liberal sorts of open source licenses. Meanwhile the pile of crap was free, unencumbered, and could thus be copied and cloned at will.

It's not just cost either. It's also friction. Having to pay for things and juggle licensing is a pain in the rear. You don't have to think about free. You just get it and run it. Low friction results in faster viral spread and speed wins.

You get what you incentivize, and you don't get what you don't incentivize. We do not incentivize quality.

Edit:

The same phenomenon is now taking hold in the news media. Quality news and fact-checked information is starting to cost money. Bullshit and propaganda is and will always remain free.

[CRConrad]

> WYSIWYG GUI design tools like old school Visual Basic (terrible language, but UI the designer is still unequaled)

It was equalled and surpassed only a few years later, by Borland Delphi.

[api]

Never used that one, but Pascal would certainly have been a better language than old school VB.

[CRConrad]

You still can, for free and all. Sure, Borland -- and the whole litany of company names that have owned Delphi, the product, since -- have on-and-off had "free" (=as in beer) editions, but that on-and-off inconsistency tends to sour my perspective on those. But, the venerable Free Pascal language and compiler gained (after a few fits and starts) a sister project, Lazarus[1], which is basically a clone of the Delphi class library and graphical IDE.

All FOSS all the way down. To quote jerryp, "Recommended."

___

[1]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Overview_of_Free_Pascal_and_Laza...

[trasz]

>I think there is potential in the emerging field of community authored software.

It’s been emerging for the past 30 years, it’s called Open Source. As opposed to commercial projects releasing a “technically open” source code, like with Chrome.

[tpxl]

It is now more relevant than ever. AGPL backends fix the proprietary API problem.

[rprospero]

It confuses me sometimes that we split the entire community between GPL versions 2 and 3 to thwart the terrible TiVo, but making AGPL just GPL 4 never seems to be discussed. Especially since GPL 3 is self upgrading, so there’s no risk of a new split.

[trasz]

AGPL fixes nothing; the companies will simply base their backends on software that’s not AGPL-encumbered.

[CRConrad]

Sure seems to fix the "taking software based on ostensibly FOSS licenses non-free by going cloud" problem, doesn't it?

Sure, if companies take software which they wrote themselves from scratch, without basing it on FOSS, down that route, that's their prerogative. But then the potential users have the equal prerogative of saying "No thanks, I prefer FOSS."

[trasz]

It doesn't - companies can still use FOSS software, just not AGPL. That's pretty much exactly how it works right now.

[CRConrad]

Yes, of course a license can't fix anything if nobody uses it.

So it should be implicitly pretty obvious that that meant "the license can fix things if FOSS developers actually use it", shouldn't it?

[trasz]

Again, no - it would only work if every single one FOSS developer agreed to use it.