Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nparafe 905 days ago
> is that Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary.

This most certainly wouldn't have happened if "open source realism" didn't stood against free software "utopian" idealists. I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it?

Lastly, isn't redhat an enthusiastic supporter of open source ? The domain https://opensource.com/ is literally copyrighted and supported by redhat...
2 comments
trelane 905 days ago
> I still remember the "Linux Kernel is now in most devices in the world" when Android came out. This didn't went well, didn't it?

I don't understand your point here. Could you please make it again, more directly?

link
aragilar 904 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens is the interviewee. He helped create OSI, which pushed Open Source (vs Free Software).
link
nparafe 904 days ago
Open source supporters were celebrating Google's use of the Linux kernel in Android, hoping that this would promote it's usage. Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software.
link
trelane 904 days ago
> Android is now a Frankenstein spyware monster that uses mostly proprietary software.

Which android are you referring to? The table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distrib... may help you.

I don't think that, say, Lineage or Calyx share the same privacy concerns as Google's android variant, or the myriad vendors' proprietary forks.

Of course, if most of Android were GPL instead of Apache, the lockin wouldn't be possible.

If you're referring to locked bootloaders and not being able to use the GPL kernel due to that, that was a defect in GPLv2 that was fixed in GPLv3 (that and software patents). TiVo was the one that induced that change, and the term was "tivoization."

link
pabs3 904 days ago
RedHat no longer pays the people who worked on the articles at opensource.com, they all got fired in the recent layoffs.
link
nparafe 904 days ago
Supported by redhat is practically on the headline of the page. "Copyright ©2021 Red Hat, Inc." is at the bottom. Redhat nowadays speak mostly about open source and almost never about free software.
link
pabs3 904 days ago
The team probably didn't bother to change those things after they got fired. Notice the latest post and lack of recent activity.
link
nparafe 903 days ago
Red Hat - We make open source technologies for the enterprise: redhat.com webpage title

From wikipedia: Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises

link
pabs3 903 days ago
Yes, but they still stopped funding opensource.com.
link