Sailor Enceladus wrote:Most interesting post I've read in quite a while.
this month ive worked on three distro remixes, put together a short book, and started a small not-for-profit organisation.
every part of this is to fight against the not-entirely-concerted but very commonly-themed effort to (or effect of) make/ing users and developers scramble around trying to fix everything.
i call the effect a free software diaspora, and i call the cause "redix."
redix is both software (of which systemd is one example) and a general way of doing things-- the purpose of which is gut and replace posix.
if redix were an alternative to posix, that would be fine. but as a replacement, it has already set back free software development for 3 or 4 years.
despite all of this, i am more optimistic about the general state of the gnu/linux distro than the general state of web browsing.
if it means enough to people, we can fix all of it. but the goal of redix is to ultimately give us more to fix than we can fix, so that we lose maintainability and it gets handled instead by billion-dollar companies, completely against the entire free software ethos.
which i fully realise a lot of people dont care about. how does this filter down to puppy?
puppy is relatively redix-free, but whenever you find youre fixing slightly different variations of the same problem over and over, and its not because of stuff that got shifted around within your own community, and its in stuff that (until recently) worked just fine for years-- thats a symptom of redix.
for people who dont quite get it yet, its easier to just say "systemd" instead. but systemd is only the best-documented example of redix. freedesktop and gnome are fond of it, mozilla is taking it up--
redix shifts autonomy away from the user and towards companies. the cure is to shift those things back to users.
give users all the power they can handle, give them automation so many can agree to have their power working for them, without having to make it a full-time job (developer-level power without developer-level dedication.)
if people move in that direction, they will turn redix into a battle cry instead of a problem.
the solution to "but i dont care about that" is defaults-- within a system that any person can take control of when they change their mind and care about something.
for example, i automate replacing pale moon. who am i to tell you? i put all the lines that replace it in a row, you select them and delete them and voila-- pale moon isnt replaced. it sucks, right, but its your call.
this is the sort of stuff the book is about, too. and the organisation, and the website, plus all of the code i work on, plus my involvement with corepup.
but its ultimately about moving power from organisations and distros and developers to users. to people who may not know what theyre doing, but want the option of decisions when good defaults dont suffice.
pelo likes to say "im a passenger, dont ask me to fix the plane."
so lets say pelo is in a plane, and for some reason the wing gets loose just as the crew passes out.
some dork on board was reading the safety manual, which tells him to press and hold down the top left corner of the display behind the seat.
a box says "reattach wing? (y/n)"
he clicks yes. for lack of a better metaphor, emergency solenoids pull the wing back into place.
planes can already land themselves, more or less. but they require pilots because sometimes the automated systems dont work.
pelo still hasnt done anything, which is fine-- but at least now (due to good design decisions) its not his last day as a passenger.
there will always be passengers like pelo-- its the dork reading the safety manual getting neglected lately, being told "we disabled the solenoids and the inflight displays. dont like it? youre free to fly with someone else."
real choices have to go beyond forcing people to simply stay or leave.
that problem isnt about this community-- on a broader scale entirely. theres a difference between the freedom you get with a gnu/linux system and the freedom you get with windows. you can develop for either platform, but its very different (i coded for many years before switching, and i am very familiar with dos as well.)
redix ultimately makes our stuff more like their stuff. thats not a good, except for them and their fans. their stuff ultimately neglects more of our needs, and leaves us without as much option to fix it.
[color=green]The freedom to NOT run the software, to be free to avoid vendor lock-in through appropriate modularization/encapsulation and minimized dependencies; meaning any free software can be replaced with a user’s preferred alternatives.[/color]